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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
OF
General L(Iterature and Science
PUBLISHED BY THE PAULIST FATHERS.
VOL. CVIII.
OCTOBER, 1918, TO MARCH, 1919
NEW YORK:
THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD
120 West 60th Street
1919
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CONTENTS.
Acadia,— 'Margaret P, Hagne, MA„
A Convert Scientist and His Work.
—Barnes J, Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.,
Anatole France, Tlie Passing of. —
Margaret B, Downing
Angels and Tlieir Ministries.— He/en
Moriarlg,
Archbishop Ireland. — Humphreg
Mognihan, AM., D.D
Bankruptcy Law, The Moral Aspect
of the.— F. Regis Noel, LL.B.,
; J>h.D.,
tB^othcr Chaplains. — Francis Avel-
: Ung, S,T,D
'Bohemia Free. — Oldrich Zlamal,
Bookman's Year in a Labor Com-
pany, A. — Frederick Page, . . .
" Carry-On," War Risk Insurance
and the. — Margaret B, Downing,
Catholic Church and the Italian
Renaissance, The. — Thomas O^Ha-
gan, Litt,D.,
Catholic Doctrine on the Right of
Self Government. — John A. Rgan,
D,D., 314,
Chaplains Story, The,— Edited bg
/. r. Martin 455,
Child Labor, The Supreme Court
and. — John A, Rgan, D,D„ . . .
Christ of the Gospels, The.— Cw^A-
bert Latteg, SJ„
Earliest Theorists of Russian Revo-
lution. — F. Aurelio Palmieri,
O.5.A., D,D
Farley, John Cardinal.— Pe/cr GuH-
dag, Ph,D„
French Wounded in the Fourth Year
of War.- Afcfrrf Felix Klein, . .
Front, Music at the.— Lorna Walsh,
Glastonbury of the Gaels.- E/eonor
Hull
Hardy Optimist, The. — Charles
Phillips,
Incarnation and the World Crisis,
The.Sdward A, Pace, Ph,D„ .
Ireland, Archbishop. — Humphreg
Mognihan, A,M., D.D
Italian Renaissance, The Catholic
Church and the. — Thomas O'Ha-
gan, Litt.D,,
John Cardinal Farley.— P«f«r Guil-
dag, Ph,D„
John Ruskin, Economist.— A «/«« F.
X, Devereux, SJ .•
Joyce Kilmer.— Ko«7k«r/ne Brigg, .
Love and the Philosopher.— Soj/iMfZ
F. Danuin Fox
Mineral Shortage, The.— M. R. Rgan,
Moral Aspect of the Bankruptcy
Law.— F. Regis No>l, LL.B„ Ph.D.,
In An Old Maryland Manor.— Afcir-
garet B. Downing,
•Melia.— Arabel Moulton Barrett, .
Padre Gilflllan.— Afay Feehan, . .
The Altar-Boy.— Katfiryn White
Rgan,
A Blaze of Silver. — Caroline D.
Swan
Annunciation. — Theodore Magnard,
A Woman Knitting.— Vfctorto Eng-
lish ' '
Cur Dcus Homo. — Terence King,
SJ
795 Opportunity of the War, The.— ^fr
Bertram C, A. W indie, ScD.,
41 F.R.S 577 ^^
Pisa and Pisan Romanesque. — Edith
85 Cowell, 331
Poetry of Corson Miller, The. —
1 Catharine McPartlin 101
Progress. — Marco Fidel Sudrez, 589, 767
194 Parousia, St. Matthew and the.—
Edmund 7. Shanahan, S.T.D.,
69, 158, 341
32 Passing of Anatole France, The. —
Margaret B. Downing, .... 85
145 Prejudice Unconquered. — William
781 H. Scheifleg, 514
Recent Events. —
755 124, 265, 414, 554, 689, 841
" Roman and Utopian More." —
501 Theodore Magnard, 433
Russian Literature. — Charles Phil-
lips 27
601 Russian Revolution, The Earliest
Theorists of.— F. Aurelio Palmieri,
O.S.A., D.D., 477
441 St. Agnes, A Typc and a Contrast. —
Henrg E. O'Keeffe, CS.P., ... 526
611 St. Matthew and the Parousia.—
— Edmund 7. Shanahan, S.T.D.,
212 69, 158, 341
St. Thomas : the Universal Genius of.
745 —Garrett Pierse 206
Salinas of Salamanca : A Great Span-
ish Organist.— rAoma« Walsh, . . 652
477 San Jose de Acoma. — Margaret B,
Downing, 784
183 Scientific Theory of Education, The
World War and ihe.— Walter
14 George Smith 721
174 Self Government, Catholic Doctrine
on the Right of. — John A. Rgan,
49 D.D., 314, 441
Some San Francisco Verses. —
762 Brother Leo, 731
Supreme Court and Child Labor,
289 The.— JoTkn A. Rgan, D.D 212
Sword of the Spirit, The.— Blanche
194 M. Kellg 488
Universal Genius of St. Thomas, The.
—Garrett Pierse 206
601 Visit to South Westland. A.— D. /. B., 642
War Risk Insurance and the " Car-
183 ry-On." — Margaret B. Downing, . 501
War, The Opportunity of the. — Sir
628 Bertram C. A. W indie, ScD.,
224 P.K.S 577
World Crisis, The Incarnation and
238 the.— Edward A. Pace, Ph.D., . . 289 -
95 World War and the Scientific Theory
of Education, The. — Walter George
, 32 Smith, 721
STORIES.
The Better Part.— Anna T. Sadlier, 666
378 The Golden Years.— F/orencc Gil-
517 more, .... .^ «... . 64
809 The Road to Christmas Night —
Lucille Borden 304
250
POEMS.
Empty Hands.— 3far«n S. O'Connell, 330
347 Fool of God, The.— Charles Phil-
760. lips 358
I Am the Way.— i/o/in N. Collins,
100 SJ ^- ^**
Kossovo: "The Field of Black-
808 birds."— Af. E. Buhler 651
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CONTENTS
m
La us Deo. — Theodore Maynard, . . 156
November Vigil.— Chor/ea Phillips, 181
Sir Galabad's Vision of the Virgin.—
J. Corson Miller 626
The Process. — George Benson Hewel-
son, 94
The Promise. — Katharine Tynan, . . 600
The Spires of St. Patrick's.— J. Cor-
son Miller, 487
To Joyce Kilmer. — Thomas Wcdsh, . 25
Village Churches. — Charles L.
O'Donnell, CS.C, 512
WITH OUR READERS.
A Plea for Ireland, 570
Basis for Reconstruction, .... 566
Belloc's Study of Gibbon, .... 573
Bolshevism, 858
Catholic Settlement Work, .... 714
Constitution of the Russian Soviet
RepubUc, 717
Mr. Dennehy's Work for Chaplains, 280
General Gouraud, 574
His Eminence John Cardinal Farley, 143
Lionel Johnson and Arthur Middle-
ton — A Comparison, 854
Joyce Kilmer's Biography, . . 286, 431
Liberty Loan Campaign, .... 142
Octave of Prayer, 570
Peace Declared, 425
QualiUes of the Patriot, .... 277
Theodore Roosevelt, 719
Status of Catholics in America, . 281
Mr. Steven's Joan of Arc, .... 139
The Pope at the Peace Table, ... 429
The National Catholic Service
School, 430
The Visible Church, 710
Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, . 428
War Relief Work, 133
War Work of French Women, . . 283
Widows and Mothers of France, . 282
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
A Commentary on the New Code of
Canon Law 256
A History of Halifax County, . . . 840
A Handbook of Moral Theology, . 256
A History of Spain, 532
A History of the Christian Church, 107
A Manual of the History of Dogmas, 538
A Modem Phenix, 411
A New Solution of the Pentateu-
chal Problem, 552
A Roumanian Diary, 836
A Soldier's ConHdeuces with God, . 409
A Soul's Appeal, 122
An Elrraentary Handbook of Logic, 113
An Estimate of Shakespeare, . . 411
Abraham's Bosom, 411
Alberta, 402
Albert de Mun, 688
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, . 413
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, . 542
American City Progress and the
Law. 401
Anno Domini, ^ 262
Applied Eugenics, 689
Ballad of Trees and the Master, . . 840
Beatrice Ashleigh, 829
Beaumarchais and the War of Amer-
ican Independence, 391
Behind the Scenes in the Reichstag, 831
Caesar's Commentaries, .... 123
Camp Trails in China, 693
Can Grande's Castle, 820
Carolyn of the Comers, 398
Catholic Art and Architecture, . . 412
Chamber Music 694
Chaucer and His Poetry, 106
Christ's Ufe In Pictures, .... 413
Christ's Masterpiece, 399
Christianity and Immortality, . . 833
Cities and Seacoasts and Islands, . 687
Colette Baudoche, 824
Color Studies in Paris, .... 107
Community Civics, 122
Credit of Nations, 396
Cursus Asceticus, 121
Doctor Danny, 838
Doctrinal Discourses, HI
Donatism, HO
Don $trong. Patrol Leader, . . . 119
Devotion to the Sacred Heart, . . 259
Dynamic Psychology 683
Effective English, 123
Eight-Minute Sermons 696
Elizabeth's Campaign. 403
Essays in Scientiflc Synthesis, . . 830
Esther and Harbonah, 115
Everyman's Land, 837
Evolution of the Dominion of Cana-
da, 816
Exercise and Set-Up, 259
Exiles, 404
Fanatic or Christian, 398
Federal Powers, 405
First Principles of Agriculture, . . 550
Five Tales, 115
Foch the Man, 690
Folly and Other Poems, .... 398
France, England and European
Democracy— 1215-1915, 835
From Bapaume to Passchendaele, . 827
From Their Galleries, 837
From the Heart of a Folk, ... 261
Front Unes, 259
German Atrocities, 397
Germany Her Own Judge, .... 112
Girls' Clubs, 840
Government and Politics of Switzer-
land, 691
Greater Than the Greatest, .... 119
Guynemer, the Knight of the Air, . 539
Happy Tales for Story Time, ... 400
Health for the Soldier an(| the
Sailor, 410
Her Irish Heritage, 548
Herself— Ireland, 393
His Luckiest Year, 838
Historical Records and Studies, . 397
Historic Mackinac, 258
Home Fires in France, .... 408
Horizons, 544
Industry and Humanity, .... 819
It's Mighty Strange, 113
Jacqueline, 541
Japan at First Hand, 693
Japanese Prints, 828
Jefferson Davis, 825
Jerusalem, Past and Present, . . . 401
Jesus in the Eucharist, 400
Joan and Peter, 697
Josselyn's Wife, 694
League of Nations. 695
33SiC0
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IV
CONTENTS
Letters to the Mother of a Soldier, 118
Life of Plus X 834
Life of St Joseph of Copertino, . 396
Light and Mist, 822
Love and Hatred, 115
Love Off to the War, and Other
Poems 692
Marriage and the Family, .... 122
Martial Lyrics, 413
Message of The Trees, 840
Mimi, 118
Modem and Contemporary European
History, 394
New Mediaeval and Modem History, 406
Nietzsche the Thinker 105
Nights in London. 838
Notebook for First-Year Latin
Vocabulary 123
Not Taps but Reveille, 551
Old English Scholarship 257
Old Truths and New Facts, ... 681
One of Them, 830
Our Democracy, 407
Our Humble Helpers, 684
Our Lady's Month, 400
Old Man Curry, 116
Our Lord's Own Words, 258
Out to Win, 391
Pebbles on the Shore, 684
Primeras Lecciones de Espafiol, . . 551
Prophets of Dissent, 534
Psychology and the Day's Work, . 533
Religion and Human Interests, . . 120
Religions of the Past and Present, . 108
Richard Baldock, 402
Richard Strauss, 830
Roman Law in the Modem World, . 817
Safe and Unsafe Democracy, . . . 821
St. Patrick's Purgatory, 118
Sketches for the Exercises of an
Eight-Days' Retreat, 112
Skinner's Big Idea, 696
Soldier Silhouettes on Our Front, 832
Songs of Manhattan, 261
Spiritual Guide for Priests, ... 413
Steep Trails, 552
Tales from Birdland, 543
Tales of My Knights and Ladies, . 260
Tales of War, 544
Taras Bulba, and Other Tales, . . 120
That Which Hath Wings, .... 696
The Advance of English Poetry in
the Twentieth Century, .... 686
The Best Short Stories of 1917, . . 110
The Boys' Military Manual, ... 696
The Business of the Household, . . 829
The Catholic Home, 549
The Children of France and the Red
Cross, 410
The City of the Anti-Christ, .... 411
The City of Trouble 547
The Corona Readers, 553
The Dartmoor Window Again, . . 837
The Destinies of the Stars, . . . . 823
The Economic History of the United
States 1^2
The Eucharistlc Epicleses ^^^
The Externals of the Catholic
Church, Ill
The Eyes of Asia, »»^
The Fairy Islands, 2W
The Faith of France, . . . • • • 25 J
The Fallacy of the German State
Philosophy, ••••,! • • • J"
The Flower of the Chapdelaines, . . iivJ
The Garden of Life, 263
The German Pirate ^^^
The Ghetto and Other Poems, . . 694
The Gilded Man, 114
The Great Adventure, 693
The Great Thousand Years and Ten
Years After, 543
The Greater Value, 550
The Hand of God: A Theology for
the People, 839
The High Romance, ...... 537
The House of Conrad, 260
The Inferno, 407
The Inn of Disenchantment, . . . 109
The Lay Folks Ritual, 552
The Life of Adrienne d'Ayen, Mar-
quise de la Fayette, 544
The Life of St. Francis Xavier:
Evangelist, Explorer, Mystic, . . 833
The Life and Times of Stephen
Girard 255
The Little Lame Prince 121
The Lord Jesus, 553
The Lure of the North, 549
The Martial Adventures of Henry
and Me, 114
The Magniflcent Ambersons, . . . 827
The Mass Every Day in the Year, 262
The Mass — Sundays and Holy Days, 263
The Mystical Life, 540
The New Testament Manuscripts In
the Freer Collection, 406
The Offender and His Relations to
Law and Society, 545
The Order and Canon of the Mass, . 552
The Patrimony of the Roman Church
in the Time of Gregory the Great, 536
The People of Action, 538
The Pilgrimage of Ufe, .... 399
The Pirate's Progress, 112
The Priestly Vocation, 695
The Principles of War, 535
The Prisoner of Love, 552
The Process of History, 679
The Progressive Music Series, ... 409
The Protestant, .• 838
The Real Christian Science, ... 551
The Rise of the Spanish Empire, . 257
The Sacred Beetle and Others, . . 822
The Sad Years, 690
The Silent Legion, 821
The Social Plays of Arthur Wing
Pinero, 404
The Shorter Bible, 261
The Sister of a Certain Soldier, . 412
The Soul of Susan Yellam, .... 828
The Star in the Window 548
The Story of Oswald Page, .... 412
The Titie, 406
The Unwilling Vestal. 261
The Valley of Democracy 404
The Villa Rossignol, 109
The Virgin Islands, 685
The War in the Cradle of the World, 824
The White Morning, 117
The Wonders of Instinct, .... 691
The World Problem, 536
The World's Debate, 680
Thomas Jefferson, 818
Towards the Goal, JJO
Unchained Russia 395
War Addresses of Woodrow Wilson, 121
War Mothers, 540
What is the German Nation Djring
For? JJJ
Winoiia'is War Farm, 116
Your Better Self, • • • • v • • • ^49
Your Interests Eternal, 550
Your Soul's Salvation 560
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OCTOBER 1918
r
THE
atholieM)pld
Angels and Their Minist^es N ^ ' ^ P 1 9 1 § Helen Moriarty 1
French Wounded in the TPo4$$i^^ f^9^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^
To Joyce Kilmer Thomas Walsh 25
Russian Literature ' Charles Phillips 27
The Moral Aspect of the Bankruptcy Law
F. Regis Noel, LL.B,, Ph.D. 32
A Convert Scientist and His Work James J. Walsh, M.D., Ph.p. 41
Glastonbury of the Gaels Eleanor Hull 49
The Golden Years Florence Gilmore 64
St. Matthew and the Farousia Edmund T. Shanahan, S.TJ). 69
The Fassing of Anatole France Margaret B. Downing 85
The Frocess George Benson Hewetson 94
The Mineral Shortage - M. R. Ryan 95
A Woman Knitting Victoria English 100
The Foetry of J. Corson Miller Catharine McPartlin 101
New Books
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THE
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MONTHLY MAGAZINE
oi
General Literature and Science
Vol. CVni. OCTOBER, 1918. No. 643.
Ine entire contents of every issue of The Catholic World are protected by
copyright in the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. Quotations and extracts,
of reasonable length, from its pages are permitted when proper credit is given. But
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PUBLISHED BY
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THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD,
120-122 West 60th Street.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
Vol. CVIII.
OCTOBER, 1918.
No. 643.
ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES.
BY HELEN MORIARTY.
|T. FRANCES of Rome describes her Guardian
Angel, whom with earthly eyes she was permitted
to see, as having the stature and aspect of a lit-
tle boy of nine. We, denied the clearer visions
of sanctity, must picture for ourselves these heav-
enly visitants, our guardian angels, as well as those other ** sons
of God " who, as the Almighty told Job, greeted the creation of
the world with " shouts of joy." However, the Bible itself has
shown them to us in manifold form; and down through all the
ages since, writers of an inspiration not indeed divine, but yet
wonderful and reverent, have given the whitest pages to their
dreams of the angels, painters their richest canvases and most
glowing colors, while into the fadeless beauty of imperishable
lines poets have set those radiant jBgures, whose stories as
found in Holy Writ are so full of sweetness and refreshment.
To the childish heart, to the mature, to the world-weary
spirit, these stories are of increasing charm. One who has been
nourished on them in childhood finds no tale in after-life, how-
ever enthralling, that holds half the thrill of those first
glimpses of the angels — the Angel Raphael walking with
Tobias, or of Jacob and his immortal slumber, with the blessed
spirits ascending and descending that wondrous ladder of
clouds. Angel figiures wavered through oiu* first awakening in-
telligence and knelt with us at our mother's knee. We were
sure of their bright wings even before we beheld them, with
Copsrriglit 1918. Thb Missionabt Societt op St. Paul thb Apostls
IN THB State of New Yobk.
VOL. cnii. — 1
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2 ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES [Oct.,
unquestioning eyes, bowing low before the Tabernacle, and the
floating incense was not more existent than their flitting airy
forms. In truth, angels are most real to children and very close
to them in their innocence. This is easy of comprehension
sin(^e Our Lord Himself said of the little ones: " Their angels
do behold the face of My Father Who is in heaven."
In the Old Testament angels are represented as beings of a
higher nature than man, gifted with superior intelligence; as a
celestial court surrounding the throne of God; as messengers of
God sent to earth to guide, instruct, reprove and console; as
agents of infinite justice and mercy, themselves entirely with-
out passion and prejudice.
In the New Testament they become still more familiar as
agents, and we find them in countless numbers, messengers of
the Most High, sympathizing with human need and suffering,
rejoicing over repentant sinners, attending on prayerful souls,
and conducting the just to their eternal home in heaven.
Origen tells us that the angels " preside over the elements,
the animals, and the celestial bodies." This idea was even
supported by the pagans, as witness Apuleius, who stated that
God uses celestial agents to rule the universe. Poetically the
Koran says that " the prayers of daybreak are borne witness
to by the angels." They are " the enlighteners of our souls,"
according to St. Augustine, ** the protectors of our bodies, the
wardens of our goods;" and God has given them to us as our
messengers too, for St. John of the Cross, the great Spanish
mystic said : " The angels, the shepherds of our souls, carry
our messages to God and bring us His back." In Jacob's bless-
ing upon his grandsons : " The angel that delivereth me from
all evil, bless these boys," we find authority for begging their
blessing upon our work and upon ourselves.
From the passage in Daniel where we read of the Arch-
angel Gabriel engaged in dispute with the prince of the Per-
sians, the Fathers of the Church conclude that every nation has
its tutelary angel; also St. Basil proves from the Scriptures the
existence of national as well as individual guardian angels.
Spirits without number guard each church as well as the
Church universal. "The celestial powers," says Eusebius,
" guard the Church of God." St. Hilary represents the angels
as surrounding the sheepfold of Christ; and St. Gregory of
Nyssa compares them to that tower mentioned in the Canticle
Digitized by
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1918.] ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES 3
of Canticles to show us that these blessed spirits protect and
defend the Church against the powers of darkness.
As for the human creature, beset on all sides by weak-
nesses, pitfalls and temptations, what is more consoling than
the belief, sanctioned by the Church though not deJBned as a
dogma, that he has a celestial guide, ever ready to help, and
comfort, and save; one whose gentle province it is always to
aid him in resisting the malice of the evil spirit, for it is writ-
ten : ** The angel of the Lord shall encamp round about them
that fear Him and shall deliver them."
The Fathers of the Church are not agreed on the question
as to whether or not each one of us is blessed with this heav-
enly guidance. Some have said that only the just are favored
with a special angel, others, however, contend that each human
being has an angel guard who never leaves him, or at least,
leaves him only when he sins. St. Basil assures us that an
angel always attends on each faithful soul, unless banished
by evil actions; and no less an authority than St. Thomas Aqui-
nas gives out the comforting statement that no sinner is entirely
abandoned by his guardian angel.
In the Psalter from which the Canonical Office is
taken, we find frequent mention of the angels, and there is a
commemoration of them in the Preface and in the Canon of the
Mass; but for many years no special day was set aside to do
them honor. In time a feast day, the second of October, was
assigned by the Church to one phalanx of the heavenly orders,
the Guardian Angels; and finally the whole month of October
was dedicated to the angels, as heavenly messengers and min-
isters of grace and mercy.
The theologians divide the angelic host into three hier-
archies, and these again into nine choirs, three in each hier-
archy, according to Dionysius the Areopagite, in the following
order: First, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Second, Domina-
tions, Virtues, Powers. Third, Princedoms, Archangels, An-
gels. The order of these denominations is not the same in all
authorities. According to the Greek formula, St. Bernard,
and the Legenda Aurea, the Cherubim precede the Seraphim,
and in the well-known hymn of St. Ambrose they have also the
precedence: "To thee. Cherubim and Seraphim continually
do we cry." But the authority of Dionysius is usually the
one accepted, since he, as the convert and favorite disciple
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4 ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES [Oct.,
of St. Paul, would have been made acquainted with all that the
Saint saw when he was transported to the third heaven.
The first three choirs receive their glory immediately from
God and transmit it to the second; the second illuminate the
third; the third are placed in relation to the created universe
and to man. The first hierarchies are counselors; the second,
governors; the third, ministers. The Seraphim are absorbed in
perpetual love and adoration immediately around the throne
of God. The Cherubim know and worship. The Thrones sus-
tain the seat of the Most High. The Dominations, Virtues, and
Powers are the regents of the stars and elements. The last
three orders are the protectors of the great nations on earth,
and the executors of the will of God throughout the universe.
It will be seen, therefore, that though the term angel is
properly applied to all these celestial beings, it belongs in a
more particular manner to the last two orders who are brought
into immediate communication with the human race. The
word, angel, is derived from the Greek, and means literally
" a bringer of tidings." Thus the title might fitly be given to
any messenger, that is to say, to any bearer of news, good or
bad, though fortunately for the sweetness and light associated
with it, the word, so beautiful in its spiritual significance, has
never been brought down to ordinary uses.
Angels are invariably represented in human form, usually
with wings, and because they stand always in the presence of
Him in Whom time and change have no place, are endowed
with imperishable happiness and immortal youth. Invariably
too they are presented in the guise of men. This fact came
up for discussion on one occasion in the presence of Madame
de Stael, who was asked why she thought this was done. " Be-
cause," was her instant reply, " the union of power with purity
constitutes all that we mortals can imagine of perfection." Age,
therefore, has no relation to these heavenly creatures. As
Leigh Hunt said, it is impossible to conceive of an elderly an-
gel, and a cherubim of sixty-two is quite unthinkable! Though
to be sure in many, if not most lives, there are those of rich and
generous years whose consecrated service entitles them to the
sublime appellation, albeit their only visible wings are those of
love and devotedness.
In addition to their duties as winged messengers of God,
the angels have another important function — to hymn eter-
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nally in heaven the praises of the Most High in harmony with
the music of the spheres. There is an ancient tradition among
the Jews that after the creation of the world the Ahnighty
asked the angels what they thought of the work of His hands.
It was, they agreed, so perfect, so vast, that only one thing was
lacking — a clear mighty and harmonious voice to fill inces-
santly all corners of the world with sweet sound in praise of
the Creator. At once, the legend has it, God set the spheres in
motion to produce this harmony.
Beyond all these choirs, however, and nearest to the throne
of grace, are the seven angels who stand always in the sight of
God. These are, in the order of precedence, first, Michael the
archangel whose name signifies, "Who is like unto God?"
He is the Captain-General of the hosts of heaven, and he it was,
who victorious over the rebel angels, became the instrument of
God in casting them down to eternal perdition. Him, God has
endowed with high privileges, and as it is his duty to receive
immortal souls into heaven, he is to be especially invoked at
the hour of death. By many he is thought to be the Guardian An-
gel of the Blessed Sacrament, and it is said, so revealed him-
self to St. Eu tropins, the hermit. He is regarded as the shadow
of the Almighty. He is usually represented, as befits his office,
a very splendid and militant figure in armor.
The second of the seven is the gentle Gabriel, the wonderr
f ul angel of the Annunciation, and the trumpeter of the judg-
ment day. His name signifies, " God is my strength," and he is
the shadow of the Son. By virtue of his visit to our Blessed
Lady, he became her guardian, and to his care is also assigned
the sacrament of baptism. He is the inspirer of prayer and the
lover of sacrifice; and we see him usually represented with a
trumpet, or a lily which he holds in his right hand.
Raphael comes next, radiant and gracious as we know him
in his care of the youth Tobias, one of the sweetest of Biblical
stories. He is the chief of all guardian angels, the patron of
guides and lovers, eyes to the blind, health to the sick — as his
name signifies, " the medicine of God." Milton calls him :
The affable Archangel
Raphael; the sociable spirit that deigned
. To travel with Tobias.
Raphael is regarded as the shadow of the Holy Ghost.
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6 ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES [Oct.,
These are the only ones, we learn, whom the Church ven-
erates by name, and the only ones, except Uriel, that are named
in the Scriptures. Uriel, the fourth of the seven, is mentioned
in the Foiu-th Book of Esdras, from which book, though it is
not recognized as canonical Scriptiure, has been adopted one of
the Introits of Easter Week. However, in a Council held at
Rome in 745 it was decided that the faithful might accept the
names and attributes which tradition had given to the other
three. Uriel is the angel of confirmation. He is appropriately
called the strong companion, and is often pictured as holding
a drawn sword in his right hand, his left full of flames.
The other three are known under different names. Some
authorities give the name of the fifth as Sealtiel, that is, the
praying spirit, said to be the angel who appeared to Hagar in
the wilderness. By others he is supposed to be Chamuel, one
who sees God, reputed to be the angel who wrestled with Jacob.
He is, in any case, the patron of priests and holy orders, and is
depicted in art with bowed head and downcast eyes.
Sixth in order we have Jehudial, or Jophiel, the beauty of
God, the remunerator, who was said to be the preceptor of the
sons of Noah, and the angel whom God said He would send be-
fore the children of Israel to lead them out of Egypt. He pro-
tects the seeker after truth, and he it was who guarded the tree
of knowledge and afterward drove Adam and Eve into exile.
Appropriately, therefore, his charge is the confessional.
The last of the seven is called Barachiel, the helper, the
angel who rebuked Sara when she laughed. Sometimes his
name has been given as Zadkiel, signifying the righteousness
of God. He is the guardian of the married state, and him we
see in Christian art with the lap of his cloak filled with roses.
The names of all terminate in el which signifies God.
The first three of the seven have always been the chief
messengers of the Most High.
Angelic visions brightened Tasso's days in his lonely
prison, and Petrarch beheld them in his dreams of Laura. To
Dante angels were dear familiar guides, and in his travels he
sees and describes them as perhaps no other pen has done,
when, as we read in the second Canto of the Purgatorio, he was
dazzled by the angel who approached — "winnowing the air
with his eternal plumes" he called the vision the "Bird of
God,'' a title, as Ruskin says, which is perfect in its sublimity
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and sweetness. In Canto VIII. of the Purgatorio we read again
of the two angels, whose vesture significant of hope was '* green
as the tender leaves but newly born;'* and later of one who
spoke
In tone so soft and mild
As never met the ear on mortal strand.
With swan-like wings dispread and pointing up —
and he has painted for us a picture of the angelic choirs un-
surpassed in all imaginative literature.
The refining and uplifting influence, as well as the spiritual
charm of these angel presences, in the life and literature of a
people is acknowledged even by those who have no actual be-
lief in them as guardians and mentors; as witness Wordsworth
when he mourned the passing of the angels before the
iconoclastic sweep of the reformers in England :
Ye too must fly before the chasing hand —
Angels and saints in every hamlet mourned!
Ah, if the old idolatry be spurned
Let not your radiant shapes desert the land!
And Mrs. Hemans:
Are ye forever to your skies departed?
Oh will ye visit this dim world no more?
Ye whose bright wings a solemn splendor darted
Through Eden's fresh and flowery shades of yore.
The "solemn splendor" was not absent from English
literature, however. Shelley, who is "gold-dusty with tum-
bling amid the stars," who " dances in and out of the gates of
heaven," as Francis Thompson tells us, could follow where
The soul of Adonais like a star
Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.
And Keats —
I was taught in Paradise
To ease my breast of melodies.
He, poor unbeliever, must have caught some far vision of
ethereal wings to lift his verse so sweetly into the realms of
celestial brightness. But it was Cardinal Newman and Father
Faber more than any others who brought back the angels to
English life and letters. Father Faber wrote of them in such
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8 ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES [Oct,
an intimate manner that one writer said of him: "An-
gels flit among his pages as birds amid the leafage of luscious
June."
Cardinal Newman was very close to the angels. He saw
them in all the phases of nature — in the wind, the rain, the bur-
geoning spring. "Every breath of air and ray of light,'* he
said in his sermon on St. Michael, " every beautiful prospect, is,
as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes
of those whose faces see God."
If he lives by faith and love, he says again, no Christian is
so humble but he has angels to attend on him. " Though they
are so great, so glorious, so pure, so wonderful, that the very
sight of them (if we were allowed to see them) would strike us
to the earth, as it did the prophet Daniel, holy and righteous as
he was; yet they are oiu* * fellow-servants' and our fellow-
workers, and they carefully watch over us and defend even
the humblest of us if we be Christ's."*
In the Dream of Gerontius he has the Guardian Angel greet
the redeemed soul thus :
My work is done
My task is o'er.
And so I come
Taking it home,
For the crown is won
Alleluia
Forever more.
And thus the Angel's most beautiful and tender farewell as he
leaves the soul in Purgatory:
Softly and gently, dearly ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And, o'er the penal waters, as they roll,
1 poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.
And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance.
Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.
Angels to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
And Masses on the earth, and prayers in heaven
Shall aid thee at the throne of the Most Highest.
^Parochial and Plain Sermons, p. 204.
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Farewell, but not forever, brother dear.
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
Francis Thompson too had his " high gold embassage " and
often, we must believe, walked with angels, albeit they were
" not of Genesareth but Thames." The pen was not strange to
angel ministries that wrote of The Making of Viola, that
rarest of all heavenly lyrics, wherein the angels, echoing the
Father Himself sang:
Spin, Queen Mary, a
Brown tress for Viola — '■
* ♦ *
Tint, Prince Jesus, a
Dusked eye for Viola —
♦ ♦ ♦
Breathe, Regal Spirit, a
Flashing soul for Viola!
Thus, simply and sweetly the lovely task goes on, and we
watch the " roseal hoverings " fall from the wings of the child-
angels on the velvet cheeks of the babe, and we see the wheel-
ing angels bearing her down to earth, singing — singing —
singing-
Music as her name is, a
Sweet sound of Viola!
Lionel Johnson makes joyous salute to the Angel Gabriel
on behalf of Michael, Raphael and Uriel on his return to heaven
after ihe Annunciation. Gabriel tells them :
I saw among the lilies dwell
Mary, our Queen, who pleaseth well
The Spirit of our God. All hail
Mary, our Queen! Sing, thou in mail,
Lord Michael! Sing, Uriel; thou
Clothed with the sun upon thy brow!
And sing thou Hail! whose pilgrims now
Shall climb the steep ways out of Hell,
Joy of poor pilgrims, Raphael!
And in an especially appealing manner Johnson sings the
Guardian Angels:
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10 ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES [Oct.,
Safely across the ocean track
O angel of my friend!
Bear him, and swiftly bear him back
My loss, his exile, end.
With white wings, mighty and unseen.
Be guardian of him still as thou hast been.
Make kind to him the Afric sun.
The Afric stars and moon;
Then when our Mayflower has begun
To prophecy of June,
Give us himself, lest summer be
Sorrow for lack of him: Ah, promise me!
Thee, O his Angel! mine implores
In tenderness to me
Far flashing toward those southern shores
Mine Angel pleads with thee.
Saying: My charge is friend to thine;
Guard thou him well or I have fears for mine.
The Scriptures are rich in stories and ministries of angels.
These relations in the Old Testament are as wonderful as they
are full of interest, but too extensive to enter into at length.
We may readily recall a few : The angel who comforted poor
Hagar in the desert; those who cared for Daniel in the lions'
den; the three heavenly strangers who visited Abraham in his
tent — a Scriptural incident which has set into the plastic litera-
ture of all times that significant phrase, ** entertaining angels
uliawares." The angel who caught Abraham's hand and pre-
vented the sacrifice of Isaac; Jacob, who seems to have been
especially loved of God, since three times he had angel visita-
tions: first, in his lovely vision of the aerial ladder: again, when
fleeing from Laban; and lastly, when he had the hardihood to
wrestle with an angel, whose blessing he later besought.
The Prophets, we are told, had daily converse with these
heavenly messengers, receiving from them the word of God.
To Isaias was vouchsafed a vision of the Seraphim gathered
about the throne. One of them, taking a tongs, lifted a live coal
from the altar, and touched the lips of the earthly beholder —
from which we have in the preparatory prayer before the
Gospel : " Cleanse my heart and my lips, O Almighty God, as
Thou didst cleanse the lips of the prophet Isaias with a burning
coal;" words full of poetry as well as of piercing penitence. In
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Ezechiel we read of the Cherubim : " The noise of their wings
like the noise of many waters, as it were the voice of the Most
High . . . and when they stood their wings were let down."
Angels appear also in the Old Testament, as instrmnents
to prevent evil as when Heliodorus would have seized the treas-
ures of the Temple; and when Sennacherib sought to destroy
the Holy City, angels intervened.
Most wondeif ul of all angel visitations, most tremendous
in its significance and effects, is of course that of Gabriel to our
Blessed Lady. In a little home in Nazareth, far removed from
the world's activities, a gentle young maiden sits at a humble
task, her thoughts so pure, so heavenly, that a fragrance as of
flowers hangs about her. There is a sudden strange hush
throughout the world. The music of the spheres is checked,
the winds pause on the hilltops, the valleys shrink into them-
selves and are still, the birds cease their singing, and the trees
and grasses bow as though a princely host were passing by.
The maiden at her simple task feels the awesome silence, and
looks up, startled. ... It is a gracious being she beholds, with a
lily in his hand. He bows before her saying: '^Hail, full of
grace — the Lord is with thee — ** . . . Listening ages until time is
no more shall find sweetness and hope in her reply: " Behold
the handmaid of the Lord '* — ^for the redemption of the world
was at hand.
It was an angel who apprised Joseph of the divine seal set
on his holy spouse, and angels innumerable hung over the
stable at Bethlehem, while on a cold hillside beyond, the shep-
herds, from angel Ups, received the immortal message. The
flight into Egypt was directed by an angel, and it was the same
messenger who told Joseph to return and take the Holy Family
to Nazareth. Of the multitudes of angels who watched over
Our Saviour's childhood, and youth, and young manhood, and
thronged over the little home at Nazareth, Scripture tells us
no word, but we know that they were there, and art has taken
this belief for the theme of many lovely canvases. But Our
Saviour Himself had no guardian angel — ^He did not require
one. The angels who attended upon Him were His servants,
not His guardians, taking that sense from the text: ''He hath
given His angels charge over Thee . . . lest perhaps Thou
dash Thy foot against a stone." We know that after Satan
left Him on the mountain top '* angels came and ministered
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12 ANGELS AND THEIR MINISTRIES [Oct.,
unto Him;'* and St. Luke tells us of the blessecf angel who came
to strengthen Our Saviomr after His agony in the garden. At
the tomb we behold the white angels of the Resurrection, and
dazzling in their radiance are those winged ministers who
made glorious the hill of the Ascension, and whose songs of
joy resounded even to the highest heaven.
It was the special privilege and joy of the angels to watch
over the Blessed Mother during the remainder of her life on
earth, and to bear her body, fair and uncorrupted, up through
the clouds when it was assumed into heaven, there to be wel-
comed by troops of other bright spirits blowing their silver
trumpets, touching their golden lutes and rejoicing as they
sang : " Who is she that riseth as the morning, fair as the moon,
bright as the sun, and terrible as an army set in array.''
In old paintings Our Saviour is sometimes pictured as sur-
rounded by what is called a glory of angels — composed of the
nine heavenly choirs, each hierarchy carefully disposed in its
proper place and painted in its symbolically correct color.
These glories are exquisitely beautiful, and suggest the infinite
beatitude of the blessed spirits who chant forever the praises
of the Most High. We too have our glory of angels, set about
us by no earthly hand but by the hand of God, and laid firmly in
our awakening intelligence by the pigments of eternal truth in
the hands of our mother, the Church. She it is who, mindful of
the gray materialism of the earthborn soul, weaves for us bright
garlands spun of heaven and heaven's mysteries, garlands
with which she leads us into higher spaces, charming us on and
upward into the.realms where angels wait and the feet of the
redeemed are white about the throne of the Eternal.
Whoso reads the story of angel ministries in the Scrip-
tures shall find therein consolation and guidance. We shall
hearken to the first poet of the angels — David, the Shepherd
King of Israel — and strive to follow the golden stream which
he set afloat, down through the ages into all the literatures of
the world, finding the light print of angels' feet on many a des-
ultory, darkened page, hearing above discordant noises the
distant flutter of their wings, and knowing for theirs the light
that bids us pause on some fair and fugitive line.
Angels and their ministries have enriched and beautified
literature; they have illuminated the best in art; they have
purified the spirit of music, made song more sweet, and
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ethereal presences have brightened some of the blackest and
most tragic moments in the world's history. They have lifted
for us the wings of hope, and from the dungeon of oiu* sin-
imprisoned souls have loosened and set free those heaven-im-
planted aspirations which it is their most cherished joy to bear
back to Him Who gave them. Angels brood softly over the
babe in its basket, guide the indecisive steps of childhood and
spread their bright wings over the innocent and the unwary.
They watch with those who mourn, weep over the hardened
sinner, and wrestle with the forces of evil. They are with us in
life, and in death they do not desert us, contending with the
powers of darkness for the sinking spirit. They are the min-
isters of judgment, leading the emancipated to the realms of
the blest, or if purgatory is its portion, going down with it into
that darkened region to cheer its flagging hopes with visions of
what it will one day enjoy in heaven. Then, when purged of
all stain, the soul is ready for the beatific vision, it is its
Guardian Angel, radiant and joyous, who proudly conducts it
into the presence of the redeemed.
The world has grown dark in these our later years; with
desolation is all the land made desolate. War clouds envelop
unhappy lands, even our own, and Azrael, the Angel of Death,
has spread his sable wings o'er many a grisly battle ground.
Wherever we turn man's hand is raised against his brother, and
the wail of the widowed and fatherless, the maimed, the
broken, and the blind, is heard above the careless laughter of
a too careless world. But those to whom the ministry of an-
gels is still the mercy of God made manifest, are fain to be-
lieve that in the midst of all this misery somewhere Jacobs of
today are slumbering in fitful dreams, their dazzled eyes held
by that shinmiering ladder, down which, as of old, angels come,
bearing balm for the stricken, strength for the weak, and the
light of heaven itself for those, high of heart and dauntless of
soul, who fall in our country's cause.
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FRENCH WOUNDED IN THE FOURTH YEAR OF WAR.
BY ABBE FELIX KLEIN.^
HE descriptions which are to follow belong to his-
tory already ancient; to the end of 1917 and the
beginning of 1918. So rapid is the march of
events with us now!
The soldier wounded during the first months
of the War came to us overflowing with enthusiasm, eager to
express himself. His mind was full of picturesque and varied
impressions and he asked for nothing better than to tell about
them. Willingly he described the emotions and spirit of the
moment of departure; his curiosity in the presence of the un-
known, the shock of the first contact with the enemy, the dizzy
joy of initial successes. He confessed the amazement and pain
of the first checks and the headlong retreat which followed
them. He spoke of the famous Joffre's " ordre du jour " when,
in the battle of the Marne, the men were told to take the offen-
sive. They stopped the enemy. They pursued him. They ex-
perienced the intoxication of a victory that gave back to France
her old prestige and felt with certainty, although at first con-
fusedly, that their battle was a decisive event in human history.
To this brillant and epic beginning succeeded a long and
sombre tragedy, to this Iliad worthy of a Homer an Inferno
worthy of a Dante. So we cannot wonder that the wounded of
1918 differed from those of 1914, and that their faces, like the
face of the Florentine poet returning from hell, reflected the
terrible things through which they had passed. The suffering
of years, the eternal waiting for a decision of arms that did not
come, the increasing horror of confronting weapons unknown
in the early months — ^heavy artillery, gas, liquid fire, aeroplane
attacks — ^lef t their mark upon our soldiers.
>The author of these notes has been Intimately associated with the most im-
portant War Relief Work undertaken by American generosity on behalf of French
soldiers shedding their blood for the common cause. The American Ambulance
of Neuilly opened its doors in August, 1914. In July, 1917, it became the American
Red Cross Military Hospital Number One. The number of wounded cared for by
American nurses, operated upon by American doctors, and supported by the gifts
of American contributors amounts to the enormous total of eleven thousand five
hundred. The author has been the ministering priest to the wounded cared for
by the Ambulance from its beginning.
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Dante imagines tlie terrible things he recounts. Our sol-
diers have seen them face to face. New Year after New Year
has come and gone, and found them living underground, in
constant danger of unseen and unavoidable forms of death,
huddled together in damp, dark holes, exposed to rain and
snow and shell fire. Rarely was there fighting — as we used to
understand the term — ^but daily death took its toll, and ill and
wounded were evacuated to the rear.
Ardor they certainly retained for the assault, and heroism
for confronting sheets of fire, or clouds of asphyxiating gas;
but in the scientific operation which the modem battle has be-
come, most things that are purely personal are more to be
dreaded than desired, a fiery temper counts for much less than
coolness, discipline, mastery of self, the spirit of abnegation
and self-sacrifice. And when the battle was won, that is to
say, when they had taken, not a town with a resounding name,
but the ruins of a village, a treeless forest, a dismantled fort, a
hill thirty metres high, the survivors still had a task before
them which had lost none of its roughness or austerity. They
had to organize the new position in haste, dig other shelters,
undergo bombardments and reject counter-attacks, all the
more violent because the enemy, supported in the rear by posi-
tions prepared in advance, was more furious than ever
after defeat. Thus it continued — until now, even now, when
under the irresistible pressure of the French, the English and
the Americans, the German wall is crumbling. At last it will be
broken, and the victorious flood of the armies of democracy
will pass through. Then our invaded provinces and the sacred
soil of Belgium will be freed; then the conditions of just and
honorable peace among all the nations of the earth may be dic-
tated on the banks of the Rhine — or farther, if necessary.
But to support, while we waited, the monotonous trench-
life to accomplish the rapid nocturnal raids or the formidable
exploits of the great days and weeks of offensive, required
more than that brilliant quality of our fathers, the furia fran-
cese that was the synonym of overwhelming courage and the
ardor which commands victory. Patience to wait, resignation
to accept, tenacity to prolong efl'orts, deliberate and indomit-
able will to overcome trials, within and without and to press on
to the distant goal of final victory were above all things
necessary.
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These qualities, summed up in one expression : ^ To the
end! '* so profoundly different from those which hitherto have
passed as characteristic of our race, were the ones most notice-
able in our combatant of the fourth year of the War. Youth-
ful enthusiasm was no more; each man numbered the dangers
run, each man took clear account of those to come.
Only austere love of duty can sustain a man at such a
height. A schoolmaster-sergeant of Lyon, Philippe Gonnard,
voices it to a friend inclined to pity him : he was ill enough to
get his freedom, but wished, nevertheless, to keep at his post
until he was killed : ** I intend to stay at the front. . . . Patriotism
for me is a passion. Does that mean that I am happy here far
from all I love? You do not think that and I have often said
I am not, in prose and verse. But from now until peace, no
man of heart can be happy. If I came back, I should be still less
happy, because instead of being dissatisfied with my lot, I
should be dissatisfied with myself."
More or less consciously, this was the rock bottom of the
character of the soldier of France after three and a half years
of war: "Will always on the stretch, anguish conquered,
melancholy transformed into nobility of soul — as long as litera-
ture does not portray these essential traits of the soldier," says
one of our best author-combatants, ^ all it creates, will only be
artificial and bear no relation to reality." *
** No matter, it is for France ! " says the wounded soldier
to the comrades bending over him, and if it is during an attack
he tells them not to stop, not to carry him away " because it is
no longer worth while," but to continue without him the noble
work for which he is ofi^ering his life. Let a chaplain bring him
divine help in time and he will die more than resigned, joyous
and radiant in the faith of his childhood, bewailing his sins and
kissing the crucifix like the French of the Middle Ages. How
many times, in the horrible frame of modern war, have words
been uttered, scenes enacted, agonies suffered which echoed the
most sublime passages of the Chanson de Roland!
But, thank God, among those who fall without being killed
outright, the minority are mortally wounded. Most 6f them
are destined to get well or at least to survive : they know it, and
are glad. As soon as they regain consciousness after the shock,
the first idea is: "Am I really not dead?" To be wounded
*L'Ame de$ Chefs, By Jean des Vignes Rouges.
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1918.] FRENCH WOUNDED 17
does not disconcert them at all. " We are here for that! " said,
the other day, one of my young friends of the class 1915, who
by exception has been preserved until now. The alternative,
in this present War, is not to come out of it wounded, or un-
wounded, but wounded or dead: to escape death is all that
one can reasonably ask. Men who have only been wounded
once, are more and more scarce, some have returned to the
front four or five times. We had at the hospital a year ago an
American sergeant of the Foreign Legion, engaged at Orleans
in August, 1914, who having fought in Champagne, on the
Sonmie and in Alsace, had received three wounds, the last
at the end of 1915, at Belloy-en-Santerre, when a German bomb
had badly damaged his left thigh: '* the last " up to that time,
for he had to go back under fire and will in all probability re-
ceive a fourth wound.
Those slightly wounded have not much merit, it must be
confessed, in being resigned or even joyful. After a rapid
dressing at the first station they will rest several days at the hos-
pital at the front, and then get leave of convalescence which
they will pass with their families. A wound for them, who can
bear a little sufi^ering, means an unexpected holiday and sup-
plementary permission. They are only sorry if they are hit
stupidly, out of action or at the beginning of a well-prepared
attack, and prevented from going on with it. Let us leave them
to their good luck, and stay longer with the severely wounded,
those, for instance, who have a leg or arm broken, a fractured
jaw, vertebrae or ribs bruised, or are deprived of one of their
senses — ^blind, deaf, paralyzed. We unhesitatingly acknowl-
edge that these three last categories of wounded feel their mis-
ery profoundly, and need time to get used to it. Those, hap-
pily much more numerous, who have only temporarily or
permanently lost the use of one of their limbs, generally con-
sider themselves very fortunate. "I have the good wound! "
they aif ect to say, meaning that the War is over for them. So
at least they express themselves, not at all wishing to be ad-
mired, and trying as it were, to minimize their courage in bear-
ing their trial.
But aside from this paradoxical attitude, they frequently
speak and act in the most simple, touching way! It is conunon
to hear one say to the stretcher-bearer who comes to fetch him :
•* Take my comrade here first; he is much more wounded than
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18 FRENCH WOUNDED [Oct.,
I; I can wait " And that when it means lying on the ground
under the bombardment, thirsty, feverish, feeling his strength
ebb with his blood. Before any one comes back to get him,
often he will try again, if he has a sound arm left, to fire his
rifle or his machine-gun once more. Glory surrounds the epic
incident of the trench where the only unwounded soldier, see-
ing the enemy arrive, cried out as if in delirium : " Arise, ye
dead ! " and the dying really rose, and succeeded, some of them,
in firing once more before they fell again, and the assailants
fled. A more recent and simpler deed, is also worth recording.
Returning from a bombardment of the enemy's factories
in broad daylight, a French machine conducted by two men
was attacked by several aviators. The observer, hit by a ball in
the chest, dropped down into the carlingue. The pilot seeing
this prepared to turn back. But hearing his machine-gun firing
again, he concluded that the observer was not seriously hurt.
As soon as he landed in France: "Well, what about that
wound? " he asked. No answer. He bent down and saw that
his companion was dead. Even in his agony he had continued
to protect his comrade.
In the beginning of the War the wounded stayed a long,
a very long time without being rescued, at the place where they
fell, or in the shelter to which they had been able to crawl. Our
stretcher-bearers of the American Ambulance found, after the
battle of the Marne, many who had lain for days and nights
in shell holes, at the foot of trees, in ruined barns or churches !
One may guess what the mortality might be! Today, happily,
it is no longer so. The field of action is more restricted and the
aid is better organized.
If transportation, however, is less retarded than three years
ago, it is still painful and rather dangerous. Even when a
special passage has been dug before the attack for the evacua-
tion of the wounded, all jolts are not avoided in this dark and
narrow way; but in going through the ordinary passage-ways,
dangerous and unseen obstacles are often encountered — crum-
bling earth, perhaps, or convoys going in the opposite direction.
If they heeded the wounded soldier, the stretcher-bearers
would go on open ground. This he frequently does, if he is at
all able to get on without aid; once hit he thinks himself in-
vulnerable — a singular illusion which has brought about many
catastrophes. At the first dressing-station and at the front hos-
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pital, relief begins. In ordinary times, this will be quite com-
plete, and the wounded will not be carried to the rear until
they are really able to stand the journey. % But while the battle
is on, they must go in the greatest haste: the worst cases arc
thoroughly cared for; the badly hurt who can be moved re-
ceive the attention which enables them to depart speedily; the
slight cases have to be content with summary consideration.
Here one sees the devotion of the nurses and the resignation of
the suflferers, and better than resignation : the noble effort not
to moan, the murmured prayer, the forgetfulness of self, eager-
ness to ask news of the fight. Among the falsities of a book a
thousand times too vaunted " (falsities due not so much to the
lie direct as to the constant dwelling on odious details, and the
suppression of admirable facts), nothing is farther from the
truth than the picture of a hospital at the front where one hears
and sees only blaspheming and rebellious men. With most of
the wounded who have spoken to me about it in oiu* hospital,
and who certainly had the right to bear witness, we proclaim
loudly that if the French army had been such as the work in
question paints it in thi^ passage and in many others, the War
would have ended long ago, and history would never have
known the names of the Mame, nor the Yser, nor Verdun, nor
the Chemin-des-Dames.
A true picture of an Ambulance at the front, overflowing
with wounded the evening of a battle, I find in these lines by an
eyewitness : " Some moderate complaints among the crowded
stretchers: one asks for a drink, one wants reUef for pain, a
bed, a dressing, to be quickly attended. But let some story be
told in the group, some incident come out like a trumpet-call,
all faces brighten, the men lift themselves a little, the mirage
of glory gives them heart again. I commemorate with piety the
anonymous example of a little Zouave, doubled over on him-
self, holding his bullet-pierced abdomen in both hands, whom
I heard gently asked : * Well, little one, how goes it? ' * Oh, very
well, mon Lieutenant, our company has passed the road from
B to the south; we had gotten there when I was knocked
out. "It's all right; we are smashing them! * ** *
I, personally, received such answers from wounded who
came to us from the Chemin-des-Dames, or from the fort of
*Le Feu. By Henii Barbusse.
*La Fataliti de la Guerre. By E. F. Julia, p. 107.
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20 FRENCH WOUNDED [Oct.,
Malmaison. When I asked for news, my mind preoccupied
with their individual sufferings, their first thought was to tell
me of the victory. The ordinary French phrase for " How are
you? Comment ga va-t-il?" (literally: How goes it?) may
apply to an event or to a person. This being so, it is never of
himself that the newly-wounded soldier thinks, but of what is
interesting to everybody — the common success. I went to wel-
come a patient brought in October 26th and asked: *'You
came tonight?"
"Yes, Father.'*
** Not too tired by the journey? "
" No, not too much.'*
"What wound?"
"Jaw pierced by a bullet, arm broken, wound in the
thigh."
"How goes it?"
"Very well! The wounded who came to the hospital at
the front were delighted, we had gotten everything we were try-
ing for!"
" You were in the attack? "
" Unfortunately no, I was wounded the day before."
" In the bombardment? "
" Yes, while we were filling up the trenches to make a way
for the tanks toward the fort of Malmaison."
" That must have been pretty constant thundering? "
" Yes, but very soon we did not think of it. In the little
bombardments you hear the shells coming and try to get to
shelter, but, in those great days, when it is going on all the
time, you can no longer distinguish anything, it is a continual
noise, a kind of huge snoring. T^ien you are quite calm."
These arie a few illustrations, a few rays of light, such as
one still gets sometimes. I do not know if they will become
more frequent with the new evolution of the War. They have
been rare, and never followed by long expansiveness. Our
wounded soldier of the fourth year of the War did not like to
speak of what he had done nor of what he had seen. What
may be the reasons for his silence? In seeking to interpret
them we penetrate a little into the psychology of this taciturn
man.
First, his impressions of the War are no longer fresh and
now he would have some difficulty in analyzing them. It is
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as with ourselves in a new country : at first we have a thousand
things to describe in oiu* letters; after that nothing strikes us
any longer. This passage to a sort of unconsciousness is the
easier for the soldier as he plays a more impersonal part in the
War: a simple cell in a great organism, a simple wheel in an
enormous machine, quite beyond his comprehension in its
learned complication. Catastrophes happen to him but no
adventures: he may be wounded, he may be killed, nothing
else. This is no material for fine stories.
A deeper reason for the silence of the witness, or rather
the actor, in the great drama of the War, is a very just realiza-
tion of the impossibility of conveying any idea of it to those
who have never been there. It is so very different from any-
thing they know; so out of proportion to the normal life of
human beings.
To these intellectual motives may be added one of feeling.
The wounded soldier does not like to speak of the War because
he does not like to think of it: there are too many horrors; he
has had to bear too many privations, too much suffering. As
soon as he finds himself out of it, he tries to turn his mind away
from it as much as possible, and to shake off the impression of
it, as the sick man in the morning shakes off his fevered night-
mare. Later on, doubtless, when his memories have lost their
keen edge, they may attract him again. All he asks for the
moment is to forget. One thing especially afflicts his heart and
tightens his lips : it is the thought of the comrades he has lost.
Such are the reasons why the later wounded, differing
from those at the beginning of the War, shut themselves up in
a silence full of gravity.
In spite of this, however, you would have a false idea of
the military hospital if you thought of it as a place of mourn-
ful desolation. Doubtless our earlier patients regained their
spirits more quickly, having no years of suffering behind them.
But the quiet and serious resignation which reigns in the hos-
pital of today does not exclude a certain sweetness; the
wounded man appreciates the intelligent and devoted care
lavished upon him, he congratulates himself and thanks God
for having escaped from mortal peril, for not having fallen to
the bottom of the abyss, for remounting now the slope at the
smmnit of which he has a glimpse of the recovery of his
strength and activity. If his wound leaves no serious traces.
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22 FRENCH WOUNDED [Oct.,
he rejoices to live again as he did before; if it has deprived
him of the use of his limbs or of some necessary organ, he con-
soles himself by the thought that the War is over for him and
that soon he will take his place at home. His infirmities, which
perhaps will weigh more heavily upon him later, he feels less
here, where they are the normal thing and where it is the ex-
ception to appear intact
It is a rest for him not to hear the voice of the cannon. And
he likes the moral peace with which the wise kindness of the
doctors, the devotion of the nurses, the friendship of the chap-
lain, surround him; he especially enjoys the many letters he
receives from his family, and those which he slowly writes him-
self, or dictates to an amiable neighbor. Often he has friends
and relatives in the neighborhood who come to see him, but
what he likes best of all is the visit from his family, his mother,
father, wife, his young children.
Another joy in the life of our wounded is the announce-
ment and then the presentation of his decoration. Once, how-
ever, I saw the Cross of Honor received with no sign of satis-
faction at all, but that was because it came too late, and its re-
cipient, one of my friends, a brave oflScer, was about to receive
another recompense in heaven. It was very affecting to see the
decoration laid on that already gasping breast, without any
consciousness on the part of the poor hero. His mother and
wife, at least, before they biuried him, could take the glorious
emblem to hand down as heirloom and as instruction to his
three little ones. It is a noble idea of the French Government,
to give the decorations of soldiers killed by the enemy to their
families — their widows, their orphans, or, if they are not mar-
ried, to their old parents. During these years filled with emo-
tion, few spectacles have impressed me so deeply as the cere-
mony of " taking arms " in the court of honor of the Invalides,
when in this historic monument, built by Louis XIV. and now
the tomb of Napoleon, a General of the Third Republic gave
the emblem of the brave to women and children dressed in
mourning, at the same time as to rough soldiers newly healed
of their wounds and ready to return to the front.
Return to the front! . . . This is the almost invariable end-
ing of the history of our wounded soldier of the fourth year of
the War. Return to the front ! Never will the heroism required
for the acceptance of such a duty be suflSciently admired!
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1918.] FRENCH WOUNDED 23
After three years of fatigue, privations, of unheard-of dangers,
after one or several wounds which brought him within an inch
of death, this man who has for long months felt the sweetness,
the care, the calm of a comfortable hospital; has had a taste of
the charms of family life once more; has little by little
turned his thought away from the horrors of war, now he is
sent back to the depot, from which he knows that before long
he will be called again to the front! And he submits, resigns
himself: what do I say? Often impatient of inaction, of the lit-
tle rules which annoy his independent temper, he asks to go in
advance of the call, to rejoin as a volunteer and without further
delay his comrades of Champagne, Lorraine, Flanders or
Picardy. He reenters his regiment as the traveler reenters his
own country, and his only sadness is to find that during his ab-
sence so many old comrades have fallen, so many new comers
have filled the gaps. But the welcome of the survivors warms
his heart.
Although it is night — ^for only at night do they go into the
trenches — the sky is ploughed with illuminating fireworks, with
projections and projectiles, of various kinds which bursting
sow quick flashes of light, and a death often as prompt. In a
maze of narrow and complicated paths our friend advances
without knowing where and feeling his way: nearer and nearer
he approaches to enemies whose sleepless hate growls menac-
ingly below his feet in the ground, around him on the earth,
above him in the sky filled with sinister gleams. He goes his
way without enthusiasm, but without hesitation, without boast-
ing, but without fear, knowing by long experience what peril he
runs, but off'ering himself calmly to his formidable destiny,
ready to answer: " Present! *' if God and his country demand
his life.
What hero in all the centuries of history attains to the
grandeur of our hero? Who ever defended, in a war so terri-
ble, a cause so important to the future of the world? Who has
striven so hard, suffered so much, so often passed through
death? To prove himself eqiial to his high mission, he has had
to rid himself of all egoism, renounce lucre and vain honors,
sacrifice family joys; many times he has known the worst ex-
tremes of weariness, thirst, hunger and cold; he equals and
surpasses in austerity the severest of monks; he practices an
obedience and humility that monasteries and Thebaides know
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24 FRENCH WOUNDED [Oct.,
nothing of, constantly ready to expose himself, as soon as he
receives the order, to a terrible and invisible death. No one
ever more completely obeyed the counsels of Christ: " If you
will be perfect, leave your father and mother, your wife, for-
sake your possessions, renounce yourself, take up your cross
and follow Me."
Those among these brave men who have faith, are con-
scious of such supernatural life and their letters — admirable
collections have been published — ^reflect a light of authentic
saintliness. The others, too, without knowing it, walk in the
footsteps of Christ; at the moment of supreme sacrifice He will
enlighten them with the brightness of His grace and will ad-
mit them, like their believing brothers, into the heaven
promised to those who suffer for righteousness. Humanity
which has never known horrors like those it is enduring now,
has also never shown such moral grandeur, and it is not aston-
ishing that in face of such great crimes and such great virtues,
our soul should pause, breathless, incapable of expressing the
excess of its emotion.
I cannot speak to the great American public about our
wounded, without saying how much we appreciate the fact that
it has followed them, with admirable solicitude, all the length
of their hard Calvary. Its. stretcher-bearers have helped us
rescue them at the front, its ambulances have carried them to
our hospitals, where they have found its doctors, its nurses to
tend their wounds, its offerings of all kinds to assure their
material well-being and their moral comfort. And in after-
care it has not been less solicitous : teaching the bUnd, reeducat-
ing the maimed and giving them the costly apparatus which
take the place of their lost limbs. When they could not survive,
despite efforts of science and devotion, it contributed toward
assuring the future of their widows and orphans.
America today gives us even her blood; she has from the
first given us her gold, given her heart !
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TO JOYCE KILMER
Killed July 30, 1918; buried at the Wood of the Burned Bridge,
near Seringes on the Ourcq.
BY THOMAS WALSH.
The moon tonight looks on another mound,
Merely another of the heaps of clod
And stones that stretch behind the battle-ground,
Another shadow and a cross of God.
Afar, around, the giant guns are heard
Booming their challenge to the shrinking foe;
And underground the bodies. still are stirred
With tremors that the dead alone can know.
For the great light goes on, not yet all won,
For all the valor folded into rest:
Blood on the morn, blood on the setting sun
Signals the rallying forces to their quest.
And he and they, untimely hurried down
That jostling thoroughfare of Death's domain.
Live in the shout, strike in the miUe brown.
And spread defiance from their ghostly reign.
Their hearts are hot, no coldness yet hath seized
Their limbs, though shattered and reject they lie;
Their prayers, their dreams still live, as though it pleased
Death that the fighter not entirely die.
And you, O friend, O brother of gay years,
There in the moonlight stretching calm and wise, —
Lo, the lament for you! — our idle tears
Heavy with pride and grief within our eyes!
You who put off the world and its allure.
Its pomp and pose, to be an honest man;
You who were ten times strong, whose heart was pure,
A Christian hero, poet, artisan!
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26 TO JOYCE KILMER [Oct.,
There was a Michael in you who could slay
The demon errors of nefarious schools,
There was a Martin who could give away
Half of his cloak, despite the jeer of fools.
There was a Joan with mystic eyes ablaze
To seize the cross-hilt sword and lead the fight.
Dreams of the saints and angels made your days
And all the world around you full of light.
Child of the stolid princes of the past.
Brother of all the lowly in the soil,
Among the fishers were your deep nets cast;
With the Assisian was your song of toil.
And from your heart with a seraphic flame
Sounded a paean of the streets and squares;
A chant of glory from obeisance came
Making the trench into a heavenly stairs.
Long, long shall we remember you, the pride
And unattended blessing of our throng —
"An angel unaware" was at our side.
And we half-knowing gladdened at your song.
Listening half-attentive as we heard
Music whose saintly purport scarce we caught.
As of the note that some enraptured bird
Amid the storm-swept forests useless brought.
But now, with all your promise and your youth
Swept from us to that heavenly citadel
Where reign the Light, the Love, the Joy, the Truth
Of which your heart intuitive could spell.
We shall proclaim you man and citizen.
Perfect and consecrate and Catholic:
The voice to sing the song of man to men.
Poet of God's designed world politic.
We shall proclaim you model of our day
For weakling Christian and renunciant hearts! —
Our tears — our idle tears — ^we brush away.
And from your strength new strength and courage starts.
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RUSSIAN LITERATURE.
BY CHARLES PHILUPS.
JH, my dear friends, all this — the people and all
that happens to them is so meaningless! So
insignificant! Pour me out some wine!" says
lakov Shalimoff in Maxim Gorki's Summer-Folk,
in the closing words of that chaotic (but by no
means insignificant or meaningless) drama of Russian life. In
that brief speech Gorki, the cynic, fifteen years ago flashed a
picture of the '' high *' Russian state-of-mind which, in the light
of present day events, appears to have been pretty nearly
accurate. There is, and long has been, a Russia to which *' the
people and all that happens to them " is meaningless and in-
significant; and so that Russia calls for more wine. And in
the meantime, the people?
In the meantime, the Russian people have become articu-
late : have established a literature.
The Russian, in his literature, no matter how he may in-
dividually incline to morbid reticence, has never been very
backward about coming forward in the matter of revealing his
state-of-mind. His literature is, in fact, about as reticent as the
tongue of a Medea : it is like the pent-up utterance of a long suf-
fering, long patient, man who at last breaks out and speaks the
truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth, unbur-
dening his soul in a veritable debauch of protest, complaint,
and self-revelation.
Translations from the Russian enjoy an established pop-
ularity in England, and find an ever-growing audience in Amer-
ica. The Russian literary game has, in fact, been overplayed
in English speaking countries. In the beginning, novelty gave
to Russian literature among us an enormous attractiveness.
Here was something new: a people whom we could almost
reach out and touch, no longer remote from the rest of the
world, geographically or commercially; yet whom we had not
begun to know, whose thoughts and ideals were as strange to
us as those of Mars: here they were, beginning to speak to us,
showing us themselves, their inner thoughts, their aspirations;
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28 RUSSIAN LITERATURE [Oct,
above all their sorrows. We caught them up eagerly; and soon
we came to know our Tolstoi, our Dostoevski, our Pushkin, our
Gogol — he has just come forth again in the form of a new
volume of tales of the Cossacks.^ Soon we grew to know all
these better even than we knew many of our own. Yet verily
they were caviar to the general. Some of us, in fact, have had
the temerity to be disgusted at times with the overdose of fish-
eggs we were getting. Others prostrate in worship before
this newest of cults, could see in Russian realism nothing but
the quintessence of the literary marvelous; and in dissenters
from that worship nothing but the most hidebound ignorance.
But we read on, nevertheless, in search of the Russian soul.
That soul, as one finds it in such Russian literature as
comes to us through English translation, whether the "clas-
sics *' of Tolstoi and his contemporaries, or the most up-to-date
novelists, is a very strangely childlike soul; and yet, at the same
time, one that is decidedly and strangely cynical. This seems
a paradox. Can a child be a cynic? The Russian is a child and
a cynic. In Lappo Daniliveskaya's story of Michail Gourakin}
this fact is made photographically vivid; and so is it also in
Boris Savinkov's What Never Happened.^ Both these novels
are strictly up-to-date; yet they are as like their grandfathers
of the Turgeniev and Tolstoi period, in pessimism and cynicism
and melancholia, as peas in a pod. In Michail Gourakin we are
shown a phase of Russian life similar to that so often ironically
pictiu-ed by Gorki, a life of utter irresponsibility and aimless
pleasure-seeking among the "" ruling classes.'' A life out of
which, nevertheless, in this case, its devotees (personified by
Grourakin) are eventually shaken back to terrible realities by
the shock of war. In this one point, at least, a note of hopeful-
ness may be found; but still the picture we are made to con-
template of a people who are selfish and self-indulgent, for
whom the sense of duty and responsibility does not exist, who
are bent on living as they please, yet who are as unfit as chil-
dren to be allowed to live as they please, is a sorry spectacle;
even though we see in them also a people with whom a con-
science yet remains, who still cherish ideals, and are tortured
by their failure to live up to it or to realize them.
^ Taras Bulba and other Stories. Everyman's Library- New York : E. P. Dutton
A Co.
* Michail Gourakin. By Lappo Danlliveskaya. New York: Robert McBrlde A Co.
< What Never Happened. By " Ropshin." New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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1918.] RUSSIAN LITERATURE 29
Perhaps after all this is the keynote to the Russian char-
acter? One would be tempted to believe so, from a reading of
much of their imaginative literature; and Joseph Conrad, the
English novelist (born a Russian), confirms this impression in
his new book Under Western Eyes * which is a frank effort at
interpretation of the Russian spirit, when he says: "In its
pride of numbers, in its strange pretensions of sanctity, and
in the secret readiness to abase itself in suffering, the spirit of
Russia is the spirit of cynicism. . . . That propensity of lifting
every problem from the plane of the understandable by means
of some sort of mystic expression is very Russian. I suppose
one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a ter-
rible corroding simplicity in which mystic phases clothe a
naive and hopeless cynicism. I think sometimes the psycholog-
ical secret of the profound difference of that people consists in
this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as
it is, whereas we Westerners cherish it, perhaps with an equal
exaggeration of its sentmiental value.'*
This ineffectual straining for ideals, this dissatisfaction
with life, so characteristic of the bom dreamer — be
the dreamer an individual or a nation, was never more
sharply revealed in any page of Russian literature as it
is in certain passages of The Diaries of Leo Tolstoi^ which
have just appeared in English. Here we find Tolstoi going
through the typical self-torture of the scrupulous Russian soul,
continually programming his ideals and laying down his rules
for a good life; and as continually checking himself up with a
yardstick of perfectability totally out of proportion to his
capacities. On his twenty-third birthday, for instance, we find
him making this entry : " I had counted much on this period,
yet to my sorrow find that I remain always the same : within a
few days I have done all the things of which I disapproved.
Abrupt changes are impossible. Several times recently I have
shown myself weak, both in ordinary relations with men, and
in danger, and in card play — and still am held back by false
shame. I have told many lies."
It is not difficult to understand how a man of such a tem-
perament, or a whole people likewise, may come to "detest
life,** as Conrad puts it. But there are two Russias: the Rus-
* Under Western Eyes, By Joseph Conrad.
■7Ae Diaries of I^o Tolstoi, New York: R P. Button A Co.
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30 RUSSIAN LITERATURE [Oct.,
sia of the peasant, and the Russia of the aristocrat. If they both
detest life, it is for two quite different reasons : the one for the
dead hopelessness of ever tasting its sweets; the other for sheer
satiety. It is from this satiety that Michail Gourakin suffers;
as, indeed, do the heroes of about ninety per cent, of Russian
novels. But in his case, as has been said, the War saves him
and this may be a hopeful note. Perhaps, in the story of this
man's ultimate redemption, the author symbolizes what all
Russia may yet experience, drawing from its present trial (a
war of all classes rather than an internecine struggle) a more
practical outlook on life, a workable ideal, a unity of purpose,
in contradistinction to the chaos that went before.
But it is hard for the Western eye to detect the faintest
signal of hope in What Never Happened, a book which, as a
novel, is simply impossible, according to our literary standards.
Here the chaos is in the form: it is a jumble. But it has a
peculiar value as a war document, for its author (writing under
the pseudonym ** Ropshin ") is one of Russia's most famous
revolutionists, the former head of the commissary department
of Greneral Komilofl^s army, and later Kerensky's Minister of
War. It is closely autobiographical, and it is consequently
ultra-radical. The seething spirit of Russia bubbles through its
pages; but when Joseph Conrad said of Russia: '"I know her
well enough to have discovered her scorn for all the practical "
— mark the practical — " forms of liberty known to the West-
ern World," he said all that can be said of M. Savinkov's docu-
ment.
Dreaminess, a " chronic moral invalidism," the genius that
reaches beyond the abnormal in the direction of the insane, and
which turns and returns upon itself until morbid melancholy
and the neurotic are achieved : a sadness that is oppressive in its
hopelessness, these characteristics of Russian literature are
found even in such a matter-of-fact book as M. V. Veresaev's In
the War.^ This is the chronicle of a surgeon's experience in the
army but unlike similar writings of French and English par-
ticipants in the great conflict, it is heavy with melancholy,
totally unrelieved by any outlook of optimism. The dark side
alone is seen and pictured : it is insisted upon, and worse still,
it is exaggerated. Take his vodka if you like, but the Russian
will not be denied his melancholia, his pessimism, his cynicism.
•In the War, By V. Versacv. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.
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This melancholia steeps the pages of Russian writings like
a dampness of a dew. A Russian anthology^ for instance,
has recently been published in English — a book which presents
readings from some twenty-five famous Slavic authors; a book
which may, indeed, be taken as fairly representative. The
gleam in it, when there is a gleam in it, is like winter sunlight,
chill and blue. Here we have Tolstoi and Turgeniev sup-
posedly at their best; Pushkin, Dostoevski, Andreyev — the
whole array — ^with new ones added, such as Volynski, for
the first time seen in English dress. But the whole effect is still
one of cynicism and morbid hopelessness.
When the Tsar fell last year, and the famous woman revo-
lutionist Ekaterina Breshkovsky * returning in triumph from
her exile in Siberia, addressed the populace at Moscow, she said
this: "At every station and crossroad there is only one de-
mand — it is the groan of the people for literature, books, read-
ing." Yes; but not, we pray, too much of their own hopeless
literature. That is altogether too morbidly introspective, too
self-analytical, to be healthful. What the Russian needs is
something to lift up his eyes, to turn them away from a too
close scrutiny of himself. More of Gogol, yes: there is whole-
someness in that robust spokesman of the Cossack; and more of
what Poland has possessed in Michiewicz; or in Sienkiewicz,
with his Shakespearean virility. What could not a Russian
Sienkiewicz accomplish for Russia, in these trying days and
the worse days that are to come, in giving his people ideals, the
inspiration of a unified national purpose, a clear vision, a
wholesome outlook on life, instead of a morbid insight into it!
These are the things that Russia needs to temper her exaggera-
tions, to enliven her heavy-spiritedness, to clean her mouth of
the bitter taste of cynicism. Perhaps the disintegration of the
present, in time bearing fruit in the whole-hearted amalgama-
tion of the future, will give it her. Perhaps, in Russian litera-
ture, we will yet come to hear that note of song which bespeaks
the sweetness of life tasted, not held away from frustrated lips;
nor yet cloying the palate of ineffectual desire.
^A RuMMian Anthology in English. New York: E. P. Dutton A Co.
*The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, Boiton: Little, Brown St Co.
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THE MORAL ASPECT OP THE BANKRUPTCY LAW.
F. REGIS NOEL, LL.B., PH.D.
IGHER civilization demands for the individual
civil liberty and equal opportunity; society needs
the untrammeled efforts of every honest man.
A practical system for the relief of bankrupts,
because of the conflicting character of the ends
to be accomplished, niust inevitably complicate the task of the
State. Such system should be an harmonious combination of
the maxims of law, the rules of ethics and the principles of
social-economics. It should be the result of the legal rights
between man and man as tempered by Christian principles and
the prerogative of society to receive the benefit of the labor of
every member. The laws of bankruptcy should not be de-
signed solely either for the interest of the debtor or of the credi-
tor, or, indeed, for their combined interests. The claims of
justice and the commercial development of the nation also
must be considered.
The common welfare is the foundation and object of the
doctrines of bankruptcy relief derived in foro interno, or con-
science, as well as in foro externo, or the courts. The bankrupt
occupies a peculiar and debatable position in the eyes of legists
and moralists. A fraudulent bankrupt is not to be considered
as entering into this discussion, since he deserves no indulgence
from society, but should be exposed to criminal prosecution
and imprisonment. We are concerned only with those who fail
to pay their debts, not those who fail to avoid paying them.
To release a debtor from encumbrances, or even from
prison, is no impairment of a contract. Imprisonment is not an
express or implied condition and release is simply a suspension
of a legal sanction for the violation of the terms of the contract.
In the absence of fraud or criminal negligence, the bankrupt,
although not guilty, is not wholly innocent, for the creditor has
rights which must not be violated even if adversity be the cause
of the bankrupt's condition. His claims are a part of his prop-
erty, but his rights are partially offset by the paramount rights
of the community. A private right must always give place to
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a general good. But this law also operates for the creditor's
advantage, for, if the insolvent debtor remain under the burden
of debt, the fund will gradually be more diminished, perhaps
depleted, while the creditor will procure nothing more, except
in the case of the conscientious man who, in any event, would
make restitution. By relieving the debtor, the community is
benefited by his experience, greater precaution and renewed
industry. In spite of his misfortune a debtor continues to enjoy
rights co-equal with the creditor. Therefore the State is called
upon to administer, differentiate and protect the rights of the
debtor and those of the creditor.^
God wills human society, but civil society cannot be main-
tained without authority to protect and enforce the definite in-
dividual rights of those composing it in a manner conformable
with the best interest of the group. To do this is the first duty
of the State. Its second duty is to determine and maintain in-
definite rights. In the fulfillment of these duties the State has
the right by the natural law to pass any positive law which
really favors the common good by the protection of some pri-
vate right. The norm of interference with private rights is the
public good. The relation of the debtor and creditor is a rela-
tion of contract entered into with the fullest intention of the
parties thereto to accomplish that which they promise. Is
the authority of the State competent to interfere with the rela-
tion of contract, and if it is, to what extent can it absolve a
debtor from his debts?
According to what theologians call "natural justice,**
the debtor owes the full amount which represents that which
he has received^ and he is obliged, coram Deo, to pay it. If he
is unable to pay in full, assuming the equal circumstances of all
the creditors, he should pay pro rata as much as he is physi-
cally able to spare, and, if afterwards he prosper and is in a
position to pay the balance, he must do so. To this rule, in the
absence of some superior general good, all the doctors agree.
It is understood that in case the bankrupt does not become able
to discharge the debt, he is not culpable, unless he assumed it
^ Legal recognition of tlili doctrine, which equity lores, is thus summarlxed from
In Re WitkowMki, 10 N. B. R., 200: "The purpose of a bankruptcy law Is to place
within the possession of a creditor that to which he may be entitled within the
shortest possible time, and at the same time if the bankrupt has made a fair and
honest surrender and complied with the requisites made of him, to giye him a
speedy release and let him begin again to provide an honest Hying for himself and
those dependent upon him and again become a useful and active member of sodaty."
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34 MORAL ASPECT OF THE BANKRUPTCY LAW [Oct.,
knowing that he could not fulfill the obligation. Physical or
moral incapacity will be a valid excuse as long as it lasts, for
if he cannot make restitution without reducing himself to beg-
gary, and those depending upon him to wretched circumstances,
it will be sufiScient if he have the desire to restore what belongs
to his creditors.
For the common good, however, the State has authority to
interpose and set aside the rules of " natural justice." By vir-
tue of this power bankruptcy laws have been established, which
relieve the debtor who has complied with all the legal require-
ments and protect him against the courts and invocation of
authority for the exaction of additional payments.^
Is this law just? Moral theologians agree that it is, for it
is necessary to and promotes the general welfare. Considered
in the specific case, it has the appearance of a discrimination in
favor of the debtor by removing a disability which would im-
pede him throughout life, and against the creditor by depriv-
ing him of his claim. Such consideration is not thorough.
Our Government chooses from the population a certain num-
ber of young men and gives them the advantage of training
and education at the Military Academy at West Point and the
Naval Academy at Annapolis. What is the object sought? It
is not the improvement of the individual in sel The greater
good which such young men will be fitted to accomplish for
the nation is the purpose of these institutions. The State is
* "It may be safely held that the elvll power has authority under certain cir-
cumstances to enact such a law as would release the debtor from the obligation of
full payment, while that obligation might have remained if the law did not exist."
Slater, Manual of Moral Theology, with American notes by Martin, I., 440. '*If the
legislative body of any nation confining Itself to matters subject to its Jurisdiction
enact a measure whose effect will be to promote the public good, there is no suffi-
cient reason to deny it such authority. . . . There can scarcely be a doubt that the
civil authority can release a bankrupt from all future liability if it chose to do so.
Especially in trading communities it may be for the public good that an honest but
unfortunate trader should be able to begin again, without being weighted with a
heavy load of past debts. If the law releases a bankrupt debtor from all future
liability, the rate of interest will soon accommodate itself to the circumstances."
Ihid,
In arguing States' rights, Calhoun held the contrary view : " If by discharging
the debts be meant the releasing the obligation of the contract, cither In whole or
in part, then neither this Government nor that of any of the States possessed such
a power. The obligation of a contract belongs not to the civil or political code,
but the moral. It is imposed by an authority higher than human, and can be
discharged by no power under heaven, without the assent of him to whom the obli-
gation is due. It is binding on the conscience itself. If a discharged debtor had in
his pocket the discharges of every government on earth, he would not be an honest
man, should he refuse to pay his debts, if ever in his power." Works, m., 512.
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permanent and takes measures for its protection. Upon the
same theory lepers are isolated, tuberculosis sanatariums are
established and the care and education of orphans are recog-
nized as duties of the State. In order to accomplish the public
good, in bankruptcy relief as well as these other matters, some
individuals obtain a mediate advantage.
It is established that the State can relieve debtors to what-
ever extent is necessary to achieve the purpose of the common
good. Now arises the question in regard to which moralists
divide into two schools. Both schools agree that the State
could, if it were considered necessary for the common good,
relieve a man not alone from legal bonds but also free him in
conscience. The first school says that the State's purpose is
accomplished by relieving the bankrupt in foro externo, and it
is not necessary to extend the relief to the ease of the con-
science, and hence the State has not the actual power to do so
and the obligation remains after the legal discharge, if the
bankrupt ever becomes able to pay it. It maintains that the
State has exhausted its powers when it permits courts legally
to discharge all debts and claims, and that its function ends
when the debtor's physical and social progress is no longer
materially impeded. Its members say that r Cessio Bonorum,
whether voluntary or ordered by the court upon the petition
of the creditors, does not of itself and independently of the
forgiveness of the creditors or other considerations, relieve the
debtor of the moral obligation of making full payment out of
his future acquisitions, if he becomes able to do so.
Against, or rather qualifying this view, Ortolan, a legal
authority, observes : " The release from debt is always classed
as a donation in Roman law," ' and he refers to the law Cessio
Bonorum. Macleod, the economist, states that, "The release
of a debt is in all cases equivalent to a gift or payment in
money." * Most theologians do not consider it so, unless it is
expressed or clearly implied. They deny that the public good
is not completely accomplished unless the debtor's conscience
is also relieved, and assert that the bankrupt is bound in con-
science to pay a debt which he no longer legally owes.
Lemkuhl expresses the opinion of practically all the
theologians that, "the insolvent laws of England or of any
•Explication historlque des InMtitutes de Justinien, liv, II., 543-557.
*The Theory of Credit (London, 1889), I.. 280.
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36 MORAL ASPECT OF THE BANKRUPTCY LAW [Oct.,
other country cannot, of themselves, discharge the conscience
of the debtor from further liability for his debts.' Slater ob-
serves : " In most countries, as in America, it seems that the
law only grants the bankrupt exemption from future molesta-
tion on the part of his creditors; it does not free him from
moral obligation to pay his debts in full if ever he becomes
able to do so." * Archbishop Kenrick published his work on
moral theology shortly after the enactment of the law of 1841.
In his observation on this law he preferred the opinion that the
Congress did not intend to liberate the conscience of the debtor,
and he held as probable the opposite opinion.^ Konings, an-
other well-known American theologian, was somewhat in
doubt and refrained from giving an opinion on the question.'
Most theologians, perhaps nineteen out of every twenty, hold
the opinion that, in the ordinary case, without extenuating cir-
cumstances and without serious inconvenience to himself and
those dependent on him, he is bound coram Deo to pay the
balance of the debt.* The law simply destroys the legal con-
tract."
This opinion seems to be supported by the natural feeling
of the bankrupt and the attitude which society and the State
assume toward hin\. Bankrupts are prone to feel guilty, just
as any other debtor feels, until the debt is satisfied.^^ A strong
presumption that the State has not the power to afford relief
beyond the legal discharge arises from the fact that the Euro-
pean States withhold privileges from the bankrupt until he has
paid his debts in full. Tanquerey states that this is the case in
•Th§ Casutst, 1„ 172.
*A ManutU of Moral Theology, I., 538. In England, Cessio Bonorum was known
ai ••The Lord'i Act." Story, H., 48.
^ Dt Justitta, n. 207. Ceterum quum probabilt sit Congresswn dominio usum
ut obligationem etiam conscientim tollat, etc,
*An eessto bonorum a solutlone Integra Uberct? Mor. TheoL, n. 801.
* Doctor Thomas BouqulIIon held this view, ef, Theologia Moralis Fundament
talis, Paris, 1903.
^Nemo tenetur restituere cum suo ualde majore detrimento, quam sit ereditoris
•ommodttm, . . . Bonum inferioris ordinis restitaendum non est cum detrimento
boni superioris aque gravis, Kutscher, Doctrine of Restitution,
" '* If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor;
you will be in fear when you speak to him; you will make poor sneaking, pitiful
excuses, and by degrees come to lose your veracity, and sink into base, downright
lying; for, as Poor Richard says. The second vice is lying, the first is running into
debt; and again, to the same purpose. Lying rides upon debfs back; whereas a
freebom Englishman ought not to be ashamed or afraid to see or speak to any man
living. But poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue. 'Tis hard for an
empty bag to stand upright!" — Poor Richard's Almanac,
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France,** and Bulot nicely states the theory of the French law
that article 1270 of the Code defers but does not extinguish the
debt" The civil law of Belgium is' the same," and according
to Bucceroni, it is the same in Italy.*' This interpretation also
prevails in Spain." Also, this fact demonstrates that the laws
were not made for the individual but for the common welfare.
Although generally commercial in spirit, from the early
days of the practice in the sixteenth century until the present
time all the great theologians of Europe have held the view that
the moral obligation is not removed. Lugo wrote that the con-
sensus of opinion of his contemporaries was that the obligation
cannot be extmguished by the ordinary law." St. Alphonsus
and Busembaum held the same view, as well as Ballerini."
To cite these few authorities is suflBcient. The preponder-
ance of opinion of different moralists, formed in different coun-
tries and times and derived by different courses of reasoning, is
to the effect that the obligation to pay the remainder of the debt
is not removed by the operation of the usual bankruptcy law.
The second school contends that the State can completely
eradicate the debt, even in conscience. Doctor CroUy, for-
merly a professor at Maynooth College, and an eminent theolo-
gian, in his work, contends that the laws of England entirely
exonerate a debt both in the court of law and in conscience."
Martin, in his American note to Slater's work, reveals himself
a disciple of this doctrine. His first argument is that incom-
plete discharge would be a curtailment of the power of the
State and the purpose of the law.
He writes : " This end is more effectually attained if the
act is extended to liberate the debtor from the moral obligation
of making full payment, and there is expediency for such ex-
tension." Next, he argues, there is nothing in the wording of
the act of the United States which prescribes legal release only,
"In Gallia Mtatnitur dtbitorem non liberari ntsi secundum ea qu« solvit, ita u^
si nova bona acqutrat, teneatur ea dimittere usque ad iniegram soluttonem. Sgnop,
Theol, Mor„ UI., n. 074. "Aucun banqueroutier, failli on dibiteur insolvable ne
pourra Ore admis dans les assemblies primaires, ni devenir ou Tester membre soit de
Vassemhlie nationale, soit des assemblies administratives, soit des municipalitis,*' C. 5
fruet tm UI,, art 13. C. 23, frlm. an. VHI., art 5, Initr. 8, mars 1848, art 4.
"Comp. Mor, TheoL, I., 659. >«Genlcot, I., n. 004.
» InsHt. TheoL Mor,, I., n. 1460. ^ Ferrerei. Comp, Theol, Mot,, I., n. 719.
** Vera tamen et communis doetorum sententia negat extingui obligationem resti-
tuendi, tie., disp. 21, sec. 3, n. 40.
"Qttod si {bonis eedens) tamen postea redeat ad pinguiorem fortunam, tenetur
adhttc restituere. Lib. IV., n. 699. Ballerini, Opus Theol, Mor. m., 451.
»De Just et Jure, UL, n. 1232.
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38 MORAL ASPECT OF THE BANKRUPTCY LAW [Oct.,
the act discharging all provable debts except such as are ex-
cluded by it. Then he applies one of the interpretive rules of
canonists : Ubi lex non distinguit, nee non nos distinguere
debemus. His next proposition is based on the nature of con-
sciences and is inconclusive. He says that seventy-five per
centum of the bankrupts of our country are non-Catholics, who,
unrestrained by the institution of confession, " pay no attention
to obligations of conscience of this kind, being occupied solely
with escaping penalties for the violation of civil laws.*' The
twenty-five per centum, who are Catholics, he thinks, have
more highly developed consciences and are thereby bound to
pay the residue.*® In order to be equitable, giving like advan-
tage to Catholics and non-Catholics, the law should be inter-
preted to release all, or none, in conscience, and since some
will not continue bound in conscience, the law should be con-
strued as conferring plenary release.*^
Martin states further: "If the bankrupt law be so inter-
preted that the moral obligation remains, the civil authority
would appear to be protecting dishonest people in their dis-
honesty, since it would virtually .say to such bankrupts, * You
need not pay the balance of your debts.''* ... It is plain that the
civil authority would thus be acting against the purpose for
which both itself and the bankruptcy law were instituted and
therefore beyond its power." He states that he has reason to
believe that Sabetti and Konings, if writing today, " would hold
the debtor's obligation extinguished, either on the ground of
full remission being granted under the Act, or by the consent
of the creditor." "
The conclusion of the Casuist,^* based on Marshall's de-
cision in Sturges versus Crowninshield," which Martin also
uses, is a glaring non-sequitur. A close study of Marshall's
reasoning shows that the discharge to which he referred was a
legal discharge only, when he said: "The insolvent laws of
most of the States only discharge the person of the debtor and
leave his obligation to pay out of his future acquisitions in full
force." These State laws were based on the Roman law, Cessio
Bonorum, which exempted only the person of the debtor from
imprisonment, and, if philosophers or theologians adopt Cessio
*^ Manual, 440 et seq,
"The reference from Martin must not in any way be construed as Indicating
the opinion of the writer on this point /
*» Ibid., 442, « Ibid,, 447. »*I., 174. "4 Wheaton, 122 c/ «e^. j
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Bonorum as the basis of their reasoning, they cannot conclude
that the debt is morally obliterated.
Martin suggests a circumstance which would remit the obli-
gation even in conscience. This is the virtual remission of the
debt by the creditor on account of modern business methods
and conditions. Business men are presumed to enter into an
implied agreement that in the event of a bona fide failure the
assets are to be accepted in full settlement. These catastrophes
are calculated for, and terms made with such contingencies in
view. A wholesale firm computes its probable losses from fail-
ures in a specific period and distributes it in the price of goods
sold on credit, which may be viewed as a premium paid for
credit. Thus all the debtors pay a proportionate share. Were
there no such contingencies, rates and prices would undoubt-
edly be lower. If an honest retailer fail, the wholesale house
or manufacturer gets his assets, and his fellow-buyers and the
bankrupt have long before made up the deficit. If the bank-
rupt owe any one, it is his fellow traders, but they are too
numerous and the amount too slight in the individual case to
become the subject of consideration.^*
There is weight and merit in the contention of the second
school that the law should be applied so as to obliterate all
liability, if it is considered as a matter of argument; but it is to
be feared that adoption of its view would be morally corrupt-
ing — a result not desired by theologians, legislators, business
men, or anybody. That it is inexpedient is proved by the suc-
cess and adequacy of the prevailing interpretation.
A few eminent teachers assert that in accepting dividends
out of the assets, the creditors remit the debt. Of course, these
arguments, or any which go to quiet the conscience, do not ap-
ply in cases of private debt, such as money borrowed from one
not in the business of making loans, or in the case of a per-
sonal charge owed to a dressmaker, etc., who takes no security
against losses. Some rigorists go so far as to consider future
acquisitions, talent, industry and integrity, as well as present
possessions, the basis of credit and within the conditions of the
contract at its making. Others have thought that an undis-
charged bankrupt or one who has not paid the deficiency
'"Sabcttl, in his Moral Theology for the United States, holds that: Attamen si
qnandoque ex rerum adjunctis apparet eredttores velle omnia condonare, vel alicubi
Ita fUri commereium nt ratio habeatnr Inter mereatores probabllls futurse cessionls
bonorum, non vtdetnr tunc cur imponenda sit obllgatio In perpetuum. Note. 463.
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40 MORAL ASPECT OF THE BANKRUPTCY LAW [Oct.,
should not be permitted to contribute to the support of the
Church or to public charity. They consider that he cannot do
so in Christian honesty.
A summarized consideration of the development of the
Federal bankruptcy system reveals that the origins of its
numerous doctrines are found scattered over the civilized
world throughout a period of twenty-five centuries. From a
legal procedure adopted for the benefit of the creditors it has
been transmuted into a commercial policy abounding with
utility and profit alike for the debtors and creditors of the en-
tire community. The legal, moral and social-economic prin-
ciples which inspired the Constitutional Convention in provid-
ing for the system, the legislators in producing it, and the courts
in defining and interpreting it, have been, in a measure, ex-
plained. Ample powers for the purposes of the system are
delegated to the national Government by the Constitution. The
crown-jewel of this legislation is its capacity legally to dis-
charge the bankrupt from the payment of his provable debts,
and to enable him subsequently to enjoy with tranquillity the
fruit of his labor.
The history of this law is evidence of man's humanity to
his fellow-man. While all concede that as long as men barter,
bankruptcy will be one of the evils of society, it is now regarded
not as a crime, but as a misfortune, not as a disgrace, but as a
malady which needs the soothing remedy of sympathy and
encouragement.
There are many unanswerable reasons applying at all
times and in all conditions and stages of government which
prove that a bankruptcy system should be a permanent part
of the national legislation. In beholding the excellent laws for
the relief of insoluble debt in the United States, a line in Frank-
lin's Farewell Address to the Constitutional Convention recurs
as applicable to this growth from that Constitution to which
he referred. He said : " It astounds me, sir, to find the system
approaching so near to perfection as it does." '^
"Elliot, Debates, V., 554.
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A CONVERT SCIENTIST AND HIS WORK.
BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., PH.D.
I HE development of the history of science in recent
years shows us how many men there were in the
olden time ** who,** to use Professor Saintsbury's
words descriptive of the old Scholastic philoso-
phers, "whatever they could not do, could think."
One of the old-time scientists who has been brought into promi-
nence by the modern historical movement is Nicolas Stensen,
the Dane.
Admiration for Stensen has grown with knowledge of his
work, for besides the discovery of the salivary duct named
after him,^ he was the first to teach definitely that the heart is
a muscle and not a mystic foimt of emotions. He has come to
be considered also one of the most important founders of
modem geology. Quite literally, indeed, it may be said that
he anatomized the ground work of Tuscany and showed the
constituent parts of its hills and mountains and valleys and
their relations to each other and their mode of origin as clearly
as anyone ever demonstrated the parts of the human body and
their embryology. It is simply marvelous to look at his dia-
grams and realize how thoroughly he understood the various
processes which had brought about the configuration of the
land and how he worked out and explained them. No one had
ever attempted anything of the kind before and yet when Sten-
sen completed his work, there was little left to be added in
after time. His little book on the subject, the Prodromus, ** re-
mains one of the most noteworthy contributions to the science
of geology and especially the geology of Italy.'* As von Zittel
remarked in his History of Geology and Paleontology, it
" already contained the kernel of much that has been under
constant discussion during the two centuries that have passed
since his death." Von Zittel even suggests that most of the
questions Stensen raised, have not been settled yet in spite of
the advance in geology.
< Hlf name in a Latlnlxed form, Steno, is attached to the salivary duct that leads
from the parotid gland into the mouth.
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42 A CONVERT SCIENTIST AND HIS WORK [Oct,
The International Congress of geologists that met at
Bologna, some forty years ago, before closing its sessions ad-
journed to Florence to hold a memorial meeting in honor of
Stensen, and to place a laurel crown on the tomb of the man
who ''had reached surpassing distinction among geologists
and anatomists/'
Since then his reputation has continued to grow until now
his prestige in the scientific world is firmly established. Stensen
did distinguished original work, still recalled with grateful
appreciation, in two sciences as far removed from each other
as anatomy and geology. He deserves besides a place of honor
in crystallography. His interest in biology was deep and his
studies in fossils have won for him a reputation in
paleontology.
A little more than a year ago the University of Michigan
honored the Danish scientist by selecting one of Stensen's
works, his well-known Prodromus or " Dissertation Concern-
ing a Solid Naturally Contained Within a Solid," for republi-
cation as Number XI. in its Humanistic Series. The publica-
tion consists of an English version of the work with an in-
troduction and explanatory notes in which Stensen*s merits are
emphasized, and he is classed as one of the great observers in
the history of science. As Professor Hobbs says in his introduc-
tion: "We must attribute it largely to the closeness of his
observation of nature and to his discriminating judgment that
Stensen was not lured into wild speculation as were so many in
his time." He goes on to say that " one of Stensen's statements
might well be printed in large letters and placed upon the walls
of our laboratories and lecture rooms as a warning to those
who undertake scientific investigation.'* The statement re-
ferred to is : ** The nurse of doubts (I should prefer to trans-
late Stensen's words * the fosterer of uncertainties ') seems
to me to be the fact that in the consideration of questions relat-
ing to nature, those points which cannot be definitely deter-
mined are not distinguished from those which can be settled
with certainty." Professor Hobbs' comment will find an echo
in many hearts: " How much trouble would be saved, if today
scholars had this point of tener in mind."
Professor Hobbs pays him the further compliment
of saying : " Stensen is the pioneer of the observational
methods which dominate in modern science " and " if we ex-
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cept Leonardo da Vinci, who like Steno was a Florentine by
adoption and who antedated him by a century and a half,
there was no writer upon natural science before the eighteenth
century that in accuracy of observation, in cogency of reason-
ing, or in discrimination of judgment might be compared with
the learned Dane." *
That is, indeed, praise from a modern professor of science,
and yet no one who knows the details of Stensen's work could
think for a moment that it was exaggerated. Stensen has come
into his own during the twentieth century. When I wrote his
life for the Ecclesiastical Review some fifteen years ago, many
were inclined to think that I must be exaggerating the signifi-
cance in the history of science of this anatomist of the seven-
teenth century who, in the midst of his distinguished scien-
tific work in Italy, had become a convert to Catholicism, was
ordained priest and eventually was made a bishop to give him
the opportunity to fulfill, if possible, his hopes of winning back
to the Church his Danish fellow-countrymen.
For it is an outstanding fact in Stensen's life that, although
a Dane and brought up in the midst of the most bitter preju-
dice against the Church, he went down to Italy, lived there for
years and became a devout Catholic.
The most brilliant scientific thinker of his time, he was one
of those wonderful men who are able to take the step across
the boundaries of the known into the domain of the unknown,
and to trace a pathway there for other men to follow. Only a
genius is ever such a pioneer. An immense new field of knowl-
edge opened up to him in the science of geology of which he
was the founder, yet he never permitted speculation to lure
him from the solid ground of actual observation and absolutely
necessary conclusions from such observation. Whenever he
touched a subject he illuminated it. His work on the heart illus-
trates this very well. When he first dared to announce that
this organ, to which all the world had been referring their emo-
tions and their feelings and their profounder knowledge, was
just a muscle pump and nothing more, a storm of indignation
broke over him. But he stood unmoved in the midst of it and
calmly went on with his work.
In every department of science the same calm force of
intellect was noteworthy. While laying the foundation of
* Itellea ours.
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44 A CONVERT SCIENTIST AND HIS WORK [Oct.,
geology in his Prodromus he discovered two most important
principles of crystallography : the striking peculiarity of light
refraction that distinguishes the crystal from amorphous sub-
stances such as glass, and that fundamental law of crystallogra-
phy, the constancy of interf acial angles. The experimental ver-
ijBcation of this law was delayed for nearly a century and a half
until the invention of the reflecting goniometer in 1805, yet
clearly Stensen not only grasped the principle of the law but he
succeeded in obtaining, with the crude instruments at his com-
mand, an experimental verification of it. He even solved the i
mystery of the so-called "phantom crystals," and blazed the
way for the development of the new science. Its scientific
evolution did not take place until Abb^ Hauy took up the
work a century later, but Stensen deserves a place of honor
among the crystallographers.
This intellectual genuis, clear-headed, thoroughly conser-
vative, broadly educated, of charming character, found it im-
possible to stay out of the Church once he came to know her
as she really was, as the result of his years of life in Italy. He
was still a young man when his conversion took place, and still
looked forward to going back to Denmark, where, being a
Catholic would be a decided handicap to his career. In fact, not
long after his conversion he was summoned home to Den-
mark by his king, and felt it incumbent upon him to inform His
Majesty of his change of belief before returning, in order to
be sure that the king would be willing to receive him as a
Catholic. His royal highness had offered Stensen a pension
in reward for his scientific discoveries of which he had heard,
but on condition that he should come back to Copenhagen and
give to his native country the prestige of any further scientific
work he might accomplish.
The story of Stensen's conversion is extremely interesting
because it shows that a man's heart must be touched, rather
than his intellect, to bring about this great change of views.
He was a zealous, thoroughly convinced Lutheran, and had
even written an answer to some of Bossuet's arguments against
Lutheranism. His mental attitude was therefore rather
strongly confirmed, and his conversion, as might be expected,
did not come about easily.
In Florence his position as physician to the Hospital of
Santa Maria Nuova, brought him closely in contact with the
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Sisters in charge and frequently into the apothecary shop
attached to the hospital. As a result he came to know very well
the religious in charge of the department. Sister Maria Flavia,
the daughter of a well-known Tuscan family. She soon learned
that the distinguished young physician, at this time scarcely
thirty years of age, who was such a pleasant gentleman, was a
Lutheran. First by prayer, and then by friendly suggestions,
she began her attempt to win him to the Catholic Church. Sten-
sen, who seems already to have been well-disposed toward the
Church, and who had always been distinguished by a wonder-
ful purity of heart and simplicity of character, listened very
graciously to the naive words of the dear old religious, who
might very well have been his mother.
She began very simply by telling him one day that if he did
not accept the true Catholic faith, he would surely go to hell.
He listened to this without impatience, and she reiterated it a
number of times, half jokingly perhaps, but much more than
half in earnest. As he listened kindly, she suggested that he
must pray every day to (xod to let him know the truth. This he
promised to do. One day, while he was in the apothecary shop,
the Angelus bell rang, and she asked him to say the Angelus.
He was perfectly ready to say the first part of the Hail Mary
but was unwilling to say the second part, as he did not believe
in invocation of the Blessed Virgin and the saints. Then she
asked him to visit the Church of the Blessed Virgin, the San-
tissima Nunziata, which he did. Encouraged by his compliance,
she suggested that he should abstain from meat on Fridays and
Saturdays. This he promised to do, and actually did do. "the
religious thought it was time then to suggest that he should
consult a priest.
Another good woman and good friend of his, Signora
Lavinia Felice, seeing how interested he was in things Catholic,
succeeded in bringing him to the notice of a prominent Jesuit
in Florence. As his friend, Sister Maria Flavia, had recom-
mended the same Father to him, he followed her advice all the
more readily, and before long his every doubt was solved.
Almost more interesting than the account of Steno's scien-
tific work, are the traditions that have come down to us with
regard to his chami of disposition and the many friends that he
made. From very early years he was noted for his religious
disposition, his gentleness, and his kindness to others. He him-
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46 A CONVERT SCIENTIST AND HIS WOHK [Oct.,
self tells that he was in poor health in childhood and accord-
ingly associated much more with his elders as a rule, and had
very little liking for sports. He liked religious topics and pre-
ferred serious talk (I am quoting his own words) to the frivol-
ous chatter of younger companions. He says further " in my
journeys, also, I kept away as much as possible from idle and
dangerous people and sought friendship with those who had
won repute through their upright life and learning." It is not
surprising that he became the favorite pupil of his instructors
at the University of Copenhagen. Some of them like Thomas
Bartholin, whose name is well known in anatomy, and Bor-
richius (Ole Borch), were favorably known, at least in the
academic world of the West of Europe, in their day.
His conversion to the Church was welcomed particularly
by his scientific friends. Viviani, the pupil and biographer of
Galileo, wrote enthusiastically of it to Magalotti the distin-
guished Secretary of the Accademia del Cimento, declaring that
this was the only thing that his very dear friend Stensen had
lacked to make him adorable. Stensen choose December 8th,
the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, as the day of his final
reception into the Church, because he felt that his conversion
had been largely due to his prayer to the Blessed Virgin and he
wanted to become a Catholic under her special patronage. The
Rosary became a favorite devotion of his. In this he had as
companions such men as Galvani, Volta, Ampere, Laennec,
and Pasteur.
It is rather amusing to have his editor at the University of
Michigan rather apologize for Stensen's conversion. He con-
fesses, however, that " he was deeply religious by nature and
there can be no question about the sincerity of his conversion."
Apparently anyone who lets any religious influence of a for-
mal character get into his life must be apologized for and this
is particularly true if he has a scientific mind and has displayed
signal ability in solving scientific questions. As a matter of
fact, however, Stensen was surrounded in Florence by men who
were devout Catholics and whose names are only less distin-
guished than his own in science. Among them, as one of his
particular friends, was Francesco Radi, the Italian poet, physi-
cian and naturalist, who has an enduring place in the history of
observations made with regard to the question of spontaneous
generation. There was no place in the world of that time
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where there was more ardent devotion to knowledge of all
kinds, literary, scientific, philosophical, than in Florence, and
the prominent men were practically all devout Catholics
closely in touch with the clergy and especially with the Jesuits,
whose members were among the most distinguished scientists
of the time, but also with the higher ecclesiastics, and even the
Pope himself.
As a matter of fact Steno had gone down into Italy because
he could obtain there better opportunities for the study of
anatomy than anjrwhere else in Europe. We have heard much
of Papal opposition to anatomical study, but when Vesalius,
the great father of anatomy, wanted to secure opportunities for
dissection which he had been able to obtain so grudgingly in
Louvain and with so much difficulty in Paris, he went to Italy.
There, not only did physicians and surgeons have permission
to dissect, but practically every artist of the Renaissance dis-
sected. Some of them made many hundreds of special an-
atomical studies. Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of these have
been recently recovered and published. Stensen went to Italy
because of the scientific opportunities to be enjoyed there,
greater than in any other country of Europe, until at the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, France became the home of
graduate scientific studies, and later, Germany became pre-
eminent.
Stensen's biographer says that '' the brilliant young Dane
seems in fact to have had a genius for friendship." He went
to Italy with the highest recommendations from some of the
most distinguished scientists in Western Europe, and it is not
surprising that he was well received and at once provided with
abundant opportunities for the pursuit of his special studies.
What is noteworthy, however, is that the Italians always
seemed ready to welcome foreigners and showed no chauvinis-
tic tendency to keep their opportunities to themselves, or to
hamper in any way the efforts of strangers. Stensen was act-
ually appointed physician to the Grand Duke, with a house and
pension, within a few months of his arrival in Florence. He
was also given, as we have seen, a position as attending physi-
cian in the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. And his experience
was no different from that of Vesalius who came from the
Netherlands more than a century before.
It is rather surprising, in the light of all this, to have the
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48 A CONVERT SCIENTIST AND HIS WORK [Oct,
first paragraph of Professor Hobbs' foreword to the
Prodromus echo the erroneous old-fashioned notion of the
supposed opposition of the Church to science, and to state that
"in reading the Prodromus one should remember that the
essay was written near the middle of the seventeenth century
when scientific observation was hardly thought of.** " Scien-
tific observation was hardly thought of*' when Italy had
already developed the sciences of anatomy and physiology
and had attracted Vesalius and Harvey; when Regiomontanus
had been invited there to correct the calendar, and Copernicus
had made there the announcement of his great theory and
then returned to Germany to work it out and to dedicate his
great book to the Pope ! Scientific observation hardly thought
of, indeed, when Galileo had made giant strides in the knowl-
edge of the heavens, the Jesuit astronomers Scheiner and
Cysatus had made their wonderful observations on the sun and
on comets, Father Cysatus actually discovering a curvature in
the orbit of comets, and Father Riccioli having introduced the
lunar nomenclature in use even today, while his colleague
and brother Jesuit, Father Grimaldi, drew up one of the first
maps of the moon worthy of the name!
Has Professor Hobbs never looked at any of our histories
of medicine to see what was accomplished before Stenson's
time in real scientific advance, that he can announce that " all
knowledge concerning the cause of the natural phenomena was
generally supposed to have been given by God directly to man
and the message was strictly guarded by the Church? ** What
nonsense a man can talk when he talks out of a depth of
ignorance — or inadvertence.
Harvey was only one of a group of Englishmen who dur-
ing the sixteenth century studied in Italy and looked back
gratefully on their experience. Linacre who did so much for
English medicine, and Caius who introduced dissections into
England are noteworthy examples, though many other names
might be mentioned. Denmark, Belgium, Holland, France,
Spain all owed the' initiative of fine work in original scientific
investigation to Italian masters, either directly or indirectly.
Indeed, remarkable as he was, to talk of Stensen as the pioneer
in scientific investigation in the sense of being the first to make
great original observations, is to ignore three or four centuries
of scientific development.
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GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS.
BY ELEANOR HULL.
I DREAMED a dream, and this is the dream I saw.
I saw a marsh, fourteen miles inland from the
sea on the western shores of Britain, south of
what we now call the Bristol Channel, stretching
far and wide and dotted with islands. Out of
this swamp rose the heights of Brent Knoll and the Tor, one
seen far out to sea, the other more conspicuous from the land
side.
The Tor * was no doubt fortified from early times and sur-
rounded by a wooden stockade as a place of refuge for the
inhabitants of the surrounding islands. Here and there lake
villages arose whose memorials we find today in the pre-his-
toric boat, the three paddles belonging to some ancient coracle,
the pottery and other remains recovered from the Glastonbury
morass. The hearths that formed the centre of the wattled hut-
dwellings still remain, though these fragile buildings them-
selves have disappeared.
Over a thousand years before the age of Christ, the Kymric
people fixed their settlements in the midst of this watery land,
where they felt safe from surrounding enemies. It may
have been these early inhabitants who began the great camps
and intersecting roads that made of Bath, Glastonbury and
Ilchester the chief centres of the West. They traded with the
Phoenicians in corn and cattle, tin and silver, lead and woven
cloths. But the Romans, carrying their conquering arms
through Gaul to Britain, rudely broke the southern trade with
Glastonbury, and transferred it to Kent and the southeastern
coast.
The Claudian conquest (43 A.D.) planted Roman camps
in every part of western England. Bridges spanned the rivers,
Roman villas adorned the rising slopes, great straight roads of
wonderful permanence were driven from caster to caster.
One of these led along the southern slopes of the Mendips to
Old Sarum near Salisbury, another from Bridgewater passed
^ Gftelic Tnn a tower or hel^t
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50 GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS [Oct.,
through Wural Hill to Glastonbury. On the great main road
the Romans built a splendid city of pleasure, now Bath. Even
in Celtic times, the Aquae Solis or " Waters of the Sun ** of the
Romans had been a place of resort. Celtic traditions clung
round Bath. Sol or Sul was the name of the Celtic divinity to
which its natural heated waters were devoted before ever the
Roman patrician and his lady took their pleasure there. Had
not the marvelous virtues of these springs ciu^ed the royal
swineherd Bladud of his leprosy?
Close to Glastonbury are the ruins of one of these Roman
villas. The discovery of Roman pottery and molds for making
Roman coins would seem to prove that near this now isolated
district was once a centre of busy interchange of tra£Qc and a
mint where money was coined. Old William of Malmesbury
describes it as '' a certain island surrounded by woods,
thickets, and marshes on the confines of the kingdom, called
by its inhabitants Ynys-vitrin or insula vitras. But the " Glass
Island " as it has usually been translated, or Glasstingabyrig,
is more probably so-called from the Celtic word glas (mean-
ing gray or green), alluding to the color of its soft turf or per-
haps of its shallow translucent waters.
In the " old Charter of the Blessed Patrick •* believed to
have been given to the abbey by Ireland's patron saint and
quoted by William of Malmesbury, it is described thus:
" There is on the confines of Western Britain a certain royal
island, called in the ancient speech Glastonia, marked out by
broad boundaries, girt round with waters rich in fish, and stag-
nant rivers, fitted for many uses of human indigence, but dedi-
cated to the most sacred of deities." But an old Celtic or Brit-
ish legend gives us another origin for the name. "There
came," it says, " from the Northern part of Britain into the west
twelve brothers and held several kingdoms there." The name
of the last of these brothers was Glasteing, who followed his
sow through the midland Angles, from a spot near a place
called Escebthorne, as far as Wells,.and from Wells through a
pass impenetrable and watery, called Sugewege or the " Sow's
Way," following her pigs till he found her beside the church
we are writing of, suckling her little ones under an apple tree;
whence it hath come down to us that the apples of yon apple
tree are called Ealdeyrcene's apple or the "Old Church"
apples; the sow also used to be called " Old Church " sow, be-
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cause while all other sows have but four feet, she had eight.
Thereupon this Glasteing, when he had reached that island and
saw that it was rich in many good things, came and dwelt in it
with all his family and finished his course of life there. This
hath been copied from the ancient books of the Britons.
Old Chronicles .tell us that apples were very rare in those
parts when first Glasteing's sow found its way to Glastonbury;
so rare that Glasteing called the place Inis Auallon or Apple
Island, a name grown fragrant since Glasteing's day not only
with the actual smell of apple orchards which stretch from the
Severn shore to Wiltshire, but with the tales of Arthur's deeds
and Arthiu^'s death; for in the Vale of Avallon King Arthiu*
lies, waiting " to be healed of his grievous wound."
Round the " Old Church " of Avallon a mystery grew up.
Who had built it, and why, men knew not. And at last their
wonder took shape in this way : " The earliest Angles," wrote
St. Augustine in a letter to Pope Gregory the Great, " first fol-
lowers of the Catholic Law, God guiding them, found in Aval-
lon a chiu*ch not built by art of men, but prepared, it is said,
by God Himself for the salvation of mankind; which church
the Heavenly Architect Himself declared — ^by.many miracles
and mysteries of healing — He had consecrated to Himself and
to Holy Mary, Mother of God." And elsewhere we read : " The
church of which we write, frequently called the * Old Church *
by the Angles because of its antiquity, built first of rushes, from
the very beginning breathed out and spread abroad through-
out the entire country a mysterious odor of Divine sanctity,
from the cult of a great devotion, rude though it may have been.
Hence the confluence hither of all kinds of people along all the
paths of the sea; hence the great show of rich treasiu^es depos-
ited there; hence its constant succession of religious and liter-
ary men." Singular, indeed, that the building of this little
church, nucleus of the greatest and most influential foundation
of western England, ^ Rome the Second " as it came to be called
in after days, should be so lost in mystery.
AU men knew, was that the Angles found a tiny wattled or
rush-built oratory, belonging to some earlier tradition, yet
bearing testimony ^' to the cult of a great devotion, rude though
it may have been." But in after days, when the noble structiu*e
that King Ina of Wessex built upon the spot took the place of
the primitive church of wattles, the size and existence of the
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52 . GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS [Oct.,
old church were not allowed to drop out of memory. Upon a
pillar in St. Joseph's Chapel there hung until the sixteenth cen-
tury a brass plate with an inscription giving the history of the
" Old Chiu'ch " and its exact proportions. When Bishop God-
win read the inscription in 1500 he describes it as very ancient
but not impossible to make out.
The measurements of the venerable wattled church are
the exact limits apportioned by St. Patrick, according to a very
old tradition, for the dimensions of an oratory of the larger
size; the smaller oratories being often not more than fifteen
feet. Even the " Great Stone Church " of Derry, whose size so
astonished people as late as the twelfth century (1164), was
only eighty feet long. Wherever the Irish or " Scottish " * her-
mit went, his first act was to erect an oratory, built of the wat-
tles or rushes of the country, with his own cell beside it. When
St. Finnian or Finan was sent to succeed Bishop Aiden in the
episcopate at Lindisf arne, " he built a church after the manner
of the Irish (Scots), made, not of stone, but of hewn oak and
covered it with reeds." * So late as the twelfth century the same
simple manner of structure seems to have been in common use
in Ireland, for, when St. Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, who
had spent some time abroad, began to erect a church of stone
at Bangor, in the North of Ireland, a great uproar arose!
"What has come over you, good man," the people cried, "to in-
troduce such a building. We are Irish (Scots), not Gauls, and
want no such novelties. How do you think you can find the
means, or live long enough, to finish it? " The " Oakhouse "
(derthech) long preceded the Damhliag mor or great church
of stone all over Ireland, and held its ground with great
persistence where wattle and wood could be obtained; and
it seems to have been the only foruf. of Irish or ** Scottish "
church known in Britain. It is likely that some humble
Irish pilgrim erected that first primitive wattled church at
Glastonbury whose existence gave rise to such wonder in
later days.
All round the western coasts of Britain and Scotland or
Alba can still be found the cells of wandering Irish hermits who
* Scotland was originally the usual name for Ireland, and its people continued
to be called Scots up to the fifteenth century. The iHsh emigrants to North Britain,
then called Alba or Caledonia, took the name with them, and it gradually took the
place of the older name. To prevent confusion, it was dropped in Ireland.
* Venerable Bede, Bed, Hist, Book m., ch. 25.
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left their native land to serve God better, as they thought, in
solitude. Some set out as a penance for crime, as St. Patrick
sent Macuil forth, " in a boat of one hide, without rudder or
oar ** to dwell in whatever land Divine Providence should lead
him to. Macuil, who came ashore in the Isle of Man, after-
wards became the apostle of that island. Close to Glastonbury
arose in after time a yet more famous and learned monastery,
founded by an Irish hermit. The great foundation of Malmes-
bury sprang from the primitive cell and oratory of the Irish
Maeldulf, who about the middle of the seventh century adven-
tured across the sea. This Irish monk was the instructor of the
famous Aldhelm. On landing on the coast, he established him-
self in a thickly wooded part of Wiltshire, building his cell be-
neath the walls of the British castle of Ingelborne. To gain the
necessaries of life he gave instruction in philosophy, for the
knowledge of the wandering Irish hermit far surpassed that
of the people among whom he came. In return for his gifts
of knowledge they gave him gifts of food and clothing, and
gradually he gathered about him a little band of followers who
named the simple monastic establishment Malmesbury (L e.,
Maeldulf sbury), after their master.
Though the name of the founder of the sister house of Glas-
tonbury has been forgotten, we can well guess in what manner
he came to Ynys-vitrin, the " Green Isle ** of the Vale of Aval-
Ion. Like many another of his countrymen, he had adventured
himself forth on the stormy Irish Sea, to drift to some shore,
"he recked not where;" knowing, as the Voyage of Maelduin
quaintly says, that ** whithersoever the Lord would guide him.
He would guide." The first pilgrim monk to Glastonbury did
not long remain alone. Other Irishmen followed in such num-
bers that part of the " twelve hides of land " granted to the
monastery by the pagan king Arviragus, " free from all rent or
tax for ever," became known as Parva Hibernia, or "Little
Ireland," from the multitude of Irish pilgrims who resorted
thither.
Why, indeed, should Irishmen not visit Glastonbury when,
according to a very old tradition, St. Patrick, St. Benignus or
Benen, his successor, St. Brigit and St. Columcille or Columba
had all visited this favored spot? " It is most certain," says a
writer who had been reading the account of William of
Malmesbury, and who added a note on the margin, " that St.
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54 GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS [Oct.,
Patrick, the Apostle of the Irish, ended his days amongst us,
and was the first abbot of our monastery/'
Those who believe that the bones of St. Patrick lie mider
the great stone recently deposited in the graveyard of Down
Patrick in Ulster, or at Saul (Sabhaill), his early church near
by, will be ready to dispute the right of Glastonbury to claim
him as its first abbot, and they will refuse to credit the state-
ment that he lies buried among those Irishmen who made their
home on the east of the Irish Sea. The doubt seems to have ex-
isted even in Glastonbury itself, for old William tells us that
"the question kept recurring whether St. Patrick had ever
been at this place as monk or abbot." The doubt seems to
have reflected the historian's own state of mind for he adds
that "this monk (most likely he speaks of himself) had asked the
question repeatedly," and had not been satisfied of the truth of
the tradition until " it was confirmed to him in a vision."
It is not impossible that St. Patrick should have spent some
time in this district of Britain; there are large portions of his
life unaccounted for, and he lived in an epoch when great in-
cursions of the Scots or Irish, with the Picts, were being made
into South Britain after the withdrawal of the Romans. Nor
is the belief that Irish Christian pilgrims had settled there be-
fore the time of St. Patrick difiicult, if we accept the now
usually held belief that there were some communities of Chris-
tians in Ireland before the coming of St. Patrick. The best
authorities would point to the southeast of Ireland as the part
where pre-Patrician Christianity existed, if at all, and that is
the very district from which Maeldulf and the Glastonbury
hermit must have come. But while not impossible, it is un-
likely that the settlement at Glastonbury was so early as the
fifth century. The date of Maeldulf of Malmesbury is fairly
well fixed, and it is more probable that the first oratory at Glas-
tonbury was erected at about the same period, that ardent
period of Irish Christianity when the sea swarmed with boats
carrying Irish monks to Britain and further afield to distant
spheres on the continent of Europe.
But the Irish tradition was wonderfully persistent. Wil-
liam of Malmesbury occupies four chapters of his history of
the abbey with St. Patrick, three with St. Brigit and St. Colum-
cille. He speaks of the supposed Charter of St. Patrick to the
abbey, recounting his discovery of an old oratory almost in
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ruins at the top of the Tor, to which the saint climbed with
great difficulty with two brethren from Wells, Irishmen both,
penetrating through the thick wood with which the oratory
was surrounded. The church was dedicated to St. Michael,
the warrior archangel, into whose charge all high points were
confided. It was believed that he alone was able to drive away
the hosts of demons with which such heights were supposed
to be infested. The St. Michael's Mounts of Cornwall and
Brittany are examples of a widespread practice.
The homily in the Irish Leber Brecc says that the grave of
St. Patrick is unknown. But Glastonbury has its own opinion
on this point. We are told by the chronicler that after con-
verting the Irish to the Christian faith, the saint ** returned to
Britain and tarried thirty-nine years in the island of Aval-
Ionia, leading there the best of lives; and he rested in the old
church, at the right side of the altar, for many years, for ten
years, namely, up to the time the said church was burned, when
his body was gathered into pyramidal stones beside the altar
towards the south, which out of veneration for the saint was
afterwards nobly clothed in gold and silver by the diligence
of the housemates." The mention of these pyramidal stones
beside the altar is interesting. They are supposed to mark
the place where King Arthur was buried, but they probably con-
tain other bones. It is interesting to note that there are no
less than five notices of the " Old Church *' or Vetusta Ecclesia
before the coming of St. Augustine to Britain in 596. This
Celtic church had had a long history before the story of Anglo-
Saxon Christianity begins.
The history of the growth of the abbey does not specially
concern us, but it may be briefly sketched. Ina, King of Wes-
sex in 708, was its first great benefactor. He pulled down the
ruined buildings of the earlier church dedicated to the Vir-
gin and built a new church to the honor of Christ and of the
Apostles, SS. Peter and Paul. He adorned it with a costly
chapel garnished with twenty-six thousand and forty pounds of
silver and erected an altar enriched with two hundred and six-
ty-foiu* pounds of gold, besides ornaments and gems, and pre-
sented to it treasures of every sort and relics gathered from
every part of Christendom. He gave it a charter with great
immunities and a large gift of land. He gave large benefac-
tions also to Wells. He sent letters to Rome with " an entreaty
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56 GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS [Oct..
that the Pope should take Glastonbury under the protection of
the Holy Roman Church/'
The foundation seems to have escaped the general devasta-
tion of the Danish wars, if it is true that relics were brought
here for safety from Northumbria. This is the more strange, as
Glastonbury was in the very district where for so many years
young Alfred the Great lay in hiding. Close by in a series of
battles culminating at Edington, Alfred swept the Danes out of
Wessex; at Wedmore in the Vale of Avallon the English-born
Danish leader, Guthram,* made peace with Alfred and received
his chrism-loosing with Alfred as his sponsor at the font.
The English-Dano kings were friendly to Glastonbury.
The great Cnut (Canute) came here to pray at the tomb of his
most formidable opponent, Edmund Ironsides, and even Harth-
acnut built a shrine for the Irish saint Benignus.
The monastery rose to the height of its power under the
rule of the famous St. Dunstan, who was its abbot from 944; for
over thirty years. He was, we are told, " the mainstay of the
glory and safety of the English." He died in 988, and left the
great abbey, which had grown up in a somewhat irregular
manner under the simple Irish system, a more thoroughly
organized Benedictine monastery. The splendid buildings
erected by his successors in Norman times, Turstan, Herewin,
and Henry of Blois, only gave outward expression to the recon-
struction of the internal monastic life.
But in 1194, during Henry II.'s reign, a terrible fire
ravaged all these buildings, and it was after their clearance
that the foundations were laid of those exquisite structures of
which alas! only the lovely outlines remain today. Henry II.
conscious that he had appropriated the revenues of the see for
his devastating wars, believed the outbreak of the fire to be
the condemnation of heaven upon his impiety. With all haste,
he sent his chamberlain, Ralph Fitz-Stephen, to rebuild the
shattered house. It was dedicated in 1186 by Reginald, Bishop
of Wells.
We must not forget, as we step inside the beautiful remains
of the Church of St. Mary, more commonly known as St.
Joseph's Chapel, that we are standing on the very spot where,
at some date before English history begins, was planted the
Vetusta Ecclesia, the ancient wicker oratory of sixty feet long.
* Called in the Norse Chronicles, *' Guthram the Englishman."
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built by the first Irish pilgrim to Glastonbury. The plaited
wattle church was now replaced by a structure of squared
stone, " with no possible ornament omitted." The sculptured
door of rich design, the arcaded walls and the elegant comer-
turrets, of which two still remain, prove the truth of this state-
ment. The south door led out to the monks' churchyard, filled,
if legend be true, with the bones of wondrous men : Joseph of
Arimathea and his son Josephus, King Arthur and his golden-
haired, sad Queen, whose bones were happily discovered to
add glory to the new erection, kings, queens and bishops in long
array. Afterwards some of the most notable of these were
gathered into the two pyramids of which we have spoken and
placed beside the high altar. Once this chapel of St. Joseph
Blood apart, but a Galilee was added to connect it with the
Great Church of SS. Peter and Paul, to be " magnificently com-
pleted," as King Henry said, "by myself and mine heirs.*'
Henry died before the noble structure he had designed was
more than just begun. It was not till one hundred and nine-
teen years later, in 1303, that it was dedicated, the work of
enlarging and adorning not being " magnificently completed,"
as Henry wished, till 1374.
Outside its Irish and ecclesiastical history, two great mov-
ing traditions form the glory and the romance of Glastonbury.
They are the tradition of St. Joseph of Arimathea and the tra-
dition of King Arthur. The one is Christian in origin, the other
is pagan. It is a ciu^ious commentary on the power of a place
like Glastonbury to combine diverse ideas into one harmonious
whole, that these two traditions, so unlike each other — the
story of the Jew who buried Our Lord in his own new tomb near
Jerusalem, and the story of the Celtic chieftain who in twelve
battles in the West drove the Romans from his native borders —
should have become so intermingled that we cannot now sepa-
rate them one from another. For did not Joseph bring with
him, in his voyage to the West, the cup of the Holy Supper and
the lance which pierced our Saviour's side? And was it not this
very cup of inexhaustible nourishment and spiritual strength
and this bleeding lance that Arthur's knights set forth to find
when they undertook the arduous quest of the Holy Grail? A
quest to which only Parzival (called in the Welsh tale, Pere-
diu*) and Galahad won, and that through great adventures, be-
cause they alone were pure in heart.
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58 GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS [Oct.,
How the two traditions met and mingled is a long story, for
it only took place gradually, as one idea led to or suggested
another. The legend of St. Joseph is briefly this. After the
resurrection of Our Lord, he with twelve companions set forth
towards the west, carrying with them some of the blood and
water washed from the Saviour's wounds and the sacred cup
of the Last Supper. They landed at Marseilles, but were sent
on, it is said by St. Philip, to Britain. Here they landed in A.D.
63 on the western coast, and hearing that they only desired a
modest means of living, the pagan king gave them a certain
island surrounded by woods, thickets and marshes, called Ynys-
vitrin, or Glastonbury, on the very outskirts of the kingdom.
On Wirral Hill they rested on their way and ever since it has
been called " Weary-all Hill," from the fatigue of Joseph and
his followers; the footprint in the stone on which his foot
rested may be seen there to this day. There Joseph leaned for
rest upon his staff, and it took root in the ground and blossomed
forth into the thorn that ever blooms at Christmastide.*^ Such
is the simple story of St. Joseph, though early native traditions
make Brons or Bran the Blessed (the very Bran whose won-
drous voyage the Irish tales recount) the bringer of Christianity
to Britain.
The story of St. Joseph's coming to Glastonbury was doubt-
fully received. Old William mentions it in 1135 as contained
in the " Charter of St. Patrick,*' a spurious document, the critics
say; and of the Holy Thorn we hear nothing till long after his
time. But in later days the idea that St. Joseph brought Chris-
tianity to Britain and that he made his resting-place in Glaston-
bury, found favor; it added to the lustre of the growing monas-
tery, which was beginning to forget its Irish origin and Welsh
connection, to believe that one who knew Our Lord had set-
tled there, and helped to spread its fame. A later historian of
the abbey, John of Salisbury, firmly believed the tale and
urges its acceptance. Above all, the widespread idea of the
survival of the Holy Chalice appealed to men's minds alike
from the romantic and the religious point of view; and before
the end of the twelfth century, we have the first extant ver-
* The original thorn tree is gone, but a cutting from it grows witliin the Northern
gate of the Abbey grounds. Another off-shoot grows hardily in the garden of the
bishop's palace. The guardian told us in 1916 tliat it blossomed " last Christmas."
It is certainly a Mediterranean thorn and may have come from the Holy Land. It is
of vigorous growth and vitality. Henry VHI.'s Commissioners declared that it blos-
somed at Christmas time.
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sions of the romance of the Holy Grail, coming in from French
sources. Li contejlel Graal is dated between 1175 and 1182,
and de Boron's text' belongs to the close of the same century.
There is no mention in these of Glastonbury or of the Holy
Thorn. Bron or Bran the Blessed is still spoken of as he who
first brought Christianity to Britain and was the first keeper
of the Grail. Nor is there any suggestion of a Grail-Quest,
which became the chief feature of the story in the Arthurian
cycle. These, to us, essisntial elements in the legend were, as
I think, added from piu'ely Celtic soiu'ces, and are the Celtic
contribution to the undying tale.
Those of us who have seen Wagner's " Parsifal " will re-
member how confused is the part played by the Sick or Lame
King in the story, and how difiScult it is to understand why he
comes into the story at all. The bleeding lance, too, though
it is made to bear a scriptural significance, seems curiously out
of place; we feel the story could develop equally well without
its introduction. But the old Welsh tale of Peredur, who is the
native representative of Parzival or Percival, provides the clue.
In the midst of Peredur's adventures we find this passage:
"And Peredur rode forward. And he came to a vast and
desert wood, on the confines of which was a lake. And on the
other side was a fair castle. And on the border of the lake he
saw a venerable, hoary-headed man, sitting on a velvet cushion,
and having a garment of velvet upon him. And his attendants
were fishing in the lake. When the hoary-headed man beheld
Peredur approaching, he arose and went towards the castle.
And the old man was lame. Peredur rode to the palace, and
the door was open, and he entered the hall. And there was the
hoary-headed man sitting on a cushion and a large fire blaz-
ing before him. And the man asked the youth to sit on the
cushion; and they sat down and conversed together."
The old man then tells Peredur that he is his uncle, his
mother's brother, and they continue to converse when " Pere-
dur beheld two youths enter the hall and proceed up to the
chamber, bearing a spear of mighty size, with three streams
of blood flowing from the point to the ground. When the com-
pany saw this, they began wailing and lamenting. But for all
that the man did not break off his discourse with Peredur. And
as he did not tell Peredur the meaning of what he saw, he fore-
bore to ask him concerning it. But when the clamor had a lit-
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60 GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS [Oct.,
tie subsided, behold two maidens entered with a large salver
between them, in which was a man's head, surrounded by a
profusion of blood. Thereupon the company of the court
made so great an outcry, that it was irksome to be in the same
hall with them. But at length they were silent. And when time
was that they should sleep, Peredur was brought into a fair
chamber."
A long time elapses and Peredur has gone through many
adventures, when one day " Arthur was at Carleon on Usk,
his principal palace and Peredur was seated in the centre of
the floor of the hall " among the other knights. " And there-
upon they saw a black curly-haired maiden enter, riding upon
a yellow mule, with jagged thongs in her hand to urge it on;
she had a rough and hideous aspect She greeted Arthur and
all his household except Peredur. But to Peredur she spoke
harsh and angry words. * Peredur, I greet thee not, seeing
that thou dost not merit it. Blind was fate in giving thee fame
and favor. When thou wast in the court of the Lame King and
didst see there the youth bearing the streaming spear, from the
points of which were drops flowing in streams, even to the
hand of the youth, and many other wonders likewise, thou didst
not inquire their meaning nor their cause. Hadst thou done so,
the king would have been restored to health and his dominions
to peace. Whereas from henceforth he will have to endure
battles and conflicts and his knights will perish and wives will
be widowed and maidens left portionless, and all this because
of thee.* " The strange visitor then tells the knights of a castle
on a lofty mountain, in which a maiden is imprisoned, and
whosoever will set her free will attain the summit of the fame
of the world. Gwelchmai (who seems to be an earlier Gala-
had) and Peredur undertake the quest, the former to set free
the maiden, the latter because he will know the truth of the
bleeding lance. Together they set out to seek the Castle of
Wonders, a long and difficult task. Finally Peredur reaches a
castle. He enters and seats himself one side of the hoary-
headed man sitting in the great hall. Gwelchmai is already
seated on his other hand. "Then, behold a yellow-haired
youth came, and bent upon his knee before Peredur, and be-
sought his friendship. * Lord,' said the youth, it was I that . . .
came with the bloody head in the salver, and with the lance
that streamed with blood from the point to the hand, all along
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the shaft.' " He then explains that it was the head of Peredur's
cousin, who had been killed by sorceresses who had also lamed
his uncle, and that it had been foretold that he should avenge
these deeds. This close of the story has no interest for us, but
I think it is clear where the story of the lame Fisher-king arose.
In the later and more Christianized forms of the legend he be-
comes confused with Joseph of Arimathea, but otherwise it has
no part in the legend about the Holy Cup; it is a pure addition
from Celtic pagan sources.
But more than this, the very central idea of the virtues of
the cup itself has received accretions from contact with the
Celtic romance of Wales and Ireland. A vessel of marvelous
powers was one of the most familiar features in old Celtic
stories. In every "house of hospitality," or central hostelry
for wayfaring men in ancient Ireland, the fire was kept always
burning, in the caldron was always hanging upon the tripod,
seething meat for all who chanced to pass that way. Each trav-
eler as he came thrust in his fork and brought up the piece of
meat in which it fixed itself; this was his portion, which he
might freely eat before he went on his journey. After eating,
he continued his way refreshed. It was the inexhaustible pot,
the caldron from which none went away unsatisfied.
Out of this actual event of daily recurrence the idea en-
larged. The gods, too, possessed a magic caldron of marvelous
virtues. Into the caldron of the Dagda, greatest of the ancient
deities, the wounded and dead, killed in the Battle of Moytura,
were thrown, that their wounds might be healed, and their
dead restored to life. It was the Caldron of Renovation or
Renewal from which none came away unhealed. What is still
more remarkable is that this idea of the Irish Caldron of Reno-
vation was so generally familiar that in the Welsh story of
Branwen, daughter of Llyr, we find Bendigeid Bran or Bran the
Blessed, afterwards adopted into Christian tradition as Bran,
the Christianizer of Britain, giving such a caldron, which is
said to have arisen out of the " Lake of the Caldron •' in Ire-
land, as atonement for an insult committed against an Irish
king, his guest and brother-in-law. There was, too, the magic
caldron of Manannan mac Lir which provided food of what-
ever flavor the eater desired. But beyond all this there was in
every house and cottage in Ireland the caldron or pot upon the
hearth, cooking the food that gave life and sustenance to the
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62 GLASTONBURY OF THE GAELS [Oct.,
family. It was associated in the minds of all with the thought
of nourishment and comfort. Into this old native tradition,
connected with a universal habit of life, there entered the
Christian thought of the Eucharistic Cup, the giver of spiritual
sustenance. In coming to Britain it found a soil prepared to
receive it, wherein it could take root and floiurish. It took
a mystic form, half touched by old romance, and we know it as
the Holy Grail, the cup of healing and of inexhaustible supply,
hidden from men in the Castle of Wonders, to be attained only
through a long and arduous quest. The " Quest " is purely of
native origin, for it grew out of those old stories of marvelous
and perilous adventures in the search for lost or hidden treas-
ures of which the Tale of the Children of Tureann in Ireland
and the Tale of the Adventures of Peredur in Wales, are only
two out of a multitude of examples.
When it became associated with the legend of the Round
Table the story became wholly Celtic. As Conchobar, King of
Ulster, gathered about him in Emain Macha the famous cham-
pions of the Red Branch, whose mighty deeds culminated in
the Quest for the Kine of Cooley, so Arthiu* the British king
formed his Round Table of splendid knights, who went on the
great Quest of the Sacred Cup, the Vision of the Holy Grail.
Thus as we stand at Glastonbury on the hill or Tor which
St. Michael and St. Brigit guard and look across the marshy
plain in whose bosom lies Inys-vitrin, the Green Isle, within
whose circle rise the ruined shafts and broken arch of the
" Great Church," and the rich turrets of St. Joseph's Chapel •
which are all that are left of its famous House, a succession
of images passes across the mind.
We see the wattled church of sixty feet, built by the Irish
pilgrim whose coracle of hides once touched these shores, but
whose name we cannot now recover. We see the Irish pil-
grims gather year by year in crowds to visit the relics of St.
Patrick's tomb. We see beyond that the tired figure of St.
Joseph climb with twelve companions the rising ground of
Weary-all Hill, and planting there his staff to grow into the
Holy Thorn.
We see kings, great and small, brought here to rest, Coel
* In the present " restorations " a heavy arch of solid masonry is being thrown
across the delicate structure of St. Joseph's Chapel, cutting off the chancel from the
nave and completely ruining the effect of the light arcadlng.
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the British chief, Edmund the Less, and Edgar and Edmund
Ironsides, whose tombs were marked and known in Mahnes-
bury's time. The noise of battle sounds, and down the quiet
vale of Avallon come Danish hosts, while Alfred watches cakes
at Athemey and dreams of conquest; we see him, in battle
after battle, subduing them to his command; we see the great
Canute, lord of a mighty empire in the north, doing honor to
the remains of his most doughty foe, King Edmund Ironside.
We see St. Dunstan taking instruction from his Irish
teachers, illuminating manuscripts, building organs, found-
ing bells, conducting choirs, making and unmaking kings,
reforming monasteries, and warring with the devil himself.
We see Hing Ina bestowing costly gifts upon the mon-
astery; king after king and abbot after abbot, adding to its
size and splendor. And lastly, we see King Henry, avaricious
of its wealth, determining on the downfall of the famous
house, and calling on his minions to lead forth and hang upon
the Tor the last of the line of abbots, an old half-witted man,
whose servile acquiescence in all Henry's demands might
well have saved his tottering steps and gray hairs.
And over all this varied history hangs brooding the mem-
ory of a great romance familiar to multitudes to whom the
history of the monastery is unknown. For romance, the
ideal history created by the mind, outlives the actual chroni-
cle of outward events.
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THE GOLDEN YEARS.
BY FLORENCE GILMORE.
T was the middle of the morning, when every
one in the house was supposed to be busy, but
with half the length of the corridor between him
and the recreation room Brother Martin heard,
coming unmistakably from that direction, the
sound of voices and suppressed laughter, and a moment after-
ward, of hammering, and of chairs being dragged across the
floor.
Brother was surprised; it would be unjust to say that he
was also curious, for he often explained that he had no curi-
osity; but, whatever his motive, he decided instantly that it
would be well for him to go downstairs by the longer way
which led past the recreation room door, and to glance in and
see what could be afoot. Perhaps he was needed to help with
some work — or some fun.
He hurried down the corridor, instinctively walking on
tiptoe as he drew near the door; he looked into the big, bare
room for a second only, and noiselessly slipped away as fast
as his seventy years and his two hundred pounds would per-
mit, although what he had seen was simple and commonplace :
five novices were at work there, evidently making ready for
some sort of entertainment. They had pushed the chairs
against the wall, and the billiard table into a corner. One
was measuring off lengths of yellow crepe paper; another,
high on a step ladder, was decorating with yellow bunting,
while the other three handed him tacks and material, and
approved, criticized, or ridiculed his efforts. But Brother
Martin did not watch them even for a moment; he stole away
stealthily, guiltily.
On the morrow it would be fifty years since he made his
vows. He had thought sadly that, there being no one left who
remembered the day, the anniversary would pass unheeded,
but a week before the Rector had spoken to him concerning
the date, calling it a great occasion; and as the intervening
days passed, he had received a few letters, and a few little
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gifts, and had shamefacedly perceived that elaborate prepara-
tions were being made, which he, living in their midst, was
expected neither to see nor to hear. It is always the part of
jnbilarians and superiors to be preternaturally dull as their
feast days approach.
The Rector — Father O'Donnell — had spoken kindly to
Brother Martin of his long years of faithful, cheerful work in
the service of the Master, and the letters had held like words of
praise; but Brother's simple, childlike heart had been aching
for many a day, it had been restless, and uneasy, and discon-
tented, and the commendation of his friends and of his
superior but made him more unhappy. "How little they
know,'* he thought more than once, " that many and many a
time I have nodded — and worse than nodded — at my post,
and visitors have had to ring the bell a second or even a third
time before I heard. How little they suspect that often, when
I sweep the corridors, especially the upper one which Father
O'Donnell seldom sees, I am careful not to look very closely
into the corners; and that, as I set the tables in the refectory
and help to wash the dishes, I am weary, weary of my task,
and envy Brother Celestine his work in the library, and dear
Brother John his care of the chapel and sacristy, and Brother
Peter Paul the business which takes him, day after day, into
the streets and the shops. They don't know that, as I work, I
have to say my beads again, and again, and again, to keep my
thoughts in order."
So, sad and ashamed. Brother Martin hurried from the
recreation room and the sight of the novices at work there, lo
the corridor which he always swept at that hour; and as he
went he muttered quite savagely: " The novices are very kind,
and I am grateful — ^more or less grateful — but why don't they
keep to their books and their prayers? What kind of priests
will they make, that's what I am wondering." And as he
worked, not very briskly or cheerfully, he thought how old,
how very old he was to be busy hour after hour, and how, for
fifty years, he had cleaned that same place at the same time
every day. Perhaps because his eyes were not as keen as they
had once been, he did not see all the dust or all the scraps.
On his way to the closet in which his supplies were kept,
he passed the chapel, and as it lacked ten minutes of the hour
at which he must be on duty at the front door, he decided to
TOL. CVUI. — 5
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66 THE GOLDEN YEARS [Oct.,
step inside for a few moments and ask Our Lord to comfort
and strengthen him. Leaning his broom against the wall, he
pushed open the door. He did not go inside. Two priests
were there, helping the sacristan: and akeady palms were
banked in the sanctuary and all three altars were a mass of
yellow flowers. One glance, and with a sigh he slipped away
unobserved, his heart heavier than before. "Why do they
want to have a celebration? " he asked himself. ' " The jubilee
means nothing to me. I am tired, and cross. It's a reproach,
and nothing else."
Slowly the long day wore on. About four o'clock in the
afternoon. Brother Martin found that he had lost his handker-
chief and to get another he wearily climbed the three flights of
stairs that led to his cell. As soon as he reached the long, nar-
row upper hallway, he knew, from a streak of light cutting
across the semi-darkness at the farther end, that his door was
standing open; and before he reached it he heard a low voice
and other sounds. Indignant, he hurried to the door to see
that an old, old father, helped by a lay-brother, had put fresh
curtains at his window, and a new mat beside his bed, and
was then hanging, to the best possible advantage, a pretty
print of our Blessed Mother with the Child Jesus clasped in her
arms. He and the brother were intent upon their work and
did not see him, and feeling heartsick and even more miser-
ably ashamed than before. Brother Martin stole away without
his handkerchief.
Not wishing to meet anyone he chose a little-used way
leading down to the parlor floor, only to pass a room in which
a band of novices were singing with great spirit, and he plainly
distinguished the words, "fifty years," and "golden years."
One of them saw him and hastily slammed the door; and an
old father, chancing to come by at the moment, laughed and
said : " How much vim those novices are putting into that song!
But we don't have golden jubilees every day. Brother — or
every year. You must be deaf and blind today."
Brother tried to laugh, but did not succeed very well.
" They would do nothing, nothing, if they knew," he told him-
self; and feeling that he could bear it no longer he determined
to go to the Rector at once and tell him just how discontented
he was — and how wicked. The anniversary must not be cele-
brated. It meant nothing to. him; he had no heart in the re-
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joicing. He was not worthy. He was only a lazy, discontented,
tired, old man who wanted to be let alone.
Brother went directly to Father O'Donnell's room but did
not find him there, and from five o'clock until six he was on
duty at the door, and afterwards had to go to the refectory and
set the tables for supper. It was quite half-past eight before
he had the opportunity he sought, and every minute of the in-
terval the desire to open the flood-gates, had grown stronger
and yet stronger.
He entered the Rector's office dejectedly, but observing as
Father O'Donnell usually was, he did not notice the absence of
Brother Martin's habitual smile. He looked up from the let-
ter he was writing, and said cheerily: "*! was just going to
send for you. Brother. Do you know, I'm afraid you're going
to be spoiled beyond redemption! Everyone in the house is
besieging me for permission to do something for you tomor-
row. Now tell me, what can I do? Tell me what you would
like. I don't want to be quite left out of this great cele-
bration."
Brother hesitated, solemn faced and unbending, all the
pent-up discontent and weariness of the preceding weeks
clamoring within him for some sort of expression. He could
not tell it all; he had no words.
"Tell me quite simply; what do you wish from me?"
Father O'Donnell insisted, beginning to see that something
was wrong, and more than a little puzzled by Brother's man-
ner and the tragic expression on his round face.
Thus urged, all Brother's longings and troubles crystal-
lized themselves into a single request. "Father," he said,
" ever since I was a novice I have swept the parlor corridor
before breakfast and the class-room corridor after I had
helped with the dishes. It was so Father Moran — may God
have mercy on his soul — it was so that Father Moran told me
to do. And Father, tomorrow — ^just for tomorrow — ^may I
sweep upstairs first, and downstairs afterward. You're not
old, and tired, and wicked, so you could never understand
how it is, but of late I— I—"
Father O'Donnell smiled very kindly into the gentle, child-
like, anxious, old face. "Yes, I think I do understand," he
contradicted. "Tomorrow you may sweep the upper corri-
dor before breakfast and the lower one later; and you will be
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68 THE GOLDEN YEARS [Oct.,
on duty at the front door from three o'clock until five, instead
of during your usual hours: just for tomorrow; and you might
help Brother John in the sacristy at six. I'll tell Brother
James Joseph to take your place in the refectory. But only
for one day, Brother. Too much dissipation would never do !"
This time Brother Martin laughed heartily, his face relax-
ing, and brightening, and brightening still more until it fairly
beamed. His heart had suddenly grown unaccountably light.
The lovely decorations in the chapel, the renovation of his
cell, the plans for an entertainment in the recreation room,
not one of these had helped : he was happy at last.
The next day passed on wings. Brother Martin could
hardly contain his happiness. Early in the morning Solemn
High Mass was sung, followed by Benediction of the Most
Blessed Sacrament, and he and another old brother served, as
happy and care-free as boys and far more reverent. He had a
place of honor in the refectory at every meal, and there were
flowers on all the tables and yellow bunting was draped about
the window frames. Throughout the day he did exactly what
he should not have been doing at that particular hour, and in
the evening the novices gave a funny, and really clever, little
play at which he laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks.
That night his prayers were longer than usual and ecstati-
cally fervent. Looking back over the fifty years of his reli-
gious life he knew that his thanks must never end.
Not until long after the house was still and every light had
been extinguished did he creep into bed, too happy to know
how utterly weary he was. " I'm glad that I am to go back to
the dear old routine tomorrow," he whispered; "very, very
glad." And a few minutes later he murmured drowsily : " The
parlor corridor before breakfast, and the class-room corridor
after I have helped in the kitchen — thank Godl It was so
Father Moran told me to do, fifty years ago today."
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ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA.
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
X.
J HE private Parousia of the Son of Man is the con-
tinued topic of our search. Jesus told the Twelve
that He would come to them individually at the
hour of death, " to take them up *' to the Kingdom
of His Father. More evidence to this effect than
could well be crowded into the confines of a single study still
awaits consideration, and it is to this untouched material that
we now set hand. Two parables shall chiefly concern us — the
Parable of the Virgins and the Parable of the Talents, reported
by St. Matthew in the twenty-fifth chapter, immediately after
the Olivetan Discourse. What reason led to their insertion in
this particular part of the Matthean text, and what, precisely,
was their intended force and point? Are they illustrations of
the thought preceding — ^further developments, so to speak, of
the Parable of the Thief? * Or, must we set them down as de-
scriptions of the Second Advent and the manner of the world's
judging, when the Lord of Glory comes?
It will be noticed that the Parable of the Ten Virgins,
curiously enough, begins with a reference to the future : " Then
shall the Kingdom of Heaven be compared to ten virgins, who
went forth to meet the Brigegroom * — a grammatical construc-
tion which plainly intimates thai the understanding of the com-
parison is beyond the present knowledge of the disciples,
though it shall later be put within their reach. When is this to
be? The text does not explicitly say; but on a strikingly simi-
lar occasion, where St. Matthew quotes the Lord as distin-
guishing between the " foolish and the wise,? ■ the verb " liken "
or " compare " * again stands before us in the future tense, and
the subject of discourse is the salvation of those individuals,
and those individuals only, who beware of " false prophets,"
and " do the will of the Father Who is in Heaven." By " false
>Matt. zzlT. 43; Luke xll. 39.
^ICatt xxy. 1. The flgure ten denotes universality.
' ^p6vi(&o<. (M^b<;. Compare Matt xxy. 2; vll. 24, 26. Same adjectives In both
Instances. * 6vL0Miidiiatxac. Matt vil. 24, 26; xxv. 1.
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70 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
prophets" the Pharisees clearly are meant, and the whole
Palestinian world-view for which they stood sponsor to an un-
suspecting folk. " Not everyone that saith to Me, Lord, Lord,
shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the
will of My Father Who is in Heaven. Many will say to Me in
that day Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Thy name, and by
Thy name cast out demons, and by Thy name do many mighty
works? And then, will I profess unto them, I never knew you;"
depart from Me, you that work iniquity. Everyone therefore
that heareth these My words, and doeth them, shall be likened "
to a wise man who built his house upon a rock; and everyone
that heareth these My words, and doeth them not, shall be lik-
ened to a foolish man that built his house upon sand." * From
the fact that the adjectives and the verbs employed are the
same as in the Parable of the Ten Virgins, it is safe to conclude
that the underlying thought is identical, and that the phrase,
" Many shall say to me in that day," has the meaning which we
found it possessing elsewhere, namely — the day of death,® the
time of the Particular, as distinct from the General Judgment."
This conclusion will justify itself to satisfaction, as the
study unfolds. It is the very heart of the teaching of Jesus.
From the seventh chapter of St. Matthew to the thirtieth verse
of the twenty-fifth, the Saviour insists on the individual and
private character of salvation, as distinct from the public and
glorious, which is to come at the end, and not, as expected, at
the beginning of the Messianic Era.
Who the Bridegroom was understood to be in the Parable
of the Virgins, needs no lengthy explaining: it is the Saviour
Himself. The appellation was taken from a figure of speech
current in the literature of Palestine. The Jews were wont to
speak of the "expected Kingdom of God" as a "Marriage
■ Compare " I never knew you " with " I know you not" Matt vll. 23; xxv. 12;
Luke xlii. 25-27. There is not the slightest eschatologlcal reference In Luke xlll.
25-27. or in vi. 43-45. Why should there be ang in Matt. vii. 23 or xxv. 127 Is not
the verse : " Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour " (Matt.
xxv. 13), a clear Indication that the meaning is the day of death, not the day of
Judgment? The recurrence of the phrase, "Depart from Me'* (Matt. xxv. 41), in
connection with the General Judgment, is no proof that such is the meaning here.
The scene in the seventh chapter is individual. Nor would the hearers have been
reported as '* astonished at the doctrine taught*' (Matt. vli. 28), were it a mere
rehearsal of existing views.
«In some manuscripts: <* I shall liken him.** « Matt. vii. 23-26.
•Matt. xxvi. 29; Mark xlv. 25; John xiv. 20; xvl. 23. Compare Matt xli. 33-37.
*Matt. xxiv. 36; Mark xlil. 32; Luke xvii. 31 have already been cleared of any
allusion to the Last Judgment The destruction of Jerusalem is meant
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Feast," and of themselves as the highly-honored intimates of
the Groom. The Saviour on one occasion made a very telling
parable out of this current and popular imagery — the Parable
of the Marriage Feast *® — ^in the course of which He so turned
its point against His self-appointed intimates, that the barb
must have been deeply wounding to their pride. Earlier in
the Matthean Text, Christ appropriates the title of Bridegroom
unto Himself. " Can the friends of the bridal room mourn, so
long as the Bridegroom is with them?" He pointedly asks
the Pharisees, when they approached Him with the plaint that
His disciples were not observing the prescribed fasts. " Days
shall come," He replied, " when the Bridegroom shall be taken
away from them " — a turn of events which Palestine had never
considered possible! — "and they shall fast in those days.*'**
Who can doubt the newness and the sureness of knowledge
that lay behind such utterances? The future was as the pres-
ent to Him Who dared say such unprecedented things!
Two points stand out most clearly: the Bridegroom is to
be taken away, and He is also to return.*' St. Luke has a beau-
tiful description of what is meant by this Return of the Bride-
groom, and we shall turn aside for a moment to consider the
Lukan Text. The description occurs immediately after the
Lord's injunction : " Let your loins be girt, and lamps burn-
ing in your hands;" which is material of the same particular
drift as the Parable of the Virgins. The Lord is quoted as
saying: "Let you yourselves be like unto men who wait for
their Lord, when He shall return *■ from the marriage Feast;
that when He cometh and knocketh, they may straightway
open unto Him. Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord,
when He cometh, shall find watching. Amen I say to you, that
He shall gird Himself, and make them sit down to table, and
shall come to their side and serve them " " — as moving a pic-
ture of the reversed rdles of Master and servant, as exists any-
where in literature. It is the very summit of the idea of Service.
The setting is fully as suggestive as the picture. The
Parable of the Rich Fool, who bade himself be merry with his
groaning goods, little recking that God would require his soul
of him that very night, ^\ has been recounted shortly before;***
as also the example of the inconsiderate ravens and lilies, that
»Matt xxU. 1-14. "Matt Ix. 14, 15. "Matt. xxv. 10.
"ivaX6atu To "break ap" a party; depart from a feast.
** Luke xll. .n5-37. »» to6tti tft vuxtI. " Luke xil. 16-21.
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72 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, trusting to Provi-
dence for the means of subsistence, and not mistaking the
problem of living for the meaning of life." This double con-
trast is followed by the advice to seek the Father's Kingdom,
and to lay up a treasure in Heaven that f aileth not, and where
no thief draws nigh**" — a context in which it is impossible
to interpret the "Kingdom" or the "coming," save as asso-
ciated with the hour of death. " And if He shall come in the
second watch, and if in the third, and find them so, blessed
are those servants. But know this, that if the master of the
house knew at what hour the thief was coming, he would have
watched, and would not have allowed his house ^* to be
broken through. Be you also ready; for in an hour that you
think not, the Son of Man will come." *®
The whole context culminating in this verse is even more
plainly of the Lord's coming to the individual at death, than
the corresponding material in St. Matthew. And if any doubt
existed, St. Peter's question would suffice for its dispelling;
for, it was on hearing these words that he said to the Saviour:
" Lord, speakest Thou this parable (of the Thief) unto us, or
also unto all? " " There can be no serious question, therefore
from the sum of the evidence thus far assembled, that St.
Peter here understood by the " coming of the Son of Man "
the Lord's return from the Marriage Feast, to take him at
death to the " Kingdom of Glory " which is not of this world.
And such, too, was the thought in St. Luke's mind when he
put pen to parchment for the composition of this section. His
testimony links itself up most consistently with the abundant
witness of St. John to the same effect. The Jewish conception
of salvation had^been transcended and overcome.
With matters thus clarified through the aid of compara-
tive analysis, we are in a position to understand the Parables
of the Virgins and the Talents. They are intended as concrete
illustrations of the thought preceding, namely — the Lord's
coming to the individual at the hour of death, to " take him
up " to the Kingdom of Glory,** which the Father has prepared
from all eternity for those who love and acknowledge the Son;
"Luke xll. 22-31. "Luke xli. 33. 34.
»For *« bouse" see Matt yli. 26, 27; Luke ri. 49.
**Luke xli. 38-40. St Mark, Instead of **the thief," has "the Lord of the
house Cometh." Mark zlli. 35.— 1 Thess. y. 2; 2 Peter ill. 10; Apoc. iU. 3 and xvi. 25
cannot l>e adduced in disproof of tliis reading, as will be shown in due course.
"Luke zit 41. »Matt xxiv. 40, 41.
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— a Kingdom of quite another nature from that which the
eschatologists of Palestine expected to see established. The de-
scription of this private and individual salvation is made most
forceful, by being set over against the public and glorious
judgment,^ which the Saviour announces as postponed in the
thirteenth chapter, and magnificently describes in the twenty-
fifth.** Already in the course of these studies we have found
the disciples inquiring of the Saviour, where this ** receiving
of one and rejecting of another " was to take place.'* A selec-
tive process of this purely moral and spiritual nature was
beyond their powers to conceive. And Jesus replied that it
would take place even in Israel at the time of her destruc-
tion.^ There was to be no other kind of salvation, when the
Old Kingdom fell.
Is it not this new doctrine of salvation which the Saviour
is illustrating in the Parables of the Virgins and the Talents?
The five foolish ones *^ are those who had the wrong Jewish
notion of the Kingdom; who expected that the Son of Man
would come in the manner which the Rabbis taught, and so
were unprepared to meet the Bridegroom coming suddenly at
midnight in death to the sleeping ten. The five wise *^ ones
are those who had the Saviour's word of the Kingdom, and
were spiritually ready, asleep or awake,** to open to Him
straightway when He knocked. The Parable of the Virgins
is, therefore, a picture of salvation as it will take place in
Israel unto the time of the destruction. Its point is the sud-
den coming of the Bridegroom to take the ready and to leave
the unprepared. The Parable of the Talents, on the other
hand, is a picture of salvation, as it shall come to those who
live to see the nation fall, and it clearly shows that there shall
be no difference in the manner of their saving, simply a more
severe test of their fruitful or unproductive lives. "Now
after a long time the Lord of those servants cometh, and
maketh a reckoning with them" — a vivid assurance to the
Twelve that there is to be no public, general and glorious sal-
vation, when the Kingdom of Israel is overthrown. Then, and
"Matt XXV. 31-45.
*«Matt xlll. 30, 40, 40. For proof, see The Catholxg Woblo, ICarch, 1918.
"Luke xvll. 37. >• Luke xvli. 37.
"Compare Bfatt vil. 26, 27. "Compare Matt. vii. 24, 25.
"For the phrase "slumbered and slept,*' see Isaias y. 27. When tlic meaning
of the parable is discovered, long-standing difficulties melt away, such as shops
open at midnight for the purchase of oil, and the selfishness of the five wise in re-
fusing to share their oil with the others. Readiness is personal and incommunicable.
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74 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
afterwards, as in the meanwhile, the Son of Man shall come to
the individual in salvation or rejection at the hour of death.
And this was clearly what St. Matthew meant when he twice
quoted the verse : " he that persevereth unto the end, the same
shall be saved." He wished to let His readers see that in Jew-
ish as well as in post-Jewish times, there was to be no' other
Gospel of the Kingdom.^®
What better proof that such is, indeed, the purport of
these two Matthean parables than St. Luke's apparently baf-
fling account of the Parable of the Pounds, assigned to a dif-
ferent occasion? The scene is probably Jericho. Jesus is
approaching Jerusalem, and is addressing a mixed audience
publicly, in language much more guarded than that which He
used when privately speaking to four of His disciples on the
Mount of Olives. He tells the mixed gathering before Him of a
" certain nobleman, who went into a far country, to take unto
himself a kingdom, and to return. And calling his ten serv-
ants, he gave them ten pounds, and said to them: Trade
with these, till I come.^^ But his citizens hated him, and they
sent an embassage after him, saying: We will not that this
man reign over us. And it came to pass that he returned, hav-
ing received the Kingdom; and he commanded those servants
to whom he had given the money to be called to him, that he
might know what they had gained by trading.*' '^ xhe exami-
nation of each individual servant follows. The fruitful are
rewarded; the unprofitable are cast out; and those hostile
citizens, who " would not that this man reign over them," are
ordered to be hewn down** in His presence; a severe phrase
that has an interesting and instructive history in the Old Testa-
ment pages, which could not have been lost on the sensitive
ears that heard it fall from the Master's lips.
Zaccharias used the equivalent of this verb in connection
with " the laying waste of the pride of the Jordan and the wail-
ing of the shepherds, who fed the flock of slaughter." **
Ezekiel employed it of " unfaithful Jerusalem, thrust through
with the sword." *^ The Second Book of the Macchabees as-
sociated it with the plundering of the Temple by Antiochus,
••Matt. X. 22; xxiv. 13.
■* l(i)<; lpxo(j.ai. — ^Thc very words used by Jesus to Peter, in referring to the de-
struction of Jerusalem. John xxi. 22, 23. Compare Matt. x. 23; xvi. 28. Cf, Thb
Catholic World, April, 1918, p. 86; May, p. 169.
»Luke xlx. 12-15. »* xorrao^dc^fa). " Zach. xl. 5. «E«ek. xvi. 40.
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1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 75
and his order to the soldiery to give no quarter to the citi-
zenry of Jerusalem. ^^ It also brought to mind *' that hateful
prince ApoUonius, ** who took advantage of the Sabbath rest,
to butcher a very great multitude." '^ It revived the thought
of those who would not " conform to the ways of the Gentiles,
and were hewn asunder in consequence." •* The only reliev-
ing feature in Old Testament history was the recurrence of
this same verb in the description of the Macchabean victories
over the former enemies of Israel •• — a slender chance on
which to build any nationalist hopes. Jesus, by the simple use
of a powerful verb that had a history in the literature of Israel,
compelled His hearers to see destruction where they expected
glory; defeat, where they looked for triumph and everlasting
exaltation. He knew that they would not accept His forecast
of history; and so He sought to make them see the future
course of events in the light of the past. Through the agency
of powerful kinesthetic images, like the "gathering of the
eagles " and the " hewing down of the hostile citizens "by the
invading hosts — He had already identified His "coming"
with the armies of invasion — Jesus graphically brought that
past before them and made it a picture of what was soon to be.
If their intellects and wills were closed, their imagination was
open to suggestion. Truly, the resourcefulness of His teaching
power has not yet been sounded to its depths.
In what particular connection was the Lukan Parable of
the Pounds uttered? Manifestly, in connection with the pre-
vailing views of the Kingdom and salvation, this relationship
being more than once indicated in what we find recited im-
mediately before. We have, first, the visit of Jesus to the tax-
commissioner Zacchaeus, and the murmuring of the crowd
against His going to a sinner's house. It is the only occasion
on which Jesus ever offered Himself as a guest, and He ex-
plained His action by saying that it was in accord with the
Divine appointments. *'Zacchaeus make haste and come
down; for this day I must*^ abide in thy house." What the
Divine appointment was, Jesus lets us know in the statement
which He makes to the despised tax-commissioner, upon the
confession of the latter that if he ever defrauded any man,
he paid him back fourfold. " Jesus said to him : " This very
»2 Mac. ▼. 12. •'2 Mac. v. 24.
"2 Mac. Tl. 9. »2 Mac. vlU. 24; x. 17, 31, 37; xll. 26.
** StL — Luke ziy. 5. Compare iv. 43.
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76 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
day is salvation ^^ come to this house : because he also is a son
of Abraham. For the Son of Man is come to seek and save
that which was lost.*' ** The " for " explains why salvation is
come to such as Zacchaeus. The Lord's visit and His host's
receiving salvation are wholly in harmony with the Father's
will and plan. The bounties of God have no such shrunken
outlook in their dispensing as that which has been assigned
them in the prejudices of men.
The fact to be noted is the way Jesus speaks of salvation.
He describes it as a present relation; as something already
within reach, and not waiting to be put into effect at the end
of Israel and the expected renewal of the world. It was an
idea to which He had called attention before, in the verse
about ** one being taken, and one being left this very night.*' **
In striking contrast to this announcement of salvation as a
present actuality is the Pharisaic conception of it as some-
thing wholly future, which we find mentioned in the eleventh
verse immediately following: "And as they were hearing
these things. He added and spoke a parable, because He was
nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the King-
dom of God was immediately to appear.'* ^ The most instruc-
tive thing about this verse is the connection which it estab-
lishes between what Jesus said to Zacchaeus and what He was
about to say in the Parable of the Pounds. ** Nay more, the
parable which Jesus stands upon the point of uttering is clearly
represented in the text,*^ as something drawn forth from His
lips by the belief of His hearers, that " the earthly Kingdom of
glory " was about to come. The grammatical signals are all
set for a reaffirmation of the statement which Jesus made to
the tax-conmiissioner, and for a denial of the expectation with
which the minds of those who heard Him were uneasily filled.
Approached in this contextual light, the Parable of the Pounds
should reveal its intended point, and cease to be the glitter-
ing generality which it all too often is, we fear, in the skim-
ming comment of the books.
**■ Ofi>Ti)p(at If ivtro. — Luke xlx. 9. Compare o6oat in next verse.
«*Luke six. 1-10.
^Luke xvll. 84. Compare the present participle o«i)^6;&tvo( in Acts 11. 47; 1 Cor.
i. 18; 2 Cor. 11. 15. Contrast the present tense dYOvn^soOc in Luke xlll. 24 with the
futures of reJecUon in Luke xlll. 25, 26, 27, 28, 29.
««Luke xlx. 11.
^ 'Axou6vTiiyv dl a6'c£>y taOta. The taCra refers to oi^poy aii)Ti)p(at If ivttoin verse 9.
*■ Elxi/ o3v. Luke xlx. 12. " He said therefore,"
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Is not Jesus "the nobleman, who went into a far coun-
try, leaving many servants and enemies behind him, the for-
mer of whom He counseled to lead productive lives until
He came? Is not He the one Who is to come back, after hav-
ing received the Kingdom — that Kingdom not of glory, but of
tribulation, which He has solemnly told His hearers some of
them shall live to see?
Is He not speaking of His Return, after the destruction
of Jerusalem, at which time, according to Daniel, He was to
receive the Kingdom? And what else can be meant by this
Return but His coming at the hour of death to each and every
one of His servants, and to those " hostile citizens " who would
not that He be their King? Is He not, therefore, solemnly pro-
claiming that salvation shall be individual and private, not
public and glorious, when Israel is destroyed? What other
meaning can be attached to the thoroughly un-Jewish state-
ment: **And it came to pass that He returned, having re-
ceived the Kingdom? *'
The Second Advent is out of the question. Jesus, as all
the evidence thus far gathered goes to show, has disconnected
that event from all association with the fall of Jerusalem. Be-
sides, the verbs *^ used are too incidental to be employed of
the Final Coming; and what follows in the text is not indica-
tive of a glorious pageant, but a picture of disaster. Jesus is
portrayed as weeping over Jerusalem, "because it had not
known the time of its visitation," *® and was soon to reap the
whirlwind it had sown. There is no thought anywhere but of
destruction, spiritual and material. The days that are to come
are " days of vengeance," *• not of " glory." We are in a cor-
rective atmosphere where the Palestinian doctrine of racial
salvation as the future privilege of the sons of Abraham is
repudiated both by word and deed. It was repudiated by the
Lord's visit to Zacchaeus, and by the defiant declaration that
this member of an outcast class was also " a son of Abraham "
— a liberal action and a liberal statement that gave deep of-
fence to the party in power. And besides, if St. Luke really
had the Palestinian conception of the "Kingdom" in mind,
when he reported the Parable of the Pounds, would he ever
have gone to such grammatical lengths to let his readers see
* 6«ooTpifu. fxav^pxo(ia(. Luke xlx. 12, 15. ^Luke xix. 44; xxiU. 28.
•Luke xxl. 22.
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78 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
that Jesus was refuting, instead of reproposing, the views
which His hearers held? Impossible! No man, who believes
one doctrine, works up his text grammatically to prove an-
other in its stead.
Of one thing only, therefore, can the Saviour here be
speaking, namely, the "Return of the Lord of those servants,
after a long time, to make a reckoning with them at the hour
of death." The text has the same corrective purpose as the
Matthean Parable of the Talents. Both are of a piece. It
expresses, furthermore, under the form of a story, what St.
John tells us in open speech : " I will come again, and * take
you up unto Myself,' that where I am, you may be also." ^° The
sole reason why the Lukan Parable of the Pounds does not at
once disclose its thoroughly un-Jewish character is our failure
to visualize the compulsion which the Saviour was under, to
teach the new in the very terms and pictures of the old. It is
this characteristic feature of the Lord's manner of teaching
which has been mistaken by many critics for Jewish propa-
ganda on the part of His reporters.
There are differences, and many, between the Lukan
account of the Parable of the Pounds and the Matthean of
the Talents. But when we bear in mind the different manner
in which Christ was accustomed to address the general public
and to speak to the Twelve in private, these discrepancies of
time and place, scene and incident, background and detail,
gradually fall away, leaving us in the presence of a common
and united thought — a description, namely, of the kind of
salvation that is to come, when Israel falls. And in the one
instance as in the other, Jesus assures His listeners that their
expectations are unfounded. The Messianic Kingdom of
Glory is not to be established until " the end of the age of the
Gentiles." ^^ In the meanwhile, an historical Kingdom of God
is to be set up among the nations, in which the winning of one's
soul or its losing shall be the fate of the individual at death.
This teaching is too firmly embedded in the Synoptic and
Johannine text to be successfully dislodged. It is the fugue
of all four Gospels.
Some points need clearing. Is the picture of a nobleman
of high rank going to a distant Sovereign to obtain authority
over his vassals, an allusion to Herod the Great, or his son.
••John xW. 3.
BSf. Matthew and the Parousia, The Catbouc World, March, 1918.
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Archelaus, and their intriguing at Rome for kingship over the
Jews? The resemblances are very striking, but there is no
proof that they amount to more than an unintended coinci-
dence. The Saviour, in the picture drawn at Jericho, is re-
ferring to Daniel's well-known vision — " the coming of a Son
of Man before the Ancient of Days to receive sovereignty, and
glory, and a kingdom"" — a prophecy which He elsewhere
declared, as here, would he separately, not simultaneously,
fulfilled. Nor need the incident about the '"embassage sent
after Him " be extraneously interpreted. On the occasion of
His triumphal entry into Jerusalem — ^reported immediately
after the address at Jericho — ^Jesus is expressly asked by the
Government officials to repudiate the Messianic title of King,
with which the populace acclaimed Him — a title which St.
Luke significantly inserts in the very text of the psalm ^^ sung
by the people in His honor. Besides, we have explicit evidence
of the unwillingness of the Jews to have " this man reign over
them." They openly repudiated His Kingship, taunting Him
cruelly with the title, as He hung upon the cross."
True, all this was posterior to the address at Jericho; but
in the wonderful knowledge of the future which we have
already found the Saviour exhibiting at more than one stage
of the present investigation, it were folly to deny that Jesus
foresaw and foreknew the Government's cruel decision in
His regard. Some have seen a Palestinian picture in the
appointment of the " faithful servants " to rulership over ten
cities or five, according to their respective earnings.^^ There is
more suspicion than evidence in this accusing charge. One
of the common thoughts of the New Testament is the sharing
of the King's sovereignty by the meritorious just, and it is this
Christian thought, not a Palestinian scene, to which Jesus is
here alluding. The Parable of the Pounds is, therefore, a
correction of the Jewish expectation that the "Kingdom of
God," in an eschatological sense, is nigh. It is the inculca-
tion of the wholly different idea that salvation or rejection is
to come to the individual at the hour of death, regardless of
his relations to Israel, or hers to him. And that is why, in
St. Luke's own words : ** He added and spoke a parable, be-
»Dan. vll. 13, 14.
" Luke xlx. 38. *' Blessed the King Who cometh in the name of the Lord."
■^Loke xxlil. 37. Compare John xlx. 15.
» Luke xlx. 17, 18.
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80 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
cause He was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought the
Kingdom of God must needs forthwith appear"
Thus, after much sifting and comparing, much examin-
ing into this little luminous link or that, we are again forced
to face the conclusion that the chief and most concerning
sense in which the Saviour spoke of His "coming," in the
Synoptic Gospels no less than in St. John, was His Return to
the individual at the hour of death, to bid Him enter into the
joy of His Lord and Master, or be gone forever from His
presence. Such was to be the manner of man's saving in the
New Kingdom, while it stiU lay encradled in the Old; and such
it would continue to be, from the day that Israel fell, until
the Lord returned in the glory of His Father with the angels,
to judge the living and the dead.°« A majestic sweep of his-
torical vision, unmatched by any of the broken lights that
went before; a redeeming perspective in which Israel is but a
passing incident, and the nations are the unmeasured reality
that endures; a most accurate forecast of the future, as anyone
may see, when the precise nature of the teaching method of
Jesus is discovered and appraised.
Still further evidence that the parables under review are
records of corrective teaching, not transcripts of Rabbinical
thought, may be gathered from the phrase accompanying their
recital in the First Gospel and the Third, namely: "Whoever
hath, to him it shall be given, and he shall abound; but who-
ever hath not, from him shall be taken away that also which
he hath." ^^ The phrase is evidently regarded as important,
since the three Synoptic writers report it, five times in all. Its
first mentioning is in connection with the Parable of the Sower,
its second with the Parable of the Talents or the Pounds "® — a
circumstance which clearly indicates that these two latter
parables are applied illustrations of the former. The under-
lying idea in the five contexts where we find the phrase re-
ported, is the right or wrong view taken of the Kingdom;'* a
convincing cross-demonstration of the thesis which we have
been all along upholding. " Take heed how you hear," *• St.
Luke quotes the Lord as saying, after He had explained to
the Twelve the Parable of the Sower. There can be no doubt,
■•Matt. XXV. 31, 32.
•^Matt. xili. 12; xxv. 29; Mark Iv. 25; Luke vUl. 18; xlx. 26.
■Matt. xiil. 12; xxv. 29; Luke vlll. 18; xlx. 26.
»Lukc vlii. 18.
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therefore, that the phrase has reference to current belief, and
is employed in a warning, corrective sense.
A Greek verb used by St. Matthew in two widely separated
verses, lets us see the conditions that provoked this adapted
quotation from Isaias*** — the verb "to snatch away."*^ It
is used by the author of the First Gospel when writing of " the
violence that the Kingdom of Heaven suffered from the days
of John," «* and is re-employed in the Lord's description of the
" seed that was snatched out of the heart of him who heard,
but did not understand His teaching.** •• The Lord has in mind
the proselyting campaign of the Pharisees against His new
doctrine of the Kingdom; a conclusion which St. Luke makes
certain when he links the verse about "whosoever hath, or
hath not,** with the perseverance of the receivers of the word.^^
The meaning of the phrase in question clarifies itself into the
following statement: "Whoever hath My word of the King-
dom, as distinct from the doctrine of the Pharisees, to him
more knowledge shall be given, and he shall abound; but who-
ever hath not My word of the Kingdom, even that which he
thinketh «* he hath, shall be taken away.*' By whom? By the
"wicked** Pharisee, the one that cometh and "snatcheth
away " that which was sown in the heart of him who heard the
word of the Kingdom, and understood it not." •^
When the phrase is seen to have this particular sense
and bearing, the Parable of the Talents in St. Matthew and
the Parable of the Pounds in St. Luke instantly resolve them-
selves into two powerful descriptions of the fate awaiting
those who accept the Pharisaic doctrine of salvation and
refuse the word of Christ to the contrary. The servants who
received money for trading, and who increased their store
during the long absence of the Master, misled by no false fancy
of the Kingdom that was to come, represent applied examples
of the " seed that was sown on good ground ** — they heard the
word of Christ and understood it, with good heart bringing-
forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some
thirty." '^ They led long and fruitful lives, while the Lord
was " gone into a far country to receive for Himself a King-
•Isalas Iv. It.
* dpvdtCtt. Matt. xl. 12; zill. 19. Read in connection Matt. xxiU. 15.
" dkpxd^ouocv. Matt. xi. 12. Compare Luke xvl. 16.
•Matt xllL 19. ••I^ 6xotAtv^. Luke vlU. 15; xxl. 19.
■Luke vill. 18. ••Matt. xilL 19. •TMatt xlU. 23.
VOL. cvm. — 6
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82 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
clom, and to return" And the opposite picture — that of the serv-
ant who had neglected, to put his talent to good use, folding
it unproductively in a napkin, instead — ^what else is this but a
portrayal of him "whose justice had not abounded more than
that of the Scribes and Pharisees?" Idly waiting for the ex-
pected master, to give Him His bare due when He came —
" Behold here what is thine! *' — the slothful servant saw others
awarded the talent which he had neglected to improve. Wait-
ing and working had not gone together in this instance, as
Jesus said they should. When the Lord had reached this point
in His address at Jericho, the audience remonstrated with Him
for giving the parable such an unexpected turn.®* It seemed
unjust that the unused pound should be taken away from the
one who had it and given to another who already possessed
much more. Whereupon the Lord declares: "/ say unto
you " — the words denote corrective teaching — " that unto every
one that hath, it shall be given; but from him that hath not,
even that which he hath, shall be taken away."
What does the Lord mean by this reply to the remon-
strance of the crowd? An interesting cross-reference in St.
Matthew informs us. The author of the First Gospel re-
ports the Lord's answer more fully than the author of the
Third. * ** Whoever hath," he says, " to him it shall be given,
and he shall abound** ^^ — a verb which is employed in the
famous verse: "Unless your justice abounds more than that
of the Scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the King-
dom of Heaven." ^^ In other words : " He that hath not My
word of the Kingdom, from him shall be taken away even that
which he thinketh he hath;" taken away, that is, by the wily
Pharisee, who will tempt him to wait idly for a " Kingdom of
God" that is not to come, instead of preparing actively for
the one that is at hand, the portals of which are open to the
fruitful believer at death. In no other sense is Israel to see
salvation within her borders, when the Son of Man receives the
Kingdom foretold by Daniel. In no other sense is salvation to
be lost or won, until the Lord returns in glory to judge the
living and the dead. " Be ye therefore ready, for in an hour
that ye think not (because of your Palestinian prepossessions),
the Son of Man will come." ^^
"Luke xlx. 25. "And they said unto Him."
" xtpCa9c6ca. Malt. xiii. 12; xxv. 29. *• ictptactSw. Matt. v. 20.
"Matt. xxlv. 44; Luke xU. 40— o6 Soxclte in both instances.
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What, then, is the Gospel of the Kingdom, which Jesus
in the thirteenth and fourteenth verses of the Discourse an-
nounces as the doctrine of salvation to be preached in the
whole inhabited earth, for a testimony unto all the nations,
before the end of the world comes? We think the con-
clusion has been both textually and critically estab-
lished, that the doctrine of salvation here proclaimed by Jesus
is none other than the coming of the Son of Man to the in--
dividual at the hour of death. The mass of evidence thus far
collected in the present series of studies admits of no other
interpretation; and even if we did not have such an abundance
of testimony, the verse in which Jesus sets forth His doctrine
of salvation — ** He that endureth unto the end, the same shall
be saved"— could readily clear itself of all association with
the superseded eschatology of Palestine. The word "end"
is without the definite article in this particular verse,^' and in
every other instance where we find it reported.^* On the other
hand, when the meaning is the "end" of Israel or the end
of the world, the noun is always preceded by the article, to
make the difference in meaning clear.^* The sense, therefore,
is the " end of life," of " tribulation," of " trial," not the " end
of Israel," or the " consummation of the world."
Additional considerations go to make this point more
undoubted still. Not to mention the evidence set forth in the
last two studies, we have the striking fact that all the contexts
in which this Gospel of salvation is announced, are contexts
which deal with steadfastness unto death as the new doctrine
of the Kingdom." When read in the light of what surrounds
its several mentionings, the verse about " enduring to the end,"
can have no other meaning. And if the several contexts of its
employment are not enough to bring conviction, we have the
translation of St. Luke, to satisfy the most exacting. The third
evangelist puts the meaning of the verse beyond all reasonable
doubt, when he translates it for Western eyes into the equiva-
lent rendering: In your perseverance, you shall win your
** *0 Ik uxo(u(va{ c(<; tfkoq. Matt xxlv. 13. Contrary to the general opinion,
Ox3(Uvctv Is used by St. Matthew in the same sense as by St. Luke and St. John.
** cl^ T<Xo^ Matt X. 22; Mark xlil. 18; Luke xxi. 19. Compare 1 Thess. 11. 16;
John xlll. l.~liDg T<Xou«. 1 Cor. 1. 8.— yiixpt xiXou?. Heb. lit 6. 14.— 5xpi -clXoui;.
Heb. vl. 11; Apoc. U. 26.
^ xh T<Xo<;. Matt. xxlv. 6. 14; Luke xxl. 9.
"Matt X. 21; Mark xiit 12; Luke xxl. 16.
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84 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Oct.,
souls,^^ Faithfulness unto death to the Teacher and Media-
tor," in an organized,", earthly Kingdom of trial and tribula-
tion, is the condition of entrance into the Heavenly Kingdom
of Glory; faithfulness intellectually, spiritually and morally —
Jesus was no Kantian separatist! — ^is the Gospel of salvation.
The Saviour spoke of His " coming " in three senses : to
Israel in power; to the world in glory; and to the individual in
salvation or rejection at the hour of death. He did not an-
nounce His Final coming as inmiinent, nor is He reported to
this effect. The so-called " Apocalypse of Jesus," in which the
Lord is supposed to have expressed belief in the nearness of
the Last Advent, or to have had others do so in His stead, is
actually a mass of corrective teaching to the contrary, as the
results of the present investigation, so far forth, have shown,
and shall show still further. The existence of these apocalyp-
tic utterances is a creation of scholarship, due for the most
part to the unproved and unprovable assumption that Jesus
always spoke of His ** coming " in an ultimate and final sense.
The fact of the matter is that in only three " verses of the Dis-
course, out of a total of fifty-one, can His words be proved to
have had this meaning; and even in these, the^end of the
world is not presented as nigh, but as put off indefinitely. He
Who appealed from Judaism to history for His vindication,
solemnly declaring that even if heaven and earth passed. His
word of the Kingdom would still remain,*® appealed to a wit-
ness which has faithfully reproduced His forecast for twenty
centuries and bids fair to do so unto the end.
w Luke xxi. 19.— Iv t^ 6xotMVB OpUov, xxfynxAt Td<; <I»oxd«; 6pUov. Here the new spir-
itnal Jdea of salvation is. cut clear from the pAys<cal-preservation doctrine of Pales-
tine, and expressed In the very terms of the latter: "Not a ^ir of your head shall
perish." Luke xxi. 17. For which phrase, see: 1 Sam. xiv. 45; 2 Sam. xiv. 11;
1 Kings i. 52; Acts xxvii. 34.
"Matt. vli. 22. 23; x. 32, 89; xxv. 40, 45.
"Matt. xvl. 18. 19; xvlil. 17, 18; Luke x. 16.
" Matt xxiv. 29-31. ■* Matt xxiv. 35.
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THE PASSING OF ANATOLE FRANCE.
BY MARGARET B. DOWNING.
J LITERARY development of the World War
which deserves searching analysis relates to the
complete eclipse of the fame of M. Jacques
Anatole Thibault, whose pen name is Anatole
France. That his vogue entered the twilight
even before the German guns had silenced the defences of
Li^ge is no longer debatable, nor that, after four years of
war, it is enveloped by the shadows of night. Of the thirty odd
books he has written or any future books he may write, unless,
indeed, the rumor of his change of heart be true, not one will
remain an influence on French national life. If their utter-
ances through a thousand varying sources may be accepted,
the French people have cast aside for all time a philosophy
which has borne such lamentable fruit. He whom powerfully
assertive critics proclaimed the greatest of living writers, not
alone in the French Republic, but in all the world of letters,
he whom they deemed worthy to count among the immortals
of literature, does not withstand the first test applied in his
own generation.
The French Republic, on July 4th and 14th, gathered to-
gether her eminent men of letters as part of a grand pageant
to celebrate the national f6te day of her great ally and friend,
and her own state holiday. The Academy had its full quota
of orators and others especially honored on both these occa-
sions, yet the name of Anatole France does not appear in the
list. His countrymen have condemned most comprehensively
the mighty works of which he boasts more loudly than be-
comes an ironist, as well as the minor writings through which
he is best known to the reading world outside of his native
country. The time may come when an apologist will plead for
the hours of pure delight which grew out of his fairy-tales. The
Honey-Bee for instance, or the keen enjoyment of his drol-
leries in holding up the origins of legends or the wizardry
with which his pen envelops the commonplaces of life, or the
pathos of it. But he has not yet lifted his voice. The writings
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86 THE PASSING OF ANATOLE FRANCE [Oct.,
of Anatole France en masse have wrought a monstrous evil.
It is nothing that en detail there is incomparable grace and
much that is innocent told in a style surpassing all other
authors in the modern school of French letters.
The critics apologetically explain, that not in the nature of
things could Anatole France hope to remain the idol of
French letters — an aged and ailing man, an ironist, a skeptic,
a hedonist. War literature must breathe the enthusiasms of
youth, must be idealistic, passionately sincere. They hail him
as the last and greatest of the Gallic ironists, who for pur-
poses of classification may be considered to begin with Villon
and include such widely separated members of the genre as
Rabelais, Voltaire, Rousseau, Renan. Briefly, the critics have
prepared imposing obsequies, but the important fact is that
as the "foremost man of letters today," they admit his pass-
ing.
This remarkable evolution suggests in a new way the dis-
cussion of the fascintating question: What constitutes the
imperishable element in literature? What quality has enabled
Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, Schiller to fasten
on the minds of such infinite variety of men, what makes the
kingdom of Homer endure forever and the writings of the
Latin poets of the Virgilian era, the solace of two centuries of
thinkers? Some keen and discerning litterateurs, many of
them American, have discussed the vogue of Anatole France
from time to time, since the autumn of 1914 and always as
something entirely of the past. They point unerringly to the
reasons which expel his writings, no matter how brilliantly
they stand out against contemporary literature, from those
which human society crowns with immortality. Mr. William
Marion Reedy, an incisive analyist, wrote in an article en-
titled The Art of Anatole France, which appeared October
29, 1915, in the excellent weekly he edits in St. Louis : " In
point of grace and deftness, in smiling, sympathetic, smooth,
urbane polished deadliness of destruction, he outranks the
diabolist of The Philosophical Dictionary and The Huron."
Mr. Reedy adds that his preoccupation with sexual license is a
serious blemish. Mr. John L. Hervey, a critic who has shown
an amazing ability in exposing the weakness of the literary
superman, in a series of articles on Anatole France which
aroused attention wherever the popularity of that arch-skep-
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tic held sway, says : " He is a destroyer in his own field and
of the nth power. This will of itself place him irrevocably in
the lower walks of literature. Supreme greatness in a writer
is not distinguished by a deadliness of destruction, but by life-
giving creativeness."
The* "writers who have arraigned him as the chief of the
false teachers who brought his countrymen to the pass in
which they found themselves when the gray legions of Ger-
many began their invasion, are too numerous to be cited. His
doctrine of pleasure and the futility of suffering and self-
denial, had borne logical fruit in the dwindling population.
His gospel of spiritual freedom had resulted in the shifting of
personal responsibility among the masses. But the lesson
which the critics have driven home means that the veil of
sophistry in which he has enveloped his literary art has been
torn away. He may, says a versatile British writer, be assured
of about five lines in the literary history of the next century.
But these lines will show him as an evil power when his op-
portunity for the betterment of humanity was supreme. His
works are destructive, and every literary eflfort which lives,
even for a brief span, is distinguished by procreativeness.
From the element of destruction in the writings of Anatole
France, comes the inevitable reaction. By those who have
loved him and praised his writings " just this side of idolatry,"
satire is considered his most formidable weapon. But with the
veil torn off he stands revealed more as an egoist than an
ironist, as a romanticist when he would impress the reader
as a profound historian, as the tool of a wizard rather than
the wizard himself. As an illustration in condensed form,
nothing is more illuminative than the fragment called After
Herodotus found in the Christmas book which he wrote in
November of 1915, Au profit des blesses du XV. Corps.'*
Prefatory to the dialogue between Xerxes and Democra-
tus, an exiled King of Sparta who had refuge at the Persian
court, France indulges in a typical ex-cathedra statement,
that man has been changeless in all the centuries and that in
the most distant ages, we find features peculiar to our own.
Then he shows us Kaiser Wilhelm as the Persian tyrant and
the Greek as typical of the Entente nations. This from a so-
called ironist, as though the merest tyro of history could not
discover the resemblance for himself!
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88 THE PASSING OF ANATOLE FRANCE [Oct.,
Xerxes. Man for man a Persian is worth more than a
Greek. For Persians commanded by me alone, exceed their
natural valiance by all the greatness which is imposed upon
them. Your Greeks, equal and free, obeying not one chief
but inspired only by their own hearts, which are often
middling, for great hearts are rare, do battle only at their
will.
Democratus. Greeks are free O King, but not in every
way. In Sparta not dying on the field but flying from it is
death.
Xerxes. I will disclose to you another advantage of the
Persians over the Greeks. The Persians are closely united
under my authority and the Greeks are perpetually quar-
reling among themselves.
Democratus. Their dissensions ceased at thy approach,
O King.
Xerxes. No matter. Heaven is on my side. Alone
among men Persians know the true gods. My design is not
only to conquer Greece but all Europe. Europe is beauti-
ful. Her heavens are kind and her soil fruitful. Of all
mortals, I alone am worthy to possess her.
Democratus. Son of Darius, if thou beholdeth in thy-
self a god and thinketh to command an army of immortals,
then thou hast not to listen to me. But if thou acknowl-
edgeth thyself a man commanding men, think how fortune
is like a wheel ever-turning and overturning those whom it
hath lifted up.
But Xerxes departed from the Spartan, not in anger
but because he thought him mad.
Very amusing, if one forgets the opening digression. But if a
reader runs across another utterance of Anatole France anent
the condition of the world and the results of the universal war,
he will suffer a reaction. In this he disclaims that he ever
wrote or thought that the French Republic of today bears the
least point of resemblance to ancient Greece.
That country (Greece) was never noble in politics. She
was great in art, but never in war nor did she ever play a
distinguished rdle in foreign policies. Her great wars were
civil wars. She excelled in killing her own. But Greece
had great historians. From them, we learn of the marvels
of her Persian war. But if Persia had possessed great his-
torians, what then?
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This view of the value of all history, may temper the ver-
dict which painstaking historians have entered against the
most pretentious of his books dealing with the past, the Vie
de Jeanne d'Arc. Of his own confession, he doubts all chroni-
cles of the past, as in reality he doubted all things. Openly
and without shadow of apology, he has taken history as the
crude stuff of which romance is fashioned, and has touched
it always with a desire to make over the material into some-
thing alien rather than to use it as it is. With this propensity
in mind, is there more conceivable egoism in the world of
letters than the statement of Anatole France, that his life
of her restored the Maid of Orleans to humanity? Mr.
Hervey, in a spirited controversy with another excel-
lent critic, Mr. Louis Lamb of Chicago, asks: *' Would
M. France have us believe that previous to his Vie, the
Maid was dead to us or dehumanized? It would ap-
pear so, which cannot but be classified among the illusions of
authorship, from which the arch-ironist is not free. I have
doubts if M. France is familiar with Mark Twain's Jeanne
d*Arc, or if he does not regard it as a crude and amateurish
performance. Yet the American ironist, as great if not greater
than M. France himself, makes the Maid a living human, beau-
tifully human figure."
It seems the essence of irony, that one who lays violent
hands on the historians of antiquity, places great stress on his
own researches in building up the so-called life of the sainted
Maid. He has consulted archives, chronicles, diaries, private
letters and tittle-tattle, principally the latter, and therefore
he alone presents the truth* about one of the loveliest ideals in
a storm torn age ! His work has become a text-book for the por-
nographist, but this distinction was not perhaps what the
author coveted. Were other proof necessary to mark the
change of sentiment in the French people, we might study the
avenues by which a popularly esteemed Parisian writer ap-
proaches the saintly Maid, and the goal which he reaches.
This is M. Maurice Barr^s, who published a study of Jeanne
d'Arc in the same series in which M. Anatole France presented
his Christmas book, the last and only utterance since he re-
alized his departed greatness.
But calamitous as it is for a certain cdterie to have re-
ceived Anatole France as a creditable historian of the
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patroness of the awakened France, there is a more glaring in-
stance still of his being a romanticist and not a historian,
and willfully so, where truth was available in the essence. No
story from his pen was read with such avidity or provoked
such a host of feeble imitators, as Thais. Quite recently, Mary
of Egypt has played the leading part in a sensational novel,
obviously a poor imitation of the fantastic light which M.
France sheds on sexual vice. As in Thais, one-half the book
paints the life of the courtesan in the era when saints starved
and scourged themselves in the Egyptian Thebaid. That
Massenet accepted this monstrous distortion of truth as the
libretto of his opera, is a matter of profound regret, for his
enticing music will live after the critics have exposed the
Satanic ingenuity of Anatole France in assaulting self-abnega-
tion and denial.
Since we live in an age of skepticism, when all historical
sources are subjected to scrutiny, there are scholars who cast
doubt on the chronicles of the Early Christian Fathers. Of
the latter Palladius is much esteemed by ecclesiastical writers,
and his Lausaic History has formed the inspiration of many
books of piety. In some old libraries, a slender volume, im-
mensely filling as to contents, may still be found. The Fathers
of the Desert. In this, and of course in the records of Palladius,
we read an almost divinely inspiring story of the Blessed
Woman Thais, once that white flame of beauty, the hetaera of
Alexandria who had driven men mad. The ascetic Belarion,
known in Church annals as Serapion of the Girdle, determined
to free the city of this awful tool of Satan and boldly invaded
the palace to work her conversidh, precisely as appears in
Massenet's opera and the story of Anatole France.
But Serapion of the Girdle is a well authenticated histori-
cal character. Not alone do the Palladian annals show this,
but recent excavations in Egypt have proved beyond a reason-
able doubt that the hermit who rescued Thais from worse tban
death, lived and died in the desert, a saint. This is certified
in other patristic writings as well as those of the Bishop of
Helenopolis, who composed his chronicles in the year 420 at
the instance of one Lausus, a court official of the Emperor
Theodosius in Constantinople, and possibly by the Emperor's
command. It was, therefore, well within the power of Anatole
France to know that his monstrous creation, Paphnuce, was
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absolutely untrue to every source of history obtainable. He
deliberately painted a demoniacal vampire, tortured by
dreams of the beauty of the woman whom he led from sin,
when he knew that truth lay in an entirely different direc-
tion. Of a certainty, he has taken the raw material of history
and made it into something repugnant, obscene and destruc-
tive. The patience of the French people has been phenomenal.
That the libel was not proclaimed and a retraction demanded
can only be attributed to the intolerable conditions in"
which all professors of religion found themselves while the
loud-toned advocates of M. France held the public attention.
Our country and its people are presumed to be lenient
and indifferent towards reckless writers, but it is not problem-
atical, what would be the fate of anyone, professing to write
a novel with a true historical background, who depicted revo-
lutionary times, and painted George Washington to the life
in every detail, yet assigned to him the r61e of Benedict Arnold.
How summarily would a romance be dealt with laid in the
days when Our Saviour walked the earth, if St. Peter were
given the part of the Iscariot in the drama of the Crucifixion.
Just so abnormal is this "masterpiece of ironic psychology."
That Paphnuce relapses into an abyss of concupiscence
eons lower than that from which he rescued Thais, is a per-
verse, deliberate invention, a worthy revenge on a great ascetic,
whose teachings, centuries old, still hold the minds of men
against the voluptuousness of M. France and his preachings
of pleasure. The pity of it is that so few know the true story
or will ever know it. For even with the regeneration caused
by the War, such books as those inspired the chronicles of
Palladius will hardly become popular. The saint of stern and
commanding fortitude is lost sight of, while the hideous
demon presented by Anatole and faithfully copied by Masse-
net lives on. Perhaps the aroused conscience of the world
will one day demand a retraction and a re-writing of the
libretto. Not many months ago, a patriotic historian die-
manded and obtained suitable action against a fellow scribe
who had libeled the memory of George Washington and as-
sailed his moral integrity. The custodians of truth have a far
stronger case against Anatole France and those who receive
the revenues from Massenet's opera.
We have yet to consider the value of Anatole France as a
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92 THE PASSING OF ANATOLE FRANCE [Oct.,
worker in the socialistic field. In the autumn of 1914, he sadly
announced he would write no more, for it was in vain. His
theories could never be made practical. It is well for human-
ity in the f utiu'e that they will not. And yet he has touched
truth in many places. As, for instance, in his doctrine of con-
verting the world to a gentler mode of thought. The Germans,
he feels, must be greeted in the brotherly spirit when the War
is over, for, as he points out, " they are part of our world and to
think to keep them outside our good will and affection, is to
contemplate sending the world back to chaos. We must fight
the evil in them by destroying the evil in ourselves. The In--
ternationale must perish." This was written after the War
began and shows the light of truth begining to glimmer amidst
the lurid and lambent hues with which he has hitherto clothed
every theme. He has expressed doubts of the results of the
War on what he has always called the French colonial mania.
Here again the white light kindles and lends faith to the
current tale that Anatole France is a changed man since the
autumn of 1914. He would have no more colonizing among the
advanced nations, for he believes it to be economically wrong.
He thinks Japan has done mankind an ineffable service in
making the white man respect the yellow. He does not
despair even of the blacks and demonstrates that even now in
pioneer countries, they are much superior to the Europeans
of 2000 B.C. He paints a Utopia, a rather jumbled State, but
it has its points.
Psychologists who have hitherto written of war and the
change it brings upon those who wage it, however unwilling
they be to accept change, will not agree with any of M.
France's theories. Socialism, they say, will come but not of his
brand. Europe, according to these seers, will be free spiritually
and in the governmental sense, but after a larger pattern and
with a wider vision than he has prepared or enjoyed. But he
is not more unprepared to accept a reversal of his opinions on
this, his favorite theme, than he is to accept the repudiation of
his teachings by the Parisians who had placed him among the
immortals. That Christmas book shows a changed spirit.
Not once can his sincerity be doubted, and not once can one
detect a gesture of satire.
Take that scrap in which he so vividly describes an epi-
sode of the bombardment of Ypres, that not even by transla-
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tion can the charm be impaired. It tells of the heroism of a
French doctor in a hospital tending the German wounded
and who will not leave his post, though the bombs are burst-
ing all about him. He writes in a letter to friends in Paris :
I could not leave my wounded for I was jealous to give
the enemy an example of humanity. I was making out my
report at the exact spot where the shell fell, but I had left
my work table but a few seconds before. It was an enor-
mous marmite that tore down the whole wing of the hos-
pital and made mince meat of poor L6onie and her little
dog. A poor little black woolen shawl with a bloody frag-
ment was all we found of the cook of the Ypres hospital,
L6onie, a simple soul with a heart of the people, a sacri-
ficial heart. Against fear and for protection, she had set up
between two slim candles an image of Notre Dame de
Thuymes, the patroness of Ypres, and who in other days
had saved the city from destruction. Every day the image
changed places, sometimes it was on the sideboard, now on
a chair, even on the floor, but always between its two
lighted candles.
If there still remain Francistes, who cling to the man who
wrote prior to August, 1914, what a grief one fragment in the
Christmas book must be to them. It is so tender, so hopeful,
so full of the sublime and indomitable courage of the French
people, that only a converted Anatole could have penned this
Little City of France. It is a matter of profound regret that
those able French scholars who rushed into print the horrors
of the Life of Joan of Arc and of Thais have not found the time
to translate the Christmas book, which is the only utterance of
M. France since the dark cloud of war enveloped his country.
But this, again, may be but another token of his passing fame.
From the hillside we saw the little city, its name is of
small importance. It is a village of France peaceably
nestled in the hollow of a valley. It was charming with
its winding streets, its pointed towers, and the clock carved
in the hood of the elegant church spire. I look upon it
with rapture. It is a way our small cities have to fill the
heart with a sadness which is yet gay and which is sweeter
than laughter. I can hear voices, for even stones have
voices for those who will listen. And the stones of that
little city spoke to me:
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94 THE PROCESS [Oct.,
** See, I am very old but I am still beautiful. The piety
of my children has embroidered me a robe of towers and
spires and dented gables and belfries. I am a good mother.
I have taught my children labor and all the arts of peace.
I exhort my citizens to that scorn of danger which makes
them invincible. I nurse my children in my arms and
when their task is done, they come one after another to
sleep at my feet. They pass out but I remain to keep their
memory. I am their memory. This is why they love me.
For man is only man when he remembers. My cloak is
torn and my bosom pierced with wounds they tell me are
mortal. But I live because I hope. Learn of me, for Holy
Hope shall save our country."
THE PROCESS.
BY GEORGE BENSON HEWETSON.
I AM to make — not made.
As the potter takes the clay
And molds it to his desires,
Purging its weakness away
By stress of his strengthening fires.
Vouchsafe me, O God, Thine aid,
Take into Thy hands my life.
That a child of Thine own by self's defeat,
I may receive it again.
Strengthened by strife.
Ennobled by pain.
Cleansed by Thy love, and complete.
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THE MINERAL SHORTAGE.
BY M. R. RYAN.
I IME was when we of the United States considered
war only in the term of soldiers and militant
sailors. The winning of a conflict would rest
upon these, and these alone, we placidly be-
lieved. But since that Good Friday when we
entered the battle arena, the fact has been steadily borne upon
us, from one quarter or another, that it is the non-belligerent
portion of a nation upon which the burden of gaining a vic-
torious peace rests most heavily. Armed forces, we are shown,
can be but of little avail if the vital resources of a land are not
marshaled to full strength in their aid. Wherefore we are en-
treated to conserve food, to produce ships and aeroplanes and
munitions, to fill the Treasury with money, to support the Red
Cross. And now comes an appeal from Washington for an
increased output of minerals.
About the middle of last April the Secretary of the Interior
wrote to Mr. Kitchen, the majority leader of the House of
Representatives, that a serious situation was developing in re-
gard to war minerals — minerals such as are necessary to carry
on our various industries engaged upon war work. He re-
quested that action be taken to stimulate production of these
minerals; and later on he addressed the Speaker of the House
on the same subject, suggesting that we might find ourselves
in a predicament should our important facilities be cut off.
And with the presence of enemy U-boats off our Atlantic coast
at this period, how significant do his words become I
Since the deadly advent of the raiders, the mysterious case
of the Cyclops has been again recalled. We remember that
it was on its way to one of oiu* ports from Brazil with a great
supply of manganese aboard. Suddenly it disappeared, with-
out even a call for succor, from the face of the ocean. Natur-
ally, our thoughts turned first to the probable loss of lives
when the news of the non-arrival of the vessel was published.
And later, we reflected a moment or two on the regrettable
loss of the ship itself. But we manifested little concern over
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96 THE MINERAL SHORTAGE [Oct.,
our failure to obtain the cargo of manganese. Yet this was
no indifferent matter. For we need manganese to harden
steel; and in how many war industries is steel not essential?
It is now a piece of common knowledge that Germany,
though adequately supplied with iron and copper, is badly
lacking in hardening materials for steel; her torpedoes, too,
have not their former strength and accuracy because of the
scarcity of nickel in the empire. Of coiu^e, over these phases
of the situation we do not repine. But our own present short-
age of minerals cannot but cause our anxiety to rise. Cer-
tainly at this stage of the hideous war game, it would be a
calamity if our steel were not of the best, if our ammunition
were of the sort that frequently flies wide of the mark.
Now, in addition to the fact that we should produce our
own minerals and thus make ourselves independent of any
other nation on the earth, and so, to an extent, impervious to
marauding craft, there is the question of ship conservation.
The Shipping Board, hard pressed as it has been to furnish
something like a suflQciency of vessels to transport troops, food
and munitions overseas, now finds itself obliged to withdraw
for military purposes, tonnage which has hitherto been de-
voted to purely commercial pursuits. For instance, five ships
have been engaged in bringing pyrites to this country. This
mineral is used in the manufacture of sulphuric acid, which is
in demand in munition plants. The majority of these ships
have now been conunandeered for war service; and whereas
we have been importing one hundred thousand tons a month,
in the future we can figure on bringing into the country but
ten thousand tons. And it is inevitable that the greater num-
ber of vessels in every line of foreign trade must shortly be
requisitioned by the Board. Consider the amount of tonnage
involved in the importation of chromium (used in armor-
plates, armor-piercing projectiles, aeroplane motors, etc.), and
manganese, perhaps the most important mineral in war indus-
tries. In 1917, we required tonnage to import from New Cale-
donia sixty-three per cent of the former mineral; and for
the latter, tonnage to supply sixty-eight per cent was needed.
This cannot long continue.
It becomes self-evident that it would mean an extensive
saving in ships if all necessary minerals could be wholly pro-
cured within our own boundaries. We could use the commer-
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cial ships to so much better advantage elsewhere ! In late May,
Edwin Gay of the Shipping Board informed the Senate Com-
mittee on Mines that there is grave danger that the Allied
shipping production will not keep even on an equal basis with
shipping losses. And he advocated that measures be taken
to relieve the ore situation in order that the ships now carry-
ing these products be released for strictly war needs.
So extensively has the mineral question been agitated that
it seems likely at the present moment that the Government
will soon be empowered to take definite steps to remedy con-
ditions. During the summer. Senator Ashurst succeeded in
persuading the Senate to pass a bill, which provides for the
opening of Indian reservations for mining of metalliferous
metals. It is claimed that many of these reservations in the
West contain much mineral wealth. That the Indians resid-
ing thereon have not engaged in mining is due to the fact that,
for the most part, they are superstitious about delving into
the earth for its riches. The Ashurst bill, then, seeks to open
these reservations to those who will mine. But there was
considerable opposition to the bill in the Senate. There were
those, for instance, who believed that it would be unfair to the
Indians. It was made clear, however, that though this plan
has been long discussed, none of the Indians have objected to
it. And, indeed, why should they? They would not lose title
to their lands : such portions given over to miners would only
be leased. And the lessees would be required to pay to the
Indians not only rental for the land but also fair royalties
for any ore removed. Some of the Senators, too, took excep-
tions to the bill on the ground that they do not hold with the
leasing system on the public domain. But Indian lands are not
public lands — and so their objections fall flat. The bill is now
awaiting the attention of the House; and it is to be hoped that
it will be received favorably there. For surely none of our
mining resources should be unutilized at this time.
The Foster bill (passed by the House, but yet to be acted
upon in the Senate) is another measure designed to encour-
age the production of metals and minerals. It is, frankly
speaking, a bill which would be totally undesirable in peace
times. It provides that the Government take over, develop, or
operate, if necessary, mines; it authorizes a revolving fund of
millions of dollars to permit the President, through the Inter-
voL. cvm. — 7
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98 THE MINERAL SHORTAGE [Oct.,
ior Department, to carry out the provisions of the act; it per-
mits the Secretary of the Interior to fix the price at which vari-
ous minerals may be sold. That the President recommended
its passage as a war measure is, doubtless, the action that
saved it from annihilation in the House. For it bears the marks
of Socialism, as does so much of the legislation nowadays.
There is a serio-comic situation involved in the pro-
tective measures which this bill incorporates. When the Six-
ty-third Congress was considering the Underwood-Simmons
bill there was an endeavor made to keep a $2.50 a ton duty on
ferromanganese; this, unfortunately, did not meet with any
success; ferromanganese went on the free list. Today this
policy is practically admitted as a mistaken one. It has been
rendered plain that had pyrites, for example, been protected,
instead of allowing the Spanish product to enter the country
at so low a rate that no one could afford to compete in the
market with it, there would have been no necessity to include
the mineral in the present bill; likewise, that had the duty on
manganese been retained the (xovernment would not now be
fretting over the shortage of that commodity. Young indus-
tries require assistance. Wherefore we have the Foster bill,
with its revolving fund of ten million dollars, in which to some
of our infant industries aid is given, not at the expense of the
foreigner, but at the expense of the people of this country. It
is a highly protective bill; a measure, as Mr. Walsh of Massa-
chusetts suggested, in which everything is protected but the
Treasury.
As originally presented to the House, the bill provided
that governmental control of war minerals should cease to be
in effect after the existing state of war between the United
States and Germany and its ally, Austria, shall have termi-
nated; and the fact and date of such termination was to be
ascertained and proclaimed by the President as soon as in his
judgment the agencies and activities provided in the bill could
be reasonably terminated. But tremendous powers are
granted to the Government in this measure — ^powers that few
members of Congress would care to bestow upon it in normal
times. So the bill as now amended, limits these powers, ex-
cept the ability to carry out any contract or guaranty entered
upon, or to wind up affairs, to a definite six months after the
War shall be over.
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1918.] THE MINERAL SHORTAGE 99
It also stipulates that the Secretary of the Interior may
enter upon contracts for necessary minerals for periods of
not exceeding two years, that he may provide storage facili-
ties for, and sell, the minerals. And it furthermore provides,
as has been previously mentioned, for the fixing of a minimum
price for minerals. That is, as amended, the bill does this. In
its initial form, it permitted the naming of a maximum price,
also. And this clause was eliminated only after extensive de-
bate. There are economists in the House who contend that the
maximum price is essential in this case, in order to guard
against over-production. If the Government becomes the
guarantor of a minimum price on minerals (they say) and the
buyer of the product, it must, at the same time, protect itself
from the danger of an over-supply, by setting a maximum rate.
But, really, can there be much danger of over-production dur-
ing the period of the War? And does not the theory that a
maximum price is havoc-working seem more tenable in this
instance?
Suppose, in accordance with the stipulations of the bill,
that the Interior Department should make this announce-
ment: " Minerals are in great demand at present. You people
who are able to mine for them, go out and do so. The Gov-
ernment of the United States will guarantee you who will pro-
duce these minerals, a price that will be fair, a price not less
than the guaranteed price fixed by the department." Now, a
poor operator, on the strength of that guarantee, might under-
take to work a mine for some one of the specified minerals. But
authorize the Department to set a maximum price for the ore,
and what will happen? The operator will be scared off, in all
probability. He knows that nlining is an uncertain game, at
the best; he is aware that developing a little mine may be a
costly business. Perhaps the maximum price would leave him
no profits after his expenses were paid. And if a man cannot
sell his products with a reasonable gain, he simply will not
bother to produce at all. There is no doubt about it: the max-
imum price here would render completely worthless every
piu*pose of the bill.
A revolving fund of fifty million dollars was authorized
in this bill when it was given to the House for consideration.
Just why the fund was placed at fifty millions rather than at
some other figure, it is impossible to say. Mr. Baruch stated
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100 A WOMAN KNITTING [Oct.,
to the House committee that had the bill in charge that he
thought one hundred and fifty millions would be required.
But some other gentlemen who testified before the same com-
mittee were of the opinion that a third of that amount would
be suflBcient; so with its fifty millions the bill went into the
House. We have such a carefree, delightful way in regard to
government finances in this country 1 However, it does seem
as though Congress is growing somewhat prudent. It is begin-
ning to look askance at measures that entail large sums of
money for execution. And so the fund was cut down to ten
million dollars — a mere bagatelle.
As has been observed previously, this bill is by no means
a peacetime measure. It is only a belated efiTort to encourage
the mining industry — and tardy efforts do not always accom-
plish results, and are not always flawless. But we must be
optimistic. The unexpected does occur occasionally. We will
hope for the best in the mineral situation.
A WOMAN KNITTIN&
BY VICTORIA ENGLISH.
O KITTEN, you play
With my ball of gray,
And snatch at the shining steel;
The knitting to you is only a game,
For the needles flash in the flickering flame,
And the tight ball rolls like a wheel.
But I, who sit
By the fire and knit,
See the yarn, through my eyes grown dim,
As a cord that runs to a trench, to bind
A man to the woman he left behind.
Her heart to the heart of him.
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7.^-WH
N-^
1
THE POETRY OF J. CORSON MILLER.
BY CATHARINE MCPARTUN.
|T this world-crisis when hearts are turning with
new fervor to God and His Blessed Mother, and
the patronage of the Blessed Virgin is fervently
invoked for this and other lands, a new poet has
laid at Our Lady's feet pledge of his life, as her
consecrated knight in deed and song. This is the inspiration
of the verse of J. Corson Miller. The grace, strength and
originality of his poems to Mary are the fruit of Catholic in-
stinct and devotion. Each has the sincerity of a prayer from
the heart to her whose titles cover the range of human needs.
In these, his unusual poetic powers are at their best. Imagina-
tion, passion, facility of musical and expressive word and
phrase, lyric tone — these natural endowments are augmented
by education, vision and Catholic faith. Buoyancy of spirit,
a poet's questing of mind, have found outlet and guidance in
religious verse. His conmiand of sonorous rhythm, musical
word and sensuous imagery suggests the influence of Edwin
Markham, Omar Khayam, Shelley and Noyes. His trend
towards philosophic thought and Catholic expression shows a
debt to Dante, Tasso, Francis Thompson and other great Cath-
olic singers.
Young in experience, writing from sympathy and insight
rather than from knowledge, he is, at times, one of the ** poets
glad with singing " of whom he speaks in a poem to be noticed
later. The boyishness of such poems as To My Queen is an
element of the sincerity which marks his verse.
Its fervor is registered where it will not be forgotten and
is certain to bear fruit, and to pass on fire to other hearts and
wills. It holds within it promise of fulfillment more fully
found in The Coronation of Our Lady, The Annunciation, The
Heart of Mary, Among the Lilies, Ave Maris Stella, The Vision
of the Cross, The Madonna of Rheims, Comforter of the Af-
flicted, titles which show that this herald of Mary's honored
name has meditated her joys and glories, and tasted of her
power. A delicate figure expresses confidence in her and sym-
pathy with humanity:
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102 THE POETRY OF J. CORSON MILLER [Oct.,
Blooming in thy snow-robed splendor,
(Lovely Lily of the Morn),
Waft thy fragrance, sweet and tender.
Where war's screaming wounds are borne.
Let thy petals drift afar
Where the grief-sick mothers are.
The World War and the unceasing conflict of the soul
with sin are the burden of many of Mr. Miller's poems. Battle
Cry, On a Nun Decorated With the Iron Cross, Come, Holy
Ghost, and The Prince of Peace are chief of these. He voices
the Holy Father's plea for peace — " to the war-wracked, bleed-
ing lands:" '
Ye warring nations of the market place.
Kneel to this little Child,
Who came to save a world with sin defiled.
And pray He make this maddened war to cease.
" Love one another,
Be kind to him, thy brother,"
This was His pleading cry.
In An Episode of Verdun, he speaks from the trenches:
" Tell her that Pierre went singing when the charge was at its
height."
The poems in which he writes from personal experience
are simpler than are those wrought as result of education and
study. Such phrases as '* faith's faucets supernal, gushing
supreme in my breast " are fittingly excluded from The Miss-
ing, a personal poem touched with sorrow and from his Christ-
mas poems : How the Christ Child Came, and King of the Poor:
He came, a Stranger to an alien land.
Where none reached out to Him a friendly hand;
He scarce could find a place to lay His head.
As holy seers of old had truly said. •
Dear Jesu, model of humility.
Give ear to me.
The Penitenfs Prayer illustrates his aspiration to the
sweep of vision and boldness of imagery, which proceed from
human passion, but it does not interpret experience as truly
as does Following From Afar,
While Mr. 'Miller tends to longer poems, he weaves his
thought smoothly into the sonnet form, with a climax that is
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1918.] THE POETRY OF J. CORSON MILLER 103
always adequate. A Winter Reverie has art and sympathy;
The Garden of God contrasts sensuous with spiritual beauty;
Death in the City is a flashlight upon a common tragedy re-
lieved by the note of faith. The Nuptials commemorates an
event most fitting for a poet's pen; the poignancy of the news-
report is softened by this picture of heroism, pathos, simple
turning to God, the triumph of love and faith, of "Joseph
Plunkett — ^married on the eve of his execution."
O Love of all my life, the day is done.
Look! Night throws purple shadows on the sea —
Cling closer, Love, through all eternity
We shall recall this hour; there is One
Besides ourselves, albeit, like the Sun —
Radiant and high — shall mold my dreams for me :
Shall give to Erin strength to battle free.
While some proud thrones sink to oblivion.
Time hastes; soon dawn shall wipe away the stars
And my young life; yet, if I e'er had fears
Of death, they've left me now — like rose-laid jars.
Love's honeyed sweetness soothes me, and appears
The Vision I have glimpsed through prison bars:
Brave Erin smiling through a veil of tears.
These sonnets breathe the atmosphere of Catholicism, and
are wide in their appeal. Excellent, yet inferior, is the tribute
to James Whitcomb Riley, printed in the Book News Monthly:
The lame, the weak, the poor, the humble soul.
The tired hands made gnarled through honest toil,
These all he placed upon Time's flaming scroll.
He knew and sang the children of the soil.
Not from the great ones of the earth shall he
Derive the honeyed homage of high praise.
Nay, he shall keep fame's immortality
Through kindly hearts that learn his lyric lays.
While we admire the sympathy, sincerity and temperance
of this poem, we cannot but miss the fire and self-surrender
so conspicuous in the poet's religious verse. Indeed, to be at
his best, so it would seem, his faith must find irresistible ex-
pression. In the verses. At the Grave of Rupert Brooke, Mr.
Miller writes in the character of a pagan poet. While there
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104 THE POETRY OF J. CORSON MILLER [Oct.,
is melody and art in the poem, we feel the character ill befits
him, and return gladly, to find him at his finest and his deep-
est in religious poems of such quality as The Commission and
Sanctuary VigiL Catholic thought and feeling are here en-
shrined in beauty and melody, and give new promise of a high
order of verse frohi his pen.
Thus we discern the many influences at work to mold this
poet's work, the burden of his hopes and fears and prayers.
The best verse of secular magazines today expresses many
creeds, and does not exclude poems of strong Christian tone.
If J. Corson Miller would win this wider field of influence — ^if
in truth it be wider — if he seeks the task of carrying the Word
to desolate hearts and thirsty souls, it will only be when, in-
dependent of audience, he writes for God. Driven by stress
of suffering and a great message, Francis Thompson expressed
Catholicism as naturally as he breathed. Mr. Miller's genius
will eventually embody the beauties of the Catholic faith in all
that he writes. He holds the key to success, to turn all failures
into victory; one may live amid " writhing marts of men," yet
in spirit remain in this chosen place :
I sing Thy altars where the red lamps burn
Unceasingly from dawn to dawn's return,
I drink Thy peace which worldly spirits spurn.
Thy best belovfcd, peace.
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NIETZSCHE THE THINKER By William Mackintire Salter.
New York: Henry Holt & Co. $3.50 net.
Mr. Salter's volume on Nietzsche is an elaborate and pains-
taking study. He appears conversant with, and to have thor-
oughly assimilated, the vast literature Nietzsche has fathered.
Often he differs from former interpreters to the advantage of
his author; still there is no offensive chauvinism in his pages; he
remains throughout the self-possessed, serene professor, who ex-
poses his themes calmly and along scientific lines.
But is Nietzsche the thinker really worth study; are his
thoughts on the great problems of man's and the universe's
destiny deserving of consideration?
A philosophy must be judged by the solutions it proposes
to these eternal questions. If its solutions are noble, elevating,
capable of uplifting mankind and of idealizing life, it is worthy,
though it contain some inadmissible elements and some dross.
Catholics, thanks to their holy faith, are not left to the unguided
light of reason alone for the solution of such delicate and per-
plexing problems. But the acute thinkers of Catholicism have
not rested satisfied without examining those questions along ra-
tional and scientific lines, and they have constructed in their
philosophy a grandiose monument of human investigation and
human skill. We may, however, admit worthy .philosophies
outside our own. The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, for
instance, contain much that is admirable : St. Augustine borrowed
considerably from the first, and St. Thomas from the second;
the speculations of Descartes, Malebranche and Leibnitz are not
destitute of elements of nobility. But Nietzsche is absolutely
depressing and debasing, is deliberately opposed to all Christian
ideals and seems to be anxious to destroy all submission to the
Maker. In fact he admits no such Being as God, the Creator and
Father of the Universe. " It is important to stop speaking of the
All as if it were a unity, a force, an absolute of some kind — we
come early in this way to take it as a highest instance and to
christen it *God.' We must split up the All, unlearn any par-
ticular respect for it, bring back feelings we have given to the
unknown and the whole and devote them to things next to us,
our own things. ... To speak blnntly, there is no All, the great
sensorium or inventorium or storehouse of power is lacking."
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Nor does he admit an immortal soul destined in happier aeons
to reach its due perfection. Souls, Nietzsche says, are just as
mortal as bodies and may even perish quicker. The next life
is simply this over again, for evolution brings out fatally the
recurrence of the same combinations, the same events. Here we
touch one of the central dogmas of the Nietzschean creed, the doc-
trine of " Eternal Recurrence " exposed at length by Mr. Salter.
If we understand the fantastic conception rightly, it sim-
ply means that the blind cosmic forces proceeding endlessly
in the same treadmill round, must of necessity reproduce the
same events and occurrences over and over again. " The eternal
hour-glass of existence is ever again turned, and you with it —
dust of dust." No proof is offered for such an absurd specula-
tion; indeed Nietzsche never abounds in proofs; for is not
Zarathustra a prophet? Nor is the idea original; he owed it and
several others to the pagan philosopher Heraclitus. (Vide M. A.
Miigge. Nietzsche, His Life and Work, p. 310 seq.)
On human personality, on truth, on honor, on social rela-
tions similar dissolving, debasing views are expressed. He quotes
with approval the adage of certain Oriental assassins, ** nothing
is true, everything is permitted." He views war as a necessity
and almost as a blessing, he affects to think that his superman
can take the place of God. Decidedly we have nothing to learn
from Nietzsche the thinker, or rather the dreamer, whose last
years were deprived of all glimmers of sanity. As Saintsbury
says : " Take away blasphemy, parody, and that particular kind
of borrowing which thinks to disguise itself by inserting or ex-
tracting * nots ' and there is not much of Nietzsche left but form."
CHAUCER AND HIS POETRY. By George Lyman Kittredge.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $1.50.
This really delightful volume contains the lectures delivered
at Johns Hopkins University in 1914 by Dr. Kittredge, Professor
of English in Harvard, and is not only a valuable addition to
Chauceriana, but also a refreshing study of a particularly vital
poet and an astoundingly vital age. It shows us, with a clarity
all too rare in modern interpretation of the mediaeval mind, Chau-
cer the man, the artist, the lover of his fellows, the sincere Chris-
tian, and next only to Shakespeare, "the greatest delineator of
character in our literature."
The usual three periods of the poet's work — the French, the
Italian, and the English — are discussed, with a fourth or trans-
sitional one added: and highly sympathetic commentaries are
given upon the Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Troilus
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and the immortal Canterbury Tales. Altogether it is a book which
should be warmly welcomed by college students, teachers of liter-
ature, and all general readers who have the good taste and good
sense to love old GeofTrey Chaucer. Dr. Kittredge is not a Catho-
lic, we believe, but he is to be congratulated upon the fairness of
his scholarship, as upon the human and urbane manner in which
he has treated one of the most urbane and human of our great
Catholic classics.
COLOR STUDIES IN PARIS. By Arthur Symons. New York:
E. P. Dutton & Co. $3.00 net.
Arthur Symons has won for himself an unique place among
English literary critics. More than most English writers, he ap-
proximates the vivid cameo-like simplicity of the French tongue.
He has, too, the gift of flavoring his criticisms with a dash of the
salt of human interest.
In the present volume are presented first-hand glimpses of
that artistic and Bohemian Paris which has become a legend
among American readers and especially among American tourists.
It is not always an inspiring or edifying Paris, this; but as Mr.
Symons reveals it, it is not, on the other hand, quite the Babylon
that many imagine. If we behold Bohemia here at its worst, like-
wise we see it at its best — and at its best it is nothing worse than
a kaleidoscopic exhibition of naive childishness which, as our
author shows, the English mind is totally incapable of compre-
hending. This highly colored Paris of the boulevards, which Mr.
Symons knows so intimately, and interprets so sympathetically
yet temperately, is not the true Paris, nor the whole of Paris,
but merely an angle of it. To the reader who already knows his
Lutetian this is patent; but the uninitiated should be warned.
A HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. By Williston
Walker. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.00.
With the best will in the world, we cannot say that Dr.
Walker's text-book of church history is "accurate and abso-
lutely free from bias," as the publishers claim. On the contrary,
it is dominated by the spirit of German-made rationalism, espe-
cially in its treatment of Christian origins; it is unfair in its
estimate of Catholic doctrines and institutions; it is fulsome in
its praise of every heresy and sect that has denied the Gospel of
Christ. Dr. Walker makes the wildest statements at times —
statements unworthy of the Professor of Ecclesiastical History
in Yale University. For example, he tells us that monasticism
teaches a two-fold morality and discredits the life of the Christian
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family; that the Blessed Virgin in a measure took the place of
Christ as mediator in the Church; that the reverence of the
saints was a development from paganism; that the Irish monks
invented private lay confession, which was not obligatory as
late as the ninth century; that indulgences are morally harmful;
that in Germany, before Luther, Christ was popularly regarded
as a strict judge, and that the spirit of the Church at that time
was an external and work-trusting spirit; that the Jesuits min-
imized the nature of sin, undermined personal responsibility by
their doctrine of probabilism, and merited the scorn of the aver-
age Anglo-Saxon Protestant by their teaching of the end justifies
the means; that Scotus was tainted with Socinianism, and more
of a like character.
Following the German lead, he makes St. Paul's Christology
differ from St. Mark's; has our Saviour become convinced of His
Messiasship at the time of His baptism; speaks of the Christ of
experience as distinct from Jesus of history, and pictures St. Paul
questioning the necessity of baptism.
Men like Donatus, Arius, Eusebius, Appollinaris, Pelagius
are all " able men," while upholders of the Faith like St. Cyril,
St. Leo L, and St. Gregory VIL are ** unscrupulous, unintellectual
and worldly " clerics.
In his bibliography he cites a few Catholic writers such as
Newman, Grisar, Janssen, Pastor, Gasquet, Hefele, Duchesne,
but gives no evidence whatever of having read them.
RELIGIONS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT. Edited by James
A. Montgomery, Ph.D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.
$2.50 net.
These lectures on the history of religions delivered in 1916-
1917 by members of the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Pennsylvania, abound in false and arbitrary state-
ments of fact, and are full of anti-Christian dogmatism and
prejudice. We call especial attention to the superficial and in-
accurate account of early Christianity by Dr. William Newbold,
and the bigoted sketch of mediaeval Christianity by Dr. Arthur
Howland.
Our readers may judge by the following passages the Ger-
man-made rationalism of these professors of the University of
Pennsylvania: "The essence of early Christianity is not to be
found in its institutions, ritual or doctrine;" Jesus never demanded
that men should accept even His own statements about Himself
as part of His message; the Apostles preached Jesus as the Sav-
iour of men, a teaching which Jesus never made a prominent
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feature of His public preaching; without a special emotional ex-
perience» men will find little but unintelligible jargon in the
writings of the early Christians; the prophets were the only
clergy of the early Church; baptism was not a divine institution*
but a borrowing from the Jews; the doctrine of the Eucharist
was a development from the Mystery religions of paganism; the
doctrine of the Church came as "' the imperative need of a central
authority making for unity;" the mediaeval churchmen used
such superstitions as relics, holy water, and the Eucharist to
restrain the turbulent masses; monasticism was in its origin a
revolt from the Church; mediaevalism insisted on legalism and
formalism and frowned down upon the inspiration of the Spirit.
As an antidote to this rationalistic poison, we recommend
to our readers the five volumes of the History of Religions pub-
lished by the Catholic Truth Society of London, or, if they read
French, the two manuals on the same subject published in Paris
some eight years ago: Christus, edited by J. Huby, and Ou en est
PHistoire des Religions, edited by J. Bricout.
THE \TLLA ROSSIGNOL. By Maria Longworth Storer. St.
Louis: B. Herder. $L00.
The first pages of this novel are rather disappointing at first
glance, but before many chapters are passed, the reader finds
himself caught in the meshes of a tale so absorbing in plot and
so brightly told, that there is no putting it down till the last
word is reached. Mrs. Storer, in fact, shows herself here quite
the mistress of the story-telling art; and in the invention of her
altogether unique plot, and the dramatic unfolding of its com-
plications, she scores a hit. The adventures of her young Eng-
lish heroine, who narrowly escapes being carried off to a Turkish
harem, are related with a gripping interest adroitly maintained
to the end; and while there is no serious attempt at characteriza-
tion, the various personages of the story are nevertheless sketched
in with a quick sure hand. In the light-headed pretty widow,
Mrs. Storer comes very near creating a real character.
THE INN OF DISENCHANTMENT. By Lisa Isaye. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. $L25 net.
These sparkling essays voice a plea for the romance and
poetry of life, and a protest against the cynicism and matter-of-
fact spirit that usually comes with old age. The writer illustrates
her thesis by many a clever story and apt quotation, and like
Chesterton delights in quip and paradox. For example : " If you
look for something lying and misleading, for something utterly
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untrue, for something in the deepest sense false, you will find it
in every verified and sworn-to fact." "We really know only
those we do not know, and those we do know are strangers to us.
We are never on intimate terms with our intimates." Old age
always speaks " of these degenerate days," but the change is not
in the age or the people of the age, the change is in the dried-up
cynic, who sees things through colored glasses. In the drabbest
and dreariest life, however, there is always a longing for the
lost Arcadia of youth. It is a pity that the religious note is
absent from these pages. The writer tells us she does not know
where the truth lies — in a gay and care-free paganism which
questions immortality, or a sombre and ascetic Church that holds
the joys of this world in little regard, and speaks of resurrection
and the life eternal.
THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1917. Edited by Edward J.
O'Brien. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.50 net.
This volume, third in the series of Best Short Stories, main-
tains the standard reached by those covering 1915 and 1916. The
editor has explained the principle guiding his judgment in these
compilations, leading him to count as " best " such stories as are
most prominent in combining literary excellence with fidelity to
life's activities and emotions. Thus another point of view be-
sides that of entertainment is established; but to enjoy the book
it is not essential that it be approached from the angle of critical
analysis. The selection has been made in so liberal a spirit that
a wide variety of interest is afforded.
DONATISM. By Adrian Fortescue. London: Burns & Oates.
90 cents net.
This interesting brochure first appeared in the pages of the
London Tablet a year ago. It is a well-reasoned and conclusive
answer to those High Churchmen who, like Bishop Gore, try to
show that the Anglican Church does not correspond to the Dona-
tists of the time of St. Augustine, or who like the impudent Mr.
Lacy, try to prove in defiance of all logic and history that we
Catholics are the real Donatists.
Cardinal Wiseman, in the Dublin Review for August, 1839,
first brought out an effective comparison between the Anglicanism
of the nineteenth century and the Donatism of the fifth. This
famous article with St. Augustine's words: " Securus iudicat
orbis terrarum " as its motto, was by the grace of God the be-
ginning of Newman's conversion, as he declares in the Apologia.
The parallel between the Donatists and the Anglicans is so
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extraordinarily close that it is clearly a case wherein Church his-
tory has repeated itself most accurately. The essence of Donatism
was its schism — the fact that it was a local sect in Africa which
had broken communion with the great Church throughout the
world. So the English Protestant Church seceded in the sixteenth
century from the centre of unity. At Carthage and elsewhere,
where they had intruded a hierarchy, the Donatists were usur-
pers, as were the Elizabethan bishops.
All Christians are Catholics said the Donatists, a false state-
ment echoed in Anglican writers of today. We answer them
with St. Augustine and St. Optatus, that a man does not become
a Catholic because he calls himself one. Catholicism means com-
munion with the Catholic Church. The test of St. Augustine is
ours today: "Can their bishops give letters of communion to
the Catholic bishops? " In Africa the Catholics were a small min-
ority amid a large schismatical national Church, but they were
united with the orbis terrarum and with the See of Peter. The
Catholics of England are a minority today, but they are joined
with Peter's See and the church of the orbis terrarum.
DOCTRINAL DISCOURSES. By Rev. A. M. Skelly, O.P., Vol. I.
Tacoma, Wash.: Aquinas Academy. $1.25 net.
Father Skelly of Portland, Oregon, has just published a
volume of doctrinal discourses for the Sundays and chief fes-
tivals of the ecclesiastical year. His experience as missionary
and pastor for many years has prepared him for the ministry
of preaching, which is being so much discussed these days in the
pages of the Ecclesiastical Review. He makes no claim to origin-
ality in his modest preface, and is quite justified in hoping that
his twenty-minute talks on the eternal truths will not be with-
out fruit of instruction and edification.
We note with regret an occasional historical exaggeration.
For instance, he cites the pseudo-Talmud miracle relating to
Zachary, the son of Barachias, and the miracle of the translation
of the Holy House of Loretto, which he incorrectly declares ** to
be the best attested in all history."
THE EXTERNALS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. By Rev. John
F. Sullivan. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.50 net.
This is the second edition of Father Sullivan's well-known
volume of the Externals of the Catholic Church, reviewed in The
Catholic World some months ago. It has proved a most useful
book for the instruction of converts. Its explanations are clear
and detailed on many points of Catholic liturgy, devotions, festi-
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vals and ceremonies. The nine sections of the volume treat of
the government of the Church, the religious state, the adminis-
tration of the sacraments, the Mass, the ecclesiastical year, the
sacramentals, the liturgical books and Catholic devotions.
SKETCHES FOR THE EXERCISES OF AN EIGHT DAYS* RE-
TREAT. By Hugh Hunter, S.J. Translated by John B.
Kokengr, S.J. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.25 net.
These sketches, presuppose, as the author informs us, the
text of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. They are not
intended, however, as a commentary upon the Exercises, but as
a development of the points of meditation given therein. While
especially composed for priests, theologians and members of
religious communities, the author hopes that lay persons, both
men and women, may use them with profit. The usual subjects
of meditation for an eight-day retreat are here presented after
the general plan of the Spiritual Exercises. Those seeking a medi-
tation book along these lines will find in these sketches an abun-
dance of material. The book is clearly printed on good paper
and tastefully bound.
GERMANY HER OWN JUDGE. G. H. J. Suter-Lerch. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.00.
The author, who is a German-Swiss, presents in this brief
volume a conclusive case against Germany. The evidence that
he produces is of the strongest character, having been taken
from German writings and propaganda. The author bares the
record by a clear presentation of the facts as he found them
in the " Belgian State Papers " and the oflBcial and semi-oflBcial
publications of both Entente Allies and the Central Powers. In
particular he shows that the international policies of the respec-
tive belligerent groups were such that no intelligent person can
escape the conclusion that Germany was the aggressor in bring-
ing on the War. He points out clearly that there was no coalition
directed against Germany before the War, and that her plea that
she is waging a defensive war is false in fact.
THE PIRATE^S PROGRESS. By William Archer. New York:
Harper & Brothers. 25 cents.
This little volume contains a terrible indictment of the Ger-
man nation. It is the story of the gradual decline in Germany's
employment of the U-boat from honorable to dishonorable and,
final ly, to atrocious uses. The book is little more than an out-
line, but it is suflBcient to show the transition in the use of the
submarine.
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AN ELEMENTARY HANDBOOK OF LOGIC. By John J. Toohey,
S.J. New York: Schwartz, Kirwin & Fauss. $1.25 net.
Father Toohey's Handbook is an excellent elementary
treatise on logic in unusually condensed form. In 227 pages of
text he lays before the average student all that he will require
to know. His explanations and illustrations of the laws of the
syllogism show the practiced teacher; while the chapter on "Fal-
lacies " is an excellent piece of work, a model of clearness and
fuller than one would expect in an elementary treatise.
The typography of the book adds to its attractiveness
and utility. We are of the opinion that this volume would be far
more instructive and profitable to seminarians than the inscruta-
ble Latin text-books they so often toil over and so rarely master.
IT'S MIGHTY STRANGE. By James A. Duncan. Boston: The
Stratford Co. $1.50.
The zeal of the convert, happy in finding the safe anchor-
age of the True Faith, and eager to share his joy with all the
world, is hehind this story of New England life; and we would
i egret to say any word that would appear to dampen such a
spirit. But we fear that Mr. Duncan's book fails of its purpose.
It is not well written; it is not interesting; it is dulled by the
introduction of homilies more calculated to exasperate the reader
than to edify him. For the author must remember that, if he
proposes to tell a story, his readers have every right to expect a
story — not a treatise on apologetics. There is one aspect of the
book, however, which is exceptionally pleasing — its many beau-
tiful touches of old-time New England farm life. Here the
author strikes a convincing note that finds response. The novel
is plainly not his forte; but he gives promise of doing well in
descriptive work.
THE FLOWER OF THE CHAPDELAINES. By George W. Cable.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.35 net.
Mr. Cable here reintroduces us to the surroundings and the
dialect he has made so familiar. The scene of his novel is laid
in New Orleans; the "flower of the Chapdelaines " is a young
Creole girl who is trying, through other hands, to place a manu-
script which relates part of her family history. We are given
the content of this work, as well as the love interest that develops
from the circumstances of its disposal. The result of this story
within a story is fairly entertaining, but ephemeral, and not upon
the same plane as the writings upon which the author's reputa-
tion rests.
VOL. cvin. — 8
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THE GILDED MAN. By Clifford Smyth. With a Foreword by
Richard Le Gallienne. New York: Boni & Liveright. $1.50.
Into the making of this novel a great deal of the genuine
stuff of imagination has entered. The author has a story to
tell, fresh and original; and forthwith he tells it with a verve,
a gusto and downright directness that we were beginning to fear
had passed utterly out of fashion.
The plot has to do with the quest of two young Americans
for the sunken treasure in the mysterious lake Guatavita — or
rather with the centuries-old quest for El Dorado, and the main
part of the action takes place in the Andean regions near Bogota.
With the arrival in South America of the hero, David Meudon,
and his party of friends from Connecticut the story goes swiftly
forward, and thenceforth the reader is whirled along on the
current of their strange and thrilling adventures.
Particularly noteworthy is the author's inventiveness, espe-
cially in his description of the marvels encountered in the vast
subterranean cave of the ancient race of the Chibchas; and of
the cave itself, as M. Le Gallienne aptly points out, *' which may
be said to be the Presiding Personage of the book ... it seems
to me impossible to speak with too much admiration. It is,
without exaggeration, an astonishing piece of invention."
The book has throughout the authentic and stirring atmos-
phere of romance — adventure, suspense, action, and in addition
a certain whimsical humor wholly delightful. And finally there
is a love-story of a singular kind. Just how it is, indeed, that the
hero can with perfect good faith and with no loss of the reader's
sympathy be profoundly in love with the beautiful Indian queen
Saijipona and the charming American girl Una, is somewhat of
a mystery. But the mystery is cleverly manipulated, and in the
end explained to our complete satisfaction.
THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES OF HENRY AND ME. By Wil-
liam Allen White. New York: TheMacmillan Co. $1.50.
Mr. White's contribution is the tale of the experiences of
two men who go to the front in the interests of the American
Red Cross. The author dwells purposely upon the lighter side
of things, not attempting to minimize the horrors, but present-
ing incidents that appeal to the sense of humor that makes life
possible amidst appalling conditions. The book will share the
welcome always ready for war literature that has this recreational
tone. Mr. White does not ignore the more serious side, but his
comments and reflections all show more acumen that his singu-
larly crude views concerning Jeanne d'Arc and Domr^my.
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FIVE TALES. By John Galsworthy. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons. $1.50 net.
One of the saddest spectacles in the literary world is to be-
hold a gifted writer abandoning himself to the fetish of virtuosity.
There is no denying John Galsworthy's powers of observation and
expression. But of what possible value are such powers when
they are devoted solely to extrinsic display. In this book, Mr.
Galsworthy seems to strike a pose and say, " just watch and see
how many horrible and sordid things I can detect in life, and
how cleverly I can describe them ! " Assuredly he can see these
things; and likewise he can describe them with such graphic art
that they are horribly, disgustingly real to us. But wherefore
this? As an example of the technique of short-story writing
Five Tales might serve in the nature of a handbook; but for en-
tertainment or edification or as social inspiration we could never
recommend the volume.
ESTHER AND HARBONAH. By H. Pereira Mendes. Boston:
The Gorham Press. $1.25 net.
This Biblical drama, written some forty years ago, but now
for the first time published, makes its appearance because the
author, a Jew, considers the present hour a timely one for remind-
ing his fellow-believers of the glories of their ancient faith. The
play, however, is not well designed, from the dramatic point of
view; it is episodic, and something of a cross between operetta
and tableaux vivants; while as verse it is negligible. The pub-
lisher's announcement on the cover is misleading, and the price
of the book is unreasonable.
LOVE AND HATRED. By Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $1.40.
The material selected for this novel should have yielded a
more interesting product. It tells the story of Oliver Tropenell,
an Englishman of gentle birth and upright character, who grows
to so covet his neighbor's wife that he secretly murders her hus-
band, and, the crime having been traced to him, escapes publicity
and legal consequences by a suicide that is interpreted as acci-
dental death.
Though the elements of tragedy are the supreme field of
opportunity for genuis, skilled intuition can sometimes manipu-
late them plausibly and effectively, a truth of which Mrs. Belloc
Lowndes has more than once given practical demonstration.
That she has failed to do so in this instance is due to an error
in judgment as to selection and concentration. Had she from the
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first revealed Tropenell's inmost heart, we might have had a
valuable psychological study; on the other hand, the plot is suffi*
ciently ingenious to have afforded a high-grade detective story
had the author confined herself to externals. In default of either
objective, the book lacks color and animation.
WINONA'S WAR FARM. By Margaret Widdemer. Philadel-
phia: J. B. Lippincott Co. $1.25 net.
This latest in the Camp Fire Girls' Series will doubtless be
as popular as the two preceding volumes. A large farm, which
the owner lacks labor to cultivate, is offered for the season to
the Camp Fire Girls, Winona and her companions. The offer is
accepted enthusiastically and the patriotic work is carried out,
with the aid of a band of Boy Scouts who gallantly assume the
most laborious tasks. The farm is managed with complete
success, its crops of vegetables and fruits harvested and pre-
served. The young people immensely enjoy their experiences,
which include one no less thrilling than the discovery and frus-
tration of the plans of some German spies. The book is brightly
written and its tone is sensible and wholesome.
OLD MAN CURRY. By Charles E. Van Loan. New York: George
H. Doran Co. $1.35 net.
This is a volume of short stories of the race track, in States
where betting is not illegal. The interest centres around " Old
Man Curry," a horse owner, and the various attempts of swindlers
to che$it him out of his rights. In each case the schemes are
frustrated by the shrewdness of the patriarchal and apparently
simple old man. The stories are fairly entertaining.
THE GERMAN PIRATE: HIS METHODS AND RECORD. By
"Ajax." New York: George H. Doran Co. 50 cents.
Among the many compilations of current war history that
have come from the press, we have found none more interesting
than " Ajax's " little volume of testimony concerning the depre-
dations of the German submarine. Practically all the now noto-
rious cases of German brutality at sea are cited, with a brief
recitation of the facts; and through the entire narrative the
honest sailor's point of view is evident — ^his abhorrence of the
treachery of the Hun mariner who has violated all the age-old
laws of the comradeship of the deep, a fellowship which from
time immemorial has existed among those who go down in ships
— except, of ppurse ^mong pirates, the outlaws of the ocean,
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THE FALLACY OF THE GERMAN STATE PHHiOSOPHY. By
Dr. George W. Crile. Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
Page ft Co. 50 cents net.
That Germany, even though she should fortuitously win in
the present War, would nevertheless lose in the end, is the argu-
ment of Dr. Crile's essay. Germany, he says, by choosing to live
according to the doctrine of force, and by seeking to impose that
doctrine, " the survival of the fittest," on the world, has reverted
to the law of the jungle. But the history of man repudiates the
law of the jungle. Man has surmounted that primitive law,
abrogated it, overcoming nature not by force, nor by wit alone,
but by the cooperation of all his powers; by the evolution of the
law of social interdependence. It is this law that Germany for-
gets in the predication of her kultur — ^the law of social inter-
dependence; and violating it, outraging it, she outlaws herself
and leagues all the other nations of the earth against her. Yet,
given her success in imposing her kultur on the world, she would
still be but preparing her own destruction. '* Rather than share
the common fate of passing through a stunting cycle of disinte-
gration, following a present German success," concludes the
author, " it were better that we all now perish gloriously on the
battlefield." Finally, he argues, the struggle being one of ideas
and philosophies, we must look to our education to win in the
conflict The viewpoint of Dr. Crile, however, is rationalistic;
and in consequence he leaves the problem in the air, unsolved.
THE WHITE MORNING. By Gertrude Atherton. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.00 net.
It is unfortunate for Mrs. Atherton*s artistic reputation that
her sense of humor did not intervene to preserve her from writ-
ing this extravaganza. The novelette pictures the end of the War
as brought to pass by an uprising of the women of Germany en-
masse; unsuspected and unbetrayed, they organize into an in-
vincible peace-enforcing machine, led by a young and beautiful
woman, Gisela von Niebuhr, who is held up for our admiration.
This formidable Amazon inauguri^tes the day of victory by the
particularly treacherous and revolting murder of her lover, a
junker, lest her tenderness for him should make her false to
her cause.
The whole conception is as grotesque as it is unpleasant,
and we should be inclined to suspect Mrs. Atherton of amus-
ing herself with a practical joke at the expense of her readers,
were it not for the solemnity with which she asseverates her good
faith.
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LETTERS TO THE MOTHER OF A SOLDffiR. By Richardson
Wright. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.00 net.
These letters from a supposititious brother to his sister, who
is the mother of an enlisted son, embody the sentiments that
patriotic writers are striving to disseminate. The brother would
have his sister view the War in its nobler aspects, and directs
her attention to her duties and privileges and the manner in
which she may best prepare herself for her part in the great
ordeal. He is perhaps a shade too meticulous in his zeal; it is
permissible to hope that comparatively few mothers among the
educated classes require guidance along so many lines as seems
to be necessary with Mr. Wright's "Molly." However, he sets
forth, interestingly and sometimes beautifully, inspiring truths
that cannot be too frequently emphasized, ^he book will re-
pay its readers, and to some may very possibly convey a new
message.
MEM L By J. U. Giesy. New York : Harper & Brothers. 75 cents.
This novelette of the Latin Quarter of Paris in war time,
while not written with any high degree of artistic mastery — and
falling far short of the inimitable French conies on which it is
quite plainly modeled — nevertheless is touching and appealing
Mimi is a poor artist's model who loves and gives without reckon-
ing or measuring. Neither she nor her sisters in toil have any
conception of God or religion. But through the War and the
sufferings war brings them, they wake eventually to an ideal
of patriotic devotion which leads them finally to a realiza-
tion of God and His laws. The tribute paid by the author
through the medium of his hero's letters, to the bravery and de-
votion of the fighting priests of France, is a pleasing feature of
the tale.
ST. PATRICK'S PURGATORY. By Shane Leslie. St. Louis:
B. Herder. 50 cents.
This little book will bring delight to all who respond to the
appeal of Ireland's legendary lore of Catholic mysticism. It
treats of Derg, " the holy lough of Ireland," whose waters, shores
and ruins are fraught with memories and traditions of past glory,
destroyed by ruthless enemies; fragments that suggest and partly
reveal material worthy of the poet's art. Mr. Shane Leslie's
gifted, sympathetic hand has welded and shaped them into charm-
ing forms. The tales are fascinatingly told with a touch of
archaic simplicity and strength and a mournful beauty that
makes these pages the most poetical of prose.
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TOWARDS THE GOAL. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. 60 cents net.
Among the distinguished writers of the world none has
given of herself more unselfishly and enthusiastically to the
cause of democracy since the War began than Mrs. Humphrey
Ward. Already crowned with lengthened years,- and with more
than a full share of a lifetime's work achieved* Mrs. Ward has
thrown herself anew into the task of composition, and with re-
markable vigor and much fine judgment has already produced
three considerable volumes touching on the conflict: a novel,
Missing; England's Effort; and now this present work. Towards
the Goal.
To secure the material for this volume Mrs. Ward was
accorded every privilege possible by the war authorities, and
was thus enabled to go to the sources of things for her facts
and experiences. The book is dedicated to Colonel Roosevelt,
whom she acknowledges as the inspiration both of it and its
predecessor; and the Colonel, who writes the foreword to the
volume, very truthfully says that the work is ** of high value as
a study of contemporary history" and as "an inspiration to
constructive patriotism."
DON STRONG, PATROL LEADER. By WUliam Heylinger.
New York: D. Appleton & Co. $1.35 net.
In this continuation of the fortunes of Donald Strong, the Boy
Scout, we are shown the young hero elevated by his fellow scouts
to a position of authority over them. How he meets the difficul-
ties and problems entailed by his new responsibilities and how
he proves himself worthy of the honor bestowed upon him, make
interesting and wholesome reading for the juvenile public. Ex-
cellent as is the book's moral tone, however, we cannot but
deplore as a grave defect the absence of any indication whatever
of belief in a Divine Leader and Guide.
GREATER THAN THE GREATEST. By Hamilton Drummond.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. $1.50.
If the title-page of this novel did not advertise a half dozen
other tales by the same author, we would be tempted to think
it a first book. For the story bears all the ear-marks of the
amateur. Young authors are particularly fond of " doing " his-
torical novels. Nothing is easier, they imagine, than to concoct
a romance and put it in the frame of a period sufficiently remote
to give it a certain vague coloring and glamour, and let it go at
that, sans truth, sans veracity, sans everything that makes a book
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worth while. Mr. Dnimmond chose the thirteenth century as
his " period," and into a threadbare tale, which is scarcely more
than a padded short story, he injected the ''atmosphere" of a
few really striking descriptions of Rome and Capua to make his
novel run full length. Seasoned with a generous peppering of
such epithets as " Popedom/* and " priestcraft," and concerned
wholly with two sharply divided sets of characters — those which
are opposed to Pope and Church, and which are therefore every-
thing that is noble and upright; and those of the Papacy itself
(darkly mysterious, cunning, conniving, all that is distasteful
and reprehensible), the tale drags its dull way through three
hundred pages in which nothing happens, and from which the
reader rises wondering how the book ever reached a printing
press.
RELIGION AND HUMAN INTERESTS. By Rev. Thomas Slater,
S.J. New York: Benziger Brothers. 75 cents net.
" Religion," says Father Slater, " sheds its benign influence
on every department of human life. It is the keystone in the
arch of human conduct; it keeps all other duties in their place,
while explaining and enforcing them." In these ten brief essays
he brings out clearly and forcibly this function of religion. After
a brief sketch of the idea of religion. Father Slater discusses
man*s need of religion, the Catholic concept of the family, modern
secularism, true liberty of conscience, the ethics of business, the
liberty of the Gospel, the limitations of the States' powers, and
the new canon law of the Church.
TARAS BULBA AND OTHER TALES. By Nikolaiv Gogol. Every-
man's Library. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 70 cents.
Present-day readers have, perhaps, tended to overlook the ex-
cellence of the romantic school of Russian literature, in their de-
sire to do justice to the achievements of the great Russian realists.
This present volume is a good corrective for such a fault. Gogol's
was a vigorous, ardent spirit, whose one passion was the Little
Russia— the Ukraine— which gave him birth. Its history, its
legends, its customs, were treasures to him, and there is a healthy,
possessive love in the way he displays them to our gaze different,
toto ccelo from the detachment we are apt to associate with other
Russian names. The longest story in this volume— Tara* Bulba
—has been called a prose epic. It tells simply and very vividly,
in the ample manner of a genius dealing adequately with a large
canvas of the life of the fifteenth century Cossacks, with its
almost* incredible rigors and dangers and its double character of
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brutality and heroism. In spite of elements of harshness inevit-
able in any such faithful portrayal, the impression retained is of
a period of vigor and manliness* even touched pathetically at
times by the finer emotions. Of the other stories, which deal with
the fullest sympathy and a great deal of sly humor, with happen-
ings nearer the present, The Cloak is easily the best. In it Gogol
shows himself master of the pathos which goes with the type of
humor that is sweetened by a love and pity for humanity.
WAR ADDRESSES OF WOODROW WILSON, Boston: Ginn &
Co. 32 cents.
This splendid little book cannot be recommended too highly.
It has been designed for use in the class-room and is admirably
adapted both in substance and presentment for such study. It
contains a well-written introduction that summarizes the world
conditions previous to the outbreak of the War and outlines
the causes leading up to that critical time. This risumi together
with a brief review of the President's life and literary work pro-
vides an interesting setting for the addresses.
The War Addresses should be found in the class-room of
every American college and high school, and the principles they
enunciate in the heart of every American.
THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE. By Miss Mulock. Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott Co. 50 cents net.
This beloved classic of children's literature loses nothing by
comparison with the mass of books for child readers that have
appeared since it was first published. It would be a misfortune
were any child deprived of acquaintance with it by allowing it to
go out of print. The present re-publication is of presentable ap-
pearance, with good type, and is illustrated in color.
FROM the press of a technical school in far-away Ernakula,
India, we have two small Latin text-l)ooks of a Cursus AscetU
cus treating of the Purgative and the Illuminative Ways. The
author P. Fr. Aurelian, O.C.D., is the spiritual director of the
Apostolic Seminary at Puthempally, India. His work evidences
extensive knowledge of the Scriptures and the Fathers, is con-
cise and clear in manner, and breathes a broad, gentle spirit.
ANEW evidence of the merit and usefulness of the booklet en-
titled The Honor Legion, originally published under the
joint auspices of The New York Social Hygiene Society and The
Chaplains' Aid Association, is its recent appearance in Spanish
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122 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
dress. The mission field of the little book will be much broad-
ened by this able translation of J. Lara, the Latin-American
journalist, well-known for his translation of Colonel Roosevelt's
book The World War. The translation was made at the request
of the War Department, and is published by The Paulist Press,
New York. Single copies, 5 cents; $3.00 a thousand.
MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY, published by The America
Press, New York (15 cents), is a little treatise which we
gladly recommend to Catholic young men and women contemplat-
ing matrimony. It discusses in the briefest possible manner the
Catholic teaching on marriage, divorce, race suicide, education,
and duties of parents and children.
A SOUL'S APPEAL, by Irene West (Huntington, Indiana:
Sunday Visitor Press. $1.00 net), is negligible as poetry, but
have an appeal for many who are converts to the Faith or are in-
terested in the story of conversions.
SCHOOL PUBLICATIONS.
The Economic History of the United States, by Ernest Ludlow
Bogart, Ph.D. (New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.75), belongs to
the series of commercial text-books designed for the reading public as
well as high school and college students. The volume begins, there-
fore, by a general survey of the vast resources of our country, shows
the spread of colonization, of cultivation, of industry, of transporta-
tion; also the increased power in machinery of every sort. The story
is a marvelous one. The author is to be congratulated on the amount
of information collated and systematically treated as well as on the
restraint with which he has confined himself to his avowed purpose.
In Community Civics, R. O. Hughes presents an abundance of in-
formation in a form most convenient for the hard-worked teacher.
It is much too detailed, however, for the ordinary pupil in the
graded school. Naturally the duty of voting comes in for atten-
tion and the writer has this to say on the subject, which we heart-
ily commend : " A candidate for oflSce ought to be judged solely on his
merits as a man, and on the political principles which he advocates.
The sooner we can remove wholly any thought of denominational dis-
tinctions in politics the better it will be for the cause of honest, unself-
ish, patriotic government." The treatment of the labor and social ques-
tions is sane and full, and the newer forms of city government too —
the commission and manager plans — receive due consideration.
"The nation with low religious and moral ideas is doomed to
downfall," says Mr. Hughes; yet when he comes to treat of teaching
religion, he is hazy and unsatisfactory. " In the Middle Ages," he says
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'* the Church possessed almost all the learning in existence, but it made
little effort to train any except its own priests. Some religious de-
nominations today believe that schools ought to be a part of the work
of the Church, but very few sects raise money enough to carry them
on.'* The author seems somewhat narrow and provincial on this point,
but at least he concedes the unity and universality of the Church and
admits that she has educated somebody I (New York: Allyn & Bacon.
$1.25 net.)
Prof. Kelsey's recent edition of Csesar's Commentaries (New York:
Allyn & Bacon. $1.50), contains several books of the Gallic War,
selections from the Civil War, a brief history of Caesar's campaigns,
with interesting and instructive references to the present world strug-
gle, critical and explanatory notes, a vocabulary, a grammatical supple-
ment and exercises adapted to the text, and numerous illustrations. It
would be difficult to 'conceive of a more complete schoolbook.
There will always be conflicting opinions in regard to the compara-
tive advantages of books like this, and those that contain only the plain
unaided text; but, possibly, the final test of value lies rather in the
" personal equation " of teacher and pupil.
Teachers of first-year Latin will find in the little pocket Notebook
for First-Year Latin Vocabulary, by Stephen A. Hurlburt, M.A., and
Barclay W. Bradley, Ph.D. (New York: American Book Co. 24 cents),
a valuable help in giving their pupils an easy and intelligent means of
acquiring a working vocabulary of some six hundred and fifty repre-
sentative Latin words. These are arranged in the regular order of
declensions and conjugations, and are nicely grouped around their
primitive roots, thus emphasizing the etjrmological and derivative value
of the leading words. The book may be easily adapted for use with
any first-year Latin book. Accompanjdng the notebook is a handbook
or key for the use of teachers.
Effective English, by Philander P. Claxton and James McGinniss
(New York: Allyn & Bacon. $1.25), is a most attractive text-book. It
contains a hundred stimulating illustrations, subjects for composition
covering a wide field of youthful interest and well within the range of
youthful knowledge. Its practical value cannot be so easily affirmed.
The authors seem to have revised the old adage so as to read: non
multum sed multa. Within some five hundred pages they range from a
review of elementary grammar through formal rhetoric and the forms
of discourse to a study of the principles of literary criticism, and of
poetry and the drama, not hesitating to prescribe original exercises
even in these. They seem also to enhance unduly the advantage of the
cross-correction system for class themes. Still, in wealth of material, in
literary quality, in close adherence to the recommendations of the
various counsels, in utilitarian aim and in attractiveness, we may ad-
mit the claim of the publishers that they have set a new standard for
books of composition and rhetoric.
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I^ecent Bventd.
The fifth German drive which began on
Progress of the War. July 15th had for its object either to seize
Paris or to obtain a foothold on the Chan-
nel. On the eighteenth, Marshal Foch threw his army upon the
German flank below Soissons which Ludendorff had left ex-
posed. From that time to this scarcely a day has passed without
recording a French or British victory. The Germans have been
receding further and further from Paris and the Channel ports.
It yet remains to be seen where they will make a stand.
Practically all of the ground lost since the twenty-first of
March has been regained by the Allies* and in several important
places the Hindenburg line itself has been pierced both by the
British and the French. Important parts of it, however, are still
in the hands of the Germans, but these are now threatened by the
Allied forces. These places include Cambrai, St. Quentin, Laon
and Le Fire. Ludendorff has been able to conduct a retreat and
has brought back the bulk of his armies to the old line. He has
suffered, according to conservative estimates, the loss of some
four hundred thousand men with large stores of anununition.
His future action depends upon the number of reserves still left
at his disposal. Many think that these have been so reduced in
numbers that he will not be able to resume the offensive, and that
the initiative will continue to remain in the hands of Marshal
Foch. The latter, it is expected, will give the foe no rest, but will
continue to harass him, now on one part of the line and now on
another. This is evidenced by the attack made upon the salient
of St. Mihiel, a section of the German line which has practically
been at rest for the last four years. The brilliant success ob-
tained by the first American army under the command of General
Pershing has wiped out this salient, and opened the road not only
to the Briey iron region, but also to the fortress of Metz within ten
miles of which the American lines now stand. The success of
the Americans has won the praise of the world and is an augury
of what they will accomplish in the future. Consequent dismay
is said to be spreading among the population of those parts of
Germany which border upon Alsace-Lorraine.
The expected Austrian attack on the Italian lines has not
been made, but in Albania the Austrians have had some success
in driving back a short distance the battalions now operating in
the neighborhood of Berat. On the other hand the Serbs have
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quite recently made a successful attack upon the Bulgarians in
the district farther to the east of Berat. No news of any change
in the position of the opposing forces in Palestine or Mesopotamia
has been received. Nor has anything been heard from East
Africa. The British are in possession of Baku and are reported to
be at Tashkent in Central Asia also. The operations in the neigh-
borhood of Vladivostok will receive notice later.
Finland still remains in name a republic,
Russia. the proposed change to a monarchical
form of government not yet having been
eflfected. It is reported, however, that on the twenty-sixth of
September the meeting of the Landtag is to be held to decide the
respective claim to the crown of the three German princelings.
Accounts of the state of the country and the sentiment of the
population towards Germany differ. Widespread dislike of the
German invaders is said to prevail. They have robbed the coun-
try of all the food stuffs they could lay their hands upon, so that
starvation threatens. Appeals have been made to the generosity
of this country for succor and sustenance. These appeals, how-
ever, can scarcely meet vdth America's customary response,
inasmuch as it might afford indirect support to the enemy. The
recent treaty between the Bolshevik Government of Russia and
Germany make this the more probable. By this treaty, Finland
has placed herself more completely under the power of Germany,
the latter having guaranteed in consideration of the payment of
6,000,000,000 marks that no attack shall be made by Finland on
the Russia controlled by the Bolsheviki, in the event of a conflict
between the Bolsheviki and the Allies, now operating in the North-
ern Government of Russia. The very fact of such a treaty in-
dicates that sympathy with the Allied cause in Finland is such
as to require the restraining power of the Germans, now domi-
nant there by force of arms, to hold it in check.
The treaty in question is regarded as a supplement of the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and indicates the traitorous purpose of the
Bolshevik Government of Lenine and Trotzky, although it does
not complete the measure of the sacrifice they were prepared
to make of their country. A further revelation brings to light
the fact that another immense sum, equaling the one mentioned,
has been exacted from Russia by Germany, not nominally as in-
demnity but for damages suffered by Germans during the War.
So, while Russians have no medium of exchange but paper money,
which no one will take, the horde of gold accumulated by the
Tsar has been sent to Berlin to satisfy German greed.
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No steps so far have been taken to place the Baltic provinces,
Courland, Lithuania, Esthonia and Livonia, under the rulers
destined to hold sway in these regions. A recent decree places
them under German military control. Germany looks upon this
as a temporary solution of the question, and on this point the
Allied Powers are in full agreement with Germany. The defi-
nite settlement will be achieved by the hoped-for victory of the
Entente Powers. Neither has there been any public statement as to
who will be king of the " Independent Poland " which the Cen-
tral Powers have set up. Current rumor had it that the claim of
Austria-Hungary for a Hapsburg Prince had been, at last, granted
by the Hohenzollerns. This, however, has met with so little
credence in Germany that its realization is doubtful. One thing
is certain: that, in the event of a German victory, the Poles
themselves will not be consulted. They have been told as much
in so many words. All information regarding the internal sit-
uation in Poland is suppressed, but if the feeling of the people
can be judged by the attitude of the Poles living in this country
and on the European Continent, no Austro-Germanic settlement
of the question will be accepted by them. In fact, there are now
fighting in France no fewer than 25,000 Polish soldiers, whose aim
is to secure for the 35,000,000 of Poles, large numbers of whom
are under Prussian and Austrian domination, the freedom to
which they are entitled, and the territory to which they lay claim.
This territory comprises: Upper Silesia with its rich coal fields;
a small part of Middle Silesia; the province of Posen; West Prus-
sia with the Baltic littoral, including the mouth of the Vistula
and the city of Danzig, and the southern Polish belt of the prov-
ince of East Prussia; Austrian Poland, comprising all of Galicia,
the Polish or eastern half, the Principality of Teschen; Russian
Poland, virtually along the territorial lines of the Kingdom of
Poland as established by the Congress of Vienna. The eastern
frontier of what was Russian Poland is not yet strictly defined
by the advocates of the new Polish Kingdom. These claims have
been endorsed, in substance, although not in detail, by President
Wilson, and, following his lead, by the powers allied against Ger-
many.
To add to the list of Bolshevik inconsistencies may seem
superfluous, yet one more is worthy of note. This Government,
so outraged by the secret treaties made by the Tsar with the En-
tente Powers, that it violated all precedents by publishing these
treaties to the world, made itself, with the German Government,
a secret treaty by which the Poles were handed over to the
tender mercies of the Central Powers.
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In the Ukraine, the Germans find themselves involved in so
many difficulties that the judgment of the saner elements who
opposed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the method of its making,
has been completely justified. The assassination of Marshal von
Eichhorn was symptomatic of the hatred which German greed
and oppression have engendered. The long standing unrest
among the peasants is spreading far and wide. Guerrilla war-
fare exists in many districts. Military regulation of civil life is
enforced; some places have been declared in a state of siege,
while the capital itself is in danger of starvation. The German
forces find themselves in such disagreeable surroundings that in
one case, at least, a mutiny occurred. Notwithstanding the dire
distress of Germany on the western front, she is faced by the
necessity of sending back to Russia at least some of the troops
which were removed to aid in the drive towards Paris and the
Channel ports.
Some progress has been made in the region of Vladivostok
by the Allied forces of Great Britain, France, Japan and this
country under the command of a Japanese General and in con-
junction with the Czecho-Slovaks. The Bolshevik troops and the
Austro-Germans who were fighting with them have been driven
back. The complications feared, because the Czecho-Slovak Gen-
eral, Horvarth, had assumed a dictatorship, have been removed
by the steadfast refusal of the Allies to recognize anything which
involved interference with the civil regime of the country. The
Allies were to give only military help to Russia and leave the
country free to form its own government according to its own
wishes.
In the Northern Government of Russia in which the British,
French and American troops are operating, affairs remain much
in statu quo. Little progress has been reported in the advance
towards the south to affect a union with the Czecho-Slovaks who
have been operating on the Volga. Nothing has been heard of any
advance of the British from Baku for the purpose of joining
hands with the Cossacks who are operating in the southeastern
district of Russia. By the possession of Baku, however, the road
to India has been closed against the Germans, and if the report
that a British force has entered Tashkent be true, their last avail-
able route to India has been barred.
In what remains of Russia, the Bolshevik Government still
retains a control apparently growing more and more precarious.
They count a few successes over the Czecho-Slovaks, but are meet-
ing with an ever-rising spirit of resistance. The campaign of
assassination, the first victims of which were the German Ambas-
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128 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
sador at Moscow and Field Marshal von Eichhorn at Kiev, has
been extended to the Bolsheviki themselves. Lenine was shot by a
woman, but his wounds have not proved fatal. Blood shedding is a
daily occurrence both in the capital and in the provinces. To
appease the mane^ of the German Ambassador the Bolsheviki
slaughtered more than two hundred of their fellow countrymen,
Socialists though they were. This is but one instance of similar
proceedings in various parts of Soviet Russia.
No wonder, however, need be felt at anything which the
Bolsheviki with Lenine and Trotzky at their head, may do in view
of the revelations now being made by our Government. A series
of documents, fully authenicated, is being published by the Com-
mittee on Public Information at Washington. These show what
was suspected before, but not fully proved, that Lenine and
Trotzky with other coadjutors, less well known, were from the
beginning of the Bolshevik movement, the paid agents of the
German Imperial Government.
Hitherto it was believed that the Bolsheviki, although mis-
taken, were acting for the downtrodden Russian masses, and were
hoping to further the material interests of the same class all
over the world and especially in Germany. The latter they ex-
pected would rise up against the Hohenzollerns and capitalists
in general as they had against the Romanoffs and the Russian
capitalists. Now we know that Lenine, Trotzky and the rest were
simply the base agents of the Imperialists of Germany whom they
professed to be determined to overthrow. According to these
documents the German Government deposited $25,000,000.00 in a
bank at Stockholm to be drawn upon by the Bolsheviki for the pur-
pose of spreading throughout Russia the agitation in favor of
peace which has brought, as its result, the so-called Republic un-
der German domination.
But this is a small part of proceedings the turpitude of which
would be difficult to equal. These documents show that before
the World War was four months old, and more than two years
before the United States was drawn into it, Germany was setting
afoot plans to mobilize destructive agents and observers to cause
explosions, strikes and outrages in this country, and had planned
to employ for the purpose anarchists and escaped criminals. The
Bolshevik revolution itself was planned by the German Govern-
ment and carried out with its assistance. The Brest-Litovsk
Treaty was a deliberate betrayal of Russia by the Bolshevik Gov-
ernment at the instance of the German Government. Even the
defence of Petrograd against the Germans was entrusted to a
German officer chosen in Germany with the consent and con-
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nivance of the Bolsheviki. German officers were introduced into
the Russian Army and were used as spies in the embassies of the
powers whom the Bolsheviki were treating as their allies. In-
cidentally, the fact that Germany was preparing for war be-
fore the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian
throne, is proved by document number three of the series. This
circular dated June 9, 1914, is as follows: "To Bezirkscom-
mendant^n: Within twenty-four hours of the receipt of this cir-
cular you are to inform all industrial concerns by wire that the
documents with industrial mobilization plans and with registra-
tion forms be opened, such as are referred to in the circular of
the Commission of Counts von Waldersee and Caprivi, of June
27, 1887.** The reference to the circular of Count von Waldersee
and Count Caprivi clearly proves that Germany's organization of
the resources of the Empire for war purposes had already been
made.
The severe reversals suffered by the Ger-
Germany, man armies on the western front and the
utter failure of the U-boats to intercept
American troops on their way to France are having a salutary
effect upon the German mind. The people are beginning to call
for a true statement of the facts, and even the Kaiser himself has
adopted a tone more in keeping with the present situation. Full
as his speech is of the usual German misstatements as to the
origin of the War, it is valuable as giving a clear indication of the
widespread dissatisfaction now felt, and even openly expressed,
in Germany as a result of the failure of the attempt on Paris and
the Channel ports. The man who used to tell the recruits for his
army that at his command they were to shoot father or mother,
brother or sister, is now brought by the necessity in which he
finds himself to make an almost suppliant appeal to the working-
men to help him extricate himself from the "thousand difficul-
ties '* in which, by the use he has made of his army, he is now
involved.
Another indication that, in some degree, the true state of things
is beginning to dawn upon the Germans, is found in the speech
recently delivered by the Vice-Chancellor of the Empire, Dr. von
Payer. This representative of one of the liberal parties makes
utterly inadmissible claims for Germany, yet renounces all de-
sire of seeking indemnities from the Allies, and this because the
continuance of the War is involving Germany in greater losses
than money can repay.
Count von Hertling still remains in office as Chancellor of the
Empire. In a recent speech he declared that peace was much
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nearer than many thought. It is rumored, however, that he is on
the point of proffering his resignation, and that he will be suc-
ceeded by Dr. W. S. Solf, the German Colonial Secretary. This
event would seem to indicate that more moderate views were be-
ginning to prevail in government circles, for in a recent speech Dr.
Solf practically apologized for the utterances of chauvi-
nistic jingoes, by admitting their presence in Germany as well as
in other countries. A further indication of the trend towards
moderation is the report that a place in the Cabinet or some other
position of authority should be given to Studemann or some other
member of the Social Democratic Party. The apology of Dr. Solf
preceded the reverses Germany has met on the western front. It
may be looked upon as certain that one result of these reverses
has been to deprive General von Ludendorff of what had been, for
some months, a virtual dictatorship. Notwithstanding all indi-
cations of something like a spirit of moderation, the exorbitant
claims of Germany have been so open and manifest that she her-
self vrill not allow it to appear that she is in any way with-
drawing from them. That unpleasant task must be left to Aus-
tria, and so the latter had to make the peace move which both
countries now find necessary.
The news from Austria-Hungary with ref-
Austria-Hungary. -erence to the internal agitation is some-
what meagre and somewhat contradictory.
On one hand the determination to deal in a most severe way with
the Jugo-Slavs' attempt to secure independence is reported, and
on the other hand the concession of home rule within the empire
is said to have been made. On what is considered good authority,
the Premier is said to have promised the Czechs, the Poles, and
the Southern Slavs a plan of home rule which will give to them
respectively complete autonomy. It is doubtful, however, whether
such a concession would be accepted at this time as a sufficient
response to the demands which are being made. Great Britain,
France and Italy and subsequently this country, stretching, as it
would seem, international law beyond all hitherto recognized
limits, have recognized the Czecho-Slovaks not merely as bel-
ligerents in the War but also as a nation. And this although they
are yet far from having secured the independence which has
always been looked upo|i as requisite for such recognition.
The Foreign Secretary, Baron Burian, now asks for a confer-
ence of all belligerent powers to meet on neutral soil for the
purpose of ascertaining whether or no an agreement can be
reached which should form the basis of peace negotiations. There
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is every ground for believing that this appeal is due to the dis-
turbed conditions existing in the Dual Monarchy. The confer-
ence proposed by the Austrian Foreign Secretary is not to have
any binding character, nor is it to be associated with an armistice.
The reason for such a conference is found in the alleged dis-
agreement between the utterances of the British Foreign Secre-
tary and of President Wilson; and of those of President
Wilson himself. Baron Burian's note shows the amazing igno-
rance which exists with reference to the mind of the Allied Pow-
ers: ''An objective and conscientious examination of the situa-
tion of all the belligerent States no longer leaves doubt that all
peoples, on whatever side they may be fighting, long for a speedy
end to the bloody struggle.*'
While it is true that everyone in every country desires as
speedy an end to the struggle as is compatible with obtaining de-
cisive results, yet never has there been a time when the Allied
countries were more determined than they are now upon obtain-
ing a decisive military victory. This is proved by the reports of
the feeling which exists in Great Britain and France among the
workingmen of those countries, as voiced by such men as the
Socialist, Mr. John Spargo. In this country the recent utter-
ances of Mr. Taft, Senator Lodge, Senator Hitchcock and Mr.
Samuel Gompers, are proofs of the clear purpose of the United
States and its Allies as to the results of this War and their
determination to effect them by a decisive victory. No wonder
then that within half an hour after the receipt of the Austro-
Hungarian note. President Wilson instructed the Secretary of
State to give the following answer : ** 1 am authorized by
the President to state that the following will be the reply of this
Government to the Austro-Hungarian note proposing an un-
official conference of belligerents:
"The Government of the United States feels that there is
only one reply which it can make to the suggestion of th^ Im-
perial Austro-Hungarian Government. It has repeatedly and
with entire candor stated the terms upon which the United States
would consider peace, and can and will entertain no proposal for
a conference upon a matter concerning which it has made its posi-
tion and purpose so plain."
What effect this reply will have upon the policy of the Cen-
tral Powers remains to be seen.
September 16, 1918.
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IT is frequently said that the fighting power of an army is in-
creased two-fold when the men in the ranks know that their
people at home are with them, with them in sympathy and sacri-
fice, bearing also their share of the burden.
Perhaps this will explain the exceptional morale, the inspir-
ing courage that have already been shown by our American
soldiers on the western front in France.
Never in the history of the world, we believe it is safe to say,
has a people stood so solidly behind its fighting men as have we
of the United States. We have not only made financial sacrifices
for their welfare, we have taken up personal service in their behalf
which embraces in minutest detail their every need in the camps
at home; their needs in the cantonments and the fighting lines
abroad; their care when wounded; their kinsfolk who might other-
wise suffer in their absence. This service has been generous;
nation wide; comprehensive. Patriotism has lent wings to the
imagination, and there is not a conceivable want of the soldier
that has been left uncared for. Not only has the Government
taken in hand the greater problems of the soldier's welfare; but
private organizations of every kind have summoned all their re-
sources, been supplemented by funds generously contributed by
every class of citizen, and given themselves under the direction
of the Government to the welfare of the soldiers and the sailors
and to the care of those innumerable problems of protection and
well-being that have sprung up since America entered the War.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE record of this unprecedented service of a nation is of course
yet to be written; but historical records that will contribute
to its complete chronicle are appearing even now. The fullest
that we have yet seen is the September issue of The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Service. This issue
makes a volume of three hundred and six pages with detailed
index. Even a volume of that size can do little more than treat
in a brief way of the principal larger classifications of war re-
lief work.
The foreword by J. P. Lichtenberger, editor of this volume of
The Annals, points out in a brief way the necessity for " the
mobilization of the national resources.*' The editor makes one
very serious mistake, which is the more to be regretted because
the volume will be frequently referred to by writers on the ques-
tion of war relief. He states that the Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A.
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are non-sectarian organizations. Of course* nothing could be
further from the truth, and it is certainly not too much to ask
that the editor of a publication of the standing of The Annals
should know whereof he speaks. Both these organizations are
strictly sectarian as their constitution expressly states. In the
body of the volume both are placed under the title ** Religious
Organizations in War Relief Work."
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
PART II. considers War Relief in Europe and Canada. Edward
T. Devine, of the American Red Cross, sketches the problems
presented by the devastated provinces and the ravages of war;
Paul U. Kellogg, of The Survey, shows how those problems have
expanded, and how the Red Cross has rushed to meet them and
extended its fields far beyond its original plans.
Ernest P. Bicknell, U.S.A., Red Cross Commissioner to Bel-
gium, recites the marvelous story of human sympathy and human
relief extended to that martyred country. There were, for exam-
ple, in June thirty-two Red Cross establishments in Belgium
which gave help to Belgian soldiers at the rate of over twenty-
five thousand a day. This number does not include an extensive
system of recreation tents and canteens attached to military can-
tonments. The Red Cross work embraces every needy class of
the population, civilian as well as military. It includes also the
refugees, and Colonel Bicknell pictures a Belgian town built up
and cared for by the Red Cross within the city of Havre.
'* A tract of land, agreeably situated on a small hill in the out-
skirts of the city was taken, and a village of small cottages is now
erected. The ground had previously been provided with paved
streets, while lines of water mains and electric wires are con-
veniently near. This village will consist of one hundred cottages,
each of three or four rooms. At the head of each cottage will be a
small shed to be used as laundry and storage space. Each cot-
tage will have a small garden plot and will be enclosed by a neat
rustic fence. Electric light will be provided, and in the centre of
the village will be a public water supply. Two schoolhouses will
meet the needs of the children, and a cooperative store, which is
a familiar and successful institution among the Belgians, will be
established in its own quarters. A central building will provide
administrative headquarters for the village, and a meeting place
for the people On all occasions.
'*The population of the village will consist of families se-
lected from the worst quarters of the city, but no family which has
less than four children will be granted a cottage in the village.
The cottages will be rented fully furnished for thirty francs (six
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dollars) per month. If any occupant of the village cannot pay
the rent, the payment will be made from some charitable source,
but no cottage will be given gratuitously. The income from the
rent of the one hundred cottages will meet all the expenses of
keeping up the streets, attending to the plumbing, lighting, clean-
ing, repairs, etc.
" The village, which, at this writing, June, is well on toward
completion, will be like a transplanted bit of Belgium. Not only
will the people be Belgian, but the schools will be Belgian taught
by Belgian teachers. A Belgian priest will look after the moral
welfare of the people, and Belgians will have charge of the ad-
ministration. When the War is ended, the cottages, which are
all of the demountable type, may be taken down and shipped into
Belgium, there to be set up again in some of the destroyed towns
of that unhappy country.*'
Colonel Bicknell testifies gladly to the courage, the coopera-
tive spirit and the fine sense of responsibility on the part of the
leaders of the Belgian people, " as we have learned to know them
through a year of close and constant contact."
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
CANADA'S war relief work is discussed by Sir Hebert Ames. He
treats especially of the National Patriotic Fund, voluntarily
subscribed, and placed under the charge of the National Execu-
tive for the relief of soldiers and their families. Interest on the
fund provides the expenses of administration. Canada seems ex-
ceptional in this, that she has left this obligation to volunteer sub-
scriptions: her government has not accepted it as a direct re-
sponsibility.
The different manner in which the same responsibility has
been met by the United States is set forth in an article im-
mediately following and entitled The Social Significance of War
Risk Insurance, by Thomas B. Love, Assistant Secretary of the
United States Treasury. Back of our war risk insurance is " the
authority and financial strength of the greatest and most demo-
cratic government in the world."
The Government of the United States now looks upon itself
as an employer of over three million soldiers and sailors, and the
Government has determined to be an employer on a better basis
than ever before in its history. The conditions of employment
have been placed according to the full meaning of a living wage.
A living wage means something more than the mere cost of sub-
sistence for the worker while he is at work. It must provide also
for the expenses of living for his natural dependents during the
time he does not work: also duriiig the time when because of dis-
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ability he is unable to work, and it must provide for the support
of his dependents in the event of his death. By the War Risk
Insurance Act the Government has met and provided for all these
demands. By that Act the Government as an employer says to the
soldier, its employee :
(a) We will pay you a fixed monthly compensation.
(b) We will request you to make to wife and children a
definite allotment of this monthly pay which will not exceed one-
half; to this allotment the Government will add an equal or
greater amount as an allowance, and pay such allotment to your
family monthly for their support.
(c) If you have other relatives dependent upon you and
wish to make them a voluntary monthly allotment, the Govern-
ment will supplement the voluntary allotment with an equal or
greater allowance and disburse such allotments to the dependent
relatives on a monthly basis.
(d) If disabled (through no willful misconduct of your
own) the Government will pay you a fixed monthly compensation
contingent in amount upon the number and personnel of your de-
pendent family, so long as your disability shall continue.
(e) In case of your death, the Government will pay to your
wife, or child, or dependent father or mother, or to all of them,
a fixed monthly compensation so long as your widow or your
widowed mother remains a widow, and the parents are depen-
dent, and to your children until they reach the age of eighteen
years.
♦ « « ♦
BUT the Government does not stop even here. If the soldier
desires additional protection against his own total permanent
disability, the Government has provided a war insurance of not less
than $1,000.00 or more than $10,000.00 at peace time rates and
without any addition for the war hazard.
This provision for our fighting men is certainly the most
liberal provision ever made by any government in the history of
the world for its fighting forces in time of war.
The purpose and scope of the War Risk Insurance is further
described by S. M. Lindsay, Professor of Social Legislation, Co-
lumbia University, and an account of the working of the new
law for the period of eight months is given by Colonel S. H. Wolfe
of the Quartermaster's Department, United States Army.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
PART IV. of the volume considers Civilian Relief Work of the
National Red Cross. Training for its home service is outlined
by Porter Lee, Director of the New York School of Philanthropy;
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the scope and organization of the Department of Civilian Relief
are described by Margaret F. Byington of the American Red Cross.
The new draft, the vast increase in the army of the United States
means that there will scarcely be one home in our country un-
affected by the absence of a breadwinner. This means that all
homes will be brought, in some way or other, into the field of
home service of the Red Cross. It means further that the Red
Cross will necessarily touch every influence, religious, social,
economic, industrial, that affects the family. It means also that the
Red Cross will come in contact with every private agency of
charity work and vice versa. The need of studying its plans : of
preparedness to meet this new and mighty agency with efficient
capable cooperation is therefore most apparent.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
PART V. is concerned with what is probably the most impor-
tant institution arising out of the needs of the present War —
the Commission on Training Camp Activities of the United States
Army and Navy, popularly known as the Fosdick Commission,
because of its Chairman, Mr. Raymond B. Fosdick. The opening
article written by the Chairman is a comprehensive view of the
purpose and field or fields of work of the Commission. Under it
work the seven organizations which within the camps care for the
recreational welfare of soldiers and sailors — the Knights of Co-
lumbus; the Young Men's Christian Association; the Young
Women's Christian Association; the Jewish Welfare Board; the
Salvation Army; the War Camp Community Service; and the
American Library Association. This Commission has govern-
mental authority over the work within the camps of all these
organizations. It has formulated programmes of entertainment,
educational courses, and athletic recreation for the camps at
home and abroad. It has the duty of enforcing the Government's
rulings concerning the suppression of vice within certain pre-
scribed zones about the camps. It has laid down a programme
and a standard of conduct worthy of the highest praise and the
most loyal support of every true, clean-hearted American. That
programme is built upon the solid Christian truth which the
Catholic Church has ever preached to the nations: that sexual
continence is entirely compatible with physical health, and should
be the rule of life for every unmarried man and woman. And the
Commission has evidently sought to build on that programme:
to do all in its power to make the American army an army of
clean, strong, fighting men; to save its soldiers from the degrada-
tion and ravages of sin; to lessen their temptations: to keep them
pure as the worthy fathers of generations yet to be; and to present
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to American youth of both sexes a standard that is really Catho-
lic, that will make America, in her thoughts, in her community
and recreational life, in her drama and her literature, other than
she has been in the past. And that there was sad need that she
should be otherwise, is unfortunately too apparent from the re-
ports included in this volume of the physical examinations of
candidates for the army.
♦ ♦ ♦ 4t
SUCH a paragraph as the following, ending the article on Mak-
ing the Camps Safe for the Army, by Lieutenant G. J. Ander-
son of the Commission, is a delightful inspiration:
** If we had done nothing more than to send across the seas
to the aid of our Allies the cleanest army the world has ever seen,
a host of fighting men who have been trained in an atmosphere
true to the highest ideals of American life, we have proved our-
selves fit to fight for the preservation of democracy. For if de-
mocracy has not made a man respect his own body, mind and
soul, and that of his countrymen, be they man or woman, it has
failed. And if it has instilled even the first seeds of this physical
and spiritual self-respect, it has succeeded according to its truest
tests."
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
BUT when the healthy-minded, normal man or woman reads in
detail the extensive programmes of certain divisions of the
Commission he will realize disappointment. Instead of re-
maining true to the high constructive programme of the Com-
mission itself, they have departed into paths that for the most part
lead downward, and that are marked out not by a hopeful, con-
structive estimate of the heights to which we may attain, but by
a Calvinistic, pessimistic obsession of the chronic inability of
men and women to be true to virtuous and noble ideals.
These detailed programmes, while no doubt containing many
good points, are built upon the fundamental fallacy that a knowl-
edge of the physical ravages of sexual sin will act as an effective
deterrent The fallacy is two-fold: it presupposes that such
evil results invariably follow, and that is not true. It presup-
poses that knowledge is virtue or begets virtue which is not true
either. Knowledge may be vice and may propagate vice. It may
and often has taught the individual how to gratify his evil pas-
sions: and yet escape the temporal consequences of sin.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
AGAIN these programmes labor under this fearful indictment —
that oftentimes they promote the very evil which they profess
to combat It must be remembered that these programmes are
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made for the entire army: that officers are obliged to give these
lectures at stated intervals to all their subordinates. Such lack
of discrimination is fatal. All men are not diseased either in
mind or body. Many are clean-minded, and rightfully resent
these lectures imposed upon them that give them an hour of
thought upon matters utterly distasteful to the healthy-minded.
Some sadly need the lectures, no doubt. Are the good and
worthy to be polluted unnecessarily because of the need of those
who are evil? If lectures of this kind are to be given, will not the
end sought be more speedily and surely achieved if the positive
ideas of virtue: the sanctity of the body as the creative work of
God, reverence for womanhood, for home, for wife, for friend,
be so emphasized and repeated that an atmosphere of pure air
be created to drive out this polluted gas attack of sexual disease?
Out of negation nothing can come. Out of a fear simply of physi-
cally evil consequences nothing can come when the danger of
such consequences are removed. Purity is not simply abstinence
from sexual indulgence: purity is the moral life of the soul.
Since it concerns primarily an act that brings man closest to His
Creator, it is inextricably interwoven with all the thoughts, esti-
mates, actions, relations and standards of a man's life. Purity is
the man. And unless this right estimate of the virtue is culti-
vated, every other attempt will fall short: will share in the per-
verted or ignorant notion that begot it and eventually play into
the hands of impurity itself. That is why the rehearsal of these
details about sex create the atmosphere of sex. The hearers talk
and discuss and are oftentimes obsessed by sex. It is a strong
enough passion in itself but when thoughtfulness upon it is thus
sanctioned by military authority, the old prohibition that these
things should not be so much as mentioned among you, is robbed
of its force, and the hearer will be led to experiment, feeling that
if infected he will be saved by the prophylactic treatment sup-
plied.
Such is the law of psychology: and such, in the larger way, is
the law of life. These programmes are handling life, and they
give evidence that those who prepared them are not altogether
fitted for a task that has challenged the wisdom of the centuries.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
WE might comment at further length upon this important mat-
ter but our space does not permit it. In the article con-
tributed by Mrs. Katharine Davis entitled Women's Education in
Social Hygiene, she states that with regard to the Committee of
which she is Chairman, The National Catholic War Council will
appoint two representatives; or at least such will be the inference
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from her words. We wish to state here that the National Catholic
War Council has o£BcialIy requested changes in the programme,
and has refused to appoint representatives until such changes
are made.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
PART VI. deals with the different Religious Organizations
in War Relief Work. The war work of the Young Men's
Christian Association is outlined by Mr. John R. Mott;
that of the Young Women's Christian Association by A.
Estelle Paddock. The work of The National Catholic War Coun-
cil, which includes that of the Knights of Columbus and other
Catholic activities, is treated by John J. Burke, CS.P. The Jew-
ish Relief work is described by Albert Lucas.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
PART VII. is under the heading of the Council of National De-
fence, which was formed by Act of Congress in August, 1916,
to create " relations which render possible in time of need, the
immediate concentration and the utilization of the resources of
the nation." This sentence at once indicates the unlimited field
and the innumerable questions with which the National Council
deals. It is worked through State committees, and has interested
itself in giving legal advice to selectives; in National and State
provisions concerning public health; in public recreation; in
proper housing conditions; in child welfare work and in voca-
tional education.
The last article in the volume entitled The War Chest Plan,
by Horatio G. Lloyd, is of particular interest in view of the com-
ing united war work campaign for all seven allied war relief
organizations.
WE have received a protest from Mr. Stevens, the author of the
new life of Joan of Arc, reviewed in the September issue of
The Catholic World. The protest is presented in all sincerity
of purpose; yet its very sincerity helps to show more plainly the
line of demarcation between Protestant and Catholic thought —
the one nebulous, vague, in the making; the other clear cut, defi-
nite, mature. Mr. Stevens is deeply grieved because despite his
good will and painstaking effort to " achieve Protestant and secu-
lar appreciation for one of the noblest characters in the history
of Catholicism," " his feeling of a mission to do a great service to
Catholicism, Protestantism and Americans," his work has met
with appreciation only from Protestant denominational reviewers,
and has been '* repudiated and censured without exception by all
Catholic reviewers." The author adds that each Catholic re-
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viewer " quoted something to censure, and changed the wording
to favor the censure." To say the least such unanimity is sur-
prising.
4: ♦ 4t ♦
BUT, quite at a loss to understand the alignment of reviewers
mentioned, and so frustrating to the author's purpose, he
seeks an explanation in the external causes rather than by an in-
ternal analysis, in line with the comments of the reviewers, of
his own work. Yet only through the latter process may the cause
be found.
Of course, it is incredible that Mr. Stevens has been mis-
quoted by all his Catholic reviewers. In the case of The Catho-
lic World, for example, we carefully verified every quotation
made by our reviewer and found every one accurate, and we may
well ask further, what malicious purpose (for su^-^.h concerted
falsification could not be accidental) could the Catholic reviewers
have in condemning the work of a man whom they recognize as
having " for his purpose a book of inspiration and loyalty, and to
interpret the meaning of Joan's life for Americans?" To con-
tinue to quote from our own reviewer: "He (Mr. Stevens) has
written in fullest sympathy with his subject and has collected
from sources and authorities a telling number of facts and ap-
preciations, and has made of them a thrilling narrative." So
much in commendation. But Mr. Stevens' interpretations are
not in harmony with history.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
FOR the cause of such concerted disapproval, we must look
within the pages of Mr. Stevens' book, and then we will find
that the looseness of his own thought is alone to blame. He says :
" This lovely girl gave a life, as loyal as was ever known, in illus-
trious revelation of the religious principle that became the Prot-
estant Reformation. As her Lord was the greatest martyr of
humanity, so was she the greatest martyr of Christianity, for
that freedom of conscience in which the * just shall live by faith.'
Nearly a hundred years before Martin Luther nailed his funda-
mental propositions on the cathedral door, she perished at the
stake for her loyalty to a life of * justification by faith/ and that
life was afterwards enrolled among the saints by the Roman Cath-
olic Church."
Does Mr. Stevens mean that Joan was a forerunner of Luther
and also a saint of the " Roman Catholic Church? " Surely a
strange paradox. Does he mean that Peter and Paul, James and
John, and the hosts that followed in their train were less mar-
tyrs for Christianity and for freedom of conscience than the Maid
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1918.] WITH OUR READERS 141
of Orleans; that she was greater even than the Voices who were
her inspiration and her strength? Had these others not perished
for freedom to believe in Christ, the Son of God, and the right to
follow His leading, there would have been no " Christianity " for
which Joan could die. In what sense Joan, so valiant in deed, can
be said to have died for "justification by faith alone," is
also difficult to see. We admit that Mr. Stevens does not add
"alone," but he necessarily implies it by associating the Maid
with Luther and the doctrines of the Reformation.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
WHEN he used philosophical terms, Mr. Stevens is guilty of the
same looseness. "Joan of Arc was a revelation of Faith.
Her enemies were a revelation of Will. Faith and Will are an-
tagonists in the limited regions of individuals, and are only one
as they coalesce in the infinite regions of the divine system of
minds which we call the social universe." Since when has
" Will " become synonymous with force and ceased to be a faculty
of the soul, the very prop of Faith? How may "Faith and
" Will " " coalesce " in the " social universe;" the " infinite re-
gions of the divine system of minds," and be " antagonists in the
limited regions of individuals? " Again we ask, what does Mr.
Stevens mean? Does anyone know what he means? Does he
himself know?
We do not know whether Mr. Stevens is a Catholic or not.
We do full justice to the sincerity of his intentions; we deeply
regret his wounded feelings, but until he can think more clearly
and define more accurately, he will, inevitably, run amuck of all
well-informed reviewers.
♦ ♦ ♦ 4t
WHEN those who do not believe in Christian dogma seek to in-
terpret a life that was essentially the expression of Christian
dogma, they are foredoomed to failure because they attempt the
impossible. They may faithfully portray certain characteristics,
certain activities, achievements that have secured the acclaim of
subsequent generations, but when they seek the deeper sources
that begot those characteristics, the springs whence came those
activities, the principles which made such achievement possible,
they cannot understand because they do not know. The lives of
the saints are written in Christian dogma. One who does not
know it and know it through intimate, personal understanding,
can as little understand or interpret it, as one who knows nothing
of Greek can thoroughly understand and capably translate a
Greek classic.
" Joan of Arc being wholly religious," says Mr. Stevens, " I
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142 WITH OUR READERS [Oct.,
conceived her life would have to be written in the form of
psychological religious speculation that could be free from all
doctrinal controversy and yet be adaptable to any orthodox in-
terpretation/* John of Arc was a Catholic; bred in the simple,
intelligent faith of the peasant. That faith, which was as definite
then as it is today and ever will be, guided her every thought,
was the root source of her every action, molded her character,
inspired her every achievement. Yet a twentieth century biogra-
pher may state that he can make this definite, fixed, clear, dog-
matic religious faith the plaything of his "psychological reli-
gious speculation;" and that he could so conceal or juggle or mis-
interpret as to make a story that ** could be free from all doc-
trinal controversy and be adaptable to any orthodox interpreta-
tion."
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE process is all too common and merits even on. the ground
of historical accuracy alone, the severest condemnation. The
Catholic glories of the past, the Catholic heroes of the past are
pictured as worthy of imitation, but the readers are robbed of
what belongs to them, the knowledge of the faith that made pos-
sible their achievements and molded ordinary mortals like our-
selves into the heroic stature of saints. It is a process that is
not confined to Catholic achievements or Catholic heroes of the
past. It endures to the present. And not uncommon is the
biography of a Catholic scientist or the estimate of a Catholic poet
that omits or lays little stress upon his Catholic faith.
We are looking forward to the announced biography of a
noted Catholic poet who has just fallen in battle. The Catholic
faith inspired much of his best work. We are eager to see with
what reserve, what frank honesty his history will be written.
THE priest who realizes that the spiritual welfare of the world
is contingent upon the outcome of this Great War, will not be
loath to use his power of reaching and influencing large masses
of the people in behalf of the coming Liberty Loan campaign.
Among our Catholic foreign population there are many who
are too ignorant of the English language to follow the course of
current events: yet habits of thrift generated in long years of
struggle at home have provided them in many cases with the
wherewithal to render substantial help to our Government. Illus-
trative of this class is the following story:
** A Polish servant girl had been employed for a number of
years by an American family residing in one of the large cities.
She was an illiterate individual and had never mastered more
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1918.] WITH OUR READERS 143
than a few of the most ordinary phrases of the English language.
Attendance at church where her native tongue was spoken, com-
prised her only recreation. Through her inability to read she
knew little of current events.
** In the first two loans her employer pleaded with her in his
simplest English to purchase at least a $50.00 bond» but without
avail. In the third loan he made no further effort.
"One Monday evening she came into the sitting-room and
in the presence of the whole family said to the master of the
house, * I want buy $500.00 Liberty Bonds. Priest say Germans
very bad and kill Polish and American peoples/ and with these
words handed him $500.00 in bills. Desiring to ascertain the rea-
son for her sudden change of mind, he elicited the information
that she did not know these facts before, and that on the previous
day the priest had preached on the subject for the first time. The
result was that she acquired an interest in worldly affairs and
thereafter inquired daily about the War."
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
WITH many others, as with this woman, to know is to act; and
a simple explanation of the facts by one whose knowledge
and honesty they respect, will stir cooperation to the extent of
their ability in the cause of the persecuted nations which is one
with the cause of America.
JUST as the last of this issue of The Catholic World was going
to press, news came of the death of His Eminence, John Cardi-
nal Farley of New York. The press of the country will carry
extensive notices of his remarkable career; of his exceptional ad-
ministrative gifts as head of the largest diocese of the world; of
the great loss that both Church and country have sustained by his
death — ^a loss that will be keenly felt for many years to come.
In this paragraph we wish simply to express our personal
gratitude to the dead prelate who from its first struggling years
gave his support to The Catholic World and continued its
friend and adviser even unto the end.
Since we assumed the editorial responsibility many years
ago. Cardinal Farley was to us not only a guide, but an inspira-
tion, a personal friend, whose kindly sympathy, keen interest and
moral guidance were among those rare comforts and helps that
can never be replaced.
Our readers will earnestly pray that the peace which his good
life merited, will be speedily given to him in its divine fullness.
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144 BOOKS RECEIVED [Oct.. 1918.]
MR. CONDfi B. FALLEN, Chairman of the Board of The Catho-
lic Art Association, requests us to announce that he is in no
way connected with any other Motion Picture Company; that
" The Victim " was produced by The Catholic Art Association, and
not by any other concern. Any statement to the contrary is false
and dishonest in purpose, and should receive no credence from
the Reverend Clergy or the laity.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
Ambucan Book Co., New York:
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. By L. Carroll. Happy Tales for Storg Time,
By E. L. and A. M. Skinner. New Medlteual and Modern History, By S. B.
Harding Ph.D. First Principles of Agriculture, By B. S. Goff and D. D.
Mayne.
P. J. Kbnboy a Sons, New York:
The Greater Value, By G. M. M. Sheldon. 56 cents. The Mystical Life, By Dom
S, Loulsmet, O.S.a fl.lO.
Gboaob H. DoaAN Co., New York:
The Economic Weapon, By A. B. Zinunerman. Pamphlet.
SiLTsa, BvmDETTK A Co., New York:
The Progressive Music Series, No. m.
BoNi A LrvsaiOHT, New York:
The Inferno, By H. Barbusse. |1.50 net. Free and Other Stories. By T. Dreiser.
11.50 net.
Thb AifEaiCA Press, New York:
Religion and Democracy, The Model Student, Pamphlets. 5 cents each.
ALPmEO A. FusMAN, 368 West Fifty-first Street, New York:
Martial Lyrics, By Alfred A. Furman.
CuAaLES ScaioNBR's Sons, New York
The Shorter Bible — The New Testament, Arranged by C. F. Kent. fl.OO net.
Longmans, Green A Co., New York:
The Dartmoor Window Again, By Beatrice Chase. |2.00 net
Dodo, Mbao A Co., New York:
Herself — Ireland, By Elizabeth P. O'Connor. |2.50 net
HouoHTON Mifflin Co., Boston:
The Victim's Return, By NoCUe Roger.
Ginn a Co., Boston:
The Corona Readers — First Reader, By James H. Fassett 36 cents.
Richard G. Badger, Boston:
Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence, By Elisabeth S. Kite.
Two vols. 15.00 per set
U. S. Fuel Administration, Washington:
Fuel Pacts,
Government Printing Opficx, Washington:
Teton Sioux Music, By F. Densmore.
**Nord-Amerika," 1006. North Fifth Street, PhiladelpMa, Pa.:
The Crusade of Grace in Honor of St, Rose of Lima, Pamphlet 17.56 per
hundred.
John Theodore Combs, Pittsburgh, Pa.:
Catholic Art and Architecture. By J. T. Comes. 50 cents net
The Extension Press, Chicago:
Christ's Life in Pictures. By Rev. George A. Keith, SJ. $1^0.
The Catholic Truth Society of Canada, Toronto:
On Prayer. By Rt Rev. Alexander Macdonald, D.D. Pamphlet
Bloud a Gat, Paris:
Guerre et Pairiotisme, Par Monslgnor S. du Vauroux. Le Moral Franeais.
Par F. VeuUlot
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THE
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Brother Chaplains ^^^^^'^^4j^. Francis Aveling, S.T.D. 145
Laus Deo OE'-'^IOIfl - Theodore Maynard 156
St. Matthew and the IJ^^I^j^ ^^fff^^^rid T. Shanahan, S.T.D. 158
Music at the Front Lorna Walsh 174
November Vigil Charles Phillips 181
John Cardinal Farley Peter Guilday, Ph,D. 183
Archbishop Ireland Humphrey Moynihan, A,M., D.D. 194
The Universal Genius of St. Thomas Garrett Pierse 206
The Supreme Court and Child Labor John A. Ryan, D.D. 212
Joyce Kilmer Katherine Bregy 224
Love and the Philosopher Samuel F. Darwin Fox 238
The AltM-Boy Kathryn White Ryan 250
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ipeal for
inds aod
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Is of pru"
r profession,
pause to
• ur any one
the banners
Hy and high
outweighed
led the ideal-
was a tan-
n was made,
V million acts
thoughts and
Im y finally de-
i'VR*, by a com-
^ affected it, no
r nurtured it in
on to them ail.
, notwithstand-
look, of religious
parated them,
a common bond of
fy to help each other
the service of the men ;
Is attainment; zealous
lo their pastoral care,
t. There were a vast
. rtuld be sent — camps,
nl so on* And as the
iinplexity, as old for-
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
Vol. CVIII.
NOVEMBER, 1918.
No. 644.
BROTHER CHAPLAINS.
BY FRANaS AVELING, S.T.D.
N a former article, I wrote of the effect which the
present War seems to have had upon the religion
of the soldiers at the front. I propose now to
deal with an aspect and, at the same time, an
effect of the War which is no less worth record-
ing. I refer to the relations obtaining between the Chaplains
of the different religious bodies who are engaged in their com-
mon and privileged task of working for their men. And I wish
more especially to refer to these relations from the point of
view of the differences in their several doctrinal positions and
outlooks; and particularly of this from the standpoint of the
Catholic Chaplain.
When we Chaplains came out first to France — and I take
it the same is equally true of the other fields of the War, when,
understanding the crying need, we first sent in our names to
the several authorities of the "Churches'* as moved by the
call of the men at the front for our service, we did so each with
the one idea and motive of doing his utmost for those men —
those fighting, suffering, dying men — of his own faith'. The
Protestant minister volunteered, his heart full to bursting with
sympathy for the craving of his boys for human encourage-
ment and guidance, for divine consolation and help; the Catho-
lic urged on by the thought of his lads waiting for the sacra-
Copyrl^l 1918. Thb Missionaby Society of St. Paul thb Apostle
IN THE State op New York.
VOL- cvm. — ^10
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146 BROTHER CHAPLAINS [Nov.,
ments; going up to the battle perchance unassoiled, brought
back broken, and possibly dying unanointed.
At the outset of the War, few of us realized the grave pres-
sure of the need. For the most part we, like those around us
in other walks of life, saw the War from afar as a thing un-
real and apart, a struggle which had no direct claim upon us
personally, though in it we were so intimately involved; a
distant drama upon which our fate depended indeed, but
which, none the less, was to be enacted by those whose busi-
ness it was to defend the honor of our country and protect its
liberties. And they had their Chaplams, their priests and min-
isters — the regular Chaplains of the old and now gloriously
renowned " Contemptibles." The call had not yet sounded in
our ears; though it is true, some of us — those who knew what
war was and had served as volunteer Chaplains in South
Africa — discerned it before the rest and went.
It was not, I think, that we were timid or preferred the
routine to which we had become accustomed in times of peace
or shirked the hardships which we believed were associated
with warfare or, least of all, slurred over the needs of our
men in the field. We did not know; we did not realize; we did
not understand. But at last we heard — and understood. For
some of us the call came in fragments of letters from the front
— those wonderful letters from amid the blare of battle and
the thick of death, full of comfort and courage for those be-
loved hearts, to cheer whom they were written, bringing tears
and smiles to the dear eyes of those who read. For others it came
when we began to realize that every British citizen had a stake
and a part in the struggle; when we met with men or Chap-
lains home in hospital or on leave, and heard what was going
on in France and Flanders at first hand. And some of us
read a paragaph in the Tablet stating that the Cardinal needed
priests to send out to the men, and asking for volunteers. In
one way or in another our Ephpheta came to us. Our ears and
our eyes were opened.
Of course, it cannot be said that the Chaplains made up
their minds to give up their familiar work at home, and plunge
into the unknown responsibilities and dangers of war led by
any one single consideration or obeying the stern call of duty
alone. They hesitated between conflicting motives, doubtless,
no less than those magnificent, great-souled and generous-
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hearted men and lads who freely responded to the appeal for
soldiers to fight then* Country's battle. Human minds and
hearts are extraordinarily complex in their workings. A
thousand factors, obscure often and unappraisable, go to the
making of a single human act; and not seldom do the emotions
outweigh the more calm and steady dictates of the judgment.
Still, in the main the heart may be trusted as well as the head;
and the balance will move with its weight more often than not
towards right decision: where mere judgment, hesitating for
lack of data, or embarrassed by their wealth, would never in-
cline it at all. No one would condemn the counsels of pru-
dence, the thoughts of family or career, business or profession,
and the emotions connected with them, which give pause to
great enterprises such as this. But who would blame any one
of that glorious band which enrolled itself under the banners
of the " New Armies " if the alluring call of novelty and high
adventure, the glamoiu: of chivalry and romance, outweighed
these, colored the more sober patriotism and gilded the ideal-
ism that spurred him on to enlist? Doubtless there was a tan-
gle of feelings and calculations: but the decision was made,
and made on grounds of patriotism and duty. A million acts
of self-abnegation and heroism were its outcome.
Doubtless also the Chaplains had conflicting thoughts and
feelings to reckon with. But they, too, when they finally de-
cided to serve were actuated, each and everyone, by a com-
mon motive. No matter what considerations afiTected it, no
matter what emotions brought it to birth or nurtured it in
individual cases, there was one thing common to them all.
There was a common union and a common aim, notwithstand-
ing the differences of training and of outlook, of religious
belief and ecclesiastical adherence that separated them.
Chaplains thus entered the army with a common bond of
fellowship despite their differences, ready to help each other
in the pursuit of their common purpose — the service of the men;
ready to sacrifice all save principle in its attainment; zealous
for the welfare of the soldiers committed to their pastoral care.
At the outset organization was meagre. There were a vast
number of posts to which Chaplains could be sent — camps,
brigades, batteries of guns, hospitals, and so on. And as the
army itself increased in numbers and complexity, as old for-
mations multiplied and new came into being, so did the chap-
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148 BROTHER CHAPLAINS [Nov.,
laincy service grow and become more complex. It was pre-
sided over, in France, by a Principal Chaplain,^ under whom
all denominations were represented. This oflQcer, who be-
longed to the Adjutant-General's Branch, posted Chaplains to
the various units, or moved them from one to another, accord-
ing to the needs of the service. He had as advisors and assist-
ants representatives of the religions recognized by the
Army: Church of Engl^and, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic,
Wesleyan and United Board; this last consisting of Metho-
dists, Baptists and Congregationalists. The Principal Chap-
lain, who still enjoys the office and dignity, was the senior Reg-
ular Chaplain of the British Army, according to the Army List,
when the War broke out. He happened to be a Presbyterian;
an officer of long military service, great parts, wide experi-
ence, and knowledge of human nature.
For a time the chaplaincy service was conducted upon
these lines, the department remaining un<ler the direction of
its one official head. In 1916, however, the Chaplains of the
Chiurch of England were organized under a head of their own
— the Deputy Chaplain General; and to each Army and Great
Base was posted an Assistant Chaplain General. Their organi-
zation was completed by Deputy Assistant Chaplains Gen-
eral at Army Corps Headquarters and Senior Chaplains
(C. of E.) at Divisions. This left all the Chaplains, other than
C. of E., still under the Principal Chaplain; and their organi-
zation became similar to that of the other side of the depart-
ment, with this modification that the appointments to admin-
istrative and Corps and Divisional posts was shared alternately
by Catholics and Protestants, and that the assistants to the
Catholics were Protestants, and vice versa. As a consequence
of the division of the department, and the organization of the
Principal Chaplain's side of it. Catholic Chaplains are thrown
much more closely into touch with non-C. of E. Protestants
than with their C. of E. brethren; and a general result of this
has been a very wide and friendly understanding of each
other's position. Were it for this alone, I think we have much
reason to be thankful.
Whereas, before the War the clergymen of the various de-
nominations who are now laboring among the troops out in
France, came seldom, if ever, into close contact, they now meet
^ The Cathouc Wobld» February, 1917.
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frequently and freely, helping each other, and, what is more,
helping the men to the ministrations of their own priest or
minister. Instead of looking at the non-Catholic as a mere
compendium of heresies, the Catholic priest generally finds
him to be a very courteous, kind and exceedingly zealous man.
He is frankly Protestant, of course; that goes without saying:
just as the Catholic is frankly Catholic. But he shows a large-
ness of mind and of outlook, which has a place — and a very
exalted place — ^for the Catholic and his religion.
There probably are exceptions : but the experience of the
writer has led him very largely to modify his opinion of the
attitude of Protestant clergymen towards the Catholic Church
and its clergy. It is doubtless due to the conditions of war
that this has come to be. Many of the Protestant clergymen
had never met, much less spoken with, a priest before. They
knew nothing of the Catholic Church at first hand; and their
opinions in its regard were formed, as they must have been,
from the old ignorant and intolerant tradition, from popular
fiction of the " Jesuit-in-disguise ** type, and from the " revela-
tions ** of scandal-mongering backsliders. They, too, must find
their opinions of Catholics changing. The priest is no longer
for them scheming, intriguing, underhand and shifty. He
does not slink like a silent, black-robed shadow round corners,
or glide softly by the wall instead of crossing open spaces. He
is much like other men, after all; has much the same interests
as themselves; can run a canteen, play a game of football, or
get up a concert for the men with the best. And as to his
religious ministrations: well, they may not be those which a
Protestant approves; but tliey certainly appear to be earnest
and very real. The Catholic men understand them and prize
them most highly; and to every appearance they derive the
greatest comfort and consolation from them.
The writer has frequently spoken with Protestant Chaplains
on these subjects. He has never met with unsympathetic
criticism or bigotry; though he has frequently noticed lack of
understanding of the doctrines of the Catholic religion, and a
tendency to mistake some of our devotional customs or local
uses or popular practices for essentials.
"You Catholics,*' it has more than once been remarked,
with almost obvious envy, "know exactly what to do in any
emergency: and your men know exactly what to expect."
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150 BROTHER CHAPLAINS [Nov.,
That, of course, is so; whether it be in regard to so simple a
thing as providing a Mass for a unit, or preparing the soldiers
for battle or for death. Confession and Communion, on the
one hand; absolution. Holy Viaticum and Extreme Unction, on
the other: the Catholic men do know what to look for when
the priest is beside them.
One wonders, too, how many non-Cafholic soldiers wear the
beads about their necks. It is a common sight: and the new
Chaplain not seldom mistakes such for members of his own
flock. A ready and probably true explanation comes from the
lips of a non-Catholic clergyman, in reply to the hazarded sug-
gestion that the men might look on them as a sort of super-
stitious charm. ** No, it is not quite as a charm. It is a tangible
symbol of religion of some kind for them. And your practice
of carrying the Sacrament for your men is tangible and prac-
tical, too. I myself*' — ^remember who is speaking — "have
adopted the plan of carrying the * sacrament * in a silver case,
so that my men may take it in the field." The man who spoke
those words wears a little silver crucifix, given to him, at his
request, by a priest: and he does not bear it either as a super-
stition or a vain thing.
One could multiply such instances almost indefinitely.
They show a growing insight into the value — the deep religious
value — of Catholic practices. That non-essentials should
sometimes be mistaken for essentials is, in the circumstances,
not astonishing. It is the unfamiliar which strikes most
strongly on the mind, and compels attention — the procession
of Our Lady through the streets, the manifold wayside cruci-
fixes, the pain binit of the French churches, the repetition of
the prayers of the rosary, the elaborate ceremonies of the
liturgy. " Surely you are not obliged to carry all those things
with you when you go to say Mass," was a conunent heard by
the writer, with reference to the gorgeous vestments used in a
French cathedral on a great feast. A lack of understanding
and proportion in the mind of a non-Catholic is almost in-
evitable when he first comes to look on a religious system so
closely coordinated as the Catholic. In order to understand
any one part of it properly, it must be understood in its rela-
tion to the whole. Otherwise it tends to appear grotesque and
monstrous. Consider, for example, a devotion such as that
which Catholics pay to the Blessed Virgin. Were it trans-
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1918.] BROTHER CHAPLAINS 151
planted — the devotion and the doctrine it exemplifies — into a
purely Protestant theological environment, it would undoubt-
edly be out of place; for, so long as Protestants continue to
think that honor paid to Our Lady must be honor taken from
God, so long they could not join in the Catholic devotion to
her without idolatry. It is only when it is conceived in its
place in the ensemble of Catholic dogma and practice, as a
consequent of the divinity of Christ, and in its relation to the
absolute and divine Sovereignty, that it has a reasonable and,
indeed, an irresistible claim upon us.
This not all Protestants realize, although many of them
are beginning to see it in its true perspective among the other
beliefs and practices of the Catholic Faith. Their tributes to
our organization, to the beauty and humanity of our religious
doctrines — ^such as that which justifies prayers for the dead, or
our attitude towards the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar — are
spontaneous acknowledgments of the worth of individual
truths. But these can never be "individual truths" for the
Catholic, who has in his religion one revelation in which all re-
ligious truths are coordinated and integrated, having their
full meaning and value in the whole. Though his non-Catholic
brethren do not perhaps fully realize or appreciate this abso-
lutely fundamental truth of the whole Catholic position, they
certainly do see something in the Catholic attitude in it
towards God and the things of God, to be admired.
The two ideals in presence are those of Divine Authority
and Human Liberty — authority in the sense of a definite and
determined divine revelation of the whole will of the Creator
in man's regard; liberty in the sense of a personal freedom,
guided in each case by the Spirit (for such is the belief of our
non-Catholic brethren) in determining the particular claims of
any given doctrine or command to one*s adherence. There
is, however, far more liberty in the system of authority than
they generally realize: for it is but one instance of the truth
making free, in the sense that all truth, religious or secular,
frees from error and its consequences. Equally is it exact to
say that the liberty claimed by Protestants in matters of reli-
gious opinion works out towards a quasi authority, even if
this be of little more weight than concerted approval.
Whatever may be true of non-C. of E. Protestant Churches
and clergymen at home, they appear to have few or no funda-
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152 BROTHER CHAPLAINS [Nov.,
mental religious differences out here as Chaplains, and min-
ister impartially and acceptably to the men of any Protestant
denomination.
Living, as one does, much with them^— often, for instance,
in the same mess : visiting the same hospitals, serving the same
battalions — the Catholic Chaplain comes to know, and to esteem
as men, his Protestant brethren. There are occasional theolog-
ical discussions, sometimes polemics: but all, as a rule, con-
ducted on the lines of quite academic argument. No blood is
shed, and rarely is temper lost; for no matter how keenly and
whole-heartedly a Chaplain may hold to his guns, the ameni-
ties of the situation keep him within the limits prescribed by
the social code.
It is supposed to be bad form to talk either religion or
politics in a mess — probably because of the strong feelings
likely to be disturbed by a discussion of either topic. But, as
this War has developed a new sort of mentality among of-
ficers and soldiers, so has it brought about a new tolerance in
the matter of subjects of discussion at mess. Political person-
alities and their doings are criticized and apologized for as in
purely civilian circles; and the keenness with which religious
subjects are often raised is an indication that they are of suf-
ficient interest to allow a departure from an old, and a very
wise, rule.
However it may be, these questions are ventilated from
time to time; and the Catholic priest often feels that he has his
finger upon the pulse of the non-Catholic heart when he hears
the opinions that are voiced, and the reasoning adopted, by his
Protestant friends. His opportunity, perhaps, has never been
so great as this for understanding the strength of its appeal to
human nature, and at the same time the weakness of the non-
Catholic position. That there is a strength in it, is not to be
denied. Its appeal to the individual is strong — to his personal
feeling, his abhorrence of interference, his love of self-
determination. He is, or thinks himself to be, free in other
things: why not in this? He is free to hold whatever political
opinions he wishes, to be a conservative or a liberal, or to be-
long to no party at all; to believe in protection or free-trade
as he pleases. Why should he not be free to believe what he
chooses in religion? The idea of authority is irksome to most
people, even if it be a constituted and legitimate authority.
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1918.] BROTHER CHAPLAINS 153
But in this matter the Protestant contends that he is the
authority.
On the other hand, the weakness of the position lies in the
extreme vagueness of its fundamentals, in the indeterminate-
ness of its theology, in its substitution of trust for faith, in its
lack of logical coherence. One Chaplain — he happened,
though, to belong to the C. of E. — actually made a boast of this
last point to the present writer, with the remark that he dis-
trusted the intrusion of logic into Religious matters. " That's
the worst of you Roman Catholics," he wound up : " you are
so logical! " But the same Chaplain made use of a striking
phrase to characterize the certainty with which the priest
formulated a doctrine in his hearing. "That is the audacity
of the Roman Catholic Church ! " Audacity and logic. Some-
thing of a combination !
The fact that Catholic Chaplains, and therefore presum-
ably other Catholic clergymen have always the same answer in
substance to give to the same question regarding religion,
strikes our non-Catholic brother Chaplains with no less force
than the fact that they know exactly what to do for their men
in emergencies. And the Protestants have come to realize,
already to a very large extent, that this is not merely due to our
accepting oiu: doctrines blindly from "Rome," and having
learned parrot-wise, in college and seminary, the questions and
answers of a kind of glorified catechism. They have come to
see that there is such a thing as systematic theology in the
Catholic Church, and that, once granted the principles, the
conclusions follow from them. They have found that the
Catholic is not altogether unintelligent in matters other than
religious; and realize that there must be some sort of justifica-
tion for his holding as true, doctrines which they cannot see
their way to accepting, which, indeed, they have been taught
to regard as false. But they will very generally admit that he
can make out a good hypothetical case for his attitude and
beliefs, provided his view of revelation once be granted him.
And that, of course, is the great crux and dividing line between
the Catholic and the Protestant religions. But it is all to the
good that understanding has progressed as far as it has.
I prefaced the present article with the statement that I
proposed to write in the main from the point of view of the
diflferences of the doctrinal positions of the Chaplains. Is
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154 BROTHER CHAPLAINS [Nov.,
there nothing upon which they can agree? Has their merely
social intercourse, their human comradeship, cemented in com-
mon dangers of mutilation and death, done nothing to draw
them more closely together in the religious life?
That is a consunmiation scarcely to be hoped for. The
Catholic remains a Catholic, and the Protestant a Protestant
Chaplain, though each may have come to know the other per-
sonally a little better, esteem him a little more highly, and
appreciate his honesty and good faith more thoroughly than
before. The non-Catholic has evolved a view, during the
course of the War (though, perhaps, it lay hidden in his prin-
ciples all the time) strikingly akin to our doctrine regarding
the soul of the Church: and he is not only willing, but sym-
pathetically anxious, to act upon it and to put such Catholic
soldiers as he may meet with in hid pastoral search among
the scattered troops, into touch with their nearest priest, or to
advise the latter as to where stray members of his flock are to
be found. As to ** communicating in divine things," of course
that is out of the question; and must, from the very nature of
the case, remain an impossibility.
Sometimes, in the stress of operations, or because of dis-
tance and lack of time, it has happened that funerals have
been taken by clergymen of another faith than that of the
dead soldier. At times this is inevitable. The last and official
mark of respect is paid to one who gave up life for his country.
Should a Catholic so be buried, his last resting place can re-
ceive the blessing of Holy Church later on, and his memory
brought before his Maker in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
But with the living, what? The writer remembers being asked
by a young minister, just as the great battle of the Somme was
about to commence, what he could do for Catholics who might
be badly wounded, or dying, if a priest were not to be found.
He received the obvious answer: " Help them to make an act
of contrition.** The phrase was unfamiliar to him, and needed
explanation. " Tell them to ask God's pardon for their sins,
because by them they have offended so infinitely good a Father
and God.** And the Simple Prayer Book for Soldiers was put
into his hands, and the homely, familiar acts of faith, hope,
charity and contrition shown to him.
The organization of the Chaplains, during that offensive,
was already so complete that it would have been difficult for a
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wounded Catholic to pass down the lines of evacuation with-
out seeing his priest and having ample opportunity for re-
ceiving the sacraments. But I like to think of that young min-
ister, should the need have arisen, kneeling by the stretcher of
some one of our own poor boys in direst plight, and helping
him to resign his soul to God in the hallowed words of a
Catholic act of contrition. I know that, if in God's providence
the sacraments of Holy Church were denied to any of our
Catholic lads in their need. His overflowing mercy would com-
pass them about and His eternal arms uphold them. But I
like to think, when their poor, battle-wrought brains, and fail-
ing strength had borne them to the lethargy which has one
only issue, that some kind friend was there, even if he were
not an anointed priest consecrated to the sacred ministry,
whose hand would press in his the nerveless hand, whose
voice would pierce the creeping, growing, shrouding darkness;
who would rouse the fleeting mind with those old, familiar
words of truest sorrow for sin, so that, thrilled at the last by
sentiments of sorrow and of love, the happy soul should appear
before its Sovereign Good, radiant and triumphant, to receive
its recompense of everlasting blessedness.
Though they may not worship at the same altar, or pro-
fess the same belief, the Chaplains have learned during the
War to know each other; and have become, with all their dif-
ferences, brethren in the service of the troops. The Catholic
has learned to respect his " opposite number " for his human-
ity and zeal. He recognizes the many virtues by which he is
naturally distinguished. And for his part, the Protestant has
come to see something of the wide humanity and religious
value of that Church for which the Catholic stands. Though
he may not realize its divinity, he looks upon it with no little
admiration and respect.
And this is as it should be; for the Protestant makes his
Church, whereas the Church makes the Catholic.
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LAUS DEO.
BY THEODORE MAYNARD.
Praise! that when thick night circled over me
In chaos ere my time or world began,
Thy finger shaped my body cunningly,
Thy thouglit conceived me ere I was a man !
Thy spirit breathed upon me in the dark
Wherein I strangely grew,
Bestowing glowing powers to the spark
The mouth of heaven blew!
Praise! that a babe I leapt upon the world
Spread at my feet in its magnificence,
With trees as giants, flowers as flags unfurled.
And rain as diamonds in their excellence!
Praise! for the solemn splendor of surprise
That came with breaking day.
For all the ranks of stars that met my eyes
When sunset burnt away!
Praise! that there burst on my unfolding heart
The colored radiance of leafy June,
With choirs of songbirds perfected in art
And nightingales beneath the summer moon —
Praise! that this beauty, an unravished bride,
Doth hold her lover still;
Doth hide and beckon, laugh at me, and hide
Upon each grassy hill!
Praise that I know the dear capricious sky
In every infinitely varied mood.
Yet under her maternal wings can lie
The smallest chick among her countless brood!
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1918.] LAUS DEO 157
Praise! that I hear the strong winds wildly race
Their chariots on the sea,
But feel them lift my hair and stroke my face
Softly and tenderly!
Praise! for the joy and gladness Thou didst send
When I have sat in gracious fellowship
In firelight for an evening with a friend
When wine and magic entered at the lip!
For laughter, which the fates can overthrow.
Thy mercy did accord —
To Thee, Who didst our godlike joy bestow,
I lift my gla^s, O Lord!
Praise! that a lady leaning from her height,
A lady pitiful, a tender maid,
A queen majestical unto my sight
Spoke words of love to me, and gently laid
Her hand into my own ^inworthy hand.
(Rise, soul, to greet thy guest.
Mysterious love, whom none shall understand —
Through love be all confessed!)
Praise! that upon my bent and bleeding back
Was stretched some share of Thy redeeming cross.
Some poverty as largess for my lack.
Some loss that shall prevent my utter loss!
Praise! that Thou gavest me to keep joy sweet
The bitter salt of pain !
Praise! for the weariness of questing feet —
That else might quest in vain!
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ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA,
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
XL
HE Saviour made a strange remark to the Phari-
sees. He told them they "would not see Him
again till they said : * Blessed is He that cometh
in the name of the Lord/ '* *
In the Lukan account, Jesus is journeying
lowards Jerusalem when the remark finds utterance on His
lips. A group of Pharisees, evidently with a view to frightening
Him out of the territory of Herod Antipas into their own juris-
diction of Judea, approach Jesus with the warning to betake
Himself at once from that region, as Herod was openly resolved
upon compassing His destruction. The Saviour bids them go
tell that crafty fox of theirs that the future course of the Mes-
sias is determined, and not subject to the will of Herod, until
His work is done. " It is ordained of God that I go on My way
hence today, tomorrow, and the day following, because it is
not fitting" — ^in view of her long list of kindred crimes! —
" that a prophet should perish out of Jerusalem.'* * A most
cutting and ironical statement in regard to them and theirs.
It was as if the Lord had said : " Take no alarm for My
safety in Herod's dominions. I am now on My way to the Jew-
ish Capital, where death awaits Me, not from Herod's hands,
but from yours." After saying which, the Lord laments over
Jerusalem, the stoner and slayer of the prophets, the city that
refused to come to safety when He called. " Behold," He next
adds with solemn emphasis, " your house shall be left to you a
desert waste. And I say to you, you shall not see Me, till it
come that you shall say: 'Blessed is He that cometh in the
name of the Lord.' " * In St. Matthew's account, the remark is
reported at the end of the Lord's arraignment of the Pharisees
for their crimes. Jesus threatens " the sons of them that slew
the prophets " with dire disaster to their city and themselves.
^Matt xxill. 39; Luke xiii. 35. * Luke xlli. 31-33. xX^v 5et [u.
• Luke xlii. 34, 35.
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"Behold, your house is left to you desolate," He tells them;
a prophetic future in a present tense. " For I say to you, from
now on, you shall not see Me, till you say: * Blessed is He that
cometh in the name of the Lord.* " The remark was made on
the occasion of the Saviour's last visit to the temple, and draws
added significance from that fact. There is nothing inherently
impossible in its having been uttered twice, and under con-
ditions substantially similar, as reported by the first evangelist
and the third.
To what point of time was the Lord referring when He
made this impressive declaration? Palm Sunday? It is not
an event of sufficient magnitude; nor did the Pharisees pro-
claim Him the Blessed One on that occasion. The Final Ad-
vent? St. Matthew never uses the bare phrase "coming" to
designate that glorious event; nor does the New Testament
anywhere assure us that the Pharisees will welcome the re-
turning Christ with hymns of praise.* The conversion of the
Jews throughout all time? The supposition does not fit the
context. The Lord is speaking of an event which His hearers
are to live to witness; He is not referring to generations yet to
be. Something more immediate is in view — a recognition
wrung from minds rebellious, that have at last been forced to
see. May we venture to propose an altogether new interpreta-
tion, capable of critical establishment, and not the mere
product of uncontrollable surmise? The time indicated is the
destruction of the temple, and the " coming " of which Jesus
speaks is His " coming in His Kingdom with power."
Grammar and criticism are not without their urgings for
the acceptance of this view. The causative particle "for,"
which introduces this verse in the Matthean text, directly con-
nects it with the verse preceding: "Behold, your house shall
be left to you a desert waste." '^ The employment of this par-
ticle clearly compels us to regard what the Pharisees are to
see and say, as connected with the laying-waste of their house,
unless grammar be of no moment in the threshing of the prob-
lem. The presence of this connecting link bids us look for the
time and manner of the " coming," as also of the " seeing " and
the " saying," in the desolation that is to befall the House of
* On the contrary. It is said that " all the tribes of the land shall mourn," on
that occasion. Matt. xxiv. 30.
» AiY<i> Y<ip 6liiv* 06 iifi lie Xlrtis ir.* 5pT(. The " Me " is enclitic, not emphatic
in both accounts. Matt xxiii. 39; Luke xiii. 35.
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160 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Nov.,
Aaron, when "the sceptre passes from Juda," and the power
of the Jewish priesthood is crushed. A study of the grammar
of the verse in the Matthean text plainly indicates this particu-
lar point of time as the period of fulfiUment. And that the
House of Aaron is meant, appears not only from the fact that
the persons addressed are the Pharisees, but also and more
strikingly, from the verse of the psalm which the Saviour is
quoting; it was the part assigned to the priest in the chanted
thanksgiving for victory .•
The connection between the "coming" here mentioned
and the laying-waste of the House of Aaron, is as clear from
the standpoint of criticism as from the lesser arid more
mechanical lights of grammar. The whole drift of the twenty-
third chapter of St. Matthew is against the likelihood of the
Lord's ever saying to the Pharisees that they would see Him
again, in any other sense or manner than by an exhibition of
sovereignty or show of power. Jesus has just finished a flay-
ing denunciation of the priestly class for shutting the Kingdom
of Heaven against men; for consuming the mite of widows in
the name of religion; for their low manner of making
proselytes; for the blind guidance which they gave the peo-
ple on the taking of oaths; for leaving the heart unclean, and
identifying morality with external conduct; for looking to the
beauty of outward appearance, and not building character up
and onwards from within; and, finally, for their insincerity in
honoring the tombs of the prophets whom their fathers foully
slew. After this sevenfold indictment, Jesus tells the Pharisees
that He will give them an opportunity to fill up the measure of
their forebears, by the " new prophets, wise men, and scribes,*'
whom He shall send among them, to be scourged, hunted down,
and slain; that upon their heads may come all the just blood
shed in the land, from Abel to Zacharias, who was hewn down
between the temple and the altar. And lest there may be any
mistaking of the time when the threatened blow is due to fall.
He tells them that it will descend upon the present generation,
and laments over the Jerusalem that refused to recognize the
Divine Visitant within her walls, and went on, unheeding, to
her doom.^ " Judgment, mercy, and faith " had pressed their
gentler claims in vain.* The time was ripe for a more drastic
method of instruction, to let the Jewish priesthood see that it
•Ps. cxvll. (cxvlii.), 26. »Matt. xxlll. 4-39. •Jfott. xxlli. 23.
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could not withstand the word of God, without national death.
Jerusalem is the centre of thought in the Matthean and Lukan
accounts; and the acknowledgment of the "Blessed One" is
clearly connected with its fate.
The second person of the verbs employed, the adverb of
time henceforth, and the solemn assurance that "all these
things shall come upon the present generation,'* leave room for
no other supposition. It is impossible to prove, and suspicions
are not evidence, that the prophecy refers to the Final Com-
ing, or that this event is expected within the generation then
alive. The thought is not of impending judgment for mankind
in general; it is limited to the governing class in Israel, by all
the grammatical indications of the text. Jesus does not say
that the whole inhabited earth shall be laid waste. He says:
"Behold, your house shall be left to you desolate." Nor is
there any mention of glory or the angels, as would, of a surety,
have been the case, from all that we have thus far found, had
St. Matthew understood this verse in connection with the Re-
turn. We are, therefore, shut to the conclusion that Jerusalem
is the reference intended in the " acknowledgment of the
Blessed One," which the Lord predicts; and the sole question
is how we shall best proceed to determine the meaning of this
prophetic verse.
The safest way is to study all that has intervened between
the first and second occasions of its use. When the Saviour
rode into Jerusalem on the Sabbath of the Palms,® the people
strewed the streets with garments and green boughs, shouting
all the way to the temple, and even within its walls : Hosanna
to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of
the Lord: Hosanna in the highest! The chief priests and the
scribes, indignant that Jesus should allow Himself to be
acclaimed with these Messianic titles, sought to have Him re-
strain the throng and disavow their plaudits. " Hearest Thou
what these say?" they indignantly asked Him. "And Jesus
answered. Yes; have you never read: *Out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise?* " ^® The com-
plete verse — ^Jesus quoted only the first half — expresses the
purpose of this " perfecting of praise," in the significant words :
" Because of Thine adversaries, that Thou mayest silence the
•Matt. xxl. 5-11.
»• - strength," " power," In Hebrew original.
TOL. cnn. — 11
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162 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Nov.,
enemy and the vengeful one." ** As thus quoted in answer to
the remonstrance of the Pharisees, it meant that the governing
class in Israel were incapable of the spontaneous recognition
which the people gave, when, but shortly before. He rode into
Jerusalem, as prophesied, on "a colt the foal of her that is
used to the yoke." " Every incident narrated, every quotation
made, and every parable uttered between the time of His tri-
umphal entry into the City and His telling the Pharisees that
they would yet acknowledge Him as the " Blessed One," has
this incapacity of the rulers for its theme. The incident of the
barren fig tree;** the questioning of His authority;** the
Parables of the Two Sons," the Wicked Husbandmen,*** and
the Marriage Feast; *^ the three attempts to involve Him in a
treasonable, ludicrous, or blasphemous utterance; *® and,
finally, the embarrassing question which He asked the Phari-
sees about David's Son and Lord," all this steady growth of
statement and demurrer shows the hostility of the Govern-
ment to His Person, their unwillingness to receive His message,
and the failure of all the efforts of Jesus to disabuse them of
their views. The whole thought of the narrative sheers away
from Hosannas of acclaim and hymns of benediction to a note
of another sort — the refusal of the Pharisees to join the choir
of praise. Not to minds so closed as these, did the Saviour
ever say that He would come in any other sense or manner
than by a destructive show of power. The great offer had
again and again been made, only to be followed by the great
refusal. Israel had chosen; and her choice was national death.
Four quotations made by Jesus between His triumphal
entry and the utterance of the prediction in question, have very
instructive contexts in the original, from which He singled
them out — the "house of prayer;" the "den of thieves;" the
" Stone which the builders rejected;" and the " Son of David,
Who also is His Lord." We have the best of evidence that the
Pharisees caught the new un-Jewish meaning which Jesus gave
to these four citings from their Sacred Books. Anger and
resort to cunning are not natural psychological reactions,
when things wholly to one's suiting have been announced. And
the recorded mental reactions of the Government to the words
" Ps. vlll. 3. " Matt. xxl. 5. " Matt. xxl. 18-22.
"Matt. xxl. 23-27. "Matt. xxl. 23-32. "Matt. xxl. 33-46.
"Matt xxli. 1-14. "Matt. xxli. 15-40. "Matt XXU. 41-45.
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of Jesus go clearly to show that neither He, nor His leal re-
porters, shared the moribund world-view of the times. Great
Teacher that He was. He sent His hearers to the sources, that
they might see for themselves, without His telling them for-
mally, what was there. And they had this advantage, that
they knew by heart what we must find by delving.
When Jesus expelled the tradesmen who had turned the
temple into a place of barter. He said to them : " My house
shall be caUed the house of prayer, but you have made it a den
of thieves.'* ^^ The first part of this quotation is from Isaias,
and in the original has the very instructive addition: "My
house shall be called the house of prayer for all nations " ^^ — a
piece of corrective teaching reported in full by St. Mark," who
also tells us that upon its hearing, the officials "sought how
they might destroy Him" for His words.'** They had seen
through text to context, and knew it was of them and their
destruction that He spoke. The latter half of the quotation —
it was about " the den of thieves " — ^is taken from Jeremias;**
and when we turn to the original context in which it lay em-
bedded, we find the Lord declaring that *' He will do to this
House, and to the place which He has given them and their
fathers, as He did to Shiloh ^^ for the wickedness of His people
Israel '* *• — namely, " cast them out of His sight,*^ make their
carcasses meat for the fowls of the air,*® and lay waste their
land." *" All of which goes to confirm the conclusion already
substantiated in the fifth study, that the " coming of the Son of
Man " at the end of Israel shall not be the glorious Advent ex-
pected, but defeat and destruction. And the effectiveness of
the Lord's method of teaching — He taught by suggestion rather
than through open statement — ^may be seen in the resolve of
the Government to destroy the Prophet Who dared beard it
with such a threatening picture of what lay in store.
The two other quotations in this section — one from the
psalm Confitemini and the other from the Dixit Dominus —
we shall consider the latter first — ^paint this picture still more
positively, and prove its truth with telling force and point.
When the Pharisees questioned Jesus about the "greatest
conmiandment in the law," •* they expected that He would lay
Himself open to the charge of blasphemy, by claiming Divine
"•Matt xxl. 13. B Isaias Ivl. 7. »Mark xl. 17. »Mark xi. 18.
••Jer. vU. 11. »Jer. vH. 14. "Jer. vU. 12. "Jer. vU. 15.
»Jer. ▼!!. 33. "Jer. vll. 34. "Matt. xxU. 34-40.
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164 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Nov.,
honors as " the Son of God." Jesus kept well withm the bounds
of Deuteronomy,*^ merely quoting its text, and saying nothing
of Himself in His reply. Soon afterwards, however. He put
the Pharisees a question that filled them with confusion.
"What seemeth it to you about the Christ? Whose Son is
He?" And they answered: "David's." Whereupon the
Saviour asked them: "How then doth David in the Spirit
call Him Lord, saying: *The Lord said to My Lord, sit Thou
on My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool?
If David then call Him Lord, how is He His Son? ' " "
The psalm ** to which Jesus thus referred His questioners
needs to be quoted in full before the thought that lay behind
its citing becomes open to discovery. Accordingly we append
Professor Briggs* translation, not that we are thereby making
his views ours, but simply to secure a text that is considered
free from gloss.
Utterance of Yahweh to my lord: Sit enthroned at My right
hand.
Till I make thine enemies a stool for thy feet.
With the rod of thy strength, rule in the midst of thine enemies.
Volunteers on the sacred (mountains) are thy people in the
day of thy host.
From the womb of the morn, come forth to thee the dew of thy
youth.
Yahweh has sworn. He is not sorry: "Thou art a priest
forever."
My (lord) at (His) right hand doth smite in the day of His
anger.
He executeth judgment on kings. He doth fill the valleys with
nations.
He doth smite chiefs, (going over) a wide land,
(An inheritance) on the way he maketh it, therefore He is
exalted.**
In the original, the Messias is presented " as sitting at the
right hand of Yahweh, with a strong sceptre to overcome His
enemies. People volunteer for the war in multitudes like dew-
drops at dawn (vv. 1-3) . An oath of Yahweh makes Him priest
forever (v. 4) . He goes to war, overcomes kings and nations,
a Dent vl. 5.
"Matt xxll. 43, 45; Mark xU. 36, 37; Luke xx. 42-44. The accounts vary sUghtly.
»Ps. cxvU. (cxvlll.). •*P$alm$, Brlggs, p. 373.
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1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 165
and is finaUy exalted in victory." ** Propterea exaltabit caput
His sovereignty is to be slowly won after widespread strife.
This is the idea expressed, however much the readings may
vary. He shall be King by himian choice no less than by Divine
selection. The world is to be won after widespread strife.
This picture of the Messias, sitting enthroned at the right
hand of the Father, and ruling thence with the rod of His
strength in a world of enemies; overcoming an indefinite num-
ber of kings and nations, by an army composed wholly of
volunteers: smiting the leaders of His enemies over a wide and
far-away land; ta£:ing possession of this extensive battlefield
of the enemy, as His inheritance; "® and coming to the joy of
victory and sovereignty, only when such a far-flung area of
conflict had actuaUy been covered by His victorious arms —
this is not the swiftly conquering Messias of Jewish expecta-
tion, Who was to sit enthroned at Jerusalem after having over-
come His enemies in a short campaign. It is another and quite
opposite portrait of the Elect One. "The same utterance
which enthrones Him makes Him priest, and this was in the
covenant of David at the institution of the dynasty, and is a
very different conception from the reestablishment of the
Kingdom" »^
What was the object of Jesus in asking the Pharisees their
opinion concerning the Christ? for such is really the nature of
His question.*^ Was it to prove His Divine Sonship, or to cor-
rect their misconceptions of the expected Christ? Both; with
the preponderance of intention leaning towards the latter. The
official theologians did not conceive of the coming Christ as
"Son of God" in the literal sense. That thought was blas-
phemous in their eyes; and they framed the question about
" the greatest commandment of the law," to see if Jesus would
openly make the claim. He did something far more effective.
He made them see their own view of the Christ and the King-
dom, shattered before their eyes in the verse of a Messianic
psalm. If the Pharisaic conception of the Messias as a vic-
torious human King reigning in state at Jerusalem were true —
how came it, Jesus asked them, that David said He would sit
enthroned at the right hand of the Lord in heaven, until His
** Professor Brlggs' analysis. Psalms, p. 373. Italics ours.
* Compare Ps. 11. 8. ** Psalms. Brlggs, p. 375. Italics ours.
* t{ &(ikfv 5oxtI xepl ToG XptoToG; Matt xxll. 42. — For same constmctioD* see
Haft xyU. 25, xvlll. 12» xxl. 28, xxU. 17, xxtI. 66.
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166 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Nov.,
enemies on earth had been made the stool of His feet? When
the two relations of sonship — the Davidic and the Divine —
were thus powerfully brought to their attention, the Pharisees
saw that they had lost out in the mental contest, as the Sad-
ducees*" before them, and forbore questioning Him further.
The simple picture of the Messias reigning in heaven and con-
quering on earth had put the theologians of the Synagogue to
confusion. This was neither their view of the Kingdom, nor
their conception of its King.
Does the force of the Lord's reasoning in this particular
instance depend on His having thought that David wrote the
psalm from which He quotes? Not necessarily, not demon-
strably. Even granting, but not conceding, that the Davidic
authorship were disestablished, the Lord's knowledge would
in nowise be involved. His argument is not necessarily based
on David's being the author of the psalm, but on his being the
spokesman in whose mouth the words are put by the psalmist;
and the words so put retain their Messianic reference to the
seed of David,^^ in the covenant made with the latter, when the
Lord caUed him from the sheepcote to be prince over His peo-
ple Israel. So that, by whomsoever written, their Messianic
significance would still remain, and the Lord's argument be as
strong as ever in its point.*^ For its point is the contrast be-
tween the Divine Lord of the inspired Psalmist and the human
World-King of Rabbinical speculation.
A striking proof that the question put to the Pharisees on
this occasion had for its aim the correction of their views con-
cerning the Kingdom and its King, is furnished by the Lord
Himself in His answer to the High-Priest at the trial.** When
Caiphas asks Him if He is the Christ, the Son of God, Jesus not
only replies in the aflBrmative, He draws the same twofold pic-
ture of His reigning in heaven and ruling among His enemies
on earth. " Besides,^ I say to you, from now on,^^ you shall see
the Son of Man sitting *^ on the right hand of Power and com-
ing on the clouds of heaven." The Saviour's doctrine of the
Christ and the Kingdom could not be more succinctly sum-
marized than in this dual picture of His sitting enthroned at
•Matt zzil. 34.
«»2 Sam. vli. 12; Ps. bcxxvlil. (Ixxxix.) 4, 36, 49; cxxxl. (cuxU.) 11.
^ The Biblical Commission, Dubium, V., May 1, 1910, prohibits the speciHc denial
of the Dayidic authorship of this psalm. «*Matt xxvi. 63, 64.^
*■ xX^iv, *• ox' 5pTc. *• xdcOixAsc — Matt xxU. 44 has same verb. "^
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the right hand of Yahweh, and coming on the clouds from that
time on. He is not to reign in state at Jerusalem, as the Jews
expected; and the Kingdom in which He is to come is an his-
torical one, the growth of which, in its component volunteers.
His judges themselves shall live to see. The grammatical like-
ness of the ** sitting " here mentioned, to the first verse of the
psalm, with which the Lord challenged the Pharisaic concep-
tion of the Messias, is very noticeable; and the adverb of time
employed to describe both the "sitting" and the "coming"
clearly indicates that the participles** are employed in the
sense of a progressive process, and not in that of a single event.
It is the Psalmist's picture of Yahweh's activity in putting down
the enemies of the King; and the activity of the King's people —
the " volunteers fresh as drops of dew;" and as abundant, who
are to make the nations His inheritance. In other words, the
Saviour solemnly declares to Caiphas that He is indeed the
Christ, the Son of God; immediately correcting, however, the
Jewish conception of His " reigning " and His " Kingdom." The
words had a political sense in the minds of the High Priest and
the Roman governor, which Jesus disavowed, by asserting that
He is, indeed, the Messias, but not the kind expected, either in
His Person, or in the Kingdom which He came to found. And
it was exactly this same thought that He wished the Pharisees
to realize through a re-reading of the psalm. He instructed
His friends and enemies to the last; and in the fiery midst of
such opposition as He met, Jesus was too discerning ever to
have said or thought that a folk so minded would either
acknowledge or acclaim Him with shouts of thanksgiving as
the " Blessed One." We have His own sacred word for it that
" all the tribes of the land shall mourn," not that they shall re-
joice, " when they see the Pierced One returning." *^ And for
this reason alone, had we not the numerous others mentioned,
the Saviour was not speaking of His Second Advent, when He
told the Pharisees that they "would not see Him from that
time on, until they said: * Blessed is He that cometh in the
name of the Lord.' "
So n^uch for the simple glories of meaning hidden in the
Dixit Dominus, until the Lord's answer to Caiphas revealed
**>ta6^t«vov. ipx6^ievov.t Cor. xv. 25-28; Ephes. I. 20-23; Col. 111. 1; Heb. i. 13; 11.
8; X. 12, 13; 1 Peter 111. 22 prove that an historical process Is meaut
^ Matt. xxW. 30.— Apoc. 1. 7 has a different application of the prophecy.
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168 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Nov.,
their presence. The last quotation — the fourth — is now be-
fore us; and in it lies the key to what Jesus meant, when He
predicted His acknowledgment by the Pharisees. "Have ye
never read in the Scriptures : * The Stone which the builders
rejected, the same has become the Head of the corner? By the
Lord this hath been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes.*"** The
Saviour has just finished the Parable of the Wicked Husband-
men, in which He explains the coming of the Lord of the Vine-
yard as the destruction of Israel and her superseding by an-
other folk. Some of the officials present, when this Parable
was uttered, took exception to its being scrip turally founded;*"
and Jesus confronted them with the quotation just mentioned,
as proof that Israel is to have no triumphant rising when she
falls.»«
In the original of the Psalm ConfiteminU^^ from which the
Lord is quoting, we have a very imposing scene. A procession
is passing through the streets of Jerusalem on the way to the
Temple. The leader calls upon three classes — House of Israel,
House of Aaron, and them that fear the Lord^-io say the litur-
gical phrase appropriate to the situation. The chorus re-
sponds with the phrase: "His kindness endureth forever.*'
Whereupon the solo proclaims the deliverance of Jerusalem
from "the nations that encompassed her, as bees encompass
wax '* — an allusion to the vain attempts of the Gentiles to de-
prive Israel of her national existence, the latest failure to
achieve that purpose being the defeat of Antiochus, King of
Syria. "Hark! a shout of joy and victory! The right hand
of Yahweh is exalted. The right of Yahweh performeth
valiantly."
The procession reaches the gates of the Temple. " Open
to me the gates of Zedek, that I may enter therein to give
thanks to Yah." The chorus replies: "The Stone that the
builders rejected has become the Head of the corner.*' The
priest responds: "From Yahweh this has come. It is
wonderful in our eyes." Finally the chorus declares : " This
is the day which Yahweh hath made. Let us exult and be glad
in it." Whereupon the priest closes with the blessing:
"Blessed is he that cometh in the name of Yahweh." The
«Matt. xxi. 42-44.
« Luke XX. 16. " Which they heoHng said to Him: God forbid! "
■•For proof, sec The Catholic Wobld, May, 1918, pp. 165-167.
» Ps. cxvU. (cxviil.).
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crowds disperse; the celebration of the festival of victory is at
an end.
The most striking thing in the interpretation of this psalm
by the Saviour is His substitution of the uerse, " Blessed is He
that Cometh," for the liturgical formula of thanksgiving: " His
kindness endureth forever.*' " This substitution changed the
whole nature of the psalm from a commemoration of victory
to an acknowledgment of defeat. By quoting the verse about
the " Blessed One that cometh," immediately after the caD of
the leader upon the House of Israel and the House of Aaron,
to say what was appropriate to the situation, Jesus put in the
mouth of the priesthood a recognition of that very sovereignty
which they refused to accord Him, when the King came into
Sion meek, and riding on a colt, the foal of her that was used
to the yoke." What His meaning was, the officials knew all
too well. He had recently interpreted the " Stone," in the sense
pure and simple of destruction; and it was from the very same
psalm that He drew His words. He had furthermore said
that when the Lord of the vineyard came, it would not be to
bring glory and rehabilitation to the sorely straitened, but " to
destroy those miserable men, and to let out the vineyard to
a folk more fruitful." ^* This interpretation of the " coming "
in the sense of inglorious destruction so incensed the priests
and scribes that, as St. Luke graphically tells us, " they sought
to lay hands on Him in that very hour^*^^ forbearing only
through fear of the populace. All three accourts testify to
the effect produced on the Government by this public denial
of Israel's expected glory.** And when Jesus told them that
what the priestly House of Aaron was to say when they saw
Him again, would be : "' Blessed is He that cometh in the name
of the Lord," and not: "The Lord's kindness endureth for-
ever," they knew that He was speaking of the overthrow of
the nation, and quoting in that most unfavorable sense a psalm
which had always been associated in their minds with the
indestructibility of Sion. Yahweh's kindness was not to en-
dure forever. The Blessed One coming in Yahweh's name
would not bring glory, but destruction. That was the mean-
ing; and His prediction of national death and disaster was all
the more galling, because a trimeter tetrastich of the psalm
" Jesus substitutes v. 26 for the last half of verses 1> 2, 3, 4, in Ps. cxvli. (cxvill.).
« Matt. xxl. 41. •* Luke xx. 17.
MMatt xxi. 42; Mark xU. 10, 11; Luke xx. 17.
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170 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Nov.,
which He quoted represented Israel as shouting : " I shall not
die, but live, and give thanks to Yah."'^^ Alas ! There would be
no cry: "Hark! a shout of joy and victory! " The hand of
the Lord " would, indeed, be exalted," but not to save. The
nations that "encompassed Israel as bees encompass wax"
would destroy her from the earth. The expected Parousia of
the Son of Man in glory would be a Parousia in destructive
might instead, and Jerusalem " would lie trodden of the Gen-
tiles, till the times of the Gentiles were fulfilled." " Where the
body (Israel) is, there shall the eagles (foreign armies) be
gathered together." " Behold, your House shall be left to you,
desolate." Jesus told the Pharisees on this occasion — ^He had
preached in Jerusalem before — exactly what He gave the dis-
ciples to understand on the Mount of Olives. The Benedictus
qui venit is no excerpt from the apocalyptic propaganda of the
year seventy, or thereabout; it is a most powerful contradic-
tion of Jewish expectation, a defiant rejection of the world-
view of the times.
The textual and critical drift of the twenty-first, twenty-
second, and twenty-third chapters of the First Gospel is un-
mistakably towards the conclusion that the Lord meant His
Return in Power, not His Return in Person, by the famous
verse about His eventual recognition by the Jewish govern-
ment and people. And if this were not enough to establish
conviction, we have the Lord's own personal avowal in the
twenty-fourth chapter that such, indeed, was the meaning
which He had in mind. When the disciples showed Him the
beautiful buildings of the temple. He declared that not a stone
of them would be left upon a stone, and that the generation
then living would witness the national disaster, without any
glorious coming of the Son of Man to appoint Israel to the
headship of the nations and the undisputed mastery of a
world made new. The simple but eflfective picture, which, by
a master-stroke of teaching. He drew forth from the Dixit
Dominus — the picture of the Christ sitting at the right hand
of the Father in Heaven, and progressively coming in a King-
dom of volunteers on earth, spelt the doom of Jewish expec-
tation, and left the educated Pharisees without an arrow of re-
ply in their well-stocked quiver. But why, if this were the mean-
ing, should Jesus use so realistic a form of expression as " You
" Pi. cxirll. (cxvill.) 17, 18.
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shall not see Me henceforth/* if He did not intend thereby His
personal reappearance? It is the sole difficulty remaining, and
one over which it is not unnatural for Western minds to
stumble.
The answer is furnished in the text itself, without there
being any need on our part to launch forth some frail argosy
of speculation that might or might not secure the proper clear-
ance-papers for its port of call. It will be remembered that
after the Parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, the Lord was
challenged by the officials of the Government to prove the
Scriptural basis of His threat, that the Parousia of the Son of
Man at the end of Israel meant death and destruction, not glory
and exaltation. The verse which the Lord flung at them in
reply, and flanked by positive proofs from other sources, was
a neighboring verse to that about the "Blessed One," namely:
** The Stone which the builders rejected, has become the Head
of the corner. From Yahweh this has come, and it is wonder-
ful in our eyes. Therefore I say to you, that the Kingdom of
God shall be taken away from you, and given to a nation
bringing forth its fruits. And whosoever shall fall upon this
Stone, shall be bruised; but on whosoever it shall fall, it shall
grind him into dust.'* "
Is it not to the wonder which the rejection of Israel, in-
stead of her exaltation, shall occasion in their eyes, that the
Lord is plainly referring when He speaks of their seeing Him
again? Is not this the kind of vision which He intimates, to
wit— prophecy realized and prediction fulfilled? And is it not
in this same sense of the necessary fulfillment of prophecy,
that the phrase, "Until you say" is added?
" let (the house of) Israel now say:
For His kindness endureth forever.
O let the house of Aaron now say:
For His kindness endureth forever.
let them that fear Yahweh now say:
For His kindness endureth forever.
It matters not that this liturgical formula of thanksgiving
violates the strophical organization in the present condition of
the psalm. The thought is the thing that matters, not tech-
"Matt xxi. 42-46. For commentary, see The Cathouc World, May, 1918,
pp. 165-167.
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172 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Nov.,
nique. The text of the Confitemini expressly states that the
testimony of the House of Aaron to the " Blessed One coming
in the name of the Lord " shall be given, as Jesus reinterpreted
the psalm, when the Stone rejected by the builders has become
the Head of the comer, and when this particular doing of the
Lord has excited wonder in their eyes.
All the words out of which the prediction of Jesus is built
are found in the original source, at least equivalently. The
" seeing '* and the " saying,'' the " henceforth " and the '' Me " "
— who can fail to detect their presence, actual or implied, in a
psalm which Jesus changed from a conmiemoration of past
victory into a future acknowledgment of defeat? Instead of
chanting hymns of praise and shouts of thanksgiving, the
priesthood. He tells them, will yet be made to confess that
Israel lost the cornerstone, when it rejected the Son of David
and withstood His word. The priestly class need not think it
can escape the Divine appointments. The testimony of the
House of Aaron, so indignantly withheld when the Saviour
came in meekness, shall yet be given when He comes in
strength.
The whole thought of text and context moves steadily
within the confines of prophetical necessity. Jesus tells the
Pharisees — what He has told them all along — ^that the Parou-
sia of the Son of Man shall not be to glorify Israel, but to re-
move her from His path. Not because of any change of mind
or heart shall their acknowledgment of Him come, but because
of the necessary fulfillment of prophecy. In view of the new
interpretation which Jesus gave to the " coming of the Son of
Man,'* and the distinction which He drew between the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem and His personal Return in glory — ^who
can doubt that He was speaking of the former event, not of the
latter, when He told the Pharisees that they "would not see
Him henceforth, until they said: * Blessed is He that cometh
in the name of the Lord? ' "
The Pharisees continued believing in the eschatological
King and Kingdom to the very end. It mattered not that Jesus
had arraigned the Government and pronounced its doom.
They trusted in their own reading of the Scriptures, and con-
fidently expected that the war with Rome would issue in their
everlasting favor. What Jesus foretold, came to pass instead.
" The ** Me " is enclitic, not emphatic.
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His wholly different doctrine of the Kingdom was brought to
realization, is being brought to realization still. He is still
** sitting on the right hand of the Almighty and coming on the
clouds," though this progressive coming is marked, as He said
it would be, by much " false teaching and want of love." Israel
was but a passing incident in the history of His Kingdom — the
beginning, not the end; and though the expectation of world-
disaster persisted long after the overthrow of the Jewish Com-
monwealth, like "winter lingering in the lap of spring,"
neither Jesus nor His reporters can successfully be charged
with having lent countenance to the opinion of their times.
Jesus preached the approaching destruction of Israel. He
never said that His Kingdom was to be consummated within
the generation then alive. A searching study of all that inter-
venes between the first and second mention of the "Blessed
One that cometh in Yahweh's name " puts this conclusion be-
yond the pale of doubt.
What must the surviving Pharisees have thought when
they saw the heathen arms victorious and the glorious Tem-
ple of their fathers ground to dust? Did no troubling flash of
hindsight on the triumph of the Nazarene's predictions come to
ruflQe their pride-blown spirits, when they beheld His reading
of the prophecies actually converted into history, and their
own made a memory full of mocking? And when they found
themselves reciting the verse: "Blessed is He that cometh in
the name of the Lord," did they not realize that they were
acknowledging Him, as He said they would, in the consecrated
language of the Seers? Not Sion, but He, was the indestruc-
tible cornerstone rejected by the builders. " He that hath (My
word of the Kingdom), to him it shall be given; but from him
that hath not, even that which he thinketh he hath, shall be
taken away."
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MUSIC AT THE FRONT.
BY LORNA WALSH.
USIC is the most eloquent tongue, the most power-
ful adjutant in all the ritual of war. The trum-
pet sounds the call to arms, and drums and fifes
steady the feet of the marching men. "The
^ heavenly maid becomes the Mother of Heroes.*'
In her notes are courage and fortitude; at her voice hunger and
fatigue are forgotten. We conquer or we die.
History is filled with her endless triumphs, for as far back
as we can see she has been war's inseparable companion. The
greatest commanders of all time, from the Caesars down to our
own General Pershing, have given almost as much attention
to the subject of music as to guns and training, although it is
not improbable that this most colossal War of long-distance
guns and trench warfare, in lessening the personal contacts,
relies less upon the powers of music than any previous strug-
gle of history.
The musical forces of the Allies, like their other forces,
were found in an unprepared state. Rudyard Kipling, plead-
ing for bands for the English regiments who were marching
off to the front in silence or with no better music than con-
certinas and whistles, pointed out that music was the reviver
of memories, that it quickened associations, opened the hearts
of men as nothing else can do, that it has always been the most
important element in the maintenance of the soldiers' morale.
" The roll and flourish of drums and fifes around a barracks is
as cheering as the sight of a fire in a room . . . discipline is
sweetened by melody and rhythm. No one can say for certain
just where the soul of a battalion lives, but the expression of
that soul is most often found in the band ... it stands to reason
that men, whose lives are pledged to each other, must have a
common means of expression. . . .^A wise and sympathetic
bandmaster feels and interprets their moods in music, or has
power to change that mood if need be. He can lift a battalion
out of depression, cheer it in sickness, and steady it in times of
almost unbearable stress."
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1918.] MUSIC AT THE FRONT 175
The chief prerogative of early battle music seems to have
been to terrify the enemy with all sorts of deafening and weird
noises : blowing of horns, beating of drums. These earliest of
war instruments were associated with many superstitions, an-
cient warriors believing that by rubbing the skin of the drum
against their thighs they became endowed with irresistible
strength. We may judge of the attitude of past ages toward war
music from the fact that through ancient, mediaeval, and mod-
ern times until within the past few centuries, all military
musicians, minstrels and instrumental players, and their in-
struments, were considered sacred, so many were the victories
attributed to their timely aid.
Rome, that greatest military centre of all time, plays the
most significant role in the history of miUtary music. The
Romans borrowed their brasses, woodwinds, and percussion in-
struments from the Egyptians, whose frescoed temples display
their vast array, and developed a most elaborate system of
music; the Greeks derived their instruments from the same
source, but being an artistic people, chose the smaUer types as
the flute, fife and lute. They considered the trumpet too emo-
tional for marching, appropriate for signaling only. The
Romans, on the contrary, had whole bands of trumpets, some
of them as long as twelve feet. The miUtary musicians must
have been Samsons in those days. There were also bands of
various other instruments. With the Romans originated the
practice of training troops to march in perfect time to drum
beats — the secret, it has been said, of their great victories — and
they were the first to have a permanent code of musical sig-
nals: trumpet, for "cavalry;" drum, for "foot."
A tremendous musical display appeared in the miUtary
triumphs of the Caesars, particularly in the "noisy days of
Augustus." After a great victory, it was customary for the
Senate to appropriate money for the brilliant entry into the
city of the victor and his army. A holiday was declared. To
quote from Macauley's Lays of Ancient Rome: " The grand
procession entered the city, headed by Uctors, clearing the way
for the Senate and the high officials, then followed players
upon the pipe and the lute, succeeded by the spoils of war,
art treasures borne by bay-crowned soldiers, on stands or
heads of lances . . . prisoners of war, with vanquished
leaders, perhaps a captive king. White oxen with gilded
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176 MUSIC AT THE FRONT [Nov.,
horns, were led accompanied by the priests who were to slay
them; and last, preceded by a throng of singers and musicians,
came the victorious general, standing erect in a four-horse
chariot, clad in an embroidered white robe, an eagle tipped
sceptre in his hand, a triimiphal wreath of gold held by a
slave above his head. Last came the army, and the great pomp
marched down the Sacred Way, through the Forum."
With the fall of Rome all knowledge of its vast military
system was lost for centuries. Meanwhile, the modern races
had come into being, the salient feature of the musical side
of their warfare being the rush into battle with war cries
and taunting songs.
William the Conqueror is the first modem king we read
of who made elaborate musical preparations for his conquests.
As he sailed forth for the invasion of England in 1066, ""his
ships resounded with music;" "a complete noise" or "big
noise," as bands were then called, and large bands of minstrels
were on board. The latter marched to battle singing the Song
of Roland, whilst the troops joined in the refrain of Dieu Aidi.
So many victories were attributed to the minstrels, they came
to be in great demand all over Europe. Men who had been
vagabonds, now became dignified officers with the princely
salary of twelve pence a day. William's time marked, too,
the beginning of military pomp, the days of fanfares and
superb court functions. The trumpeter was a creature of great
splendor, wearing the feather of nobility in his cap, ranking as
an officer; with his own horses and grooms, and even directing
military movements. Every noble houshold now had its min-
strels and trumpeters.
The Renaissance in the sixteenth centiuy brought notable
progress in the history of modern military music, with its
revelation of the vast military organization of the Romans.
Many new treatises were written on the " Art of War." An im-
portant one by Machiavelli in 1521, recommended the adoption
of the Greek flute and fife corps for marching. The Italians,
delighted to find that the Romans had had a permanent code
of military signals, and a substitute for the voice, set to work,
at once, to adopt them. The trumpeters of horse signaled for
"saddle," "mount," "mess," "march," "alarm," "charge."
The drummers for "foot," "march," "assault," "battle,"
" skirmish," " retreat." The training of troops to march in per-
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feet time was speedily adopted: this was followed by the re-
organization of all the armies of Europe and from this time
dates the foundation of the standing armies of kings and
nobles. Drimi and fife corps were in such demand that even
so powerful a monarch as Henry VIII. was unable to secure
these " wry necked musicians/' as he called them.
One cannot wonder they were scarce when one reads the
extraordinary list of accomplishments expected of them:
" they must be secret and faithful; ingenious in the use of their
instruments, and office of sundry languages, for ofttimes they
be sent to parley with their enemies, to summon their forts or
towns, to redeem or conduct prisoners, which of necessity re-
quireth languages."
But who would not have been a kettledrummer in those
days? Attached only to the noble regiments, he was a mag-
nificent creature, mounted on a gold chariot, drawn by six
white horses. He must die first, rather than have his guns
taken. On the other hand, he who captured enemy guns was
ennobled immediately. Grace as well as courage was expected
of the kettledrummer: "'he should have a pleasing motion of
the arm and an accurate ear "
Whilst honors thick and fast had come upon the military
musicians, our great composers were eating with the servants
in the kitchens of their noble patrons; no feathers of nobility
in their cap.
Such was the position of LuUy at the court of Louis XIV. :
he was the first great composer to have a share in shaping the
destinies of military music, arranging music for the bands in
four parts, for previous to his time fanfares, tunes, marches
had been played in unison.
A most thrilling event of the seventeenth century was the
descent upon Eiu'ope of the spectacular Turkish bands, " full
of irresistible music," of fife-shriek and cymbal-clash. Gigan-
tic blacks, gorgeously arrayed in brilliant, slashed tunics, and
high feathered turbans, performed all sorts of acrobatic feats
as they played, shaking cymbals, tamboiu'ines, jingling
johnies' — crescents outlined with countless bells mounted
on a long pole — over their heads, under the arms, between the
legs. A big novelty was the drum major twirling a baton with
skillfully easy air. The unspeakable Turk has been respon-
sible for a good many things, too terrible to mention, not the
▼OL. cvin. — ^12
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178 MUSIC AT THE FRONT [Nov.,
least among them our sad introduction to a vast assortment of
percussion instruments.
That apostle of militarism, Frederick the Great, founder
of the standing army of Prussia for conquest, ever on the alert
for all things military, sent to the Sultan for one of these bands
'' in full rigg." This great commander, talented musician and
flute player, was the first to see in a more cultivated system of
music a powerful means to popularize the military; he set
about to form a more harmonious combination of instruments,
known as harmonie music, which later became a favorite with
composers.
The coming of the greatest military genius of modem
times. Napoleon, brought another artistic advance: the band
of the National Guards under Siu'ette became world famous.
Surette was the founder of the first school of military music,
which formed the embryo of the Paris Conservatory. More-
over, it was the inspirational power of music on the English
side that put an end to Napoleon's dreams of world conquest.
It had been the custom to send bands to the rear whenever
a battle seemed imminent, but at Waterloo, when the English
soldiers were weary and starved and victory seemed uncertain,
Wellington reversed this rule, sending bands to the front to
play the National Anthem. This clever stroke of strategy
brought the refreshment and inspiration needed to produce
a victorious finish.
Soldier songs have played a very important part in modern
warfare, each nation having its own chants for marching, and
those for relieving the tedium of camp life; their power for
nurturing patriotism has never been equaled. The country
that gave a pension to the composer of the words and the
music of Die Wacht Am Rhein, certainly realized this fact.
Bismarck, that diplomatic framer of pretexts to start wars
against his neighbors, said: "It has been worth many regi-
ments to Germany." However, all the beautiful German war
songs had a noble origin in the hearts of men fighting for their
own fields. An English woman hearing that her country had
declared war against Germany, exclaimed : " I am not afraid
of their guns, their numbers, or their perfect organization, but
I am afraid of their songs." In the pocket of every Grerman
soldier is to be found his song book — The Good Comrade.
That solemn little word. Tod, death, seems to haunt nearly all :
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1918.] MUSIC AT THE FRONT 179
the soldier goes forth to meet death; he expects no other
end.
The English attitude embodied in their war songs is in
sharp contrast — the soldier takes leave of his family as though
he were going on a week-end trip; it would be very ill-bred to
hint that he might never return. They rather give expression
to the pleasant facts of war: cheer around camp fires, the glory
of victory. Tommy shocked Fritz as he met him with the flip-
pant, Tipperary: Fritz singing soberly his hymn-like tunes.
Rule, Brittania, Rule the Waves, that splendid song writ-
ten by Dr. Arne, in 1740, is doubly significant now. But when
all is said, it will be conceded, generally, that the most stirring
national song ever written is The Marseillaise, which proves
that the most skillful composers have not been the most suc-
cessful. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle wrote it while engaged
in active duty, as Captain of Engineers, at Strasburg, in 1792.
Since then it has inspired many a brave deed, as in the Franco-
Prussian war of 1870, during the battles around Sedan. In an
adjacent village, Bazeilles, defended for many hours by the
French against greatly outnumbering Bavarians, the former
seeing no reinforcements coming, gave up hope and started to
retreat, when an officer arrived to announce the coming of
troops. He was unable to stop the tide of fleeing soldiers, until
a happy inspiration seized him. Upon seeing a regimental
band drawn up on the side of the road, he shouted: *' La Mar-
seillaise, play it! " And the retreating soldiers stopped to join
in its patriotic notes long enough to form new columns and ad-
vance to victory.
The Italian camps are perfect nests of nightingales; there
are ceaseless bursts of song on plain and mountain top, even
Alpine frosts do not seem to chill the beautiful Italian voices.
A superior officer is solicitous, at once, for the health of a
songless soldier. The Alpine soldier must have^ an official
warning where he must not sing, such as the signs " Pericoloso
di Valanga" — danger of an avalanche — ^where the vibrations of
the voice in singing are apt to precipitate such a catastrophe.
The war song most popular with the Italians — The Young
Warrior — is by that talented American-negro composer,
Harry Burleigh, better known there, it would seem, than in his
own country.
Toscanini played an important part in the war news a few
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180 MUSIC AT THE FRONT [Nov.,
months ago, when his countrjrmen made a big advance on the
Austrians at Monte-Santo, the Italians with knives between
their teeth. Toscanini's band mounted higher and higher with
them, under fire from both sides, until he reached the summit,
all the while calmly leading, baton in hand, as though at a
concert. He was decorated for this bravery.
The American temperament, like that of other countries,
is reflected in its songs; a spirit of optimism, a care-free, jaunty
air pervades them, also an alertness, an electric spark, a wak-
ing-up note; there is the English attitude of refusing to look
on the dark side, as Send Me Off with a Smile, Pack All
Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag. Like all wars, our Civil
War had a great deal of music: John Brown's Body, the
most popular Northern marching song; Dixie, the favorite
Confederate one. In the retreat before Richmond, 1862, when
the Confederates were being driven back, one of the latter said
to a comrade : " Ifs no use. Rem, we won't lick the Yanks : look
what weVe been givin' *em and they're still singin' as if they
were goin' to a weddin'."
The most significant fact in regard to music in our camps
is the training of our soldiers to sing in large masses. General
Bell has been fully alive to the tremendous need of music in
the life of a soldier. " Singing men are fighting men," he said
at Camp Upton and at Plattsburg; " I wish each company to
learn new marching songs. It is well to march to battle with a
song on one's lips, and nothing will so unify the mind and spirit
as singing together in large groups."
Many of our most talented musicians have enlisted in the
service : Sousa is a Lieutenant in the United States Navy, train-
ing a band of players at the Great Lakes Naval Station, its
members to be sent out, in turn, to form new bands; Albert
Spaulding, the violinist, is with the forces in France, a Lieu-
tenant in the Signal Service of the Aviation Corps. The War
Department has placed song-leaders in all the camps — Avia-
tion, Ambulance, Army and Navy. Harry Barnhardt, the well-
known leader of community choruses, has planned the open-
ing of a school in New York for the training of song leaders
and the discussion of band problems.
As to the actual part played by music at the front just now,
the English Captain Dugmore has been telling us something in
his lectures of his life of two years at the French front. Every
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regiment has its own band, that plays, however, only within
eight miles of the front, and there are many song rallies.
Twenty-four hours before a charge a big concert is given,
attended by the thousands who are to go "over the top."
Music is depended upon to send them off in patriotic mood,
united in bravery and courage, "until death do them part."
No singing or music of any sort is, of course, permitted in
the first line of trenches, nor do any bands advance to battle,
with the exception of bagpipes which. Captain Dugmore says,
have been found necessary for a successful charge. The brave
pipers play under the fiercest fire, and they have succeeded in
turning the tide of battle when the men seemed ready to col-
lapse. The British navy has revived the use of bagpipes:
there is scarcely a ship without them now and some have whole
bands of them.
NOVEMBER VIGIL.
BY CHARLES PHILLIPS.
November whispers death, they say;
And on the wind a voice of grief;
And in the rustling of the leaf
A symbol of the ended day.
The sun is silver now, they cry,
And all its golden warmth is fled:
The chill of dying things or dead
Is on the air and in the sky.
And where but yesterday we strolled
By tuneful stream and flowery field.
Now all the watercourse is sealed,
The blossoms rotting in the mold.
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182 NOVEMBER VIGIL [Nov.,
And so have come the lonely years
Upon me, stealing without warning:
A golden eve — ^a silver morning! —
And where the dew was, only tears.
Yet O November of the skies
Of sapphire light and silver air,
I love you still ! I make a prayer
Of joy to you — not tears, not sighs,
But song! — ^because, whatever the flame
Of starry frost your blue nights bring.
Or withered green or vanished wing,
Life still remains to me the same —
Deathless and beautiful, though I
Mark it and measure it alone
Beside a grave-mound's fallen stone;
Beautiful, deathless, fair and high!
For now, because the air is clearer.
Swept by November's windy broom,
I see beyond the leaf-strewn tomb
Horizons that bring Heaven nearer;
And in the rustling of a leaf
That trembles on the sunken mound
The echo of a voice ! a sound
Of other things than tears and grief!
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JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY.
(18^2-1918.)
BY PETER GUILDAY, PH.D.
|N his funeral oration over Cardinal Lavigerie in
1892, Belgium's eloquent orator, Monseigneur
Cartuyvels, gave expression to a truth which
crystallizes the judgment posterity must form
upon the late Cardinal Farley.
Every man, he says, called by God to exercise a powerful
influence over his contemporaries, is conducted towards his
destiny almost by hand. Nothing is fortuitous in the span of
his life; a fatherly Providence enables him to find at every
moment all that is useful and necessary in the preparation for
his futiu-e ministry; and if the design of Providence finds in
such a man a docile and obedient subject, his entire life un-
folds itself with a divine logic.
That Cardinal Farley lived such a life — a life filled with
the divine logic that renders it simple to the beholder, is a
touchstone of understanding for us who saw him pass beyond
the shadows to his eternal reward. There had never been in
his heart any striving fot place or vantage in the leadership
of the Church. Promotion and success, from the viewpoint of
the world, and honor upon honor came to him during his long
span of seventy-six years. Truly, in looking backward now,
it may be recognized that the hand of the Almighty led him
from one post of importance to another until he reached the
highest princely honor, save the Papacy, the Church can con-
fer upon her sons. He died as he lived — simply, kindly, un-
affectedly. His last wish was to be brought home to the scene
of his many labors, for the parting would be easier and the
farewell less poignant in the midst of activities he had been
forced to lay down when his last illness came upon him.
The simplicity of his life was in vivid contrast to life's last
courtesy; for the stranger visiting New York on September
24, 1918, would have been met with what has been acknowl-
edged to be the most wonderful tribute ever paid to a dead
ecclesiastic. The scenes which took place that day, when the
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184 JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY [Nov.,
authorities of Church and State met to say farewell to the
remains of the august Cardinal, surpass description. The
splendor of his obsequies threw into arresting relief the motto
— non nobis Domine — ^which he had taken as the keynote of
his episcopate. Around his funeral casket stood the £hte of
the day — leaders of Faith and of Government, representatives
of America's Allies, detachments of soldiers and sailors, while
the streets around his Cathedral were blocked by the thou-
sands for whom there was no room within. What funeral
services, it may well be asked, ever outshone his in splendor?
Sad as all Catholic hearts were in the loss of their devoted
shepherd, it was but human to display to a world which gazed
ujpon them, the depth of their love for the man of God who
had led them from year to year in the way of righteousness.
At the very moment they were laying him down, thousands
of unseen hearts were breaking over the losses chronicled that
morning from the red-rimmed battle fronts of Europe. Death
had brought its dark mantle to the firesides of so many homes
in the episcopal city that there were few who gazed upon the
procession of ecclesiastics and laymen, thronging across the
space in front of the Cathedral to find their places within, who
did not feel that in the Cardinal's passing went the father of
them all. For a father he had been to all in his beloved city;
a father to all the gallant young souls who had left with his
benediction to fight the fight of justice and of right three thou-
sand miles across the sea; a father to the httle ones that filled
the schools and asylums of his diocese; a father to the religious
who daily taught them in these temples of learning; a father
to his priests, fellow-workers in Christ for the salvation of the
generation around them. A city mourned him; a nation con-
sidered his loss a calamity; the world saw in his passing an-
other broken link with a past which ever grows more dim with
time.
Of the many fine things said of the late Cardinal Farley in
the pubUc press at the time of his death, there is one which
will receive greater prominence as the years pass by. His
modesty, his gentleness, his energy and tact made themselves
felt in everything that he did; but it was only during this last
year when his country found itself in the throes of war, that all
the patriotic love he possessed, reached its fullness of life and
expression. The War showed him to be one of the most reso-
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lute patriots in the land. His message to the Catholic life of
America awakened every heart to whom the world crisis' had
brought its sacrifice. He will be remembered for many long
years as one of the kindliest figures that graced the metropoli-
tan See of New York. His keen sense of all that was orthodox
made him one of the theological leaders of the Church in
America. His place in the life of the nation will always have
the added prestige of his sturdy patriotism, and the blessing he
gave to our armies is one that will be enshrined in every his-
tory of the War.
No American of our time realized more keenly the mean-
ing of the world struggle which began in 1914. " We are fight-
ing," he said, " to uphold those ideals of political liberty and
freedom which guarantee to every nation, great and small,
peaceful possession of its territory, unhampered development
of natural resources and equal opportunity in industrial and
commercial competition." His constant prayer from the day
that America entered the conflict was that the God of battles
would give us justice, freedom and peace. John Cardinal
Farley stood for everything that America is fighting for — ^for
the restoration of honor and rectitude among the nations of
the earth; for the right of small nations in the pursuit ofjheir
own self-determination; for the emancipation of oppressed
peoples; for responsibility in government.
A life of such varied activities can hardly be described in
a simple way. Father Faber says somewhere in his letters that
every man has several biographies that run along parallel in
his life. To one in Cardinal Farley's position there were so
many demands upon his talents and energy, that it would be
diflScult to sum up in a word the net result of such a life both
to Church and State. His entire ecclesiastical career was spent
in and around the city of which he died the Cardinal Arch-
bishop. Of the three-score and sixteen years which were given
to him, almost sixty were spent in New York. His priesthood
spanned the pontificate of four Popes. Pius IX. he saw often
as a student in Rome. Leo XIH. he knew intimately; and his
aflTection for Pius X. was one of that saintly PontifTs happiest
possessions. He assisted at the election of the present Holy
Father, Benedict XV., in whom he saw the divinely chosen
leader of the Church for the crisis through which the world is
still struggling towards its freedom.
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186 JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY [Nov..
He was bom April 20, 1842, at Newton Hamilton, County
Armagh, Ireland, the son of Philip and Catharine (Murphy)
Farley. His parents died when he was a child, and through
the generosity of an uncle he was enabled to begin his studies
at St. Macar tan's College, tMonaghan. The sectional controversy
which was soon to blaze out into the world's worst civil war
was reaching its apex of intensity when young John Farley
reached America in 1859; and first among the books he read
in the new land which was to be his permanent home, was
Uncle Tom's Cabin. South Carolina seceded the following
year, and the whole North was soon convulsed by the turmoil
which followed in the wake of this dread decision. In St.
John's College, Fordham, where young Farley entered in order
to complete his college course, and later in St. Joseph's
Provincial Seminary at Troy, where he finished his philoso-
phy, the Civil War and its aftermath — the impossible, and to
some extent, the infamous. Reconstruction — ^were almost as far
away from the students as the Great World War is to many
today. Possibly the nearest the war ever came to them in their
quietude was when the Draft Riots broke out in New York City
in July, 1863. But it was in the American College, Rome, where
he matriculated in 1867, that the future Cardinal met with
students from the various sections of the United States,
and here Civil War was still a burning topic. His
diaries bear witness to the interest he displayed in discussing
this vital question with his fellow Americans. His years at
Rome were spent in an assiduous study of theology, and he was
ordained to the priesthood on June 11, 1870. It was in Rome
in the fall of 1869 that he first met Archbishop McCloskey,
who had come to attend the Vatican Council. There is an
incident related by Cardinal Farley in his diary for this year
which had a deep significance in his future. Father Farley
was questioned at Rome by Archbishop McCloskey about con-
tinuing his studies for the doctorate, but he declined to do so,
on the ground that he did not consider himself worthy of that
honor.
The truth, was, as he confessed in later life, that he was
anxious to begin his ministry among the poor of New York.
After his return to New York in 1870, Father John Farley was
appointed assistant-pastor of St. Peter's Church, New Brigh-
ton, Staten Island. During the next two years he devoted
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himself in his spare hours, few as they were in such a busy
parish, with a course of reading, and there are among his
papers several well-filled notebooks containing excerpts which
he culled at this time from a large number of books. He dis-
plays a keen perception of the best in literature. His poetic
instincts were a good guide in such a study, and it is clear from
the works he read that he had already acquired a fine taste for
belles-lettres.
In 1872, Archbishop McCloskey called him to New York
and appointed him his private secretary. " From 1872 to 1884,"
he tells us in the preface to his Life of John Cardinal McClos-
key, ""I was Cardinal McCloskey's secretary. During those
twelve years it was my custom to write down with as little de-
lay as possible all our conversations regarding his own per-
sonal history." Much that has entered into, this biography, the
last important work he did, was taken from these diaries.
Father Farley's methbd of relating and collating these con-
versations show a marked historical power. No incident is
left without its proper historical emphasis and in the indexes
which he made for each of his diaries, there are cross-refer-
ences and other aids that help one to search for the facts in
question. In the initial chapters of this Life, which he pub-
lished in 1899 in the Records and Studies of the United States
Catholic Historical Society, and in his History of St. Patrick's
Cathedral, which appeared in 1908, Cardinal Farley gave evi-
dence of possessing the modem historical method. The com-
pleted biography of his eminent predecessor has been acknowl-
edged as among the best books of the year. He accompanied
Cardinal McCloskey to Rome in 1875, and was present on Sep-
tember 30th, when Cardinal McCloskey took possession of his
titular Church, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where New York's
first Bishop, Dr. Concanen once lived. On October 3, 1875,
Father Farley described to Monsignor Preston in a humorous
way how he managed to get " into a * cubby-hole ' through the
contrivance of the master of ceremonies and the connivance
of the cameriere, so that we could see the whole proceedings
of the Secret Consistory. We saw the Cardinal getting the
ring and the title of which you will have read before this
reaches you." It was on this visit that the young secretary
saw at Paris " the grand altar of our Cathedral," before which
he lay the other day in the repose of death. '' It was set up so
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188 JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY [Nov^
that His Eminence might see it all together. Well, I assm*e you,
I have seen nothing equal to it in richness as an altar in all my
travels." Other trips to Rome followed this one of 1875, and
as the years passed by. Cardinal McCloskey depended more
and more upon the prudence and judgment of Father Farley.
The year before the Cardinal's death, Father Farley was made
private chamberlain to the Pope, with the title of Very Rev-
erend Monsignor. He was appointed this year, 1884, to the
pastorate of St. GabrieFs, New York City. We find him in
November of that year numbered among the notaries of the
Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. No part of the Coun-
cil's proceedings int^^este^ bim more than the discussion which
arose over the creation of the Catholic University of America;
and five years later he rejoiced when Divinity Hall, the first
building of the University, was dedicated. In 1891, he was
chosen Vicar-General of the Diocese by Archbishop Corrigan,
and in December, 1895, he was consecrated Titular Bishop of
Zeugma and Auxiliary Bishop of New York. At the death of
Archbishop Corrigan in 1902, he was appointed his successor,
and during the next sixteen years he ruled over the Arch-
diocese with a success which rivals to a great extent the episco-
pate of his three noted predecessors.
Among the historic events of his rule, first in order of
time comes the greatest work, perhaps, undertaken during his
episcopate, the making of the Catholic Encyclopedia, of which
he has been given the title of Founder. This superb under-
taking owed its origin as well as its success to his constant and
enlightening help. Volume after volume appeared from 1907
down to 1914, and the Cardinal always looked upon the com-
pleted work as the result of his own fostering care. The cen-
tenary of the erection of the diocese in 1908, the consecration
of St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1910, and his elevation to the
Sacred College of Cardinals in 1911 are among the noteworthy
events of his later years. During the seven years that re-
mained, his one endeavor was to promote Catholic education
in his diocese, and his most unfailing attention was given to
the Cathedral College and to the Seminary at Dunwoodie.
Next to his own diocese. Cardinal Farley loved best of
all the Catholic University of America. He had watched its
growth from the mustard seed planted at the Third Plenary
Council of Baltimore in 1884; he had seen its development as
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the years went by; and he recognized in it the hope of the
rising generation of Catholic educators and scholars. At the
laying of the comer-stone of Gibbons' Hall on October 12,
1911, Cardinal Farley left no doubt in the minds of his hearers
of his unswerving devotion to the ideal the Catholic Univer-
sity enshrines. "This corner-stone," he said, "is one of the
milestones in the path of our University on its way to what we
may now confidently regard as a glorious future." The Uni-
versity, whose trustee he was from the beginning, always
turned to him for guidance in times of stress. His presence at
the semi-annual meetings of the Board of Trustees was looked
forward to with pleasure on the part of all connected with
the University, and the kindly smile and firm hand-grasp were
always anticipated and never forgotten.
Seventh in the succession of prelates who have ruled over
the Church of New York, his sixteen years as its Archbishop
were spent in molding the institutional Catholic life his
predecessors had created into a perfect system of Church gov-
ernment. We are too close to the results of his labors to judge
them with the historic impartiality which would give them
their proper place in American ecclesiastical history; but the
expression of sentiment at the time of his death is a guide to
the appreciation of the futiure. Each one of his predecessors
contributed to the ecclesiastical life of the province, over which
Cardinal Farley was placed by Pope Leo XIII. in 1902, stable
elements of control which he inherited and which he brought
to a culminating perfection. The biographer of John Cardinal
Farley must judge his success as the head of America's great-
est diocese in conjunction with the constructive work of Arch-
bishop Hughes, Cardinal McCloskey and Archbishop Obrrigan.
These three ecclesiastics were different in education, char-
acter and spiritual insight; and it was not surprising to find
John Farley on the morning of his succession to Archbishop
Corrigan, September 15, 1902, giving expression in his diary
that day to an overpowering sense of fear at the exalted posi-
tion to which he had been appointed by the Holy See. It has
been our privilege to read all his private diaries, the first of
which was begun as a student at Rome, and few pages of reli-
gious biography reach such a height of humility as the one he
penned the morning that the mantle of these three great prede-
cessors was placed about his shoulders. Probably the secret
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190 JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY [Nov^
of his success as Archbishop of New York can be found in that
page. The time has not yet come to give these intimate out-
pourings of his soul to the world, but the secret of his success
in the work which he accomplished and in the manner in which
that accomplishment took place, is not hard to find. For, as
Canon Sheehan's keen-visioned biographer has written : " He
had striven to be humble; and for that reason he was able to
achieve what men of perhaps greater talent leave unaccom-
plished."
In the Thoughts of Pascal there is one to this effect, that
the circumstances in which it is easiest to live according to
the world are those in which it is most difficult to live accord-
ing to God. Nothing is so difficult according to the world as
the spiritual life; nothing is more easy according to God.
Nothing is easier than to live in great office according
to the world; nothing is more difficult than to live in it
according to God. It has been the happy lot of some
of the servants of God to combine by their modesty and
gentleness both the one and the other. It is these
men who win the hearts of their fellowmen to the things of
God, who enkindle them with the desire to know and love
Christ the Master, and who bind them to His service. John
Cardinal Farley gave the keynote to his own life in a passage
which may be found in his address on Catholic Unity at the
meeting of the American Federation of Catholic Societies at
Madison Square Garden, August 20, 1916: "The best, the most
fruitful thing we can do for the Chiu-ch is to make her spirit-
ualizing influence so resplendent in our character and conduct,
that the religiously indifferent who surround us will see her
claims vtrified and illustrated in the self-sacrificing devotion
of her children to the service of God and to the service of man.
The world is trying to do good to humanity from piu-ely human
motives. Let us prove to it that the faithful who serve God
are the best because they are the most disciplined servants of
men." This was his own exalted purpose; this can be made
his best epitaph, for his life stands a memorial to a singleness
of endeavor which has made him one of the truly great citi-
zens and patriots of our day.
His work as a churchman almost surpasses belief. His
was the constructive power which kept religion step by step
abreast of the tremendous growth of the city and State of
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New York. His sixteen years as Archbishop witnessed the
construction of over one hundred new churches, and the
method which he inaugurated for financing the exceptional
growth of churches and schools, hospitals and asylums, has
made it possible for his successor to keep a strong guiding
hand over every aspect of the Catholic life of New York
which he may be said to have institutionalized for all time.
His journals and diaries are filled with honest and out-
spoken expressions of opinion on persons and events of the day.
There are many pages of wise and judicious comment on all
that he saw and heard about him; and it is from these pages
that he drew many of the incidents chronicled in the later
years of Cardinal McCloskey*s life. One cannot escape the
conclusion in reading the Life of John Cardinal McCloskey,
that here with surety can be found the influence which guided
and modulated John Farley's life. Those twelve years of his
secretaryship from 1872 to 1884 left an impression upon him
which could never be altered. There was a difference, how-
ever. Cardinal McCloskey he has described as one whose
souFs serenity had never been disturbed by trouble. No dif-
ficulty, he has written, ever marred the sweet tenderness of
Cardinal McCloskey*s faith. He drew to himself all those who
loved both God and the children of God. He disliked public
display and avoided everything that might bring him before
the public gaze. Modest in speech, benign in manner, with
great personal simplicity of heart, he was noted for his cool-
ness and self-possession under ev^ry circumstance. Utterly
fearless in the presence of danger to the Faith or to the insti-
tutiojis of the Church, he was nevertheless self-contained and
reserved, and did little that would enable the general public
to estimate the profound depth of his heart. All these ideals
of character Cardinal Farley possessed in no small degree;
but there was added to these one which he possessed in a
unique manner — the spirit of joy. His name must always be
ranked in the gallery of the joyful people of this country.
There was a quiet joy in the way he worked; he prized labor
as a joy;. his spirit gave a charm to whatever toil he was en-
gaged in, and in everything that he did the lightsomeness of
his heart never ran dry and the spirit of gladness was never
absent
Cardinal Farley was slight of figure, though robust to the
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192 JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY [Nov.,
last. His keen Irish blue eyes never lost their humor. He was
graceful to a degree uncommon among men. His soft voice
which never quite relinquished the silken accent of his native
land, attracted all who met him. Little children forgot his
crimson robes, the sparkling ring, the red sash and biretta,
and saw in him up to the last the same loving father he had
been when forty years before he took up his life work as God's
priest among the Catholics of Staten Island. When roused to
just indignation by infidelity or disloyalty to civic or spiritual
trust, grown men never forgot the swift stem flash of his eye
and the thundering power of his words. He was always easy
to approach; he was considerate in listening to callers, and he
never failed to send his visitors away encouraged and cheered
in the difficulties they laid before him.
As a citizen he occupied the first place in the greatest
metropolis of the New World. His loyalty to the Government
was prompt and entire, and from the moment the United
States entered the War he was foremost in proclaiming the
duty every American citizen owes to his country. Obedience to
constituted authority he considered the sacred duty of every
Catholic in the land. " Criticism of the Government," he said,
" irritates me, and I would consider it little short of treason."
His letters to the clergy asking their cooperation with federal,
state and municipal war measures are among the best docu-
ments issued so far on the War. He took every opportunity to
recommend to the pastors of the Archdiocese a ready and
enthusiastic support in all patriotic movements. As a church-
man he appreciated the fact so strongly expressed by the late
Archbishop Ireland at the Third Plenary Council at Baltimore
that the American people have had false prophets in the past
who strove to create prejudice against the Catholic Church on
the question of loyalty. Again and again in his early student
days and in his years in New York, he had heard the echoes of
these accusations of the lack of Catholic allegiance to the
free institutions of America. And in all his relations with
those outside the Church, he never failed to leave the impres;
sion that he was no less an American citizen than a member of
the Catholic hierarchy of the land. Gentle and tolerant as he
always was with non-Catholics, the narrow insular viewpoint
of those who proclaimed, in spite of all evidence to the con-
trary, the Church to be the enemy of free institutions, taxed
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his patience more than anything else he met with in life. He
was a true American in this, that he expected every man to
take his loyalty as an American Catholic for granted.
In announcing the death of Father Faber to his congrega-
tion at St. Mary of the Angels, Manning broke through the
studied reserve which marked his attitude in the pulpit and
said with tears : " He was a great priest . . . and he died as a
priest should die, amid the prayers and tears of his flock.
Though he lived in the world, I never saw anyone so detached
from the world; if ever there was a higher or a lower path to
choose, he always chose the higher; if ever there was a truth to
be spoken he spoke it unhesitatingly, without any desire to
accommodate it to the tastes and fashions of men. I know of
no greater glory than can come upon the head of a priest than
this." John Cardinal Farley died thus, mourned by a world
made up of many who were not of his faith, by a world of
which he was a great moral leader but from which he remained
spiritually aloof to the end. His name is enrolled in that sin-
gularly favored class of God's servants whose lives bear the
closest scrutiny, for he lived but for one purpose — to give
glory to God before men and to bring all men to the feet of
Christ by love. He died rich in virtue, his name is a benedic-
tion throughout the land, and he will be remembered as one
whose heart was ever devoted in Christ to his fellowmen.
VOL. cvni; — 13
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ARCHBISHOP mELAND.
BY HUMPHREY MOYNIHAN, A.M., D.D.
N the morning of Wednesday, September 25,
1918, a prelate passed away whose memory will
always be a golden spot in the annals of the
Church in America. For seven and fifty years,
John Ireland towered up among the priests and
bishops of America, never ceasing, with vision of mind un-
dimmed and enthusiasm of soul unquenched, to lead the way
in all the high and holy enterprises that starred the crowded
years of his long life. To analyze the secret of greatness is
ever a difficult task — a task all the more difficult when one has
to do with a mind world-wide in sweep and sympathy.
Within the narrow limits of a magazine article we can only
trace the bare outlines of Archbishop Ireland's career, sketch
the causes in which his life was spent, and seize the qualities of
soul that fitted him to do great things for Church and Country.
He was born at Burnchurch, County Kilkenny, Ireland,
September 11, 1838. When he was fourteen years of age his
family, which had emigrated to this country in 1847, settled at
St. Paul, at that time a village of some six hundred souls. A
year later Bishop Cretin sent him to France. With him went
Thomas O'Gorman, the present Bishop of Sioux Falls, who was
to be his life-long friend and co-worker. Having completed
his preliminary course at Meximeux, and his theological
studies at the Grand Seminary at Hyeres, he returned to St.
Paul and was ordained to the priesthood December 21, 1861.
To France he owed much of the idealism that colored his
whole life. His love for France, his trust in her soul never
wavered, not even in the darkest hours through which in after
years she was fated to pass.
An indication of Father Ireland's future career was given
when, a few months after his ordination, he entered the army
as Chaplain and accompanied the Fifth Minnesota Volunteer
Regiment to the South. A mural painting in the Minnesota
State Capitol shows him with his regiment as it plunged
through the battle of Corinth. How Father Ireland wa8 fouad
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with the men posted closest to the enemy^s pickets, how he
rallied a company that had left a gap in the Union lines, how
under fire he rushed ammunition to the men when cartridges
were failing — these and many other picturesque stories were
told around the camp fires and endeared the young Chaplain
to soldiers everywhere. In the G. A. R. reunions, no name was
more warmly cheered than the name of " Chaplain Ireland.**
It was also an open secret that the old soldiers had no more
powerful friend in the Pension Department at Washington.
In 1869 he launched a campaign against intemperance,
the curse of those rough days. One winter's night three men
under the influence of drink called upon and begged him " for
God's sake*' to organize a temperance society. The total
abstinence society which was organized the following Sunday
was the beginning of a natioi\-wide crusade against the drink
evil. From hut to hut Father Ireland went, and from hamlet
to hamlet, and wherever he passed roads became safer for
travelers in the evenipg. When, in 1875, he was appointed
coadjutor Bishop of St. Paul, he did not relax his efforts. He
made war upon the liquor traffic, which he characterized as
''lawless and reckless, deliberately fomenting and spreading
intemperance, fattening upon the putrid fruits of alcohol, defy-
ing all law, human and divine, fostering sin and crime, fasten-
ing itself upon the laws of land." Never in America was
an evil denounced with more fiery eloquence than was the
liquor traffic by " the Father Matthew of America." That the
campaign on which Father Ireland entered as a young priest,
and which closed only with his life, helped to arouse public
opinion and awakened the country to a sense of its peril, that
it inspired others to become leaders in the movement, that it
placed high-license laws on statute books — all this is familiar
to those who are conversant with the history of social welfare
in America.
Side by side with the campaign for temperance went the
campaign for Catholic colonization in Minnesota. Bishop Ire-
land set out to do for Irish emigrants what was being done
with such happy results for Grerman emigrants. While Ger-
man emigration flowed through the seaboard cities out upon
the broad plains of the West, the thousands of Irish who
landed on the wharves of New York, poor, friendless, and un-
trained save for farm work, settled down in the cities, where
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they were exposed to intemperance, the besetting temptation
of drudgery and poverty. In those days it was a gigantic task
to organize, on a large scale, an emigration movement to the
far-off prairies of Minnesota, but when friends pictured the
difBculties of it Bishop Ireland simply said: **I will risk it
all in view of the blessings which will follow if I succeed." He
organized the Catholic Colonization Bureau, and scattered
emigration pamphlets far and wide.
In these pamphlets he emphasized the moral and spiritual
advantages of country life for emigrants. "There is about
the same difference,** he wrote, "between the moral atmos-
phere of the rural Catholic colonies to which we invite our
people, and the back streets and alleys of the overcrowded city,
as there is between the pure air of the prairie and the foul air
of the city lane.** Success crowned the movement. At Grace-
ville, within the short space of three months, lone hundred and
fifty comfortable homes were built around the church. At
Adrian a village sprang up almost over night. At Avoca, De
Graff, and Clontarf vast tracts were settled. In Swift County,
for a stretch of twenty-eight miles, one was never out of sight
of a settler*s house. These colonies developed into the most
flourishing parishes of the diocese. No wonder that in hun-
dreds of homes dotting the prairies of Minnesota there was
mourning as for a father when the news of Archbishop Ire-
land's demise traveled from door to door.
The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore marked a turning
point in the history of the Church in America. It also marked
a turning point in the career of Bishop Ireland. The occasion
was a memorable one, and with the unfailing judgment that he
always showed in fitting the theme to the time, he selected as
the subject of his address the relations of the Church to
modem society. The foundations of authority in eternal law,
the origin of society in the ordinances of God, the mutual rela-
tions of liberty and authority, the need of social virtues in re-
publics — subjects so vital to a nation's welfare — ^he expounded
with all the fire and force of his impassioned eloquence. For
a people who regarded the Church as the foe of progress, or
looked askance upon her as irrevocably wedded to obsolescent
institutions, he painted an arresting picture of the Church as
the guardian of liberty in all ages. They who listened to the
voice from the West declaring the imperishable principles
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from which government derives its authority and laws their
sacredness, went home with a new realization of the truth that
the Church is the strongest bulwark of the nation.
Five years later, November 10, 1889, the hundredth anni-
versary of the establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in the
United States, called forth another stirring address — The
Mission of Catholics in America. This discourse, breathing
love of Church and Country in every line, must be read in
the light of contemporary events. The inspiration of it came
from the conviction that **the greatest epoch of human his-
tory, if we except that which witnessed the coming of God
upon earth, is upon us, and of this epoch our wisdom and our
energy will make the Church the supreme mistress.'* It was
a trumpet call to Catholics everywhere, and it went reverberat-
ing over the land — and far over the seas, also, rousing from
lethargy those who " in utter oblivion of the living world be-
hind them sat at the gates of cemeteries weeping over tombs
that shall not be opened.**
Two years later Archbishop Ireland was the outstanding
figiu*e in a controversy which deserves more than a passing
notice.
Mr. Peter Paul Cahensly, a member of the German Im-
perial Parliament, presented to Pope Leo XIII. in 1891 a memo-
rial praying for the appointment of bishops, in proportionate
representation, for the difTerent nationalities to which Roman
Catholics in America belong. This brought to a climax a
movement which for some years had been gathering force,
and which aimed at fostering and perpetuating among the
various foreign elements of the Church the use of their own
languages and traditions. By such means, it was alleged, the
interests of religion would be safeguarded and leakage from
the Church diminished.
Archbishop Ireland was quick to see the danger to the
unity of the Church in America, and the peril of accentuating
the taint of foreignism already attached to Catholics. He
threw himself at once into the breach. " Our country,** he de-
clared, ** is not a Poland, to be partitioned at the good pleasure
of foreigners. We have, under Peter*s successor, our
autonomy, and for the sake of the American Church and the
American Republic we will retain autonomy.** " The mass of
our Catholics are Americans,** he argued. " They resent any
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attempt to make them Irishmen or Germans, or any other kind
of foreigners. The bishops of America are fully able to ward
off any foreign invasion in the Church and to maintain it on
thoroughly American lines."
Meantime, statesmen also were growing alarmed. The
controversy found its way into the halls of Congress, where
Senator C. K. Davis declared that '' there is more matter for
profound concern in the attempts Herr Cahensly made last
year to denationalize American institutions and plant as many
nations as there are people of foreign tongues in our midst,
than in all the Chinese questions which have arisen since
1858." Had Mr. Cahensly succeeded in his scheme of appoint-
ing ** national " bishops, the manifold elements composing the
Church in America would have remained so many foreign
colonies, living in weakness and isolation, shut off from one
another and from the country by the barriers of language.
If these elements have been fused into a compact whole, throb-
bing with vitality, and presenting an unbroken front to the
world, it is, in large measure, due to the man who saw farther
than other men and saved the Church and the country from
Cahenslyism.
While the field on which that battle was fought has now
only historical interest, a passage in the Cahensly memorial,
read in the light of recent events, is seen to have momentous
significance: ''Through their immigrants the nations are
acquiring in the great Republic an influence and an importance
of which they will one day be able to profit. These nations
are doing everything in their power to have those of their
nationalities settled in the United States develop and
strengthen themselves in every respect. . . . The people of the
United States is not a people of one race, only, but of all races
and of all nationalities. Every race, every nationality may
take its place in the sunlight. Precisely owing to this fact,
and because religion is the comer-stone and the keystone of
every social edifice, the nations have an immense interest in
their emigrants being represented in the episcopate of the
United States by bishops of their own. And therein lies the
reason why all the nations whose populations are emigrating
to the great Republic are expecting from the paternal solici-
tude of the Holy See the bishops whom their dearest interests
caU for."
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Another controversy which was fought out at the same
time created a great furore. It turned on the so-called Fari-
bault school plan. In two parishes of his diocese Archbishop
Ireland made an arrangement with the school boards by
which, in consideration of the nominal sum of one dollar a
year, the parochial school building, during the hours devoted
to secular branches of knowledge, was to be regarded as a
State school, preserving its character as a parochial school
before and after the regular school hours. In this manner
State aid was secured for the schools, while the schools re-
tained their own teachers and their Catholic tone. The chil-
dren heard Mass as usual every morning, and received reli-
gious instruction every afternoon within the walls of the
school. This arrangement was, as the Archbishop declared, a
measure of internal administration, intended to meet a dif-
ficulty in well-defined and well-understood circumstances. It
was never meant to supplant the Catholic school system as it
existed within and without the borders of Minnesota. Indeed,
it had been in operation for years under less favorable con-
ditions in scores of parishes throughout the country. When
introduced into Minnesota it made two towns of the diocese
storm centres of a controversy that attracted the attention of
America. The fact is that the connection between the con-
troversy on Cahenslyism and the controversy on the school
question is much closer than may appear to the cursory eye.
The motives underlying both were the same, the issues at stake
in both were identical.
The matter was carried to Rome, and again Rome sup-
ported the Archbishop. Now that Archbishop Ireland's career
is before us in its fullness, and that we scan the whole tone
and trend of his life and thought, it is superfluous to say that
to no man did he ever yield in love for the Catholic school
and in solicitude for its safety. Never, for an instant, did he
alter his views on a question so vitally bound up with the
Church's existence, nor deviate from the position which he
held on Catholic education from the first days of his priest-
hood. On this point there can be no lingering misconception
in the minds of those who knew him. The just words spoken
by Archbishop Keane of Dubuque in the course of his funeral
sermon were well-weighed : ** He was a life-long, consistent,
wise, and uncompromising advocate and promoter of Chris-
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tian education. One would look far for a diocese better pro-
vided with buildings and teachers. He leaves a rich heritage
of carefully studied programme, and a wonderfully adequate
equipment for the further development of this great Catholic
work.'* These words may serve as a final commentary on a
famous controversy.
The year following the closing of these controversies saw
Archbishop Ireland once more at Baltimore. The twenty-fifth
anniversary of the episcopal consecration of Cardinal Gib-
bons, October 18, 1893, suggested the discourse on The Church
and the Age, which at once attracted universal attention. He
drew a picture of the age as one who could look into its very
soul and see that with all its faults " it worships unwittingly at
Christian shrines, and only awaits the warm contact of Christ's
Church to avow itself Christian." It was on this occasion that
he spoke of the great need of the hour: "The want in the
world, the want in the Church, today as in other times, but
today as never before, is men among men, men who see far-
ther than others, rise higher than others, act more boldly than
others.**
This was the greatest task to which Archbishop Ireland
addressed himself — to bring the Church and the country into
closer contact, to dissipate misconceptions, to make the Church
understood by his fellow-countrymen — this, the work which
gives him a place of his own among the bishops who have built
up the Church in America. He strove to do in America what
Manning and Lacordaire and Schlegel had striven to do in
Europe. And he did it in discourse glowing with intensity of
feeling, often startling in boldness of thought and candor of
expression, and lit up with truths of lasting wisdom. His
methods were conciliatory: men of large mind do not deal in
objurgation. He had implicit trust in the power of truth to
win its way in the world. Bigots o/ the baser sort he did not
stoop to notice. Only once did he allude to a certain class of
them, who were making themselves unusually obnoxious, and
them he dismissed with the remark, " Let the frogs croak."
He had too much faith in the American people to believe
that they would discriminate against any class of citizens on
the ground of religion. Men who knew little or nothing of
Catholicism, or who viewed it with suspicion, came to trust
the Church, once they felt the charm of Archbishop Ireland's
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spirit. Under that spell came all classes of men — gentle and
simple. He could soar to heights accessible only to the most
cultured, and descend to the level of the humblest intelligence.
It is a wonderful tribute to the greatness of such men as Car-
dinal Manning, Cardinal Gibbons, Cardinal Mercier, and Arch-
bishop Ireland that they could win the hearts of entire nations.
Proofs of the confidence with which the country re-
sponded to his appeals came to him in many pleasing forms.
The document in which he refuted the free silver fallacy was
reprinted by the million. His words condemning the recall of
judges echoed through the country — " Let us pray the God of
nations that there be no sacrilegious hand laid upon the courts,
impairing their independence or lowering their majesty." More
than one administration consulted him and carried out his
suggestions. The embassy to Rome at the conclusion of the
war with Spain was, perhaps, the most striking proof of the
trust reposed in him by the statesmen of the nation. That em-
bassy, with Mr. Taft as its head and Bishop O^Gorman as its
ecclesiastical advisor, was unprecedented in the history of the
Church in America. And it was not in America only that Arch-
bishop Ireland's broadminded policy of conciliation won
friends among all classes. In France men of all shades of re-
ligious and political thought looked up to him and were will-
ing to listen to him. As the unofficial representative of Pope
Leo XIII. in 1892, as the official representative of President
McKinley, on the occasion of the presentation of the statue of
Lafayette to the French people, as the panegyrist of Jeanne
d'Arc, he drew around him men who had nothing in common
with one another, but who, one and all, were at home with
him, and could discuss frankly and amicably with him most
delicate questions of policy.
When it was necessary to defend Catholic teaching he
presented the case for the Church fully and calmly, appealing
always to the reason of his hearers. Nowhere, perhaps, was
the Temporal Power of the Sovereign Pontiff more grievously
misunderstood than in the United States. Suspicions were to
be allayed, prejudices removed, public opinion enlightened.
Archbishop Ireland undertook the task, pleading with voice
and pen that, as the Catholic Church is the Church of all na-
tions, its Supreme Chieftain must be of no nation, but have a
territory of his own where all nations are at home, and where
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no nation is master. " Will any one assert that it is merely a
right to what is vitally essential to its life and its work that the
Papacy, the Chieftaincy of Christ's Church, received from its
Author, or that it was not the intention of its Founder that it
should not always have that integrity of outward form and
freedom of action required for the exercise of its ministry with
dignity and efficiency.'* Cogent reasons drawn from the mis-
sion of the Church, telling historical illustrations, testimonies
cited from friend and foe drove home his powerful plea. Who-
ever reads the Archbishop's article on the Civil Princedom of
the Pope, in the North American Review for March, 1901, will
see him at his best as an apologist, and will be filled with fresh
wonder at the justice of tlie PontifTs claims for the inde-
pendence essential to the exercise of his high office.
There was no movement vital to the welfare of the State,
no theme vital to the interests of the Church that he did not
make his own. Of patriotism he spoke as only one could speak
who had served on the battlefield. When last year with fail-
ing voice he bade good-bye to the first volunteers of Minne-
sota, he said : '' The man should not live who does not love and
cherish his country. To defend America is to defend not only
the nation that protects you, that nurtures you, but the nation
that stands in the universe for the highest ideals, the noblest
principles governing mankind." And while he spoke as a
soldier-patriot, he also spoke as a bishop whose duty it was
to give warning that "for its own protection the age of de-
mocracy must be an age of religion."
In education, as in all things else, he translated his ideas
into acts. School and college and seminary he fostered, ever
striving to awaken in his people ambition to take the place
that was rightfully theirs, ever insisting that education severed
from religion cannot mold character nor give to the country
the men the country needs. From its inception the Catholic
University found in him a powerful friend and advocate.
Of labor and capital and their relations he often spoke and
wrote, allaying the passions and prejudices that spring from
the strongest of human motives and holding the balance of
justice between clashing interests. Rarely was the judicial
character of his mind more clearly evinced that in an article on
Personal Liberty and Labor Strikes, which dealt so sanely and
impartially with tlie most contentious aspect of a thorny ques-
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tion that it was referred to by judges on the bench and quoted
by law journals in several States. The triumphs of science
and industry he eloquently portrayed when the world was
pouring into the Columbian Exposition all the material evi-
dences of human progress; but still more eloquently did he
plead that the greatest triumphs of humanity are spiritual
and moral victories.
From time to time themes of gentler strain would evoke
addresses full of sweet inspiration. Charity in the Catholic
Church would touch the chords of his soul to words of music;
the story of the Maid of Orleans would move to its depths a
soul full of chivalry; the convents of the Northwest could draw
forth noble tributes to the devotion and sacrifices of cloistered
life. Thus it was: wherever good was to be done, wherever
the cause of the Church was to be championed. Archbishop
Ireland was always found, each new theme bringing into play
some new quality of mifid, some new flight of eloquence, some'
new vein of a nature richly dowered.
While Archbishop Ireland was winning prestige for the
Church at home and abroad, and vindicating the place of re-
ligion in the life of the nation, he never allowed the exacting
demands made upon his time and energies to divert his
thought for a moment from the field of his special predilec-
tion. His heart was in his diocese. He harked back with pride
to its early days and told again and again the story of its
pioneer missionaries; death snatched the pen from his hand
as he was writing the life of Bishop Cretin. How he toiled for
his diocese his works proclaim. Like the Homeric husband-
man standing in the harvest field and gazing at the golden
sheaves that ripened under his fostering hands, Archbishop
Ireland in the closing years of his life could look around upon
the field to which he had devoted his life, and behold on all
sides the fruits of his labors — the colonies he planted, the
parishes he organized, the churches he erected, the priesthood
he trained, the schools and colleges and cathedral he called
into being.
The St. Paul Seminary, founded and endowed by the
illustrious James J. Hill, and the College of St. Thomas, he
cherished with special affection. The Cathedral of St. Paul
was the consunmiation of his life work. The boy who, in 1852,
had drifted on the tide of emigration to the frontier settlement
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by the Mississippi, and had watched the hamlet grow into a
great metropolis while he himself was growing into greatness
and world-wide influence, crowned his city with a basilica
which is one of the noble temples of the world. " He has done
a great work and finished it " — these words written by Cardi-
nal Newman of the prelate with whom Archbishop Ireland
had much in common, may be applied with equal truth to the
Archbishop of St. Paul. He was one of the few men to whom
it was given to do a great work and to enjoy its consummation.
Nature endowed John Ireland with the gif f^ that fit a man
to do great things in the world. The splendid physique, the
commanding presence, the massive grandeur of countenance,
the rugged yet refined personality, stamped him as a man
among men. His intellect would have achieved eminence in
jurisprudence,^ statesmanship, learning. It was a mind sin-
gularly alert and retentive, quick to grasp a subject in all its
implications, a mind in which the mingling of the ideal with
the practical was as wonderful as it was rare. His dauntless
spirit had a splendid scorn of difficulties : " Do not," he said
on a historic occasion, '" lose time in thinking of the opposition
that will come to you," and no one ever accused Archbishop
Ireland of counting the odds when the interests of religion
were at stake.
His oratory, while recalling the style and spirit of his
French masters, was peculiarly his own, forging language
and fusing words in the flame of its inspiration. It was the
eloquence of a great tribune of the people, as well as of a great
prelate of the Church. His industry was untiring; such
industry as is required to carry out the works that genius
inaugiu^ates. These endowments of nature were enhanced
by others of a more personal character: a high sense of dignity,
a keen insight into human nature and all its ways, a feeling
for the simple things of life, a faculty of thinking largely
and liberally on the common things of life, a delicate
perception of the word to be spoken and the thing to be
done, a kindly sense of humor that never failed, a tempera-
ment that took interest in everything, and a gentleness of soul
known best to those who came in closest contact with him. Dr.
Johnson said of Edmund Burke that no one could meet him
under a gateway in a shower of rain without seeing that he was
the first man in England. It might be said with truth that
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even a chance meeting with Archbishop Ireland left the im-
pression that he was one of the great men of the world.
The secret of Archbishop Ireland's real grandeur, the in-
spiration of his whole life, is to be sought in his devotion to
the Church of Christ. If ever a man was enamored of the
Church, of its beauty and its truth, of its mission through the
ages, it was Archbishop Ireland. Whether he was hearing
confessions by night on a Southern battlefield, or carrying help
and hope to his colonists on the prairies, or fighting for souls
against the demon of intemperance; whether he was speaking
to the little ones of Christ in some remote parish of his dio-
cese, or addressing the hierarchy of the United States assem-
bled in Council, or the Catholics of France at Orleans or Paris,
in all his varied activities, as manifold as the activities of the
Church itself, love of the Church was the passion of his life,
dominating and overshadowing all other motives and pur-
poses. Love of the Church it was that, at a time when other
men lay down their burdens, led him to take upon himself
tasks the fulfillment of which would be the work of a lifetime
for men of less ardent zeal.
As there rise up before us hil^ breadth of vision and splen-
dor of devotion; the monuments of piety and learning with
which he adorned religion; the words of power he spoke pro-
claiming that Christ is, indeed, the Way and the Truth, the
Life and the Light of man; the battles he fought for religion
with a majesty of thought and utterance that brings back the
days of the Basils and the Chrysostoms; the austere life and
the illustrious example; the wisdom that saw afar, the patience
that never grew weary, the courage that never faltered; the
zeal burning day and night on the altar of his soul, setting
aflame all hearts that came within its glow and kindling them
to deeds of generous enterprise; we see that John Ireland was
all that a great Bishop should be in an age that calls for the
consecration of glorious gifts and devoted allegiance to the
cause of Christ.
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THE UNIVERSAL GENIUS OF ST. THOMAS.
BY GARRETT PIERSE.
KEATING of one who has been proposed by the
Church as the model of Catholic students, it is
of interest to inquire what was his special
characteristic. In the life of every great man
there is some unifying principle governing all
his actions; there is some dominant quality which explains
every other endowment. In the case of St. Thomas, what was
this supreme gift? He belonged to a period when the Church
was illumined and adorned by a galaxy of doctors and learned
men. He could be brilliant like Abelard, yet brilliancy was not
his distinguishing quality. He could be subtle like Duns
Scotus, yet subtlety is not the characteristic by which wc re-
member him. He could be seraphic in his writings like the
saintly Bonaventure, yet ardent mysticism was not his domi-
nant qualification. What was it then? Tradition supplies us
with the answer. All the centuries have given him a special
epithet which points to the vastness, the universality of his
attainments; all the centuries have proclaimed him the Uni-
versal Doctor.
Owing to his universality of gifts, St. Thomas is at once
the symbol and the product of the Catholicity of the
Church. There are some who find it hard to realize how
the Catholic Church could have produced in St. Thomas so
universal a genius as well as so great a saint. There
are some who point with scorn to the Catholic Church
as possessing a system of narrow intellectualism and as cramp-
ing the various powers of her children. There are those who
refer to Scholasticism, or the philosophy favored by the
Church, as inconsistent with the full development of the imagi-
nation, or of the nobler qualities of the heart. They forget,
however, that the Catholic Church is suited to all men, and to
all the faculties of man. They forget that the same Mother
Church, "who in her intellectual capacity is characterized by the
most accurate and legal definitions of dogma, in her system of
cult and public ceremonies is calculated to strike the imagina-
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tion of all, and in her preaching of the solace of religion for
the living and the dying can satisfy the human heart as noth-
ing else upon earth is able to do. They forget that St. Thomas,
while the most finished product of the Scholastic philosophy
of the Church, had all the highest faculties of man harmoni-
ously developed. The pen that wrote the Sum of Philosophy
against the Gentiles also wrote the familiar Pange Lingua, one
of the noblest effusions of the human heart aided by divine
grace. The mind that composed the strictly intellectual Sum
of Theology was combined with an imagination that created
the inunortal Lauda Sion.
Against those who say that the Catholic Church is purely
intellectual, narrow, and formal, against those who assert that
she supplies no fitting outlet for the varied forms of human
genius, against those who refer to her Scholastic philosophy as
a means for contracting the heart, against the shallow theories
of all those cavilers regarding Catholicism, there stands one
decisive fact, and that fact is St. Thomas of Aquin.
Though St. Thomas had all his higher faculties harmoni-
ously developed, yet it is to his intellect that humanity looks
for the largest results. His intellect, too, partook of his gen-
eral character for universality. What a broad range of mental
vision he enjoyed! What liberality of mind in the purest
sense of this much-abused phrase ! He took all knowledge for
his province, and, doing so, he had to dare greatly; he had to
give e^idence of the inspiring force of truly Catholic ideals.
The authority of Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of an-
tiquity, was to some extent suspect in the days of St. Thomas,
and yet St. Thomas did not hesitate to make him his own. The
Aristotelian philosophy was contaminated by the grossness of
pagan principles; much that was good was embedded in the
corruption of much that was evil. In addition to this intrinsic
repulsiveness of some of his doctrines, Aristotle had acquired
an odious name through the misrepresentations and adultera-
tions of Arabian scholars. What marvel then that some within
the Church, seeing how he was utilized against the Faith,
fearing that his teaching might corrupt the precious deposit
of Catholic doctrine, regarded Aristotle as unsafe? Their
feelings resembled the instinctive attitude of St. Peter when he
was shown in vision the multitude of beasts and reptiles and
fowls, symbolizing the Gentile nations, when he was com-
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208 THE UNIVERSAL GENIUS OF ST. THOMAS [Nov.,
manded to kill and eat them, and when he exclaimed: "'Far
be it from me, for I never did eat anything that is common and
unclean/* *
Thus many children of the Church regarded the teaching
of worldly philosophers as something that would defile the
Faith by its very touch. Nor were their fears altogether
groundless. How tremendous a task it is to reconcile with
Catholic dogma the real knowledge of all the philosophers and
scientists, we may faintly realize if we remember those who
have attempted it since the days of St. Thomas, and have suf-
fered shipwreck of the Faith. Trusting to their own unaided
powers, venturing on the unknown seas of speculation without
the lifebuoy of St. Thomas' sanctity, they were sadly sub-
merged. The venom of pride, always a lurking danger in
human science unaided by divine grace, proved fatal to their
intellects. When philosophy conflicted with faith, those proud
minds rejected faith and kept philosophy; St. Thomas would
have rejected philosophy and have kept the Faith.
Yet St. Thomas did not shrink from the noble, though
herculean labor of accepting all the truths of all the philoso-
phers known to him, and of harmonizing them with the Catho-
olic Faith. It was his characteristic to seek out truth rather
than error, good elements rather than mistakes — hence the
positive and constructive character of his work. He was
broad-minded enough to recognize that whatever is true, what-
ever is good, even though alloyed with the corruption and the
pride of man, comes from the Giver of all gifts, and that to find
fault with the truth in any form or from any source is im-
plicitly to find fault with God.
St. Thomas became all things to all philosophers. He was
the broad-spirited St. Paul of the intellectual world, making
himself the apostle of the Gentile philosophers, purifying them,
correcting them, and converting them to the service of the
Christian faith. He did but follow out the liberal counsel of
the Doctor of the Gentiles: "Whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever lovely, what-
soever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise of dis-
cipline, think on these things " *
Hence we find the best product of pagan philosophers and
of Christian writers in the pages of St. Thomas. The influence
» Acta X. 14. * Philipp. iv. 8.
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of Socrates is there, the forerunner of Christian modesty, with
his abhorrence of ostentation, and his great principle that we
should know ourselves, and knowing ourselves, know that we
know almost nothing. In the works of Aquinas there is no in-
flated display; no superfluous paragraph or word; the small-
est term is employed to express the greatest idea. Plato, the
contemplative of paganism, imaging and feeling the elevated
ideals of eternal truth and beauty, meets us in the writings
of St. Thomas. There, too, we have the analytic, discursive
Aristotle, master of all who know. Beside these excellent ex-
ponents of natural reason, we find, also, the noblest instru-
ments of the higher light of revelation. Knowing the Scrip-
tures almost by heart, he knew also the traditionary writings
in which the remainder of the divine message is enshrined. He
was acquainted with the great ecclesiastical writers. The mar-
tyrs who "underlined the doctrines of Christianity with
their life's blood," saints like Justin and Cyprian, meet us in
his works. The Fathers of the Church, these giant minds that
polished Christian dogma in their conflicts with the unortho-
dox, and embellished it in their homilies for the orthodox —
with them and their characteristics St. Thomas was familiar,
and their conunentaries on the Sacred Word are felicitously
combined in his work entitled The Golden Chain. St. Augustine,
called the Christian Plato, because of his soaring genius; St.
Jerome, greatest Scriptural scholar, of whom Augustine said
that nobody knew what he was ignorant of; St. Athanasius,
who for the Christian truth was ready to take issue with the
world; St. Gregory the Great, with his practical Roman mind
and his Oriental gift of allegory; the orator, Chrysostom, with
lips of gold — all these Fathers honeycomb the pages of St.
Thomas; they were his models, and more than one Pope has
instituted a favorable comparison between him and the great-
est among them.
At first view of the universal attainments of St. Thomas,
contemplating what the Church in her sacred Liturgy calls his
" marvelous erudition,'* the mind is bewildered. We are like
one beholding for the first time a vast forest; the mind is over-
awed by a sense of the boundless and by fear of the unknown;
it recoils before this symbol of infinity itself. But, soon, its
native power asserts itself, because capable of ideas greater
than the greatest wilderness, the mind grows accustomed to
VOL, CVIU. — 14
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210 THE UNIVERSAL GENIUS OF ST. THOMAS [Nov^
the vastness of the scene, and undergoes a gradual enlarge-
ment; its hitherto narrow horizons of thought become in-
definitely extended; and it is enticed to explore what is
stretched before its view.
On account of his extensive knowledge St. Thomas has
been compared with Solomon. Although according to the
words of Holy Writ, " God gave to Solomon knowledge and
wisdom exceeding much," and a largeness of mind ^ as the
sand that is on the seashore," though he could discourse of all
living creatures, of beasts and of fowls, and of reptiles and of
fishes, though he could "' treat about trees from the cedar that
is in Libanus unto the hyssop that cometh out of the wall,"
though he was wiser than all men of his time, or of preceding
ages, wiser than all the Orientals and the Egyptians, yet one of
the Sovereign PontiflFs of the Church, Innocent V., in a moment
of divine inspiration, applied to St. Thomas the grand tribute
taken from Scripture : " The Queen of the South came from the
ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold
a greater than Solomon here." '
A man of such wide attainments could not have neglected ,
the science of God. Possessing a genius for universal study
he would be sadly inconsistent if he omitted the study of God,
Who is the All-in-all. For, what goes to make a man? What
powers distinguish him from the other beings of the earth?
His intellect and his will. What is the deepest thought of his
intellect? The thought of the Infinite! What is it that most
mightily moves his will and thrills his soul and agitates his
being? The magnet of boundless good and happiness. And
this infinite reality, this boundless happiness ever pursued by
restless hiunanity, as the pole is sought by the magnetic needle,
is none other than God Himself. We estimate the greatness
of a science from the greatness of the matter with which it
deals. The knowledge of a small thing is a trivial knowledge;
the knowledge of a greater thing a greater knowledge; the
knowledge of the greatest Being is the greatest knowledge.
The science of God may be driven from its rightful place; it
may be expelled from the schools and the universities; it may
be dethroned for a while by the pride of men, but St. Thomas
gave it for all time its proper rank; he enthroned theology, the
science of God, as the empress of sciences by divine right.
•Matt xU. 42.
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1918.] THE UNIVERSAL GENIUS OF ST. THOMAS 211
It was the privilege of St. Thomas to see in vision the glory
of that Infinite Being Whom he had already perceived, in a
dark manner, through the dim glass of earthly knowledge. It
was in the year before his death. In comparison with what he
then saw, all mundane things, even human science, even his
own Sum of Theology, his life's work, appeared to him as so
much straw. Partly owing to failing health, partly owing to
absorption in the* Eternal Reality disclosed by his vision, he
lost all interest in temporal things, and from thenceforth the
Universal Doctor threw down the pen for ever. He died be-
fore completing his Compendium of Christian Doctrine, and
before fully adding the great Sum of Theology. The pen
that had begun the Commentary on the Prophet Jeremias left
it unfinished to the present hour. A sad reminder of the im-
perfect character of man's performance notwithstanding the
magnificence of his plans! A sad reminder that not this life,
but the next, is intended to satisfy worthily the boundless am-
bitions of the human heart! All the achievements of St.
Thomas, gigantic as they appear to us, appeared little to him,
viewing them from the truer standpoint of a higher world.
His works have been called perfect masterpieces, but in com-
parison with that heaven which he saw in vision, St. Thomas
realized that there is found no perfect masterpiece here below.
The greatest painter in his master achievement did but fix on
canvas some faint shadow of the All-in-all. The one earthly
mood that will endure for ever, the one reality of realities is
the love of God. St. Thomas found this reality; to God he de-
voted all his labors. He sounded the keynote of his life when
receiving the sacred Body of Jesus Christ for the last time:
" Thee have I preached: Thee have I taught, against Thy name
have I never uttered a single word.'*
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THE SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR.
BY JOHN A. RYAN, D.D.
HE decision of our highest court of appeal, that
the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act is unconsti-
tutional, has called forth pretty general expres-
sions of regret. Many of the critics have used
rather severe language. They have intimated
that the majority of the Court could just as well have given a
favorable decision, and that the verdict of unconstitutionality
represents an unnecessary and inexplicable perversion of judi-
cial reasoning. Others seem to have gone further, and to assume
that the unfavorable decision is equivalent to a usurpation of
power. Something of this sort must have been in the mind of
the United States Senator who proposed that Congress reenact
the law and add a clause forbidding the Supreme Court to de-
clare it unconstitutional a second time I A few commentators
have assumed that the unconstitutionality of the law is so
jfixed and definite that the Court could not have decided other-
wise, so clear and indisputable that Congress should have
known better than to attempt such legislation.
Both these views are extreme and unjustifiable. It is not
necessary to assume that the majority of the Court followed
any but the most straightforward processes and standards in
arriving at a negative decision, and it is a virtual attack upon
the rights of the Court to assume that the Court had no busi-
ness to declare the law unconstitutional. Whether or no the
framers of the Constitution intended the Court to have ths
power of nullifying laws, its right to do so has through long
usage become an essential element of our constitutional
system.
Persons who criticize Congress for passing the child
labor law, and who hail every decision of the Supreme Court
on the constitutionality of a statute as an official announce-
ment of something inevitable and obvious, forget that not all
the parts of the Constitution are as definite and inflexible as
a carpenter's rule. Some of its articles are, indeed, of this
nature; for example, the provision that "no person shall be a
Senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years."
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Should the people of any commonwealth send to the United
States Senate a man of twenty-eight years, the election would
be patently unconstitutional. The Supreme Coiu't would not
be called upon to interpret or apply this article of the Consti-
tution. To prevent the man from taking his seat, the only
thing necessary would be to establish the fact of his age. When
this was done, the unconstitutionality of his election would be
obviously, objectively and infallibly certain.
Not all the provisions of the Constitution are of this char-
acter. Not all of them are so dear in scope and content that
when ax>plied to a law which they affect, they inunediately,
unmistakably and infallibly pronounce it constitutional or un-
constitutional. Many of them are so indefinite that honest
and competent men disagree concerning their meaning and
application. This is particularly true of those provisions
which relate to social and labor legislation.
It may be well to recall the fact that Congress has ho direct
authority to pass laws concerning child labor, or any other
condition of labor, in private employments. Our federal Gov-
ernment is one of "enumerated," or delegated, powers; that
is, it can do only those things which have been explicitly com-
mitted to it in the national Constitution. Among these
specifically enumerated powers and functions, we find no men-
tion of the age, hoiu*s, wages or other conditions of labor. All
such matters are left, or " reserved," to the control of the sev-
eral States.
Therefore, the Keating-Owen Act by which Congress
attempted to regulate the labor of children, sought that goal
by an indirect route. It followed that clause of the Constitu-
tion which specifically authorizes Congress to regulate com-
merce between the States. It prohibited the shipment in in-
terstate and foreign conMnerce of the products of factories,
mines or quarries in which were employed children under
fourteen years of age, or in which children between fourteen
and sixteen were permitted to work more than eight hours a
day or more than six days a week. By a vote of five to four,
the Supreme Court declared this law unconstitutional on two
grounds: first, that it goes beyond the authority conferred
upon Congress by the interstate commerce clause of the Con-
stitution; second, because it interferes with a local matter
which the Constitution reserves to the jurisdiction of the States.
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214 SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR [Nov..
Justice Day, who wrote the majority opinion, contends
that the power to regulate interstate commerce does not in-
clude the power to prohibit the interstate movement of articles
or products. The constitutional authority to regulate, he says,
is merely the power to " control the means by which conmierce
is carried on." This is the first issue between the majority and
the minority of the Court. It turns upon the interpretation of
the verb, " to regulate." According to the majority, this refers
only to the means, methods, instrumentalities and processes
by which goods are taken across the borders of a State; in the
view of the minority, it extends in a very comprehensive way
to the goods themselves.
Had such a measure as the child labor law been brought
before the Court previous to the Civil War, it would probably
have been proclaimed unconstitutional without a dissenting
voice. Up to that time, the Court had always construed the
commerce clause as conferring merely the power to " control
the means by which commerce is carried on." Since then, how-
ever, it has handed down several decisions upholding the con-
trary view, and sustaining legislation which actually excluded
certain objects and conunodities from shipment in interstate
commerce. Taking account of these cases. Justice Day as-
serts that they were all exceptional. The excluded articles
were all of such a peculiar character that interstate conmierce
in them could be regulated only through absolute prohibition.
The most important of these "exceptional" cases were pre-'
sented by the laws concerning the Louisiana Lottery, Pure
Food and Drugs, the White Slave Traffic, and the shipment of
intoxicating liquor into "dry" States. "In all these in-
stances," says Justice Day, " the use of interstate conmierce
was necessary to the accomplishment of harmful results," and
genuine regulation could be exercised only "by prohibiting
the facilities of interstate commerce to effect the evil in-
tended."
This situation, contends the Justice, does not obtain in the
present case; for when the goods made by child labor are
offered for shipment, the evil has already been accomplished.
And "the goods shipped are in themselves harmless." The
first reply to this argument is that not all the evil which the law
seeks to prevent has been done, once the goods are produced.
The law aims not only to render impossible the employment of
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young children, but also to protect against unfair competition
the manufacturers in those States which have good child
labor laws. It would prevent the products of cheap and ex-
ploited juvenile labor from underselling commodities that
are made under more humane and expensive conditions of
employment. Without such a law the textile manufacturers
of Massachusetts who wish to sell their goods in, say. New
York or Illinois, are unfairly handicapped in their competition
with the textile manufacturers of North or South Carolina.
This is an evil which, to quote the words of Justice Day, " can
be accomplished only by the use of interstate transportation."
It is quite as dependent upon the facilities of interstate com-
merce as the evil done to the morals of a New Yorker who
bought a lottery ticket made in Louisiana.
Justice Day does, indeed, take note of this aspect and
effect of the law, but he deals with the subject rather sum-
marily: the commerce clause of the Constitution was not in-
tended to give Congress the power to equalize unequal econo-
mic conditions among the States; for example, to close the
channels of interstate conunerce against the products of States
that have no minimum wage and maximum hours laws.
Nevertheless, it would seem that the framers of the Con-
stitution did intend the conunerce clause to be utilized for the
general purpose of protecting the citizens of some States
against the selfish action of other States. The main object of
the clause was to prevent one State from erecting tariff and
similar barriers against the commerce of another. Is not Con-
gress acting upon the spirit and principle of this purpose when
it legislates to hinder one State from imposing upon another
the disadvantage of unfair competition resulting from lax
child labor regulations? We may admit, indeed, that this par-
ticular use of the commerce clause is contrary to the letter of
the intentions of the authors of the Constitution; for they were
strong individualists who neither believed in nor foresaw the
necessity of protective labor legislation. Inasmuch as they
did not think that the age, or hoiu*s, or wages of labor should
be regulated even by State laws, they undoubtedly would not
have desired the conunerce clause to authorize federal action
against those States that have done least in the field of
regulation.
However, the prevention of unfair competition was only
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216 SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR [Nov.,
the secondary object of the Keating-Owen law. Its primary
purpose was to put an end to the employment of child labor.
Justice Day contends that to exclude the products of such labor
from interstate commerce does not directly prevent the evil,
since the undesirable labor has already been performed when
the goods are oflFered for shipment. One might reply that the
same was true of the anti-lottery law. The evil was conmiitted
when the resident of another State yielded to the temptation
to gamble by purchasing a ticket in the Louisiana lottery;
therefore, it had been accomplished before the ticket was pre-
sented for interstate transportation. Yet the anti-lottery law
was sustained by the Supreme Court.
The anti-lottery law put an end to the evil of interstate
gambling in lottery tickets, not directly by its exclusion of
those pieces of paper from interstate conmierce, but indirectly
by its action upon the minds of prospective purchasers. As
soon as such persons realized that lottery tickets could not
legally be sent to them trom Louisiana, they ceased to buy the
tickets.
The child labor law was calculated to operate in precisely
the same way. It could not have undone the evil that had been
committed in connection with child-made goods that it actually
excluded from shipment; but it could and would have pre-
vented the repetition and continuance of the evil by inducing
manufacturers to discontinue the employment of child labor
upon goods that they wanted to send out of the State.
Although the evil was committed in production, not in trans-
portation, the production itself would cease with the closing
of the channels of interstate commerce. Therefore, the Keat-
ing-Owen Act complied with the test laid down by Justice
Day; for it dealt with a situation in which " the use of inter-
state commerce was necessary to the accomplishment of harm-
ful results."
Should it be objected that the interstate transportation of
child-made goods caused the evil of child labor only indirectly,
not by any harm that the goods did after they were shipped,
but by its encouragement of the continuation of the evil, the
reply must be that the objection has no force since the anti-
lottery act was sustained by the Court. For the operation of
that act to prevent the evil inherent in this form of interstate
gambling, was equally indirect. As Justice Holmes ob-
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serves in his written expression of the views of the four dis-
senting members of the Court, ** it does not matter whether the
supposed evil precedes or follows transportation. It is enough
that, in the opinion of the Court, the transportation encour-
ages the evil."
A complementary point made by Justice Day in his state-
ment of the difference that he conceives to exist between the
child labor case and the anti-lottery and other cases, is that
the goods made by child labor ** are of themselves harmless."
But the same is true of lottery tickets. The evil which the law
sought to reach consisted in a previous transaction concerning
the tickets, not in any harm that they directly inflicted upon
their possessors. Justice Holmes points out that the Pure Food
and Drug Act, which the Court sustained, " applies not merely
to articles that the changing opinions of the time condemn as
intrinsically harmful, but to others innocent in themselves,
simply on the ground that the order for them was induced by a
preliminary fraud."
In like manner, the " innocent " goods made by child labor
were affected by preliminary evil conditions of emplojrment.
Nevertheless, Justice Holmes does not seem to think it
necessary to defend the constitutionality of the child labor act
by laying much stress upon its similarity to other acts upheld
by the Court. He flatly denies that the constitutional power of
Congress to regulate interstate commerce includes the power
to prohibit only in exceptional cases. " Regulation means the
prohibition of something, and when interstate commerce is
the matter to be regulated, I cannot doubt that the regulation
may prohibit any part of such conmierce that Congress sees
fit to forbid." He points out that the Constitution gives Con-
gress the power to regulate interstate conMnerce " in unquali-
fied terms." Therefore, he construes the words of the com-
merce clause of the Constitution according to their widest
extension and comprehension, regardless of the intentions of
their authors, the character of the commerce, or the evils to
be prevented.
Whatever may be thought of this principle of consti-
tutional interpretation in the light of traditional methods,
there can be no doubt that it is more conducive to political and
social welfare than the principle upheld by the majority. Noth-
ing has done so much to provoke argimients for the radical
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218 SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR [Nov.,
amendment of the Constitution as the method of construing
it narrowly and strictly, when a broad and liberal construction
would have sustained vitally necessary social legislation. The
issue is not one of distorting the Constitution, but of interpret-
ing it in a spirit that is in harmony with the needs of today,
even though it may be contrary to the social and political
philosophy of the men who wrote it more than a century and
a quarter ago.
Although the majority of the Supreme Court declared the
Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional primarily on the ground
that it exceeded the powers of Congress, the opinion of Justice
Day indicates that they were greatly influenced by their con-
ception of State's rights over local trade and manufacture.
This is clearly shown not only by the amount of space given
to the second argument, but by the implications that lie be-
tween the lines of the entire majority opinion.
Justice Day points out that the ultimate effect and aim of
the law is to regulate production, "' by standardizing the ages
at which children may be employed in mining and manufac-
ture within the States." At the end of his argiunent, we find
this siunmary statement of the position of the majority: " the
necessary effect of the act is by means of a prohibition against
the movement in interstate commerce of ordinary conmiercial
commodities, to regulate the hours of labor of children in fac-
tories and mines within the States, a purely State authority."
Not far from the beginning of his opinion, he had laid down
the principle that " a statute must be judged by its reasonable
and necessary effect."
The minority of the Court admit both these propositions,
but deny that the ultimate and incidental effects of the law
should be decisive on its constitutionality. Justice Holmes
contends, in substance, that the law should be considered only
in its immediate effects; and these consist only in the regula-
tion of interstate commerce through the exclusion of the
products of child labor. Notwithstanding this effect, the States
could continue the employment of children in manufacture.
The products thereof could be consumed within the State, or
destroyed, or placed in warehouses. The child labor law would
prevent none of these things immediately or directly; it would
prevent them indirectly, by its reaction upon the minds and
interests of the manuf actiu'ers.
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1918.] SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR 219
In support of his position that this ultimate effect and
reaction of the law has nothing to do with its constitutionality.
Justice Holmes produces a " cloud of witnesses," in the form
of previous decisions of the Court. Congress placed a tax upon
oleomargarine, the final aim and effect of which were to put an
end to its manufacture within the States. Yet the Supreme
Court sustained the law; and Justice White (who is among
the five who did not sustain the child labor law) laid down
the proposition that it was beyond the scope of the Court to
inquire into or consider this ultimate effect and purpose of
the oleomargarine tax.
Justice Holmes also cites the ancient tax on State banks,
the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and
the White Slave Traffic Act. In all these cases the law was
intended to affect and did affect production within the States,
and interfered with the State exercise of the police power;
yet the Court declared that none of these ultimate effects was
a reason for denying to Congress the power to produce certain
inmiediate effects. Whatever may be the view of legal authori-
ties, very few laymen will be inclined to deny that Justice
Holmes has clearly and completely established the contention
that he set out to establish in his citation of these authoritative
precedents.
The argument from possible and conjectural consequences
is brought forward by Justice Day, and apparently it exercised
a very great influence upon the minds of the majority. If the
Keating-Owen Act is within the power of Congress, " all manu-
facture intended for interstate shipment would be brought
under federal control to the practical exclusion of the
authority of the States; all freedom of commerce and the
power of the States over local matters may be eliminated and
thus our system of government practically destroyed.''
The reply of Justice Holmes to this contention is incisive,
fundamental and complete : " The act does not meddle with
anything belonging to the States. They may regulate their
internal affairs and domestic concerns as much as they like.
But when they seek to send their products across the State line
they are no longer within their rights. If there were no Con-
stitution and no Congress their power to cross the line would
depend upon their neighbors. Under the Constitution such
commerce belongs not to the States but to Congress to regu-
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220 SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR [Nov.,
late It may carry out its views of public policy, whatever in-
direct effect they may have on the policies of the States.'*
No matter how far Congress extended its control over
interstate conmierce, the individual State would still have the
power to supplement such control, and to regulate exclusively
those activities that do not bring goods into interstate com-
merce. Why should a State desire to have greater power than
this? By the very fact that goods enter interstate commerce
they affect the welfare of people in other States. Therefore,
the national Government, which has charge of the interests of
the people of all the States, should have power to determine
the extent and the manner of this extra-state influence. It
should have the authority to prevent that selfish action of in-
dividual States which is injurious to the people of other
commonwealths.
The extent to which this fear of ulterior consequences
affects the judges of the majority is further seen in Justice
Day's statement that if Congress were constitutionally author-
ized to enact the child labor law, it could also deny the chan-
nels of interstate commerce to the products of a State that did
not have eight-hour and minimum wage laws. Apparently he
brings forward this possibility as incontestable proof that the
principle of the child labor law is preposterous. On the other
hand, the friends of the law accept this consequence with
equanimity, and, indeed, with eagerness. If the Keating-Owen
Act had been sustained, many of its advocates would have
worked for laws which would do the very things that Justice
Day regards with aversion? For they believe that federal
legislation is necessary to protect the more humane and en-
lightened States against the selfishness of those that permit
labor to be exploited for long hours and at low wages. They
know, for example, that many manufacturers in the more
progressive States would welcome minimum wage legislation
if they could be protected against the unfair competition of
manufacturers in States that permit starvation wages.
This is a national concern, and it should be controlled
by the federal Government. If any State wishes to live on a
lower industrial level it may do so, but it should not be per-
mitted to impose that evil upon other States through its abuse
of the privileges of interstate commerce. Such a State should
be required to keep the products of its sweated labor at home.
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1918.] SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR 221
just as the man who has a contagious disease is compelled by
the quarantine regulations to confine the danger of contamina-
tion to his own family.
Nor would federal laws of this sort be equivalent to the*
imposition of higher standards by some States upon other
States. The thing would be done by Congress which repre-
sents the people of the whole country. ** The national welfare
as understood by Congress," says Justice Holmes, '*may re-
quire a different attitude within its sphere from that of some
self-seeking State." If Congress is impotent to protect the
national welfare against the low social and industrial stand-
ards of a small section of the nation, our system of govern-
ment would seem to be defective in a vital matter.
The majority of those who profess to fear the increase
of federal control over industrial matters heretofore regulated
by the States, have never taken the trouble to make an ade-
quate survey of the situation. While asserting that this change
will amount to excessive and despotic centralization, they have
no clear idea of the degree to which the power of the federal
Government would be extended, or that of the States dimin-
ished. Nor have they any reasoned theory of the principle or
rule that should mark off the field of state from that of federal
control.
State autonomy is not an end in itself; it is only a means
to public welfare. It promotes this end when it is exercised
wisely in regard to matters which concern only the people
within the boundaries of the individual State. When the mat-
ter to be regulated is one which affects persons without, as well
as within, the State, exclusive control of it by the State is un-
democratic and contrary to public welfare. It amounts to
government of the people of one State by the people of another
State. The lax child labor law of North Carolina affects the
cotton manufacturers of Massachusetts who must sell in the
same market as their Southern competitors. They are put at a
disadvantage by this particular State law. Similar injury is
done to the people of every State that has advanced labor
laws, whether as regards hours, wages, safety, or accident
compensation. Producers in such States cannot easily com-
pete for the sale of their goods in a common market with pro-
ducers in those States where production is cheaper because
labor is insufficiently protected. Moreover, the existence of
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222 SUPREME COURT AND CHILD LABOR [Nov.,
this handicap prevents further advances in humane legisla-
tion by States that would otherwise be disposed to take such
steps.
Perhaps the objection will be raised that if the more
progressive States had not enacted their beneficent labor laws
their citizens would not have been subjected to this dis-
advantage as regards interstate competition; therefore, the
responsibility rests originally upon these States. They have
exercised their authority to the ultimate injury of their own
inhabitants. The power to injure, as well as to benefit, is
necessarily included in the scope and theory of State autonomy.
The objection proves too much. It exposes the funda-
mental weakness of the theory of state control. If each State
is compelled by the exigencies of interstate competition to
refrain from passing beneficial labor laws until all other States
are ready to do likewise, all the States are helpless. Theoreti-
cally they possess a power of state autonomy which practically
they are unable to exercise. They are unable to legislate effec-
tively on behalf of an important class of their own citizens;
for if they adopt the necessary statutes they subject another
class of their citizens to a species of unfair competition which
reacts injuriously upon their entire industrial life. Therefore,
the theory of state autonomy in the regulation of industry
breaks down utterly. Instead of state autonomy, it means
state helplessness.
All industrial conditions and relations which are sub-
stantially the same in several States should presumably be
subject to uniform regulation. This presumption becomes a
certainty when regulation by a single State' seriously affects
the citizens of other States. The appropriate legislation should
be enacted by all the people concerned. Now there are only
two conceivable means of attaining this end. One is uniform
state legislation by agreement among all the States. No for-
mal argument is necessary to show that this is practically im-
possible. The other, and the only feasible method, is that of
federal action.
At present the federal Government is unable to regulate
the conditions of private industry and employment because it
is not authorized to do so by the Constitution. This defect
could, indeed, be removed by amending the Constitution, but
the process of amendment is so slow and difficult that the com-
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merce clause of the Constitution has seemed to present a
shorter and more promising path to the desired goal of federal
regulation. Conceivably this clause could be utilized for the
enactment of laws that would exclude from interstate com-
merce all goods that were not made in conformity with what-
ever conditions Congress saw fit to impose. In this way the
federal Grovemment could set up and enforce uniform stand-
ards and regulations with regard, not only to child labor, but
to hours, wages, safety and sanitation in workshops, and
insurance against accidents, sickness, invalidity and unem-
ployment.
While federal action of this sort is for the present im-
possible, owing to the unfavorable decision of the Supreme
Court in the child labor case, the analysis that we have made
of the majority and minority opinions indicates that a con-
trary decision is not beyond the range of reasonable hope.
Just as the minority opinion written by Justice Holmes in the
New York bakeshop case (Lochner vs. New York) has since
become the view of the majority, so his opinion in the child
labor case may be adopted by the majority in the not distant
future. This forecast receives powerful support from the
social thought of one time and the whole logic of events. It
is also strongly reenforced by the intrinsic merits of the
opinion written by Justice Holmes.
For clear and incisive thinking; for synthetic grasp and
application of essential principles; for keen distinction between
things that superficially seem to be alike; for broad and
humane conceptions of legal policy and social welfare; for
progressive views of the nature and function of the Constitu-
tion; for overwhelming logic; and for conciseness, irony and
simple eloquence — that document has few parallels in the an-
nals of our highest and ablest judicial body.
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JOYCE KILMER.
BY KATHERINE BREGY.
B|
|ETWEEN war and the poets there is an enmity as
irreconcilable as that between the woman and
the dragon of the Apocalypse, or between beauty
and violence, or to speak quite simply, between
good and evil. And because of this enmity, this
"pure and perfect hate," they are eternally seeking one an-
other — that they may eternally destroy one another. Joyce
Kilmer himself sang about this perennial leap of the poets
into battle : all the long way from that " loveliest of kings,"
David, who " smote now his harp and now the hostile horde,**
to the days of the young Rupert Brooke. And of war*s mortal
aim at that being so precious to man, the song-maker, the
blood-stained centuries make their repetitional confession
. . . even down to the bullet which laid low the poet of our
own Expeditionary Forces. Yet still is song herself immortal:
and never a poet falls, but that a thousand new poems are
given to man.
It was the hardest of all things to believe, this sudden
quenching of Joyce Kilmer*s enormous vitality. When he
marched so blithely and so modestly to the wars — " Naturally
I*m expecting to go, being of appropriate age and sex,** he
wrote to one friend; and he insisted upon going as a private,
not wishing, as he said, "to be an officer in charge of con-
scripts*' — ^when he went, we all said that the tragic outcome
was unthinkable. And we said it all the more vehemently,
perhaps, because the deep " reason of the heart ** knew it to be
inevitable. He must needs die as he had lived, swiftly, beau-
tifully, with a purpose. His was the cry, not always so
promptly answered, of every Crusading heart —
A short life in the saddle, Lord,
Not long life by the fire !
In manner, Joyce seemed purposely to avoid all appear-
ance of haste: yet the whole crowded record which began in
New Brunswick on that first birthday, the sixth of December,
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1918.] JOYCE KILMER ^ 225
1886, is one of almost incredible concentration. /He found time S
to be graduated from two colleges, Rutgers and Columbia, be-
fore he was twenty-two years old. From the classroom he
sped not only to the posts of editor and teacher, but to the
happier — if heavier — ^burdens of husband and father. He / r
bounded up the heiahts of song, and labored most patiently in \J\
the valley of toil^/^e plumbed the deep seas of the soul and ^ ^^
did not rest until he had captured the one priceless pearl of
Faith. On all sides he gathered in his brief transit the spoils
of honor, of service, of tenderness and of mirth. " His life,"
said one friend, ** was a fury of writing." A fury of living it
was in all truth for the boy-faced poet, until that moment of
intense and heroic action when the mortal bullet pierced his
brain, plunging him suddenly into the ultimate peace. As all
the world knows now, Joyce had gone out ahead of his bat-
talion to locate suspected machine guns in a copse so aptly
called the Wood of the Burned Bridge. When the men of
his own " Sixty-ninth " overtook him later, he was lying where
he had crept, his eyes apparently still gazing over a natural
trench into the enemy quarters. . . . They called, but could not
break in upon his silence. . . . That was on Thursday, the first
of August, 1918, at the height of our historic summer oifen-
sive : and where he fell, on that trampled hillside close to the
river Ourcq, his grave is marked by a little cross today.
" I have discovered," Joyce wrote some few weeks before
his end to a friend who was both poet and priest, *' since
some unforgettable experiences, that writing is not the tre-
mendously important thing I once considered it. You will find
me less a bookman when you next see me, and more, I hope,
a man." There he did himself — as usual! — less than justice,
for he was always preeminently and incorrigibly the man.
His humanism was an impassioned thing, a thing of prin-
ciple and of instinct, too. There were some of us who used
to tease him about his persistent democracy — he being wont
to defend himself with the most democratic and beautiful
fervor. And loving so the common things of universal life,
he set about glorifying them in his verse. Like Patmore, daz-
zled by tKe warm firelight of joyous domesticity, he deter-
mined to sing again the pseon of ** things too simple and too
sweet for words." He found rainbows staining every side-
walk — transfiguring the delicatessen shop or the midnight com-
y
^POL. Gvm.— 15
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226 JOYCE KILMER [Nov.,
muter's train, spanning the dull apartment-house if a woman's
face but shone from some upper window, even glorifying the
urban patois of " servant girl and grocer's boy." These little
genre sketches, as they might be called, were exceedingly well
done, and they struck an immediately popular note. There
was a time, indeed, when Joyce Kilmer's sympathy and facility
threatened to make of him another colloquial singer, like —
with a difference! — ^Eugene Fields or James Whitcomb Riley.
nd being from first to last an idealist, the young poet had at y'
heart a really profound reason for this praise of the ordinary;/^
the same reason which made him later on declare. the Catholic
Church to be " the one genuine democratic institution of the
twentieth century." He summed it up very perfectly at the
close of Delicatessen:
\
' , ; O Carpenter of Nazareth,
/ Whose mother was a village maid,
y ^ Shall we. Thy children, blow our breath
In scorn on any humble trade?
Have pity on our foolishness
And give us eyes, that we may see
Beneath the shopman's clumsy dress
The splendor of humanity.
Here was precisely the cause to which he was sworn in life
^and death, too — the splendor of humanitji. But Joyce in his
time played many parts. He was not only a poet : he was also
what he would probably have described as a literary hack —
but what others would name one of the best-known and most
versatile newspaper-man in the United States. He has left one
volume which might serve as a manual of the gentle — and diffi-
cult — art of interviewing.^ He was a literary critic of sound
and quick judgment, an admirable editor and lecturer. And
his little book The Circus, published the winter preceding his
enlistment, shows him a familiar essayist of real charm and
distinction. Here he chats in a very modem, very sympathetic
and slightly satiric vein about alarm-clocks, the abolition of
po^ts, the joys of the subway and the picturesque democracy
of the commuter's life. It is the chatting of one who thinks
both clearly and cheerfully, by the same token, it is the irony
of one who has never forgotten the dreams of the far-away
^Literature in the Making,
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1918.] JOYCE KILMER 227
purple mountains. One is tempted to quote many colorful or
amusing passages: the thrilling adventure of the young clerk's
noonday freedom, or the gentle *' reconciliation " of the day
after Christmas, when the majestic tree becomes a familiar
friend since "some of its needles have formed little green
aromatic heaps on the carpet, and . . . the china angel and two
or three of the red glass balls have been taken down for the
baby to play with." But probably the delicate and very human
quality of Joyce Kilmer's fancy is nowhere more attractive
than in this fragment from the highly original essay which
gives title to the book :
" The stage's glories have been sung by many a poet. But
the circus has had no laureate; it has had to content itself
with the passionate prose of its press agent. The loss is
poetry's, not the circus'. For the circus is itself a poem and
a poet — a poem in that it is a lovely and enduring expression
of the soul of man, his mirth, and his romance, and a poet in
that it is a maker, a creator of splendid fancies in the minds
of those who see it.
** And there are poets in the circus. They are not, perhaps,
the men and women who make their living by their skill and
daring, risking their lives to entertain the world. . . . No, the
subjective artists, the poets, are to be found in the basement
if the show is at the Garden, or, if the show be outside New
York, they are to be found in the little tents — the side shows.
This is not a mere sneer at the craft of poetry, a mere state-
ment that poets are freaks. Poets are not freaks. But freaks
are poets. . . . Behold, therefore, the man on whom a crushing
misfortune has come. He puts his grief into fair words, and
shows it to the public. Thereby he gets money and fame. Be-
hold therefore, a man whom misfortune touched before his
birth, and dwarfed him, and made him a ridiculous image of
humanity. He shows his misfortune to the public and gets
money and fame thereby. This poet shows a soul scarred by
the cruel whips of injustice; this man a back scarred by the
tattooer's needle.
" But the freaks would not like to change places with the
poets. The freaks get large salaries (they seem large to poets)
and they are carefully tended, for they are delicate. See, here
is a man 'who lives although his back is broken. There is a
crowd around him; how interested they are! Would they be
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228 JOYCE KILMER [Nov.,
as interested in a poet who lived although his heart was
broken? Probably not. But then, there are not many freaks."
This is a capital example of what Joyce describes, in his
admirable essay on Hilaire Belloc, as '* the poet who writes
prose.** It is also an eloquent evidence of the critical faculty
which went side by side with his naturally rich and indigenous
creativeness. No one could know better than Joyce Kilmer
when he was being praised " for the wrong reason.*' He knew
quite well, for instance, that his much lauded Twelve Forty-
five (how he detested being asked to read it aloud after one of
his lectures!) was a tour de force. But he would have been
the last to claim that such delightful journalistic verse was
really poetry — even if he did once whimsically describe a poet
as " only a glorified reporter.*' Simplicity and humanity were
his both by natural taste and as cultivated virtues; cultivated
by way of protest against the artificial and highly inhuman
literary fads which preceded the more recent fads for
" virihty ** and " elementalism.'* Against all these Joyce Kil-
mer's face was as flint : his scorn of them was but scarcely con-
tained in such biting diatribes as To Certain Poets. But as his
youth grew toward maturity, his enthusiasm into experience,
he perceived that naiveti itself might conceivably become, a
mannerism. More and more he put from him the suspicion of
a professional domesticity — a professional democracy. The
rarer quality, the essential poetry, which had always under-
lain his work, leaped then into its rightful, foremost place.
The Kilmer manner is at its best in the much quoted and
perfect lyric called Trees. This was nearer, perhaps, to the
supreme, brief songs of Blake than to any more recent poet;
but it was more winsomely human than Blake. It was of ex-
quisite simplicity, neither precious nor puerile. And of the
same fine lineage is the less familiar Easter quatrain :
The air is like a butterfly
With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
And sings.
There are originality and flashes of both human and divine
passion in The Fourth Shepherd. But one of the most radiant
of these earlier poems, and one of which the poet himself was
rather fond, is that riot of music and imagery called Stars:
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1918.] JOYCE KILMER 229
Bright stars, yellow stars, flashing through the air,
Are you errant strands of Lady Mary's hair?
As she slits the cloudy veil and bends down through.
Do you fall across her cheeks and over heaven too?
Gay stars, little stars, you are little eyes.
Eyes of baby angels playing in the skies;
Now and then a winged child turns his merry face
Down toward the spinning world — ^what a funny place !
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ '
Christ's troop, Mary's guard, God's own men.
Draw your swords and strike at hell and strike again.
Every steel-born spark that flies where God's battles are
Flashes past the face of God, and is a star.
All of these poems are contained in the volume called Trees,
published in 1914. There was a still earlier volume. Summer
of Love, marked by the faults and virtues of tentative youth,
which Joyce was quite willing to have go out of print;
although, as he modestly said, '' some of the poems, those in-
spired by genuine love, are not things of which to be ashamed."
His higher music was increasingly to the fore in Main Street,
which did not come from the press in its completion until after
Private Kilmer had sailed for France. But here, too, were at
least three little poems — the title-giver. Roofs, and The Snow-
mem in the Yard — ^which are a most lovesome apotheosis of the
earlier familiar style. Professedly, these are not subtle;
although surely there is nothing of the obvious in a fancy
which can label the Milky Way of the illimitable skies, '' Main
Street, Heaventown." And there is scarcely a page without
some such tender felicity as this from In Memory:
Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder;
Love is a poignant and accustomed pain.
It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;
It is a linnet's fluting after rain. . . .
Only an authentic poet could give the delicious surprise
of these last two lines! There was development on every side,
in variety of theme and lyric treatment, in breadth and depth
and height, through all this later work of Joyce Kilmer's. It
is significant, too, that during that final year or two he wrote
less frequently, for when a young and robustly creative poet
ceases to be prolific, it is usually a hopeful phase of transition.
t
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230 JOYCE KILMER [Nov.,
In art as in the spiritual life, Newman's dictum holds true:
" To live is to change ... to be perfect is to have changed often."
By every count, indeed, Joyce was growing. For the new life
coming to the world after this War, he was magnificently pre-
\ pared: how well, both spiritually and technically, is shown by
\ the two poems published during his active service — The Pray-
er of a Soldier in France and the haunting song of " the wood
called Rouge Bouquet'* Where th^ future might have led his
active and ardent spirit we can but conjecture now. He was
less than thirty-two years old when the bullet found him. But
which among his contemporaries, which of all the younger
American poets, could show a sounder and fresher achieve-
ment, or a more solid promise?
In the volume called Trees was one poem which we have
purposely deferred to mention, not because its implications
were few but because they were so many. This was the poem
Folly, one of the most thoroughly characteristic Joyce ever
wrote. It is, of course, a praise of the wisdom of fools, the follia
d^amore, the divine intoxication by which in every age the
idealist burns his bridge and plunges headlong toward the
compelling Source of his dream. Its moral was to do great
things — or peradventure little things — ^for Love, not coimting
the cost: like Jeanne the superwoman on one side, or on the
other like ** Christ's plaything. Brother Juniper."
What distant mountains thrill and glow
Beneath our Lady Folly's tread?
Why has she left us, wise in woe,
Shrewd, practical, uncomforted?
We cannot love or dream or sing,
We are too cynical to pray.
There is no joy in anything
Since Lady Folly went away. . . .
Joyce used to say that he "was glad when people saw that
Folly was a religious poem." It was more than this : it was a
revealing poem. It revealed the fact that this successful young
journalist and popular poet was at soul a mystic. Perhaps it
was sorrow, or perhaps it was joy — or perhaps it was both to-
gether — which brought him this sacred initiation into life. In
any case he was true to it: true even unto death.
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1918.] JOYCE KILMER 231
Close beside Folly should be grouped, among the earlier
poems» Pennies, St Laurence, and those strangely prophetic
lines called Poets. The pages of Main Street are very rumor-
ous of this strain. Sometimes, as in The Robe of Christ, it is
a mystical study of temptation. In that splendid Apology it
is the Crusader cry again. But in Gerard Hopkins it is the old
Teresian thirst for martyrdom —
O bleeding feet, with peace and glory shod!
O happy moth, that flew into the Sun!
Those who knew Joyce Kilmer best can bear testimony to
the enormous sincerity of this religious — even this ascetic —
emotion : although it was even less frequent upon his lips than
in his song. He was one of those many-sided natures — happily
they are less rare than is commonly supposed — who could
harmoniously combine simplicity and worldly wisdom, human
tenderness and a quick sense of humor, artistic eminence and
a most ardent and honest piety. To the spirit of the Church
Catholic, into which he and his young wife Aline had been
received in 1913, he was beautifully obedient. He was a nor-
mal, youthful, healthy child of God, and there was no sen-
suous beauty in all nature to which he did not quickly respond.
Neither was there anything he detested much more thoroughly
than ^ cant '' or mock-heroics. Like most human beings, he
wanted all the happiness God would let him have — and per-
haps a little more. But he was in the habit of receiving daily
Communion, and he had an incorrigible, if secret, fondness for
the counsels of perfection !
It was the peaceful side of his mysticism which gave spur
to most of the religious poems. Joyce habitually thought, and
spoke, of holy things with a most simple and engaging inti-
macy. He found for the Most Potent Virgin a new title, that of
the Singing Girl. Into the crowded ways of the city streets,
as later into the trenches overseas, he took Christ and His
bright saints with him. And so he was abl€ to give us such
lyric's as The Thorn, or Annunciation, or that blithe ballad
Gates and Doors, which only Mr. Bellqc, perhaps, of all other
living poets, could have written. And he was able to sing
that precious song of Roses, a thing of such tender sweetness
that it would have graced the lips of Chaucer's gentle Prioress :
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232 JOYCE KILMER [Nov.,
I went to gather roses and twine them in a ring,
For I would make a posy» a posy for the King.
I got a hundred roses, the loveliest there be.
From the white rose vine and the pink rosebush and from the red
rose tree.
But when I took my posy and laid it at His feet
I found He had His roses a million times more sweet.
There was a scarlet blossom upon each foot and hand.
And a great pink rose bloomed from His side for the healing of the
land.
Now of this fair and awful King there is this marvel told.
That He wears a crown of linked thorns instead of one of gold.
Where there are thorns are roses, and I saw a line of red,
A little wreath of roses around His radiant head.
A red rose is His Sacred heart, a white rose is His face.
And His breath has turned the barren world to a rich and flowery
place.
He is the Rose of Sharon, His gardener am I,
And I shall drink His fragrance in Heaven when I die.
Joyce Kilmer had reached just this milestone when his
fine energies were drawn into the maelstrom of the Great War.
AU the chivaky of his nature sprang like a sword to the defence
of outraged humanity. His poem. The White Ships and the
Red, written in a single day and published in the New York
Times shortly after the destruction of the Lusitania, remains
one of the most memorable poems America has yet contributed
to the conflict. His sonnet to Rupert Brooke was a prophecy,
almost in every line, of the sacrifice he was himself so soon to
make:
In alien earth, across a troubled sea.
His body lies that was so fair and young.
His mouth is stopped, with half his songs unsung;
His arm is still, that struck to make men free. . . .
The New School and Mid-Ocean in War Time showed again
where his song was leading. Then, in the spring of 1917,
our country ranged herself definitely with the Crusader
nations, and the call was for men. Less than three weeks
later, Joyce had tossed aside every consideration of temporal
advancement, of prudence, of the heartstrings, enlisting as a
private in the Seventh (New York) Regiment. By August, in
order that he might be sooner at the front, he obtained a trans-
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f er to the " Fighting Sixty-ninth " or, as it is now known, the
One Hundred and Sixty-fifth United States Infantry. And
with these, in October, he sailed for France.
Life had not smoothed the path for him. Within six weeks
of his departure he had seen his little daughter Rose gathered
by the Divine Gardener, and had welcomed a little new-bom
son, Christopher. But his hand was set irrevocably to the
ploughshare, and he went on — smiling. That he did contrive
to smile all through the hardships of that long winter in
France his letters home seem to prove. At first. Private Kil-
mer had acted as statistician in the office of the regimental ad-
jutant. But he longed to follow his heart and his song to the
very thick of the fight: and he gave neither himself nor any-
body else any peace until he was again transferred, this time
to the perilous and fascinating work of the Intelligence Sec-
tion. Here he was happy — ^here he won all hearts. Major
Esler, the supply sergeant of Joyce's regiment, gives of these
days the sort of detail one might expect. ^ He would always
be doing more than his orders called for — that is, getting much
nearer to the enemy's positions than any officer would ever be
inclined to send him. Night after night he would lie out in No
Man's Land, crawling through barbed wires, in an effort to
locate enemy positions and enemy guns, and tearing his
clothes to shreds. On the following day he would come to
me for a new uniform ! "
What was he thinking of all those days of strenuous serv-
ice, those nights of thrilling vigilance? Of all the old things,
perhaps, with new vehemence. He worked and played and did
not forget to laugh. To one friend, during the spring of 1918,
he sent the picture of a most delectable Gallic Harlequin,
whimsically declaring this to be "the new uniform of the
American troops in France " — which he, for one, found very
comfortable ! But his soul sent its message in one of the very
few poems he wrote on foreign soil, that most direct, most
manly and most saintly Prayer of a Soldier in France:
My shoulders ache beneath my pack,
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back.) \ ^
I march with feet that burn and smart,
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart.)
Men shout at me who may not speak,
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek.)
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234 JOYCE KILMER [Nov.,
I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear»
(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?)
My rifle hand is stiff and numb,
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come.)
Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.
So let me render back again
This mUlionth of Thy gift! Amen.
It is sweet to remember that during his last month of May
Joyce was given a brief respite from the hardship and the hor-
ror, and sent up to a mountain spot *' among pines and firs —
very lovely, indeed! " as he put it. Here he was resting: which
means that he was working only six hours a day; and he seems
to have remembered to send messages to almost everyone who
ever called him friend. He even remembered to have his photo-
graph taken: could he have suspected, one wonders, how
preciously those crude little cardboards would be treasured
when he had kept his coming "rendezvous with death?*' It
was evidently about the time of this furlough, also, that he
wrote one of the most remarkable letters ever sent by a soldier
in action, the letter to Father Garesch^ quoted earlier in this
paper. It mentions serenely the comfort of living in a land where
one is reminded " in every room of every house, and at every
cross road, of the Faith *' — also his "intensely interesting" work
in the Intelligence Section — closing with these really momen-
tous words : " Pray for me . . . that I may love God more and
be unceasingly conscious of Him. That is the greatest desire
I have.''
He was ready, very ready for the accolade of blood. He
seems even to have thirsted for it. It is known now that on
August 1st Joyce was serving outside his own battalion, hav-
ing learned that the latter was not to be in the forefront of the
great Ourcq attack. " He was at the very front, and he was
there not because he had to be but because he wanted to be,''
wrote Sergeant Alexander Wollcott, who, of course, had known
Joyce when both were staff contributors to the New York
Times. His account of the epilogue to Joyce's tragedy will
stand repetition here for its wealth of graphic human detail :
** I wish I could find words adequate to tell you how deep
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and genuine was the regiment's sense of loss in his death. I
was with them in the woods the day they came out of the line
to catch their breaths, and the news of Kilmer's death greeted
me at every turn. The captain under whom he had been serv-
ing for several months, the major at whose side he fell, stray
cooks, doughboys, runners — all shook their heads sorrowfully
and talked among themselves of what a good soldier he had
been and what an infinite pity it was that the bullet had had
to single him out. And in such days as these there are no plati-
tudes of polite regret. When men, good men and close pals,
are falling about you by hundreds, when every man in the regi-
ment has come out of the fight the poorer for the loss of not
one but many friends, there is no time to say pretty things
about a man just because he exists no longer. Death is too
common to distinguish any one. ... I gathered that his stock
among men of all ranks had been climJ^ing steadily from the
first days when many of them, including myself, felt that he
he was out of his own element in a rip-roaring regiment. As
the regiment's laureate, they all knew him, and they knew,
too, that he was at work on a history of the regiment. He had
become quite an institution, with his arms always full of maps
as they used to be full of minor poetry, and his mouth always
fuU of that imperishable pipe."
Joyce had written his own Yale, had written it a few
months before in memory of some of his regimental brothers
"sent west" by a German shell; but the lines were not pub-
lished until just after his own death. Rouge Bouquet is of a
noble and plaintive beauty — the beajrt^ of the old Kilmer and
the new, the Singing Man turned Fating Man. We quote but
the latter half:
There is on earth no worthier grave
To hold the bodies of the brave
Than this place of pain and pride
Where they nobly fought and nobly died.
Never fear but in the skies
Saints and angels stand
Smiling with their holy eyes
On this new come band.
St Michael's sword darts through the air
And touches the aureole on his hair
As he sees them stand saluting there.
His stalwart sons:
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236 JOYCE KILMER [Nov..
And Patrick, Brigid, Columkill
Rejoice that in veins of warriors still
The Gael's blood runs.
And up to Heaven's doorway floats,
From the wood called Rouge Bouquet,
A delicate cloud of buglenotes
That softly say:
"Farewell!
Farewell !
Comrades true, born anew, peace to you!
Your souls shall be where the heroes are
And your memory shine like the morning star.
Brave and dear.
Shield us here,
Farewell r"
Is there a final word to say, after this great cloud of wit-
nesses? If there is, let it be the Requiem written by Father
Duffy, the devoted and high-hearted Chaplain of that most
faithful regiment : ** Joyce was one of those soldiers who had
a romantic love of death in battle, and it c'ould not have missed
him in time. He voluntered his aid to Major Donovan in the
line, acted as his adjutant when Lieutenant Ames was killed,
went forward with the Major in attack when he could hon-
orably have remained at duties behind, and met his death.
. . . God rest his noble soul 1 *'
It is told by one close friend who used to question Joyce
about his conversion, that he "liked to feel he had always
been a Catholic.'' It would be hard, truly, to find a more char-
acteristic exemplar of the anima naturaliter Christiana in
modern life. He was both Catholic and catholic. On the
human side he was amazingly inclusive in his tastes : he liked
nearly all sorts of people — only, in each sort it was the best he
liked. He kept the same sane balance in artistic things, loving
" whatsoever things are lovely," alike old and new, simple or
profound. ' Prose and verse he wrote with almost equal
facility; and, which is saying perhaps more, he could write
ballad or " free verse " with almost equal charm. On the re-
ligious side he was at once very proud and very humble —
humble as a little child, infinitely trusting his Father and his
Mother, hence neither afraid nor ashamed of his toys. The
pride was of heroic timber, a sort of sublimated noblesse
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oblige, urging him on to the highest fulfillment of all his Faith
implied. He was quite ready to follow his Lady Folly unfalter-
ingly, though she led, indeed, to the Wood of all Burned
Bridges ! More than once his more intimate friends have been
startled to hear upon Joyce Kilmer*s usually smiling or senten-
tious lips some sudden doctrine of the most extreme renuncia-
tion — ^like the shadow of a half-anticipated Calvary falling
across a garden gay with poppies or blue with the beckoning
gentian He had summed up and made his own that death-
in-life which is the eternal paradox of Catholicism. All the
human things life offered, love and home and friends and fine
work, he took and deliberately sacramentalized. Then, at the
call of what he believed the greater need, the greater good, he
deliberately crucified them. The thought was not new to
him : is it new to any Christian poet? It is the root of all costly
mysticism, and years before he himself had put it into two un-
forgettable lines —
They shall not live who have not tasted death,
They only sing who are struck dumb by God!
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LOVE AND THE PHILOSOPHER
BY SAMUEL F. DARWIN FOX.
|N the month of April, 1844, there took place, at
Paris, one of those odd little incidents so familiar
to every student of history — incidents in them-
selves quite ridiculously trivial, commonplace,
peradventure undignified, but nevertheless con-
ducing to unfoi'seen effects of recognized historical moment
which yet (so far, that is to say, as ludicrous inconsistency,
sheer irresponsibility, and total lack of logical connection with
their proximate causes are concerned) resemble nothing so
much as a children's " game of consequences " in real life. For
in that year, and in that month of the year, the philosopher
Auguste Comte paid a visit to one of his favorite pupils — ^M.
Marie by name — a young man of parts but of no particular im-
portance, who had lately become a professor (in the wide
French connotation of that term) and was living, with his fam-
ily, in a modest apartment in the Rue Pavee situated in the
heart of the peaceful and provincial Quartier du Marais. It
was merely one of those little social amenites which are part
and parcel of our normal and every-day existence; yet an
episode so petty and so natural was directly responsible for the
begetting of a new religion — the Religion of Positivism, that
curiously emasculated Rationalistic parody of the Catholic
Church which, despite its manifold and manifest incon-
gruities, speedily established a position for itself in the fore-
front of the jostling crowd of parvenu heresies and reach-
me-down sects, and has, indeed, continued to attract adherents,
of more than average intellectual ability, even down to the
present day.
Could the " consequences " of the children's game be more
fantastic, more far-fetched — ^more delightfully inconsequent —
than this strictly historical sequence of events?
M. Marie was sheltering beneath his roof-tree not only
his child-wife (a girl of fifteen summers), but also his widowed
mother and his sister Clotilde, who had recently been sepa-
rated from her good-for-nothing husband, M. de Vaux.
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1918.] LOVE AND THE PHILOSOPHER 239
Clotilde, indeed, possessed a little home of her own in the
immediate neighborhood — her house, still standing today, was
in the Rue Payenne — ^but she took all her meals with her
brother, and passed her evenings with him. And thus it was
that she first encountered the bemused philosophical visitor
to the Rue Pav6e. He fell violently in love with her at sight;
and his passion waxed piadder and more furious day by day,
till finally he came literally and actually to deify the beloved
object of his heart's desire.
Clotilde was nine-and-twenty years of age: of surpassing
loveliness, she seemed far younger than her years; and her
personal attractions, enhanced by the daintiness and grace of
her deportment, were oflf-set to perfection by a natural air of
aristocratic distinction and old-world refinement. This agree-
able trait was possibly inherited from her mother's ancestors,
the Ficquelmonts, who were T)ne of the four families of Lor-
raine possessing the title of grands chevaux. Auguste Comte
was her direct antithesis. Apart from his intellectual genius —
which, indeed, was carefully confined within the covers of his
books — he was the most bourgeois of the bourgeois: moreover,
he was forty-five years old. Raid, moist-eyed, slightly pot-
bellied, he is described, by those who saw him, as perpetually
spuming a little froth of saliva at the comers of his lips. The
singularly unpleasing characteristics of the outward man
might be expected strongly to militate against his chances of
success as a lover; but he entirely realized the mental and in-
tellectual superiority of his inward self, and he firmly resolved
that his lady-elect should be made to realize it likewise.
To say that Clotilde was agreeably flattered by the un-
stinted homage of a man already so famous in the world of
wits, is only another way of saying that she was a woman.
Rut it would be unjust to assume that her feelings in the matter
were purely superficial, and that they began, continued, and
ended in the mere gratification of her feminine vanity and
self-esteem. The deep places of her soul were really stirred by
the unsought-for, humble and almost groveling adoration of a
man whom, from an intellectual point of view, she unf eignedly
respected and admired. On the other hand, she had been
brought up from childhood in the good old traditions of god-
liness and Christian morality; and she could not forget that
there was living in the world a certain M. de Vaux to whom she
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240 LOVE AND THE PHILOSOPHER [Nov.,
was bound in lawful matrimony. She could not fail to remem-
ber, likewise, that her worshipper himself had also in the
world a woman who bore his name, however much she might
dishonor and besmirch it.
Thus, over and above the strictly virtuous and honorable
dispositions of Clotilde — who made up her mind, from the
outset, in no respect to overstep the limits of legitimate friend-
ship — a two-fold barbed-wire entanglement fenced oflf the
frantic lover from the being in whom his soul delighted. To
cut through the twice-tied Gordian Knots with the brutal and
double-edged dagger of divorce, and to seize upon his prize
amid the general applause of the world, the flesh, and the
devil, was, in this case, altogether impossible: for the State
was then at least nominally Christian; and the cheap and
nasty legalized processes that now lie ready to hand for the
putting asunder of those whom God hath joined together, met
with no sanction or toleration in the civil law.
This consideration was, to Comte, a mere bagatelle. With
characteristic impatience of common decency and of the eter-
nal fitness of things, he himself was perfectly prepared, at a
moment's notice, to take a flying leap over every convention
and obstacle which barred the way to his desires; and he set
to work, tirelessly, systematically and shamelessly to induce
his lady-love to leap in unison with him. In one of the twen-
ty-four letters, all carefully numbered and re-copied, which
he addressed to Clotilde upon this matter, we find him
solemly urging that her continual abiding presence — their
total union" as he expresses it — is fundamentally necessary
for the "great work** which he is engaged in elaborating.
This should be noted in view of subsequent developments.
But all this was to no purpose. Like the deaf adder of the
Psalmist, the lady stopped her ears, and refused to hear the
voice of the charmer, charmed he never so wisely. And Comte
was fain to take a hint from the principles of military tactics,
and prudently to fight in retreat until a more favorable occa-
sion should present itself for taking up again the grand
offensive.
Although you have not yet replied to my letter of Satur-
day the twenty-fourth (he writes) I trust that it has served
to dissipate, in some degree at least, the very proper feel-
ings of uneasiness with which the indiscreet expression of
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my earliest desires must naturally have inspired you; for it
assures you of my firm purpose to respect, in future, the
virtuous limitations which — when, in my thoughts I had
dared to overpass them — ^you were obliged to recall to my
notice.
Again, with reference to the Platonic situation now estab-
lished between them :
What a precious contrast it affords to the melancholy
state of Affective Compression wherein I was plunged,
despite myself, when beginning my fundamental work a
fortnight ago! ... I am so permeated by this healthful
reaction, that I shall not hesitate some day to address to you
the public Dedication of a work in which you have in-
directly cooperated in this regard — that is, if the conven-
tions of respectability do not forbid me such a confession.
And, on June 3d, the feast of St. Clotilde, he contented
himself with sending his friend a fresh proof of the ardor of
his sentiments under the innocent form and appearance of a
Lettre Philosophique sur la Commemoration Sociale.
Clotilde's answers to these singular love-letters were at
the same time simple and adroit; in other words, they were
the answers of a woman of virtue and of wit.
In reply to an epistle, lengthy, ponderous and dull,
wherein Auguste Comte (ever a man of many words) exposed
the nature of his feelings towards her, she wrote a spirited,
charming and frank letter which — as a fair sample of the tem-
per of her correspondence — deserves to be translated in full:
Thursday morning, June 5, 1845.
You have given me an earnest of your esteem, M. Comte;
I hope that you will find an earnest of mine in what 1 am go-
ing to say about myself. I could not have believed it possi-
ble to add in any way to what 1 have suffered for so long a
time; but I see now that we can feel the counter-blow of
others* sorrows, even while we are being bowed down by the
burthen of our own. My heart is, as it were, torn in sunder
and, when I tell you that 1 ask, each night, whether I shall
have the courage to live through the coming day, it is but
the literal truth. In the name of the consideration which
I bear you, 1 pray you strive to overcome a passion which
can only make you wretched. A hopeless love kills body
and soul alike: it mows you down like a blade of grass.
VOL. CVUI. — 16
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242 LOVE AND THE PHILOSOPHER [Nov,,
For two years I have loved a man who is separated from me
by a two-fold obstacle. In vain have I striven to transmute
this sentiment into motherliness, sisterly affection, devo-
tion; it has devoured me under every form and shape. To-
day I need calmness, coupled with activity. I am putting
whatever strength I possess into a work which may be use-
ful to me in the future: I wish to think of nothing now
but that. Keep your friendship for me; and believe that
I price your heart at its fullest value. Mine is as broken:
it must be mended at the springing-wells of Solitude and
Resignation.
My wish is that you should not come to visit me at home;
let us spare one another our emotions — ^they can only be
disastrous to us both. Use in this battle the panoply which
as a man is yours; a woman has but her heart to fight
withal; and she, too, is none the less expected to win the
day. If, as I like to think, you have understood and appre-
ciated me, you will find in my sad confidences a sincere
proof of my interest and esteem: there are sacred trans-
actions which are, to my eyes, impenetrable mysteries — I
shall go to my grave in ignorance of them.
, Farewell, Sir; I give you my hand in all sincerity, and I
love you with all affection.
C. DE Vaux.
The poor philanderer was naturally taken aback by a
statement of the situation so plain spoken and unambiguous.
However, as he took the earliest opportunity of saying, this
letter, far from destroying his devotion to the writer, served
but to strengthen and confirm it. ' And, not to be outdone in
generosity and frankness, he, too, was about to make a con-
fession — a confession which, peradventure, would torture his
pride, as a man and as a philosopher, to an infinitely greater
degree than the avowal of a hopeless love had wounded the
feminine vanity of Clo tilde:
. . . Yes (he writes) I shall have the courage to tell you.
During the greater part of the year 1828, being then twenty-
eight years old, I was a madman. And, since the fullness
of your confidence prompts me to be perfectly frank in
return, I shall complete this avowal by a further confession
which hitherto I have never confided, even to my dearest
friends: during my recovery from this terrible malady, in
spite of all my efforts, I was fished out of the Seine. . . .
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This man — ^who recognizes that he once was mad; who
(though he recognizes nothing of the sort) is still upon the
hinterland of mania; who in the near future is to become
crazier than ever before — this man now undertook, if not to
conquer, at all events to transform a love which could but
trouble his life and that of the woman he adored. Henceforth
he would aspire to be but a friend — the most tender and de-
voted of friends.
The health of Clotilde which had long been precarious, and
was now beginning to be alarming, became the subject of his
perpetual solicitude. A further occasion for showing forth his
friendship quickly presented itself. Clotilde had very wisely
determined to take up her pen for the two-fold object of dis-
tracting her mind from its torments and of supplementing her
modest pecuniary income. Comte assisted her with his advice,
pointed out the pitfalls, above all encouraged and supported
her by an admiration and approval which his love did not
prevent from being seasoned with shrewd and sensible criti-
cism. From the point of view of style, he had certainly noth-
ing to teach Clotilde; contrariwise, if grace, delicacy and
natural spontaneity could be acquired by rote in any school,
he had everything to learn from her. But can an elephant
learn gracefulness and lightness from a swallow? However,
if Comte was unable to add anything of his own to Clotilde*s
native gift of expression, he could surely guide her in the
choice of subjects and devote the treasures of his learning and
genius to the suggestion and inspiration of noble thoughts
meet to be clothed in noble language.
It was the miasmic age of exotic and decadent Roman-
ticism. George Sand filled the literary horizon, seducing, be-
wildering, subjugating the wits of womankind, and extending
her baleful influence over intellects of stranger, sterner mak-
ing. Would Clotilde consent to be the echo of that voice of
cloying fascination? Would she, too, submerge herself in the
spirit of the times, and become a fervent apostle of " the right
to be happy? " Small wonder had she done so. Ill-wed; in-
finitely attractive; richly talented; living on the outskirts of
society; entirely lacking in those strong religious convictions
which are as a mighty bulwark against human weakness and
instability — everything seemed to conspire to make her a
child of her age. Comte saw the danger; and with equal per-
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244 LOVE AND THE PHILOSOPHER [Nov..
spicacity and promptitude, he proceeded to put her on her
guard against it. We cannot, however, credit his action, ex-
cellent and timely as it was, with being entirely disinterested.
Here is a typical passage, dealing with this subject in
terms of almost pontifical solemnity, which occurs in one of
his letters to Clo tilde at this time:
Humanity is in travail with Total Regeneration: yours
must be the noble ambition to second rather than blindly
to trouble it. There will now be greater honor, and more-
over, greater literary renown, in defending the true funda-
mental notions of the domestic order, than in joining —
even with your talent — the mob, already so vulgar, of sense-
less and criminal reactionaries against the elementary bases
of Human Society. Certainly you must never write against
your convictions; but you must mistrust the only too
natural temptation which is tending, at this time, to mis-
take simple personal inclinations for those true social con-
victions which needs must be so rare, among your own sex,
in these our days of mental and moral anarchy.
In writing these words, it might have occurred to Comte
that he himself might better " defend the true fundamental
notions of the domestic order '' by living with the woman he
had chosen for his wife, instead of fobbing her off with a
yearly pension and hankering after another mistress. But
perhaps it were unreasonable to expect too great a devotion
to limping logic on the part of a love-lorn philosopher — even
though he be the founder of the Positivist Religion.
However, the important point is that Clotilde so far
profited by his advice that her novel entitled Lucie, and pub-
lished by Le tiational, contained nothing in any way calculated
to trouble ** Humanity in travail with Total Regeneration.** On
the other hand, it might fairly be said to contain nothing what-
ever to assist it. The publication of Lucie was as a flash of
sunshine in the colorless monotony of her daily life. She saw
the possibility of a little more comfort, perhaps of independent
leisure — all the intoxicating perspective of renown. For did
not her friend and mentor, the philosopher of universal repu-
tation, enthusiastically declare that Lucie was a master-
piece. Feverishly she set herself at her desk again, to weave
yet another romance, called Wilhelmine, which her cruel
malady obliged her twenty times to interrupt, until, a few
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months later, her pen slipped from her languid fingers for
evermore.
The future High-Priest of Humanity was constitutionally
unable long to satisfy himself with the illusion of exceeding
heroism. With a humble persistence — so humble that it be-
came quite touching — Comte pursued his dream of a ''total
union.*' Clotilde answered him as follows:
I shall be your friend for ever if you wish it; but I shall
be nothing more than that. Look upon me as a woman who
is engaged; and rest assured that beside my sorrows there
is still room for great affections.
The philosopher, however, was far from seeing, in the
successful issue of his love, a mere simple and vulgar gratifica-
tion of his personal desires. Weightier matters, verily, were at
stake. What woman would dare refuse a mission such as the
following?
After having lately passed in mental review all the ideas
of Humanity, I must now make proof of the feelings thereof
— even those that are painful : this is an inevitable and most
necessary condition naturally imposed upon all the Regen-
erators of Humanity. ... An habitual expansion of our
principal emotions — ^above all, those which are at the same
time strongest and sweetest — ^becomes, therefore, just as in-
dispensable for my second Great Work as my former men-
tal preparation was necessary for my first. I hope that,
duly weighing this necessity, you will be unable to retain
any material doubt as to the happy philosophical efficacy
which I expect to accrue from your eternal friendship.
My own organism has inherited, from a very tender
mother, certain intimate chords which are essentially
feminine; and these, from lack of opportunity, have not, as
yet, been played upon sufficiently. The time is at last come
for the development of an activity which — albeit barely
touched upon in the First Volume of my Great Work
(which volume is essentially logical) — will strongly char-
acterize the following volume, and, still more strongly, the
Fourth and last Volume. It is from your health-bringing
influence, my Clotilde, that I expect this inestimable im-
provement.
About this time, Clotilde*s family began to take umbrage
at the assiduous attentions of Auguste Comte. The mother
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246 LOVE AND THE PHILOSOPHER [Nov.,
and brother naturally regarded with anything but favor the
progress of what the philosopher called " our holy friendship;"
and they gave him clearly to understand that he would do well
to curtail his visits. This was a terrible blow to the philan-
derer.
He learnedly and laboriously explains to Clotilde that, if
she persists in her cruel conduct of treating him only as a
friend, he will become mad. What could the poor woman do?
This mighty man of renown; this choice spirit; this Regenera-
tor of Humanity, solemnly assm'es her that she — and she
alone — is indispensable, not only to his health and happiness,
but also to his Work! For the sake of a squeamish virtue
which perhaps was mistaken after all, ought she to endanger
the priceless gift to the world of that "Fourth and last
Volume** which Comte could not compose without her col-
laboration? She was not a believer in the Christian religion.
And then she was weary, so desperately weary — ^weary of life,
and weary of refusing. The hour was at hand when Auguste
Comte was to reap the reward of his gentle yet pitiless per-
sistence. "I cannot bear that you should become ill or un-
happy because of me,** wrote Clotilde, "I will do what you
want.** And she promised to visit him the very next day.
On receiving this wonderful and unexpected message,
Comte fell upon his knees in thanksgiving before the arm-
chair whereupon Clotilde was wont to seat herself when she
made her rare and fleeting visits to his house in the Rue Mon-
sieur-le-Prince — that famous armchair which is, even at the
present day, exposed for veneration to the faithful of the
Positivist Religion. But he made the common mistake of
counting his chickens before they were hatched. Clotilde had
barely arrived at his house, when the virtuous traditions of
her family and of her whole life violently reasserted them-
selves; and, quite regardless of the stupefaction, consternation,
and utter despair of the philosopher, she departed as sud-
denly as she had come.
Despite the nimbus with which he continued to adorn his
divinity, Comte was utterly unable to take this in good part.
In the days that followed, he multiplied his epistolary com-
plaints of Clotilde's attitude in " refusing his happiness ** and
"compromising the future of Humanity.** He had not them
elaborated his later theories wherein love — as generally un-
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derstood by humankind, and as understood by Comte himself
during the lifetime of Clotilde — is treated with a sovereign
contempt. But he loved too deeply to be really angry. Seeing
that Clotilde was inexorable, he quietly reassumed, till better
times should come, his former attitude of a humble adorer,
content but to breathe the same air as his well-beloved; and he
courageously undertook to impose upon himself a discipline
befitting the elaboration of his famous Politique.
If so be my heart continues to distract me, I must learn
patience to restrain it until such time as my brain is better
suited to bear it. The time lost thereby will doubtless be
very inconvenient, but not irreparable; it would be other-
wise if my health were to break down. Now, in order to
prevent such a catastrophe as that, my great plan is to see
that the front and back parts of my brain are not over-
excited at one and the same time.
We must confess to liking to imagine that the "cruel"
Clotilde could not resist a smile as she put away this precious
missive in the glove-box where she kept the poor man's letters.
The idea of the philandering philosopher solemnly working
away at his " Great Book '* with the front part of his brain
alone, is really too ludicrous for words.
Clotilde's own health was meanwhile going on from bad
to worse. A slow fever was perceptibly and surely doing its
deadly work; but, by its very ravages, her beauty was only
made the more apparent, so that her family remained in bliss-
ful blindness of the danger. Comte himself was more clear-
sighted; alarmed, he lu-ged a consultation of the doctors; and
anticipating, as by a kind of presentiment, the terrible moment
when Clotilde would be snatched from him for ever, he insti-
tuted, at this time, a form of worship in honor of his goddess.
Each day began with a ** Loving Prayer." The rites and cere-
monies attendant upon the same are (of course) described in
a letter to Clotilde.
Clotilde's malady suddenly began to develop by leaps and
bounds. Her novel, Wilhelmine, the expression, in terms of
matter, of so many of her hopes, lay unfinished on her desk.
She had no longer strength to work; no longer energy often
to pen those pleasant letters, graceful in thought and elegant
in style, which, up to the present, she had written almost daily
to her friend the philosopher. He himself waxed more and
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248 LOVE AND THE PHILOSOPHER [Nov.,
more restless; till, at the end, becoming fairly desperate, he
lost every remaining particle of his self-possession. Believing
that the immensity of his grief conferred upon him every right
and privilege, he led to Clotilde's bedside, in the very teeth of
the protests of her family, a physician of his choice. But not
all the care or medicine in the world could stem the rapid on-
rush of the hungry waters of death. The poor body itself —
eaten up, it would appear, by a general tuberculosis — slacked
energy and strength to struggle for its life. Clotilde was dying.
. . . Crazed with grief Auguste Comte rushed wildly into the
house; flung himself into the sick room; contrived, by hook or
by crook, to get the weeping relatives for one moment to with-
draw; and profited by the occasion to bang and bolt the door
in their faces. Oblivious to everything save his mad and selfish
sorrow, Comte refused to let them in, till Clotilde — alone with
him — ^breathed forth her gentle soul unto the God Who
made it.
The great thinker, who all his life had dwelt upon the
hinterland of sanity and madness, became decidedly insane
when his "Beatrice" (as he called her) had left him to a
lonesome sojourn in this vale of tears. Forthwith — as the pro-
foundly ridiculous expression of a profoundly sincere sorrow —
he composed his Exceptional Dedication to his Eternal Com-
panion. The first volume of the Philosophie Positive opens
with a Dedication, of twenty-five pages in octavo, to the glory
of Clotilde.
Then, while writing his great work dedicated to Clotilde,
he organized, in a sort of liturgical collection, the formal cu/-
tus of his goddess.
Certainly, the faithful were to be submitted to an austere
enough discipline, if we may judge from the following
programme :
At half -past five in the morning, prayer of one hour's
duration.
This prayer is to consist of:
1. A Commemoration — to last forty minutes, kneeling
before the Altar;
2. An Effusion — of twenty minutes, whereof the first
five are to be passed kneeling; the ten following, standing;
and the five last, kneeling again.
All this is interspersed with, or followed by, a kind of
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litany made up of words spoken by Clotilde, or addressed to
Clotilde by Comte, extracts from letters, quotations in Latin,
Spanish and Italian. We need not dwell upon the matter: the
ravings of a disordered brain are scarcely fit subjects for con-
troversy and discussion. But we have a perfect right to mar-
vel that people, who are otherwise quite sensible and intelli-
gent, should have been found to perpetuate these extrava-
gances even to the present day.
We have not, however, yet finished our account of the set
devotions of the Positivist. At half -past ten exactly, the litany
is again to be repeated; then the worshipper makes a genu-
flection in order to say three stanzas of Dante, and sits to re-
cite two sonnets of Petrarch ** f arsed •* with the words : " The
stone of thy Tomb is thy first Altar." Seven words of
Clotilde now follow, and another repetition of the litany. In
the evening, the whole tedious performance begins over again :
** Commemoration," " Effusion," " Consolation " — the pfiQciant
meanwhile (like the saints in the Psalm) "'rejoicing in his
bed."
To the extraordinary regime, which Comte imposed upon
his followers, he was himself the first to submit. Faithfully
and meticulously he practised it during the eleven remaining
years of his life. Furthermore and moreover, once a week at
least, he repaired to Pere Lachaise, and prayed, and wept, and
gibbered over the tomb of his long-lost love. And year by year,
on St. Clotilde's day, he read aloud, in that place of burial, his
Lettre Philosophique.
Such is the fantastic and melancholy love-story of Auguste
Comte and Clotilde de Vaux, whence arose a new religion.
However much the half-crazy philosopher may have been
mistaken — and gravely mistaken he was — in his notions of
what a perfect social organization should be, he seems at aU
events to have laid hold upon this truth: that woman has her
part to play in every projected reconstruction of society; and
that her mission of love and service must be recognized as
fundamentally necessary, alike for the maintenance of peace
in the family and in the commonwealth, and for the prepara-
tion of peace in all the world.
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THE ALTAR-BOY,
BY KATHRYN WHITE RYAN.
EOPLE enter the Cathedral and one by one like
pieces of mosaic, cover its floor. Small bits of
sentiency, these men and women collect now
under lofty arches to form a pattern of praise. Is
H ^^ horn* the pattern will dissolve again.
The watchful altar quivers back of the candles like a face
under restraint. During these moments preceding the service
the sounds of the church become muffled, expectant. In the
aisles a swish and patter, the prankish rattle of a dropped coin,
the clatter of a cavalryman's heel on the marble floor.
Through the opening and closing doors at the rear of the
church .there enters the sound of bugle-calls from the Camp
in the Park. The dark mosaic stirs to completion, the bits fit
closer into place.
I glide along the pew to make room for others not come
so early as I. My eyes seek anxiously the sacristy door. My
five senses are uniting, tightening to one knot of expectancy.
It is neither service nor song that I await, but my son ! Today
he becomes an altar-boy. Today portals of self-reliance open
for him; his me-less future signals him. Does his hand miss
mine? I question anxiously.
Now! A note from the organ! Slowly the door of the
sacristy opens, and slowly through it comes the rich pontifical
procession. In purple and lace the cross-bearer and back of
him in scarlet vestments a boy with incense. It rises in fra-'
grant mist from the golden cup swaying on flexible chains. A
group follows of little boys in white, and leading them my lit-
tle boy.
Suddenly the organ is freed and the triumphant paeons
dash through the church and against the walls and strain at
the Gothic roof like smothering seas. The sunlight floods in
through the stained glass windows, flashing everywhere, the
altar startles, illumined; and echoes resound in my conscious-
ness, clamoring like the insatiate sea. O child, the treasured
sight of you! With brimming tears I watch you. You are
more than child to me. You are love and grief and joy.
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How unfamiliar is this maimer! Not with leaping feet
and laughing eyes and rufQed clothes of play, but in solenm
•rder you advance, each slow step tottering with infantile pre-
cision; hands that have no knowledge of need clasped tight in
intercession; and eyes that have guessed no wrong lowered in
quaint contrition.
A long white surplice covers you! Ah — this white gar-
ment recalls memories, memories that are never far. I see
you again, O flower of short and tragic marriage, of love so
real it endures in your beautiful form; I see you again as first
I saw you, your new-born body enfolded in white robes — as
you were that first dazzling hour when, my eyelids lifting
slowly, I beheld you in your father's arms! There were two
of us then to rejoice in you. Today — ^you have only me.
The bell sounds that presages Sacrifice and all heads are
bowed. My head is bowed, but is it you or God I am worship-
ping? Is it humility that bows my head?
I contemplate my child as God must contemplate His world.
The same sentiment of proud parenthood is mine as His. I
grow insolent in possession. The organ shivers, and sends
forth wan, far-off* sounds like calls heard at night through a
storm. My complacency passes. Dread of my ignorance,
dread of my weakness, dread of all obstructing things rush
in to taunt me, who must doubly guide.
In the street a drum booms lightly, hurriedly. The sol-
diers are breaking camp.
The bell rings again. The little white-robed band sepa-
rates from the crowded priestly pomp, and through a path so
sentineled you lead your little mates to the steps of the altar.
Circling you disappear behind it. It has hidden you from me !
child, I know loss too well to trust you even to God. Make
haste, return into my sight. The sanctuary grows dim — dim.
Unquiet I gaze about me. With haughty passivity my
neighbor, a childless woman, reads her prayer book. Her
over-confidence protrudes itself like her wrist pufiing from the
tight glove. A mother, mumbling unheeded prayers, adjusts
the ribbons of her daughter's bonnet. The stiff leather boots of
the men in uniform, in the pew in front, creak loudly.
There! A glow of light from the rear of the altar! It is
illumined anew, it reveals once more the face of new-found
gladness. Diminutive and stately you emerge again into my
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252 THE ALTAR-BOY [Nov.,
rejoicing vision. You are suffused in beauty, you have gath-
ered new splendor. You return bearing in your two extended
hands a lighted candle. Procuring Light then was the purpose
of your absence ! Light that vivifies you and opens the way be-
fore you}
Dear child, seeing you now a calm overtakes my restless
heart. I am not proud, I am not alone, I am not rebellious, I
am not afraid. Rhythmic the music, ebbing gently as a river at
change of tide. My knees are reverent now, my head is hum-
bled in thanksgiving. The merciful music flowing into still-
ness gathers up my prayers as it goes. The friendly murmurs
linger to tell me he is protected, the child I would protect, that
his path is sentineled by the invisible purposes of God. And
calmly I pray: "When my son goes forth on errands of his
destiny, errands that shaU not bring him near high altars,
equip him, Crod, as now with Light — ^with Light. Let him
carry it in his eyes, in his heart, in his hands. . . **
The people rise and stir, the service ends, the pattern dis-
solves, the aisles fill with out-going throngs. At the doors they
congest for the soldiers are marching by.
** Ah," say the people, " they are on their way to the ships.
They are off to fight the Huns. They're going to stop the War,
those poor fellows! "
Straight lines of troops pass in swinging cadence one after
the other. The men are carrying guns. The sun strikes across
the bayonets and the steel glistens and sparkles. The bright-
ness is reflected on the strong masculine faces and something
free and rejoicing shines in them.
Are they too, these men, these little boys grown up and
carrying guns, are they too safe and secure as my little boy
with his lighted candle? Are they too bearing a God-given
weapon with which to secure the Light? Are they too fulfilling
errands of a rare destiny, they too sentineled even here by the
purposes of God?
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THE FAITH OF FRANCE. By Maurice Harris. Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin Co. $1.60 net.
It is most di£Bcult to present in review so profoundly moving
a book as this, in which Maurice Barris celebrates the spirit of the
youth of France. The intimate reality in these boy-soldiers' let-
ters and journals, which the author compiles with such reverent
sympathy, is of the sort which eludes words even while it pene-
trates the heart. It is not merely that their thoughts seem to
move, unconsciously and as though out of simple necessity, on
an exalted spiritual level. It is the combination of this attitude,
so heroic and yet so humble, with the youth of the greater num-
ber of them. These boys have qualities of gravity and vision, a
perfection in the ideal of sacrifice, an authentic spiritual poise,
which touch one almost to tears. ''Whence spring these little
soldiers without fear and without ^reproach? " we ask with
Maurice Barris, at the end of his volume, ** This illuminating side,
this glance full of repose, these sublime thoughts which rise with-
out inward conflict to the surface of their existence! Are they
really our young brothers? They seem twice born; from the soil
of France, from an ancient lineage where all were noble, and
again from that peril which has now become national."
This book is, in no sense, a discussion of the religious prob-
lems still existing in France. The author seeks, in the revelations
made by the letters, examples of the common heroism shown by
Frenchmen of all religious beliefs. Catholics, Protestants, Jews
and even Free Thinkers manifest the spirit of this self-sacrifice.
It is to the examples of its manifestation that the author addresses
himself. He has not chosen to examine the springs of action, nor
to take up questions of motive which a thoughtful reader wrill
inevitably ask. Therefore while the volume is unusually valuable
for what it gives, it should not be overestimated through a
thoughtlessness of what it does not give. The volume is
designedly a book of one effect; it presents in an unusually ap-
propriate manner the phenomena of courage and self-sacrifice on
the battlefield. It is not, as the author explicitly notes, that
their religious differences now seem to them unimportant, but
rather that the circumstances of war have contributed to bring
to the fore their similarities, and to this trend they have for the
time being abandoned themselves.
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254 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
Among the Catholics ^hose " heroes seem to breathe \vitk
calm in an almost supernatural atmosphere " there is the closest
interaction between intense religion and intense patriotism. Each
soldier dead for France is to them, in the mystic economy of the
supernatural life to which all are called by the Church, a sacrifice
and a pledge. At the outbreak of the War, the Jeunesse Catho-
lique was 150,000 strong. Of these, 100,000 went into the trenches.
What they have done is described in the laconic sentence of one of
their leaders, " Survivors are rare." Yet, with almost the whole of
" the young Catholic generation buried in the trenches," there is
yet the supernatural certainty expressed in the words of one of the
survivors : " We should infer from the frightful losses of our as-
sociation, not that we will disband but that we will establish a
future more beautiful than the past; it will yield much fruit, that
selected grain which has been so lavishly cast upon the blessed soil
of France." The 25,000 heroic soldier-priests, many of whose cita-
tions for special military honors are here quoted, represent to the
full the union of devotion to country and devotion to God.
Among the Protestants, to many of whom ** the general idea
of war seemed at variance with their ideal of God," has come the
conviction, which appeases their consciences, that France is fight-
ing a holy war, that she stands as champion of those things which,
to them, compose the positive element of their ideal — nationality,
personal freedom, world peace.
Many of the Jews find, in the emotions of combat for a great
cause, an increase in their natural spirit of reverence — a satis-
faction, as one of them put it, of their ''homesickness for the
Cathedral which was afar off " — and a poignant intensification of
their love for France. "No price is too great," one letter runs,
" for this [the satisfaction of the longing to do something worthy
for France], " and may my little son always walk with head erect,
and in a France that is restored may he never know the torture
which has poisoned so many hours of our childhood and our
youth." The soldiers from the ranks of the Socialists display
heroic courage and devotion. There is often a change of heart in
certain deep respects among them, well typified by the case of
Albert Thierry. In 1903 he wished that the world might be free of
" hypocrites, idiots and Christians." The journal which he wrote
in the trenches admits that Christians love France and justice, and
are necessary for the nation's welfare. The same journal adds:
"ilW peace that is merely from without is of no value unless
peace reigns in each tmd every soul."
Thus does the free-thinking Socialist, in the hour when his
country's call exacts his best, return to a great Catholic truth. The
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book shows many and fundamental differences in religious belief,
but every one of its examples also show an approach and a recon-
ciliation with the Catholic truth which made France the leader in
the world's civilization, and which will make her secure in that
leadership once again. France at home, as well as on the battle-
field, has had to rid herself of Socialism and free thinkers. A
free thinker has led in the work of purgation; and the Generalis-
simo of the Allied armies is a devout believer who hesitates not te
ask the Catholics of France to pray for victory. To the unbiassed,
thoughtful man there is no doubt of the road that leads both to
victory and to reconstruction.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF STEPHEN 6IRARD. By John Bach
McMaster. Two volumes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott 4
Co. $5.00 net.
Stephen Girard, one of the wealthiest private citizens of his
time, began his career as a cabin boy on a French merchantman
trading with Santa Domingo, and died a great merchant prince in
the city of Philadelphia. John Bach McMaster has related his
life history in a two-volume biography based on the Girard manu-
scripts. Of these 50,000 papers, 14,000 are taken from his office
letter books; 36,000 are letters from his captains, agents and cor-
respondents in every noteworthy seaport of Europe and the New
World; many of the manuscripts consist of ships' papers, docu-
ments relating to prize courts, and all such business matters as
might be of constant occurrence in the busy life of a man of such
magnitude of interests. The biography is therefore a series of
the most important of these letters, chronologically arranged. As
a record of business correspondence, however, the book lacks the
personal touch, and beyond giving a clear account of a prosper-
ous life in an eventful time, conveys no definite impression of
Stephen Girard as a man, and in this respect seems a failure.
By the terms of his will probably drawn in 1826, Girard be-
queathed to the city of Philadelphia cash and real estate which is
today worth $32,700,000. He left so much of $2,000,000 as might
be necessary to be used for the erection of a permanent college for
poor white male orphans of Philadelphia. Then comes the pro-
visions — " no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect
whatsoever, shall ever hold or exercise any station or duty what-
ever in the said college, nor shall any such person ever be ad-
mitted for any purpose, or as a visitor, within the premises ap-
propriated to the purposes of the said college."
Needless to say Girard was practically an atheist. He claimed
to believe the principles of " pure morals," but he had repudiated
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256 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
the foundation upon ^hich morals are built. He is one of the
forerunners of that empty humanitarianism which in our own
days has proved so inadequate in both the realities and the crises
of life. It will be remembered that Daniel Webster argued before
the United States Supreme Court on the unconstitutionality of
Girard's will. Webster lost his case, but his speech is the classic
estimate of what an immense injury Girard forced his country to
suffer. Mr. McMaster calls him ** the greatest public benefactor
of his time " — and that may be true — but as the decades pass he
is shown more clearly to be a public enemy.
A HANDBOOK OF MORAL THEOLOGY. By Rev. Antony Koch.
D.D. Adapted and Edited by Arthur Preuss. Volume one.
St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.50 net.
This is the first of a series of five volumes, which will cover
the whole field of Moral Theology. In two hundred and eighty-
four pages of text it gives an excellent introduction to its science,
and treats of morality, its subject, norm and object. The text
itself is brief and clear; while the footnotes are unusually full
and contain much curious and out-of-the-way information, c. g.,
that the Scholastic term for the speculative conscience (syn-
teresis) is in its Greek dress incorre(5t, the proper form being
syneidesis (p. 188). The section devoted to the "History and
Literature of Moral Theology " (pp. 42-73), is admirably well done
— ^in fact would do credit to a professional littirateuT. We do
not remember to have seen before nearly so good a conspectus.
The chapters also that treat of free-will and its determinants are
luminous and suggestive. The chapter on "Scruples" seems some-
what brief and summary. Nor do the readings contain any refer-
ence to Father Eymieu's book, Le Gouvernement de SoUmeme, on
that subject; nor to Father Gemelli's, De Scrupulis. Is the word
" scrupulant " (p. 202) really English? Scrupler and scrupulist
are common in old writers; "scrupulant" we do not remember
to have seen before.
A COMMENTARY ON THE NEW CODE OF CANON LAW. By
Rev. P. Charles Augustine, O.S.B., D.D. Volume one. St.
Louis: B. Herder. $L25 net.
Father Augustine taught Canon Law for nine years (1906-
1915) at the Benedictine University in Rome. Consequently he is
fully qualified to expound the New Code. The first sixty pages
of his book are devoted to the history and literature of the sub-
ject; th^ explain the slow formation of the various collections
and codices; the spurious collections of the ninth century, the
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Decretals of Gratian, Gregory IX., Boniface VIII., the Corpus
Juris Canonici and the Post-Tridentine sources. The second part
of the volume (pp. 72-184) exposes and comments on the New
Code up to Canon 86. This part comprises six titles: (1) On
Ecclesiastical Laws; (2) On Custom; (3) On the Reckoning of
Time; (4) On Rescripts; (5) On Privileges; (6) On Dispensa-
tions. The Canons are cited in Latin, followed immediately by an
English translation. The notes are clear, concise and substan-
tial, and adapted for the conditions obtaining in our Western
World.
OLD ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP IN ENGLAND FROM 1566 TO
1800. By Eleanor N. Adams, Ph.D. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press. $2.00.
This volume discusses the beginnings of Old English scholar-
ship, and traces its progress until it took a recognized place in the
scholarly world. It begins with the publication of the first Old
English book in 1566, and ends with the establishment of the first
professorship of the language at Oxford in 1795.
THE RISE OF THE SPANISH EMPIRE. By Roger Bigelow Mer-
riman. New York : The Macmillan Co. Two volumes. $7.50 net.
Professor Merriman of Harvard purposes to write the history
of Spain from its beginning down to the death of Philip II. in four
volumes. The first two volumes of this scholarly work have just
appeared. They carry the story down to the death of King Ferdi-
nand, January 23, 1516.
The first volume treats of the constitutional history <rf the
different Spanish kingdoms in the Middle Ages, and of the growth
of the Aragonese Empire in the western basin of the Mediter-
ranean. It will surprise many to read that mediaeval Castile from
the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the fourteenth century
possessed all the appurtenances of a thoroughly democratic
rigimcy and that the vigor and liberty of its municipal govern-
ment was probably unsurpassed anywhere in Western Europe.
These volumes on the whole are remarkably free from the
prejudice which blurs the vision of most English and American
historians who treat of the history of Catholic Spain. Occasion-
ally, however, we find evidences of bias in the blind acceptance of
anti-Catholic writers like Lea on clerical celibacy or the Inquisi-
tion, and in his voicing of oft-repeated charges against the Catho-
lic Church. For example he falsely accuses the mediaeval clergy
of Castile of universal licensed concubinage, revives the old
calumny of the jus primse noctis, and insists upon the " intoler-
VOL. cvm. — 17
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able exactions '* of the Bulla de la Cruzada. He is wrong again
in ascribing to Ferdinand the idea of a national church, indepen-
dent of Rome — an idea peculiar to Henry VHI. of England and
the Lutheran princes of sixteenth-century Germany.
These two volumes are almost exclusively based on printed
sources and standard secondary works, although manuscript
material has been utilized in Chapters IV., V., XV. and XVI.
Great pains have been taken to indicate fully the authorities for
all important facts, and an attempt, not always successful, is made
in the bibliographies that conclude each chapter to give a critical
estimate of the authors cited.
HISTORIC MACKINAC. By Edwin O. Wood, LL.D. Two
volumes. New York: The Macmillan Co. $12.50 net.
Dr. Wood, during the many summers which he spent on
Mackinac Island, gathered together a most extensive library of
books of travel, fiction and history relating to the Mackinac coun-
try. Moreover, as a member of the Michigan Historical Commis-
sion, he had many opportunities to study in detail the history of
the old Northwest. The fruits of his reading and study are given
us in these fascinating pages.. The author makes no claim for
original research, but presents to his readers a perfect picture of
Mackinac from the days of Jean Nicolet.
Volume I. describes the discovery and colonization of the
island by the French, the contest between the English and French
for the Northwest country, the beginnings of the fur trade, the
lives and labors of the early missionaries, the customs of the In-
dians, and the places of interest on the island. And in Volume
II. we have graphic accounts of the island written by the many
famous travelers and literary men who have visited its shores dur-
ing the past century. Schoolcraft, McKenney, McKenzie, Dr. Gil-
man, Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Jameson, Margaret Fuller, William
CuUen Bryant, Bayard Taylor, and many others have written of the
charms of Mackinac Island, its history, its legends and its
heroes.
The book is profusely illustrated, well documented, and pro-
vided with excellent maps, a complete bibliography and a full
index.
OUR LORD'S OWN WORDS. Volume two. By the Right Rev.
Abbot Smith, O.S.B. New York: Benzinger Brothers. $1.25.
In both Volumes I. and II. the writer confines himself
to the words of Our Lord in St. John's Gospel. As St. John's Gos-
pel contains some of the most important discourses of the Master,
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including those on the Holy Eucharist, Chapter VI., and the Dis-
course after the Last Supper, it affords the reader every oppor-
tunity for becoming very closely acquainted with the mind of our
Divine Lord, from the first recorded word of His public life:
•*What seek ye?" addressed to SS. Andrew and John, to the
last, at the close of the Last Supper: " Arise, let us go hence."
This second volume contains one hundred meditations: sim-
ple ponderings and explanations of what Our Lord's words mean,
with a paragraph of direct prayer to gather up the lessons of
Him, Whom St. John calls: the Word of God — the Word made
Flesh.
DEVOTION TO THE SACRED HEART: ITS THEOLOGY, HIS-
TORY AND PHILOSOPHY. By Rev. Joseph J. C. Petrovitz,
S.T.D. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.25.
Devout clients of the Sacred Heart wdll welcome this schol-
arly volume, the author's thesis for the doctorate at the Catholic
University of America, which was fully treated in the pages of
The Catholic World, September, 1917. It is the only complete
treatise we possess in English on this most popular devotion.
FRONT LINES. By Boyd Cable. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
$1.50 net.
Like every other living writer, Boyd Cable has been inspired
by the epic sweep and monumental issues of the Great War. He
went to the front as an artillery oflBcer in 1914. This present
volume is dated " On the Western Front, 1918." Yet in spite of
his four years of active service, he has found time to produce sev-
eral books which have done real service in depicting and inter-
preting the conflict. These present sketches, offered by their
author as an antidote for "war weariness," are written with a
verve and clearness that justify his confidence in their effect. We
are again reminded of the conditions under which our men and
their Allies fight and of their sublime heroism. A book like this
has a real place in the life of the present.
EXERCISE AND SET-UP. By G. Samuel Delano, M.D. Boston:
The Four Seas Co. $2.00 net.
Dr. Delano's book is a plea for proper exercise. After thirty
years of medical experience, particularly vdth diseases of the
chest, the author has reached the conclusion that much physical
hurt comes from a mistaken conception of the physiological func-
tion of the human machine. He condemns very strongly mere
muscle energizing — that form of studied scientific physical cul-
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ture which aims at the development of muscle. He is a great
believer in rest and quiet. His theory is that circulation is the
basic operation of the body. He therefore opposes forms of ex-
ercise which are merely strenuous, developing outward muscles
only without increasing the power of circulation. His aim is to
develop stamina by increasing the respitory volume and stimu-
lating circulation by aspiration.
The set-up exercises which he gives are based on this theory
and are simple and moderate in reaction. The book contains
many sensible ideas.
THE HOUSE OF CONRAD. By Elias Tobenkin. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.50 net.
The author of Witte Arrives gives us here a picture of the
thwarted hopes and ambitions of a German immigrant, Gottfried
Conradi, an ardent disciple of Lasalle, who comes to this country
determined to found a family wherein Socialism shall be the
religion and rule of life. The earlier chapters graphically outline
the characters and their ideas, and seem to be lasdng an elab-
orate foundation for a work of some sociological value. This
promise is not fulfilled. The experiences that befall Mr. Toben-
kin's people are in no respect the definite outcome of peculiarities
of nationality and mental outlook. Originality decreases, and
interest flags correspondingly, as the story deflects into the famil-
iar grooves of the old, sorry, world-wide tale of social inequalities
and the power of money to work class injustices and " make
oppression bitter." Evidences of the author's ability are not
wanting, but as a whole the novel disappoints.
TALES OF MY KNIGHTS AND LADIES. By Olive Katherine
Parr. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 40 cents.
Under the name of " Beatrice Chase," Miss Parr was already
known to a considerable number of readers when she published,
in her own name, White Knights on Dartmoor. This told of a
"crusade" launched in 1916, with the cooperation of Mr. John
Oxenham, to combat the social evil among the soldiers at the
front. The present brochure is in form the counterpart of its
predecessor and, as the title denotes, gives further account of the
workings of the enterprise, now widened to include women as
well as men. The content is made up largely of letters from per-
sons who have had themselves enrolled as members. Although
no names are given and no confidences violated, the publication
hardly seems well-advised. SufiScient time has not elapsed to
allow of even an approximation of the actual Value and success
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of the undertaking. The present volume, like the first, is tinc-
tured throughout with an emotionalism that does not bring re-
assurance.
THE UNWILLING VESTAL. By Edward Lucas White. New
York : E. P. Dutton & Ck). $1.50.
This novel deals with the vestal virgins in the time of Mar-
cus Aurelius and his son Commodus. The author's background
and classical setting is historical, but his characters, on the plea
that human nature is ever the same, talk and act like men and
women of the United States in the year 1918. There are a num-
ber of startling scenes, ostensibly written to bring out in bold
relief the cruelty and superstition of the age, but one cannot but
suspect a sensational motive. We found it hard to interest our-
selves in the heartless heroine, Brinnaria, or her degenerate
gladiator lover, Almo, whom she finally marries after many an
attempt to slay him. It is a book that will delight the lover of
the modern moving picture.
WE regret we are unable to recommend to our readers a publica-
tion by Charles Scribner*s Sons, New York, entitled The
Shorter Bible (The New Testament). The New Testament in its
integrity is none too long; and that integrity has a virtue of its
own which cannot be marred without injury to the whole and in
our judgment without disrespect to the divine Author of the
Sacred Word. Moreover, it misleads and deceives the reader;
condensation and modernity do not acquit the authors of the
responsibility of presenting in a faithful and full way the Sacred
Bible. To call this book The Shorter Bible is as untrue as it is
impudent. ($1.00.)
ONE of the phenomena of these war-ridden literary days is the
flood of poetry that continues to be published — ^not all war
poetry by any means, but verse of every imaginable description.
Of course, one cannot help but suspect that a good deal of this is
the accumulated product of past days, which the authors, wise
in their generation, now judiciously cast upon the tide of the
moment, while that tide still flows. But some of it is of the mo-
ment itself. A number of the verses in Marris Abel Beer's Songs
of Manhattan (Boston: The Cornhill Co. $1.25), are of the living
present, and not a few of them reflect with fidelity the life of
the metropolis. Waverly Carmichael's From the Heart of a Folk
(Boston: The Cornhill Co. $1.00) is a collection of dialect negro
songs — ^the dialect of which, however, is not always convincing
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in its effort to be phonetically realistic. The Fairy Islands (Bos-
ton: The Cornhill Co. $1.25) is an essay into the realms of fancy,
the thinnest ice on which any poet dare venture. If the present
author has not always succeeded, she — ^we are sure of the femi-
nine — has had distinguished company since verses first were writ-
ten. Fancy is also the chosen field of Denton J. Snider in his
volume entitled The House of Dreamery (St Louis: Sigma
Publishing Co.) The author of this book of verses appears to
be one of those unhappy creatures who have been smitten by
the divine fire of poesy and rather badly burned, but whose re-
sponsive cries are so inarticulate as to be incoherent even to the
limit of grotesquely.
THE EUCHARISTIC EPICLESIS, by J. W. Tyrer (New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. 75 cents net), may prove serviceable
to the students of this interesting and somewhat vexed question.
The author indicates the motive of the book in the following
words: " The subject of liturgies is a very important one, and the
most important of all liturgical problems is that of the Eucharis-
tic Epiclesis — a solemn appeal to God to intervene and make the
Sacrament what Christ designed it to be when He instituted it.
For some years past the writer has observed what seems to him a
tendency to magnify the evidence in favor of one particular solu-
tion of this problem and to minimize that in favor of a different
one. He has accordingly endeavored to gather together, so far
as he was able, the whole of the evidence to be found in the Greek
and Latin Fathers of the last four centuries and to make it speak
for itself."
A very laudable work, as far as it goes. Some might prefer
that it should go further towards the solution of the problem —
a problem, however, secondary for those who hold with the Church
that the epiclesis is not the necessary form of consecration. Only
one work by Catholics is quoted, the suggestive dissertations of
Dom Connolly: Liturgical Homilies of Narsal, 1909, and The So-
called Egyptian Church Order and Derived Documents, 1916.
EVERY publication that tends to enable the faithful to assist at
Mass intelligently and fruitfully merits the highest praise.
Anno Domini, a new departure in this direction, is a welcome
addition to the literature of the Mass. This little monthly aims to
draw attention to the beauty and instruction found in the Masses
prescribed in the Ordo for the month. It should be used in con-
nection with a Missal or Mass book. The Home Press, New York,
by which it is presented, publishes also The Mass Every Day
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in the Year ($2.50 — $5.00 according to binding), by Revs. E. A.
Pace, D.D., and John J. Wynne, S.J., and The Mass, Sundays and
Holydays, by John J. Wynne, S.J., which rank with the best Mis-
sals for the laity published in this country. Anno Domini should
prove of especial value to teachers in academies and colleges,
and to all who wish to cultivate devotion to the Holy Sacrifice. The
price is $1.00 a year postpaid; 10 cents a copy. Five subscrip-
tions, $4.00; ten subscriptions, $7.50 postpaid.
IN The Garden of Life, by Mother St. Jerome (London: Heath,
Cranton, Ltd. 60 cents) we have a slim volume of religious verse
marked by real delicacy and originality of thought — a tribute to
that beauty of life in which even the most detached and mortified
of souls may well rejoice. Forewords by the Rev. C. C. Martin-
dale, S.J., and by Mrs. Armel O'Connor add to the attractiveness
of the little book.
PAMPHLET PUBUCATIONS.
For the convenience of our readers we make the following sum-
mary of war pamphlets published here and abroad that have come un-
der our notice: The Achievement of the British Navy in the World
War, by John Leyland (London: Hodder & Stoughton) Turkish Pris-
oners in Egypt (London: Gassell & Co., Ltd.); The Commemorative
Medal in the Service of Germany, by G. F. Hill, M.A. (London: Long-
mans, Green & Co.); The Dawn of Armageddon, by Crawfurd Price
(London : Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd.) ; Dangerous
Optimism, by Otfried Nippold (London : George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.) ;
The German Colonies; What is to Become of Them? by Ren6 Paux
(London : Wightman & Co., Ltd.) ; British Civilian Prisoners in German
East Africa, a Report by The Government Committee on the Treat-
ment by the Enemy of British Prisoners of War (London: Alabaster,
Passmore & Sons, Ltd.) ; German Catholics and Peace, A Challenge to
the Centre (London: Office of the Tablet); After Three Years, re-
printed from The Round Table (New York: Macmillan A Co.).
Published by T. Fisher Unwin, London: German Rule in Africa,
by Evans Lewis; The True and False Pacifism, by Count Goblet
D'Alviella. The Seizure of Church Bells and Organs in Occupied Belgium,
by Cardinal Mercier (England: The Campfield Press); France and
America (New York: Guaranty Trust Co.); The University of Chicago
War Papers, by Frederick D. Bramhall (Chicago, 111.: The University
of Chicago Press); Constitution of the United Nations of the Earth
(Fall River, Mass. : Pamphlet Publishing Co.) ; The Desert Campaigns,
by W. T. Massey (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; German War Aims,
by Edwin Bevan (New York : Harper & Brothers) ; The Pope on Peace
and War, a calendar of Papal documents from September 8, 1914 —
August 11, 1917 (London: Catholic Truth Society).
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By Bloud & Gay, Paris: The Church of France During the Wcw,
by Georges Goyau; Who Was Responsible for the War," by Nelson Gay.
By George H. Doran Co., New York City: Some Gains of the War,
by Walter Raleigh; British War Aims, by David Lloyd George; My Mis-
sion to London, by Prince Lichnowsky; From Turkish Toils, by Mrs.
Esther Mugerditchian; The Deliverance of Jerusalem, by E>. W. G.
Masterman, M.D.; Memorandum on Peace Terms; Martyred Armenia,
by Fk*iz El-Ghusein; A War of Liberation.
The Catholic Mind for the past six months covers such varied
topics as The Pope and War, the relations of the Holy Father to Eng-
land and France; The Catholic Lag mem* s Duties; Catholics and Social
Reform; Ozanam's Ideal of Social Work; Labor Problems and the
Church; Our Country's Call, an address by Rev. Joseph Mulry, S.J.,
bound up with The Cross at Neuue Chapelle, by Chaplain Tiplady, and
a book-list for Catholic children. The Ethics of Irish Conscription in-
cludes an article on The Irish Bishops and Conscription, and a patrio-
tic address by Rev. Frances X. Reilly, S.J. Was Tyndale a Martyr? also
contains articles on the Movies and Modern American Mothers; Faith
and Facts, a lecture by Alfred J. Rahilly, M.A.B.Sc., is reproduced from
Studies and The Psychology of Medimval Persecution from the Bom-
bay Examiner. Volume XVI., No. 10, contains an article on
Christian Science, by Henry Woods, S,J., Catholic Education by Rt.
Rev. John J. Cantwell, D.D.; and a sketch of General Ferdinand Foch
from the London Universe. Other pertinent topics presented are The
Meaning of Prohibition, The Feeling for Literature and Religion and
Democracy.
The Catholic Truth Society has brought out for soldiers Saints
for Soldiers, by Mrs. Armel O'Connor, and Carry On, by " A Lieutenant,
R.N.V.R." Some of their more recent pamphlets treat of Personal Im-
mortality, The Resurrection, Catholic Orders and Anglican Orders,
Some Facts About Martin Luther. There is also a sketch of the Re-
demptorist, Father Edward Douglas. A Missionary Manual offers a nice
collection of prayers and hymns suitable for missionary societies and
for use on missions.
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IRecent iSvents.
Every day since the last notes were writ-
Progress of the War. ten progress has been made in driving
back from French soil the foes by whom
it has so long been overrun. The ** iron wall " — the Hinden-
burg line — ^behind which the late Chancellor of the German
Empire felt secm-e that he and his would escape the punish-
ment due to their crimes, has been broken and scarcely a trace
of it remains. Lenz with its coal mines has fallen and so have
Cambrai, St. Quentin, Laon and LaFere with the massif of
St. Gobain. Farther east in Champagne the French, with the
Americans, are approaching one of the main lines by which the
Germans bring supplies to their troops, and still farther to the
east American troops have taken Grand Pre, an important place
which guards the road connecting the German troops now
in France with those in Alsace-Lorraine. The importance of
this post and of this district has led the Germans to hold it
with their best troops, and so the most difficult task has been
assigned to the Americans.
At the other end of the line one of the most gratifying
features to note is that the little Belgian army, under the per-
sonal command of the King of Belgium, has taken a most active
and successful part in driving into full retreat the Germans
who have so long held the seacoast. So far have the Belgians
advanced up to the present time that they are said to be
within ten miles of the Dutch frontier. It is possible that some
of the German forces may have to take refuge in Dutch ter-
ritory. By last accounts Lille, the largest manufacturing city
occupied by the Germans, has been taken by the British. They
also occupy that part of Ostend which was so long used as a
German submarine base. Where the Germans will stop is not
known. The often-repeated assertion that there are lines upon
lines of fortified trenches in which they can take refuge, does
not seem to be true. These successes lend color to the
hope that a decision may be arrived at before winter comes on,
but in the judgment of experts this hope is too sanguine.
No change has taken place on the Italian front, and to the
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campaign in the Balkans allusion is made elsewhere. To
many the most striking results of the War and those most
worthy of rememberance have been attained in the Holy Land.
For centuries Europe in the Crusades strove to get possession
of the sacred places where Our Lord lived and died, but in
vain. The object of Columbus in his quest of the East Indies
was to obtain riches for the purpose of driving out from Pales-
tine the desecrators of its sacred soil. What none of these
could do, has been accomplished as a by-product of
this War. General AUenby by brilliant manoeuvre has de-
stroyed two Turkish armies which stood in his way for some
time, and has followed up this success by taking possession of
Damascus, said to be the oldest city in the world. Nor has he
stopped there, but has advanced farther north, and should
by this time be far on his way to Aleppo which is the centre of
Turkish supplies in Mesopotamia. East of the Taurus chain,
Aleppo forms an almost necessary base of supplies, the pos-
session of which will place such Turkish troops as are now in
Armenia and the Caucasus almost at the mercy of the British
forces — of the army operating in Mesopotamia scarcely any-
thing has been heard for some time. The detachment which
recently arrived at Baku has been forced to retire. A junction
of General Marshall's forces with those under General AUenby
coming up from Damascus, is about to be effected.
So great have been the reverses inflicted upon Turkey
combined with the surrender of Bulgaria that it is looked upon
as inevitable that Turkey will be suing for peace in a very short
time. The fall of the Turkish Cabinet in which a notorious
Emir Pasha was the Minister of War, is a clear indication of
this, as the new Grand Vizier, Tewfik Pasha, is known to be
pro-Ally in sentiment
No political changes have taken place in
France. the French Government, M. C16menceau
still remaining in power. Through the
efforts of Mr. Samuel Gompers, the majority of the Socialists
who favored conversation with the Socialists of Germany at a
conference in Switzerland have renounced the idea, although
a minority are still in favor of that proposal. As to the morale
of the great mass of the French people, Mr. Gompers testifies
that it is wonderful, while the army fights on with sublime
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courage and intelligent patriotism bound to bring full and com-
plete reward. •
The efforts of Germany to throw the responsibility of the
war upon the Allied Powers have been frustrated by many
authentic publications, especially by the statement of Prince
Lichnowsky. The publication of the Yellow Book by the
French Government containing the text of the treaty made on
the occasion of the Franco-Russian Alliance, adds another
refutation to the German allegations. This text shows that the
alliance was purely defensive in character, providing for joint
military action only in case either France or Russia should be
attacked by the Triple Alliance, or any two members of it,
and providing for joint mobilization only after an enemy
mobilization had taken place. It was therefore strictly defen-
sive. By not calling upon Italy the German Emperor implicitly
recognized that the war which he had declared against Russia
was not defensive but offensive, for had it been the former his
treaty with Italy would have given him the right to call upon
the Italian Government to abide by the terms of that treaty.
The retention of an army at Saloniki has
Bulgaria and the more than justified itself. For a long
Balkans. time the Germans have derided it as the
"largest internment camp in Europe.'*
In less than two weeks the troops in this " internment camp "
have been able to bring about a complete surrender of Bul-
garia and the consequent abdication of Ferdinand the crafty.
More than that, through the surrender of Bulgaria, the direct
way for Germany to the Middle East has been closed, and all
her plans for the domination of Turkey in Asia, of Persia and
of Egypt have been thwarted. The advance of the Serbians to
Nish and even beyond, has cut the railway communication
between Berlin and Constantinople. Their further advance,
supported by their Allies, may lead to the crossing of the
Danube and possibly to the capture of Budapest and Vienna,
if , as is likely, the Southern Slavs should rise and co5perate
with the armies^of Serbia. To these possibilities may be added
the reentry of Rumania into active cooperation with the Allies.
This would close to Germany the only remaining way to Con-
stantinople across the Black Sea. Further possibilities include
joining forces with the Russians who sympathize with the
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Allies and the reconstitution of the battle line on the western
front of Russia.
The unconditional surrender of Bulgaria, under the terms
of which she demobilized her troops, gave to the Allies the
right to manoeuvre on her territory and to make use of her
railway systems, was followed by the abdication of Ferdinand.
He was elected Prince of Bulgaria on the seventh of July,
1887. In 1908, after declaring the independence of Bulgaria,
and rejecting all dependence on Turkey, he proclaimed him-
self King or Tsar of Bulgaria. The reason for his abdication
has not been made public, but it seems certain that he had so
committed himself to the Central Powers that he felt bound
to abdicate when he could not carry out these promises
because of the determination of the Bulgarians to have peace
at any cost. So Ferdinand gave up the crown to his son, Boris,
whdm he gave over to the Orthodox Church years ago after
solenmly promising that all his children should be brought
up in the Catholic Faith. The young Prince has assumed the
title of Boris III. His predecessor of the same name, Boris II.,
Uved as far back as the tenth century and was dethroned by
the Greeks.
Throughout that part of Russia over
Russia. which Lenine and Trotzky still hold
sway — a part impossible to define on
account of the ever-varying conditions — the reign of terror
so increased that our (jovemment, which at first seemed to
look with favor upon the Bolsheviki, was compelled to ad-
dress to the Allied Powers and to the neutral States a note of
protest, in the following terms: " This Gk>vemment is in receipt
of information from reliable sources revealing that the peace-
able Russian citizens of Moscow, Petrograd and other cities are
suffering from an openly-avowed campaign of mass terrorism
and are subjected to wholesale executions. Thousands of per-
sons have been shot without even a form of trial; ill admin-
istered prisons are filled beyond capacity, and every night
scores of Russian citizens are recklessly put to death, and
irresponsible bands are venting their brutal passions in the
daily massacre of untold innocents.*' On this account the
United States addressed the civilized nations, inviting concerted
action to end the horrible state into which Russia under Lenine
and Trotzky had fallen. To this note, it is said, most of the
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Powers addressed have returned answers favoring the pro-
posals of our Government, but so far nothing has been pub-
lished to show what practical steps, if any, have been taken.
Certainly no result is evident in Russia and, in fact, things have
gone from bad to worse. Lenine still remains nominally in
power, although recent report indicates that his hitherto faith-
ful coadjutor, Trotzky, is secretly favoring a counter revo-
lution. It is possible that Lenine himself may become the
victim of still more advanced revolutionaries.
The expeditions into Russia from Vladivostok and Arch-
angel have met with considerable success. From Archangel
American, British and French troops have advanced over
three hundred and twenty-five miles in the direction of
Vologda, meeting with no serious opposition. The peasant in-
habitants, for the most part, seem to recognize in the invading
troops deliverers from the extortions of the Bolshevik Gov-
ernment. In Eastern Siberia Japanese mounted troops, march-
ing eastward from Chita and northwest from Blagovestchensk,
have efTected a junction at Rufulov, three hundred and six
miles northwest of Blagovestchensk. General Hovarth*s move-
ments are somewhat mysterious. According to latest report
he is said to have entered into relations with the Omsk Govern-
ment and to be cooperating with it. Of General Seminoff
nothing has been heard of late. There is little indication
of the present prospects and position of the Czecho-Slovaks
either in Siberia or in European Russia. The prospect of co-
dperation in southeastern Russia between the Cossacks and the
British force which arrived at Baku some time ago, has been
blighted by the enforced withdrawal of that force — the
Armenians and the Georgians having failed to give the support
which had been looked for.
The prospects for the future restoration of order and for
the establishment of a stable government are not at present
very bright. Some think the number of troops sent is inade-
quate; others fear that it is not yet clear to the Russians that
these troops have come, not to dominate but to help the Rus-
sian people to form their own government without the slight-
est interference on the part of the countries they represent.
Yet another government must be added to those into
which the Russian empire has been split. At the far distant
town of Ufa a Pan-Russian Convention was held to form a
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government, having for its objects the liberation of Russia
from the power of the Bolsheviki, the annihilation of the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the restoration of treaties with the Allied
nations and continuation of the War against the German
coalition. The council which formulated these objects con-
sisted of representatives of all governments and parties in
Russia, except the Bolsheviki and the forces which first
opposed the Constituent Assembly. Its projects for in-
ternal reform are the very reverse of those adopted by
the Bolsheviki. If this new government has a force be-
hind it or can attract to itself the support of the people of
Russia in general, the hope is justified that it may be the means
of saving Russia from the anarchy and chaos which now exist.
This is the more likely inasmuch as the practical steps taken
have received the approval of all the provisional Governments
now existing in Russia, including that of Siberia. A Com-
mittee of Five has been appointed with a view to its becoming
the lawful authority for all Russia. This Commitee is to pre-
pare the way for the meeting of a Constituent Assembly on Jan-
uary 1st, provided two hundred and fifty members attend.
Another source of hope is the fact, vouched for by M.
Kerensky, that the old Constituent Assembly, the legitimately
elected voice of the Russian people, suppressed by the violence
of Lenine and Trotzky, is still holding secret sessions and is
preparing a constitution for the Republic. This Constituent
Assembly may be looked upon as the true voice of the Russian
people, for when the Tsar and the successor named by him
abdicated, the legitimate power passed to the Provisional Gov-
ernment. Under this Provisional (government, the members of
the still existing Constituent Assembly were elected by a free
and universal suffrage. It remains, therefore, the centre of
order and authority and needs only necessary support to en-
able it to assert itself and end the reign of chaos.
Finland has ceased to be a republic, if the Landtag which
now exists is to be considered as the voice of the Finnish peo-
ple. A few days ago it elected Prince Frederick of Hesse as its
king, but it is doubtful whether this new made monarch will
ever exercise his power. By latest reports the Germans, in their
distress, are leaving Finland, and it is unlikely that the Finnish
people, whose love of democracy is so well known, will suffer
themselves to be ruled by any king much less by one from
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Gerriiany. Even before the exodus of the Germans, the action
of the Landtag had met with opposition. If the Germans have
actually taken their departure, it was at the request of the Fin-
nish Government. A still further indication of the desire of
the Finns to get rid of the foreign invader, is manifested in an
agitation initiated by Republican and Socialist papers to favor
an approach to the Entente Powers. Of the strength of this
movement, it is impossible to judge at present.
The reported evacuation of Finland by the Germans, is
said to have been accompanied by a similar evacuation of at
least one of the Baltic provinces, but these reports must be re-
ceived cautiously. The German Vice-Chancellor, before the re-
cent overtures for peace, declared that the existing treaty with
the four Baltic provinces would have to be revised, and that
these provinces would, in all probability, have to be combined
into a single state, as a partition based on ethnographical con-
siderations would be practically impossible.
In Poland the Regency Council at Warsaw has issued a
manifesto in which it accedes to the peace principles set forth
by President Wilson. It also announces that the Council has
decided to take steps to place the electoral system on a broader
democratic basis. Nothing more is heard of the project to
place upon the throne the Austrian Grand Duke whose can-
didacy has been so earnestly pressed by the Dual Monarchy
upon Germany. In the Ukraine unrest still continues.
The long list of German ex-Chancellors
Germany. was increased by the resignation of Count
von Hertling on the last day of Septem-
ber. That day, the Kaiser made, according to Count von Hert-
ling's successor. Prince Maximilian of Baden, a basic alteration
in the political leadership of the German Empire. In his let-
ter accepting the Chancellor's resignation, the Kaiser expressed
his desire that the German people should cooperate more than
heretofore in deciding the fate of the Fatherland. He stated
in his decree " that the men who have been borne up by the
people's trust, shall, in a wide extent, cooperate in the rights
and duties of government." Following upon this, a meeting
was held of the representatives of the various parties in the
Reichstag, and a government was formed with Prince Maxi-
milian at its head which is declared to be responsible, not to the
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Kaiser, but to the people. This government includes Con-
servatives, members of the Centre, Liberal, Social Democratic
and Radical Parties. Among these are Herr Mathias Erzber-
ger and Herr Groeber of the Centre Party, and Philip Scheide-
mann, leader of the Majority Party of the Social Democrats.
Thus, in one day, the long-sought for Parliamentary Govern-
ment became an institution. It is to be noted, however, that it
rests solely on the will of the Kaiser and might (pace the new
Chancellor) be abolished by him tomorrow, as he is its sole
author. This was the case in Russia; the Tsar established the
Duma and spent the rest of his life undoing what he had done.
The new Chancellor in his opening speech declared that
the basic and fundamental change made by the Imperial De-
cree, involved the submission to the Reichstag of the principles
upon which his government was to be conducted. He declared
these principles had been settled by consultation not only with
the federated governments, but with the leaders of the major-
ity parties of the Reichstag. He claimed that his government
was the representative of the political convictions of the Ger-
man people, and that on no other condition would he have
accepted the office of Chancellor tendered to him by the em-
peror. " Only the fact that I know the conviction and will of
the majority of the people are back of me, has given me
strength to take upon myself conduct of the Empire's affairs in
this hard and earnest time in which we are living. . . . Only if
the people take active part, in the broadest sense of the word,
in deciding their destinies; in other words, only if responsibility
extends to the majority of their freely elected political leaders,
can the leading statesman confidently assume his part of the
responsibility in the service of folk and Fatherland." He goes
so far as to say that it affords him most satisfaction to have
representatives of the laboring classes associated with him
in the conduct of the affairs of the Empire. Without the
support of the masses of the people his government would, he
declares, be condemned to failure.
Proceeding to outline the foreign policy of the Govern-
ment and its attitude toward peace, Prince Maximilian de-
clared that he accepted the answer given by the Imperial Gov-
ernment to Pope Benedict XV., and that he recognized the
binding character of the Resolution of July 19, 1916. This
Resolution declared against all annexation and against indem-
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nities, but when Russia and Rumania were defeated it was set
aside and treated with contempt. Now, owing to Germany's
recent defeat, it is again made, at least avowedly, the rule to
be followed in all subsequent treaty-making. The Chancellor
intimated, thereby contradicting the statement recently made
by the Vice-Chancellor, Von Payer, that treaties already made
would not stand in the way of a general peace, thus imply-
ing willingness on the part of Germany to revise the treaties
of Rrest-Litovsk and Bucharest. Also that more liberal in-
stitutions giving immediate control to the civil authorities in
Poland and the Baltic Provinces, would receive the Chan-
cellor's approval. The war map to which the former Chan-
cellors used to point with such pride, the new Chancellor de-
clares will not form the basis of a new peace which will be
made on the principles of justice. So far from' looking upon
the new Parliamentary Government as a thing likely to pass
away. Prince Maximilian declared it to be his profound con-
viction that when peace is concluded there would never again
be a time when a government in Germany could be formed
without the support of the Reichstag or drawing its leaders
therefrom. The new Chancellor characterizes himself, not as
the minister of his Imperial Majesty but as the servant of the
people. This is the keynote of his speech, marking the momen-
tous change involved in the new administration.
Prince Maximilian's first act was to ask the President to
make representation in the interest of the Central Powers for
a general armistice on land, on sea and in the air, and to
start without delay negotiations for peace. To induce the
President to make this request for an armistice, the German
Government declared its acceptance as a basis for peace nego-
tiations of the demands made by the President in his
message to Congress on January 8th and in his later pro-
nouncements, especially his speech of September 27th. These
demands include the evacuation of Belgium and its restor-
ation; the evacuation of invaded portions of France and the
righting of the wrong done to her in 1871 in the matter of
Alsace-Lorraine; the readjustment of the frontiers of Italy
along clearly recognizable lines of nationality; the giving to
the peoples of Austria-Hungary the freest opportunities of
autonomous development; the evacuation of Rumania, Serbia
and Montenegro; the giving to Serbia the lands taken from
▼OL. Gnn. — 18
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her and of a port on the Adriatic; security for the nationalities
now subject to Turkey and the opening of the Dardanelles for
the free passage of ships of all nations; a new independent
Poland with free access to the sea; the evacuation of all Rus-
sian territory and an assurance that Russia should be left free
for self -development. These demands are not accepted by the
German note as it stands, but only as a basis for discussion —
a discussion which if any of the parties so willed might last to
the end of the century. Accordingly the President in the ques-
tions which he sent to the German Chancellor, asked whether
the German Government accepted them as terms and not
merely as things to be discussed.
To this question Germany replied in the following terms :
" The German Government has accepted the terms laid down
by President Wilson in his addresses of January 8th and in
his subsequent addresses on the foundation or a permanent
peace of justice. Consequently, its object in entering into
discussions would be only to agree upon practical details of th^
application of these terms.*' From this it appears that
the terms of President Wilson are accepted as final and not
merely as bases of discussion, except as to the practical details
involved in carrying them out. The President in his reply
recognized that the acceptance of his terms had been made by
the German Government without qualification, and so far it
may be considered that an agreement between the United
States and Germany on this point has been reached. As to
the armistice for which the German Government asked,
the President, in the questions sent to Berlin, stated that
he would not feel at liberty to propose a cessation of arms to
the Governments with which the Government of the United
States is associated against the Central Powers, so long as the
armies of those powers are upon their soil. The good faith of
any discussion would manifestly depend upon the consent
of the Central Powers immediately to withdraw their forces
everywhere from invaded territory. To this the German Gov-
ernment replied that, in accord with the Austro-Hungarian
Government, for the purpose of bringing about an armistice,
it was ready to comply with the propositions of the President
in regard to evacuation, and suggested that a mixed commis-
sion be appointed to make the necessary arrangements.
The President in making known his "answer** to the
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Crerman Government on this point replied as follows, through
the Secretary of State: "It must be clearly understood that
the process of evacuation and the conditions of an armistice
are matters which must be left to the judgment and advice
of the military advisors of the Government of the United States
and the Allied Governments, and the President feels it his duty
to say that no arrangement can be accepted by the Government
of the United States which does not provide absolutely satis-
factory safeguards and guarantees of the maintenance of the
present military supremacy of the armies of the United States
and the Allies in the field/' A further condition imposed by
the President for the granting of an armistice is that the Ger-
man (government should cease the illegal and inhuman prac-
tices which it still persists in, of sinking passenger steamers
by its submarines, of destroying, burning and plundering the
towns and villages the Germans have been forced to abandon in
France. The German suggestion of a mixed commission is,
therefore, set aside and the terms of the armistice are left as
is usual to be fixed by the military authorities. The Council
of Versailles is in this case the competent military authority,
and it is generally understood that the guarantees to which the
President refers as warrantiog the granting of an armistice
will be the giving up to the Allies of the fortresses of Metz and
Strasburg as well as the city of Coblentz.
The President in his last Fourth of July speech at Mount
Vernon, declared that every arbitrary power, anywhere, that
can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the
peace of the world, should be destroyed, or, if it cannot be de-
stroyed, it must at least be reduced to virtual impotency.
Accordingly, in the questions sent to Berlin, he makes the
following inquiry: " The President feels that he is justified in
asking whether the Imperial Chancellor is speaking merely
for the constituted authorities of the Empire who have so far
conducted the War? " To this question the following is the
reply of the Grerman Government: "The present German
Government, which has undertaken the responsibility for this
step towards peace, has been formed by conferences and in
agreement with the great majority of the Reichstag. The
Chancellor, supported in all of his actions by the will of this
majority, speaks in the name of the German Government and
of the German people." At the time these notes are being writ-
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ten no answer has been received to the Presidents last note
conveying to Germany his decision. The effect of the President's
call for a democratic Germany with a decisive popular voice
in the conduct of affairs, has already been felt. The long de-
layed reforms of the Prussian Electoral Franchise, has been
conceded by the Upper House of the Prussian Diet with the re-
luctant concurrence of the Conservatives who were opposed to
the reform. The latter declare that although they look upon
this change as detrimental to the best interests of the country,
yet in the present distress and danger in which Germany finds
herself, they bend to the popular voice. A Committee of the
Reichstag recommends giving that body the right, in concur-
rence with the Federal Council, to declare war, unless the
country is being actually invaded or its coast attacked. All
this involves an extension of popular rights. Moreover, by a
further resolution, treaties of peace and treaties with foreign
States which deal with affairs coming under the competence
of the imperial law-giving bodies, will require the consent of ,
the Federal Council and the Reichstag. The constitution of the
Empire is to be amended so as to give the Reichstag this ex-
tension of power.
The Cabinet of Baron von Hussarek has
Austria-Hungary, been forced to resign, not having been
able to find a way out of the difficulties
in which the country is involved. It is expected that the Coali-
tion Cabinet will be formed or at least an attempt made to
form one. Likewise in Hungary, the cabinet crisis has
occurred in which the Ministry of Dr. Wekerle has met with
the same fate as that which befell the Austrian Premier and
there too, it is expected, a Coalition Ministry will succeed. To
the Dual Monarchy's many troubles, is added the recrudes-
ence of the movement to separate Hungary from Austria. Sup-
porters of this separation have always been found in Hungary,
but active attempts to bring it about have been in abeyance
for some years. Austria-Hungary concurred in Germany's
petition for an armistice, sending to Washington at the same
time a note to that effect. To this, the President so far has
made no reply. The Foreign Secretary, Baron Burian, has
just acknowledged openly that hope no longer exists of the
military success of the Central Powers.
October 17, 1918.
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WHEN clouds lower and darkness covers the earth, men cry
out for the sun: they crave Light. Maurice Barr&s, pictur-
ing the heroism of young France, pays tribute to the fanning
flame of faith, of spiritual vision which has blown the fires of
patriotism to white heat: in the midst of darkness the youth of
France have seen the Light; have heard the Word: " Without Me
ye can do nothing," and have gone forward with the mighty cry:
** I can do all things in Him Who strengtheneth me." It is but an
example of, a tribute to the age-old truth taught by the Catholic
Church of the coordinating, unifying power of religion. It gives
the power to focus right, saving from shortsighted selfishness, far-
sighted indefiniteness, astigmatic uncertainties. It fixes the ideal
in the eternal, unifying every aim, harmonizing every act. In
God alone can all be made one.
* ♦ ♦ *
SENATOR VANCE of North Carolina wittily parried an ex-
pression of sympathy concerning the loss of sight in one eye
by saying: " I now have an eye single to the interests of North
Carolina." It is the tendency of great crises, great misfortunes
to give us this eye single, to simplify, to unify; the power of a
strong appeal to rectify vision. But the man who sees singly be-
cause the eye of the body and the eye of the spirit meet in a com-
mon focus alone knows true "preparedness," he alone meets
every new obstacle with ready accommodation without need of
any extraneous aid to adjustment. The plus mark of religion
is the hallmark of the family man, the statesman, the patriot.
God is his Source and his Goal : all things from Him, all things to
Him. When we try to describe the patriot we find ourselves im-
mediately speaking the language of the spirit, weighing spiritual
values.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE prophet Ezechiel gives a picture of God-directed men of
purpose, unsurpassed for comprehension and simplicity:
" Their faces were stretched upward . . . and every one of them
went straight forward: whither the impulse of the Spirit was to
go, thither they went : and they turned not when they went." Here
is high purpose — straight of aim, bright with hope, steadfast in
deed, certain of success: that unfailing fruitage of the Spirit,
"charity, joy, peace, patience." These things we demand of
every man who would serve his country. We demand of him
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devotion — singleness of motive — ^the cheer of a hopeful outlook,
steadfastness born of faith in his cause and perseverance and
patience unto success. Without religion we ask too much and
give too little.
* * * *
BECAUSE man is mortal he must cling to the finite, because he
is immortal he must reach out to the Infinite : his loves must
know the boundaries of space and time — my home, my people,
my country — and yet be made fast with him in the bosom of the
Eternal that dying they may not die. This is a thought that
should stir and guide our service of the men who are serving
home and people and country. No effort should be spared to com-
fort their mortality with every personal touch of home that the
organized War Activities can bring them; no sacrifice should be
too great to solace their immortality with the presence of the
Word made flesh among them; that their faces may be lifted up to
Him in the Holy Sacrifice, that the impulse of His Spirit may bear
them on steadfastly to victory.
* * * *
IF examined critically it will be found that President Wilson
when he summoned the country to war was compelled to use
language that is preeminently spiritual: compelled to voice aims,
purposes and motives lifted far above the material into the region
of the soul, and that in his messages and speeches he repeatedly
employs language that has no meaning unless the spiritual and
the eternal are the greatest as well as the immediate concern of
individuals and of nations.
When President Lincoln wished to express sympathy with
the mother of five sons who had given their life for the Union, he
instinctively employed the words of religious faith and spoke of
the altar and the sacrifice. In the work of Maurice Barr&s, when
a suffering or a dying soldier speaks in the hour of his heroic test,
he speaks a spiritual message big with spiritual import. The
negations, the purely materialistic, the purely humanitarian, have
no place there because they are so evidently insufficient to meet
the gauge which his spirit faces. He must speak and express his
best. And that expression is an unanswerable proof of the old,
fundamental teaching: " What doth it profit a man if he gain the
whole world yet lose his own soul? " It is the rout of materialism
and a purely sensible philosophy. It is the defeat of determinism.
It is the liberation of the spirit, a claim to that freedom whereby
the sons of God are made free. It does not mean that religious dif-
ferences count for nothing in the presence of a great crisis. As
it testifies to the truth of the spirit, so does it testify to the longing
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for a knowledge of the definite, spiritual life ^th God — ^the Spirit
Who creates. It is the yearning of the watchers of Israel who
waited through the night for the coming of Him Who would be
both the example and the power, as well as the very life of God
with us.
The sincerity of its faintest expression must be both wel-
comed and nourished. The bent reed must never be broken nor
the smoking flax be quenched. The trial of the spirit is the oppor-
tunity of the apostle — and never was there more world-wide op-
portunity than there is today.
* ♦ * *
THE Government has asked of millions of our sons the highest
sacrifice — to go forth and offer their lives that others may
live. The Government has asked of the entire nation the personal
service of all — our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor that our
cause may not know defeat. The Government has consecrated
this sacrifice by declaring that it is to be unsullied by conquest or
financial reward; that no territory shall be acquired; no indem-
nity accepted; no payment received. Without religion this would
have been impossible. We still live sustained and guided by
Christian tradition. We use the language of Christianity when
we go forward to the fight; the vast majority of our soldiers and
sailors are Christians; the Catholics in army and navy far outstrip
their percentage of the population; the demands for chaplains is
universal and insistent; the Christian tradition is the source and
secret of our strength. Without that religious spirit the Govern-
ment would have asked too much and we would have given too
little. It is religion that consecrates country, that gives to it not
only temporal but eternal value, and that convinces the soldier he
does not die in vain.
♦ ♦ * ♦
WHILE it is true that many of the Christian body are feeding
upon waters, the source of which they either deny or forget:
while it is true that many are interpreting Christianity simply in
terms of humanitarianism, of service for others: while it is true
that many deny the dogmatic truths which alone give substance
and life to Christian faith — it is equally true that this extra-
ordinary phenomenon of humanitarianism has its hopeful as well
as its fearful aspect. Is it not true that as it sprang from the truth
of the Incarnation, it must return to an acknowledgment and an
acceptance of that same Truth? Man's spirit at its highest and its
best hungers for the -Spirit that endures, hungers for God, and the
everlasting cry and desire of the human heart for ** God with us "
will inevitably not be crushed, but made keener and more in-
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sistent by the heart that loves its fellows, and yet through that
very love yearns to know that its fellows are eternal brothers of
himself, and that all, through the Incarnate Word, are one in the
sonship of God.
* * * *
THE very humanitarian tendencies that we at times deplore may
happily be accepted as guiding lines to the remaking of the
nations. They who, with no other satisfaction, yet hungry for
spiritual truth, give themselves to human service as the end-all
and the be-all will inevitably feel the greater want that we can
satisfy. To speak their language — and yet to express the higher and
the supporting message : to outrival them in their own field, to be
sustained by the spirit of truth when their spirit of service fails —
this is to lead them on to the Promised Land of revealed truth,
for which all of us were created and without a knowledge of which
humanity is, in spite of all human service, bewildered and
forsaken.
THE older readers of The Catholic World will remember Mr,
William Francis Dennehy as a contributor to its pages. For
thirty years he spoke constantly, as editor of the Irish Catholic, in
the highest interests of Church and Country, ** ever mindful of the
proper place of the Catholic publicist, loyal and submissive in
the fullest sense of the words to Holy Church, to the Pope and to
the bishops, eager to champion and uphold every good cause, in-
flexible where principle was at stake, seeking as chief reward the
consciousness of duty fulfilled."
It is of timely interest and profit to draw attention to an
achievement that he reckoned the most joyful of all his editorial
career — namely, ""the securing of something approaching a suf-
ficiency of Catholic chaplains for the Irish troops. . . . When the
appalling state of spiritual destitution of the English-speaking
Catholic soldiers who were engaged in the awful struggles in
France and Flanders was, through the intermediary of a Catholic
chaplain, brought to his knowledge, Mr. Dennehy consecrated all
the resources of his ingenious intellect, his big courageous heart
and his vigorous pen, to compel its removal. He had to penetrate
the thick hide of the officialism of the War Office and to move the
inertia and routine of the military authorities. Despite the fact
that he was seriously ill at the time, by letters to the Secretary of
State for War, by articles in his paper, he so stirred public opin-
ion that it became irresistible; and it is to the credit of the late
Lord Kitchener that, once he grasped the truth that the Catholic
Church deals with her subjects not en masse, but each as an
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individual, that great soldier made ample provision for the sup-
ply of Catholic chaplains." Mr. Dennehy also interested himself
in providing personally and securing through the pages of the
Irish Catholic spiritual comforts and reading matter for the
troops. And what he did for the army he did also for the navy.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE fact that this great service rendered to the Catholic troops
was accomplished through opening the eyes of ofBcialdom
to the Catholic point of view, is immensely suggestive for loyal
Catholics living under any non-Catholic government. It is our
duty to present the Church's point of view and to expect and re-
quire justice according to that light. Herein lies true loyalty to
Country as well as to Church. Of such as of Mr. Dennehy, it may
well be said : " Both Church and Country will miss his wise, hon-
est, fearless advocacy."
THE Nouvelles Religieuses of September 15th pays grati-
fying tributes to the status of Catholics in our country where
" religious toleration is a fact as well as a doctrine," and public
protection is extended to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. '' The
spirit of equity exercised by the Government of the United States
towards Catholics is," it says, "worthy of special mention."
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE same journal notes the effect on the Catholic soldiers of the
American Expeditionary Force of the monuments and tradi-
tions of the Faith in the older Catholic civilization, and it further
commends the whole spirit of our men towards religion and
France. A few paragraphs are well worth quotation:
" The sojourn of the Americans among the French is one of
the most extraordinary occurrences of the times. We do not claim
that the example of the American troops is always to be followed,
but it is frequently excellent. The extremely strong discipline
exercised over these young men of the New World who have come
to succor the Old, who show themselves so obedient, so consider-
ate of our usages, so honest in their financial dealings, so gay, so
well inclined towards our churches and our religious ceremonies,
so free in every respect from demagogy has deeply impressed the
populations of both town and country. One cannot but think,
when the great bell — instead of the little one — rings out at mid-
day in our rural parishes, that this revival in ringing the Angelas
is due to Mr. Wilson's initiative, the President of the United States,
and a Protestant. There is not a single camp of U. S. A. soldiers
where one cannot glean some traits of agreeable flavor — ^we give
two among a thousand instances:
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** A general staff had just been installed in a large western
town. Lodgings were scarce. The colonel, the major, an oflBcer
of ordnance, after long search found two rooms to accommodate
four ofBcers. For there was a fourth, the chaplain, who in this
regiment is a Catholic priest The colonel took the rooms and
said to the chaplain: " I will sleep in this room with the major
and the ordnance ofBcer; it will hold three beds. You will occupy
the other room alone, you must be able to receive the men who
have business with you.* Another colonel, who had passed sev-
eral weeks in a town of the same section, was called to the front.
The evening before his departure he started in search of a child
to adopt. He went to the poor mother of a large family and said:
• We know that you have been widowed by the War. Will you
allow us to educate one of your sons at our exi)ense? It will give
great pleasure to our ofBcers and to myself. We have all sub-
scribed for the purpose a certain amount out of our monthly pay.
The child would be the ward of the regiment, which could
thus repay the hospitality it has enjoyed while billeted in
the town. Are you willing?' The mother, quite taken aback,
asked after a moment's hesitation: *But shall I be able to keep
him with me? ' * Certainly,' replied the colonel, * you will bring
him up as you judge best. We only ask that he shall write to us
from time to time, and keep us informed as to his progress in his
studies. Then when he is twenty we will pay his passage to Amer-
ica, so that we may make the acquaintance of the adopted son of
the regiment.'
" The matter was arranged and is a fresh revelation of the
* American heart ' of which we were so ignoraiit."
AVERY touching testimonial to the Catholic Faith of France
was recently given to the Holy Father by the widows and
mothers of France, who subscribed themselves " those who suf-
fer most for France and who hold her future in their hands, and
are glad and proud to proclaim themselves publicly the most faith-
ful daughters of His Holiness."
These two hundred thousand widows solemnly pledged them-
selves, as the heads of families, " to bring up their children in the
love of the Church and to instruct them in the serious duties im-
plied by such devotion and allegiance."
* ♦ ♦ *
HAD the sole parental right devolved on the women of France
in the past as it does in the present, there would have been no
need of war to purify and reveal the Catholic spirit of France.
This fact alone is an augury for the permanence of the religious
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revival. In this testimonial we hear the voice of the women of
every class and every part of France, supported and endorsed by
their cardinals, their archbishops and bishops.
Magnificent appurtenances for the celebration of the Holy
Sacrifice according to their intention accompanied the testimonial.
This material evidence of the self-sacrifice and devotion of the
widowed women of France gives further proof that they are,
indeed, " rooted and grounded in faith " in the infinite value of the
unending sacrifice of Calvary.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
BY the power of this faith, France must be rebuilt physically
and spiritually.
AN Englishman, living in France, when asked: "What are
French women doing? " replied, " They are keeping the coun-
try going.'* An article originally published in The Nineteenth
Century and After and reprinted in The Living Age of August
10th, substantiates this statement with an astonishing account
of the activities of French women and French organizations. The
author draws attention to a fact little appreciated in this country,
that French women were peculiarly prepared to assume duties and
occupations quite foreign to the ordinary life of women in other
countries. As she says, for taking up the tasks laid down by the
men called to arms, a French woman was "partially prepared
by her custom of sharing the life of her menkind in a daily com-
radeship quite unknown in any rank of life in England. For the
French woman not only takes part in her husband's recreations
— the British workman's * beanfeast ' has no equivalent in France
— but she shares his business life, counsels him in his enter-
prises, is conversant of les affaires, and more often than not in
small households, shops, and caf6s, she keeps the accounts and
holds the purse. Also in all agricultural life, as Millet's pictures
have made familiar to English eyes, she shares the daily toil, man
and woman sowing and reaping side by side in the fields, the vine-
yards, the orchards of their beloved land."
* ♦ ♦ . *
ONE might say that in France the women alone were prepared
to meet the exigencies of war, for " the war of 1870 had shown
French women their heart-rending helplessness and ignorance,
natural consequence of lack of training and organization. To
realize was to remedy — * Never again,' vowed the women of
France. The Society of the Croix Rouge was founded, and from
an acorn rapidly grew into a vigorous widespreading tree, whose
leaves are ' for the healing of the nation.'
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284 WITH OUR READERS [Nov.,
" Long before the supreme hour struck in 1914 this society
numbered its thousands in every province, and the three main
branches were doing splendid, efficient work, not only among the
wounded and sick of the army at home and wherever French
troops were stationed abroad, but also in going to the assistance
of others at war, and the victims in catastrophes, such as the
earthquake in Sicily, or epidemic in Italy.
'' For many years past it had been a general custom for young
women and girls of the educated classes to attend a course of
Croix Rouge lectures and go through a practical training, often
of a very thorough description, concluding with a stiff examination
in order to obtain the certificate of the society. In such num-
bers had the young women of France thus prepared themselves,
that it would almost seem as if they had been prompted by some
intuitive sense, some overshadowing of coming events. It is cer-
tain their Government sounded no note of warning, felt no more
need than did our own, to prepare, even in such first essentials of
war as guns and boots. It was fortunate indeed that these
thousands of efficient women had prepared themselves in times of
peace for the colossal task awaiting them. They formed at once
a nucleus, capable of indefinite expansion. At the call thousands
more joined up for training, while others, who had retired, offered
themselves as teachers and organizers of ambulances. Already
in 1916 the numbers of hospitals organized and maintained by the
three great branches of the Croix Rouge had grown to about 1,800,
and the military hospitals and homes where the Croix Rouge
matrons and nurses give their services are now too numerous to
count, increasing as they are daily with the needs of the army."
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
BUT perhaps more interesting because less well known and
without precedent, are the instances of French women filling
the posts of men in public life. Of the long list of women acting
as mayors, several deserve special mention.
"Madame Fiqu6mont, school-teacher at T , on the first
of August, 1914, offered herself to replace her husband as secre-
tary to the Mayor. The town was bombarded and for some weeks
occupied by the Germans, but she never quitted her post. After
the Germans retired, the old Mayor fell ill and his place was then
filled by Madame Fiqu^mont, who remained on with her two
children efficiently administering the affairs of the Ck>mmune.
"Again Madame Machires, acting as Mayor of Soissons,
dauntlessly faced the invading army, answering, when the Ger-
mans demanded the Mayor, * I am the Mayor;' and though the
Hun General threatened to have her shot, she boldly remon-
Digitized by
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strated with him for the excesses and violence of his troops. She
was * cited ' in the ofBcial report of September, 1914.
** Not only in the devastated regions, but throughout France,
women are acting as mayors, head teachers, and postmasters. At
one town in the Dordogne the Municipal Council was convoked
and presided over by a woman. She superintended the work of
the Commune so ably that the Sous-Pr6fet begged her to continue
to fill a post in which no one else could replace her."
* * * *
IN the field, in the shop, in factories and ofBces women have been
at the helm, and women's organizations have met and con-
trolled every evil which menaced the internal welfare of the nation
— drink* vice and child mortality.
The enumeration of all these activities is not possible in these
pages. To sum up the spirit behind them we will quote the
clarion call of the Union Franqaise to the French wives and
mothers waiting with open arms the return of their own from the
battle front. " French women, we who are sisters in love of our
country and in our duty to defend it, let us not forget that we
are about to be put to a severe test, that all the world will now be
able to judge what is the quality of our souls, what the value of
the spirit animating us. By the effect of this leave on our soldiers,
the manner in which we receive them, and above all the way in
which we send them back to their duty, we shall show whether
we are women worthy of France, or merely poor loving creatures
without courage or noble ideals, unworthy to be wives and
mothers of French soldiers. . . . Our responsibility towards them is
overwhelming, for the attitude of the women may be a decisive
influence. . . . Let us never forget that our inner thought reflects
itself upon the face and in the speech, and that ignoble thought
like noble emotion will find an echo in the hearts of our men. . . .
Remember that we have not the right to be feeble and that revivi-
fying tenderness testifies to a far greater love than enervating
tenderness — our soldiers will never mistake the difference. Any
woman who at this hour destroys in a man the high sense of duty
towards his country will be a criminal, since we are fighting not
only for France but for the principle of right and of justice in the
world, and this duty should be accepted, not as a heavy charge,
but as an honor and a joy."
* * * ♦
AMERICANS have done much and are doing still more for
France, but we must not forget in self-gratulation the very,
very much that France has done for herself.
In the estimate under consideration of What French Women
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286 WITH OUR READERS [Nov-,
Are Doing, it is disappointing to find no real understanding of the
inspiration of their accomplishment. To be sure the work of the
nuns has its part in the eulogium, but that scarcely suffices.
The endeavor of France is rooted in the living tradition of
self-sacrifice and service, inculcated by Catholic truth and fos-
tered by Catholic sacramental life : it is the heritage of the saints
of the " Eldest Daughter of the Church."
WE are glad to publish the following letter in regard to the
biography of Joyce Kilmer now in process of preparation.
In the paragraph of With Our Readers in question, this promised
life of Elilmer was alluded to, but with no specific knowledge of
Mr. Hollida/s treatment of his subject, nor any intent to speak
prejudicially of his work. We are happy to know that Joyce
Kilmer's fame is in the hands of so careful and conscientious a
friend and biographer :
Editor The Cathoug World.
Dear Sir: Two pages of the October number of The Catholic
World have just been brought to my attention. These are pages 141
and 142, torn from the magazine, and bear at the top the line ** With
Our Readers." Please let me speak about them.
These pages begin somewhere after the opening of what is appar-
ently a review of a book about Joan of Arc by a Mr. Stevens. I gather
from your reviewer that it is a poor book. The feature of the review,
however, with which I am concerned is that, to my mind, it has the
effect of being, by skillful implication, prejudicial to a book the char-
acter of which cannot be known to this reviewer, as it is not yet
altogether written, that is my own biography of Joyce Kilmer.
I think if you will look again at the pages I speak of, you, too, wiU
feel that this is so. The reviewer obviously distrusts my book, and
would instill into the minds of his readers a like distrust. Now the
point I have in mind is that I feel very deeply that this is not altogether
justice to a matter which I have more at heart than I have ever had
anything else in my life; the extension of Kilmer's fame and the in-
creasing in value of his literary property for the benefit of his family.
And so I want to tell you now that the work which I have in hand
does not, in any degree, omit to lay stress upon Kilmer's Catholic faith.
Nobody but a hopeless fool could fail to recognize the indisputable
fact that Kilmer's spiritual greatness as a young man and his power as
a poet sprang in incalculable measure from his religion.
I spent months on end with Kilmer during all his waking hours
throughout the whole period of his life between twenty-one and thirty-
two. He told me what, from all the evidence I have in hand, he never
told but one other person — a priest, the occasion of his conversion.
I knew Kilmer some considerable time before he became, formaUy,
a Catholic. And I have been deeply impressed by the fact, so patent
Digitized by
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to me, that he was never really himself, never seemed to know ex-
actly what to do with life, until he found what was his natural spiritual
home.
I think my testimony will carry all the more weight because of
the fact that I am absolutely disinterested in the matter.
The Memorial Edition of Joyce Kilmer will include poems, essays
and letters. Most of the letters are, as in simple justice they should be,
his letters to Catholics, many of them distinguished in Catholic cir-
cles. They are, as he everywhere was, very positive in their Catho-
lic point of view. I myself have a happiness in printing them be-
cause of this, as I greatly admired the manner with which, skillful poli-
tician as he was in many ways, he never hesitated to do the most un-
politic things in the service of his faith.
The memoir which I am writing is to be submitted before it is set
in type to searching Catholic criticism, which I earnestly solicit from
anyone interested in giving it.
The book, however, is not a purely Catholic book in this: It pre-
sents a man of extraordinarily varied talents, among other things one
of the most capable, industrious and prolific journalists of his time, a
gift for humorous essays sufficient to make a reputation on that alone,
as well as a poet. AU in all a figure whose memory is an asset to the
nation.
Please pardon me if this letter is an intrusion.
Sincerely yours,
Robert C. HoixroAY.
IN our October issue we spoke of the constant support and in-
terest shown in the well-being of The Catholic World by the
late Cardinal Farley. The Cardinal frequently told the present
editor how The Catholic World had engaged his attention from
its very first issue: how he read it faithfully every month. His
abiding interest was a reflex of that of his predecessor, Cardinal
McCloskey, under whose guidance Father Hecker founded the
magazine, and who helped its infant years by a gift of five thou-
sand dollars.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
Vol. CVIII. DECEMBER, 1918. No. 645.
THE INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS.
BY EDWARD A. PACE, PH.D.
NE of the remarkable features in the present
world crisis is the sudden discovery of new
meanings for well-known facts and tendencies.
There is already a mass of literature dealing
with the issues of the War. Competent writers
are showing us the background of the War, the antecedents
of the great conflict, its causes, origins and warnings. Things
long familiar are now seen as portents, and theories that
seemed harmless are openly charged with criminal intent.
Hence the need of appreciations and interpretations quite dif-
ferent from those that gained acceptance prior to 1914
In retrospective study, emphasis is laid upon the political
and economic conditions which brought about war. Diplo-
macy also comes in for its due share of attention. The course
of events is traced by some authors from 1870, by others from
1815 and by others still from the break-up of the Roman Em-
pire. There is plainly a desire to make the historical survey
as thorough and complete as the available sources of infor-
mation will permit. It may, therefore, be expected that those
who accept and ponder the lessons of history will get at least
a fair understanding of the War. They will recognize its im-
mediate causes, and back of these they will discern remoter
Copyright 1918. Thb MissioNAaY Sogibtt op St. Paul thb Apostlb
IN THB State op New Yobx.
TOL. evnz. — ^10
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290 INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS [Dec,
influences whose real significance has hitl^erto been
obscured.
But this is not the whole explanation. It is generally felt
that account must be taken of something besides the demands
of conmierce or the need of colonial expansion. These, indeed,
have become more urgent in modem times, but they are not
new. They are no whit more wonderful than the ambitions
and intrigues which in the past, as in the present, have planned
and carried on conquest. Even those characteristics which mark
out this War as the greatest of calamities — the imparalleled
slaughter and wastage— are intelligible in view of the progress
that science has made and its control of physical forces. Nor,
finaUy, is there anything mysterious in the endeavor of each
people to maintain its own form of government, its institutions
and its power. That simply expresses the nation's instinct of
self-preservation.
The most significant thing about this War is its philosophi-
cal background. No conflict of the kind ever acted out so
directly and explicitly a system of ideas and principles such
as those that have been flung into the face of mankind during
the last four years. There have been violations of right be-
fore now; other wars have been marked by atrocity and
rapine. Yet some pretext was usuaUy put forward or some
excuse was offered to conceal the real motive. There were
limits which civilized nations felt bound to observe, however
fierce or desperate the struggle. The mere fact that they were
able to crush and seize was not alleged as a sole and sufficient
justification for so doing. They would not have boasted of
injustice, any more than they would have made treason the
soldier's ideal or cowardice a claim to distinction.
The theory that might makes right is startling enough
when it is put into practice. Then it arouses indignant protest.
Philosophers no less than ordinary people are instantly up
in arms — Crusaders in coiu'age and aim. Yet this theory was
advanced before there was any suspicion of war. It was
published as broadly as any other product of philosophic
speculation. The books that contained it were calmly re-
viewed; they gave occasion for "interesting" discussions.
That they would stir up any more violent strife was not fore-
seen — ^probably because of their very boldness. The conmion
sense of humanity, it was thought, would recoil from such
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extremes. With the broadmindedness of our age, the diffusion
of knowledge and the progress of education, the people might
be trusted to prevent ideas of that kind from getting either
test or application. And yet they got both.
The natiu'al inference is that the philosophers who con-
fided thus far in the power of common sense, must have over-
looked something. They must have forgotten what they, more
than any one else, should have clearly understood and remem-
bered from the history of their own science. For the develop-
ment of philosophy in the modern period has carried the
minds of men steadily on toward acquiescence in the very
principles which now cause amazement. A long preparation
had removed one after another the only convictions that could
harmonize human relations. It had done away with the no-
tion of divine law and its sanctions, with the spiritual nature
of man and his dignity, with the moral order as including in-
ner freedom. In place of these it had set up the concept of a
physical world in which every event is rigidly determined,
and had chained man himself within the same inevitable
sequence. With force as the one aU-pervading reality, it was
superfluous to declare that might makes right. There is no
right either made or in the making. Might simply makes other
kinds of might, just as force is transformed into force.
For minds warped by this sort of philosophy, the fate of
older ideals could not have possessed much interest. It mat-
tered little that religion was left without a basis and that
Christianity in particular was shown to be impossible. But
this apathy did not satisfy the leaders of thought. They could
not afford to miss the opportunity of giving a final stroke to
forgotten beliefs. Christianity, they asserted, has failed be-
cause it did not prevent the War. The burden of blame was
thus adroitly shifted, and the philosophy which was really re-
sponsible came forward to teach the world a new way of
salvation.
It is not necessary to anticipate the outcome of any par-
ticular scheme of reform; but judging by facts and experience,
we may say at once that no theory of life will avail as the
basis of peace unless it accept the central truth of Christianity
and reject the errors by which that truth has been hidden
fro^i the eyes of mankind. Each of those errors has been
tried by criticism and, theoreticaUy, each has been found want-
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202 INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS [Dec,
ing. Now, however, they have been tried by the test of their
own devising, by the merciless searching of war; and the
world today faces the alternative — either abandon what is
false, or abandon the hope of peace.
The fact that many persons have adopted a wrong philoso-
phy and still have retained the spirit of service and love, does
not acquit them of error; it simply proves that they did not
carry their theories to logical effect. On the other hand, when
the teachings of Christianity are proposed as the means of
healing mankind, what is meant is not a mere fragment or a
thinned out remnant of the Christian faith. Too often a par-
ticular phase in the personality of Christ or a single line of
His teaching is held up for imitation, while the fundamental
truth whence all the rest proceeds is neglected or denied. Such
eclecticism not only divides Christ but it also robs of vitality
the members that are so dissevered. For this reason, the be-
lief that acknowledges the loving-kindness of Jesus yet for-
gets how stern He could be when occasion required, is defec-
tive in itself and is powerless to deal with evils that call for
sharp rebuke. And even more futile is the attempt to build up
a vigorous Christianity upon the idea that Christ is merely the
perfect man; this is equivalent to saying that His was a beau-
tiful character woven round a core of illusion; and such
characters are neither guides nor ideals.
Christ is the Incarnate God; that is the vital truth with-
out which there can be no such thing as the Christian religion.
Once that is discarded, we may have eloquent pleas for
humanity and earnest strivings after fellowship and endless
schemes for service; we may have enthusiasm and vision; but
we will not have Christianity. And whatever else we may have
will not secure the peace of the world, because man will still
be the maker of his own standards and the arbiter of his own
destiny. Of God*s design no thought will be taken.
Through the Incarnation, God revealed Himself to man.
He did not endow finite minds with power to grasp the Infinite
nor give to reason, as such, an insight into His essential being.
But what .man needed to know, and more than the deepest of
thinking would have discovered, was made known through
Christ. In Him, His teaching and His works, were visible the
attributes of deity. In that Person men saw, as fully as mortal
eye could see, the divine Being. Omnipotence and wisdom.
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justice and mercy and love, surpassing what man had con-
ceived, were manifest in Him. " 'Lord, show us the Father, and
it sufficeth us.* . . . 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.* **
This is the essential meaning of the Incarnation.
Compare with it this statement of a modern thinker: " It
is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard
that through which all things exist as The Unknowable.*' This,
according to Spencer, is the fundamental truth in religion and
the basis on which alone religion and science can be recon-
ciled. The consequences are easily drawn.. God cannot be
known by any sort of revelation; His attributes, so-called, are
fashioned by oiu: thinking; His will is inscrutable; His law,
if such there be, no man can ascertain. Has He any concern
for human affairs? Does He hold any standard of right and
wrong? Will He, now or in a day to come, mete out reward
and punishment? These questions, in the agnostic view, are
not only hard to answer; they are absurd. And no less vain are
hope and prayer and worship.
Which of these antithetic doctrines finds its logical out-
come in the philosophy back of this War? Which of them is
more likely to establish justice and peace?
It is at once plain that if God is unknowable, appeal to
Him for the justice of a nation's cause is a cry in the void.
Likewise, if nothing can be known of His rule or providence
or sanctions, the State must be supreme and its supremacy
absolute. Since it is accountable to no higher power, it alone
must judge of the means whereby it shall maintain its place
in the Sim. And since it holds at its disposal the things that make
life worth living, there is no reason why it should not take the
place of the Unknowable as the object of cult and devotion.
Though obvious, these conclusions are not citations of fact
in answer to the question of fact: which doctrine, the Chris-
tian or the agnostic, is responsible for present conditions? But
they are, none the less, borne out by the witness of history.
They are verified by the record of the century and a half dur-
ing which our own national life has developed.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness." The founders of the Republic
were not agnostics. They knew of a Supreme Being as the
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294 INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS [Dec.,
Creator of mankind. To His creative action they ascribed the
rights for which they were about to struggle; and these rights,
because of the Creator's endowment, no power could alienate.
They declared the colonies independent, ** appealing to the
Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their inten-
tions;" and they pledged themselves to support their Declara-
tion " with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Provi-
dence."
While this document was being signed at Philadelphia, the
philosopher of Konigsberg was elaborating his Critique of Pure
Reason. The year that saw the end of the War of Independ-
ence saw also the first edition of Kant's revolutionary work.
Theoretical reason, he asserts, can neither prove nor disprove
the existence of God. '* From the same ground on which, in
the thesis, the existence of an original Being was proved, its
non-existence is proved in the antithesis with equal stringency."
As regards the question whether there exists a Supreme Cause
of the world, " reason, in the very midst of her highest expec-
tations, finds herself so henmied in by a press of reasons and
counter reasons, that, as neither her honor nor her safety ad-
mit of her retreating and becoming an indifferent spectator of
what might be called a mere passage of arms, still less of her
commanding peace in a strife in which she is herself deeply in-
terested,* nothing remains to her but to reflect on the origin of
this conflict, in order to find out whether it may not have arisen
from a mere^misunderstanding.
Between this philosophy and that which is expressed in
the Declaration of Independence there is more misunder-
standing: the opposition is wider and deeper than the sea.
The "truths" which form the basis of American freedom
are not, according to Kant, self-evident; they cannot even be
demonstrated by any effort of speculative reason. If the
existence of God be an insoluble problem, it is useless to speak
of the Creator's endowment, more useless still to battle for
rights and liberties which are supposed to have come from
God.
Kant, it is true, endeavored to restore through the prac-
tical reason what his former Critique had destroyed. The
moral order, he contended, obliges us to believe that God ex-
ists. Our human interests, our sense of duty, the requirements
of life, postulate the existence of an original Being *' whence
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everything receives both unity and purposeful connection." In
other Words, we need God, therefore we must believe that He
exists.
Such a corrective may have satisfied Kant, but it did not
convince all his followers. It failed to recall them from the
darkness into which Pure Reason had plunged them. Many,
indeed, rejoiced in that very darkness as the most luminous
light ever kindled by the genius of man. If they felt at all the
moral needs which Kant found in himself, they could easily
take refuge in the verdict of theoretical reason; they could
appeal from Kant to Kant. That this was quite generally done
is evident from the progress of thought during the century that
followed. Kant himself would have found it more and more
difficult, as time went on, to maintain the positions of his Prac-
tical Reason. Of the two things that filled him with admira-
tion, the starry firmament is still visible; the moral order is
clouded with the exhalations of his speculative thinking.
Kant has been criticized for staking so much on the dis-
tinction between Reason Pure and Reason Practical. Never-
theless, this represents, in germ at least, the broader division
that was opened between the trend of philosophy and the
world's aspirations. On one side, speculation drifted farther
and farther from the recognition of God, stopping in succes- .
sion at the Absolute, at Matter, at the All-Being, at the Power
behind phenomena, and finally at the Unknowable. On the
other, the peoples struggled on to the attainment of their God-
given rights. Without much concern for the findings of Pure
Reason, often with less regard for the moral order in the Kan-
tian sense, they fought towards freedom. With their eyes fixed
on that goal they saw, for the most part, only the outer shape
of the obstacles which they had to overcome. They scarcely
realized that the power which opposed them had its source in
philosophy; and still less did they suspect that the same philos-
ophy was the cause of their undoing. Nothing makes tyranny
bolder than the exclusion of God from its reckoning and noth-
ing so quickly exhausts, in those that are oppressed, the power
of effectual resistance. The struggle then narrows down to
the question whether the brain of the few or the brawn of the
many shall conquer. In either case, agnosticism is sure of its
triumph.
The victory is more easily won when disregard of the
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296 INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS [Dec.,
Supreme Being is coupled with a low estimate of the fellow-
man. Such phrases as " the sacredness of life " and " inalien-
able right " are then emptied of their meaning. Fear and in-
terest may hold in check the impulse to kill or defraud; but
where those deterrents are lacking, the fact that a man, just
for the sake of humanity, has a claim to respect, will not count
for much. In war, especially, cruelty will become a virtue,
compassion a symptom of weakness.
No one is surprised at the treatment which the savage gives
his enemies: it is rather what we should expect of him, seeing
that he is so far below our standards of intelligence and prog-
ress. But what does perplex us is the savagery of civilized
peoples. Has culture no power to stay the animal instincts?
Has education no fimction but to sharpen the tooth and the
claw? These questions are conmion enough at present and
they are by no means easy to answer. If the schools had been
completely under Christian influence, the problem would have
been solved — ^by the same logic that holds Christianity respon-
sible for the outbreak of war. As it is, however, there are not
many well-informed people who regard education as a failure.
The Christian idea of man's dignity is derived from the
truth that a divine Person assumed our nature, thereby giving
it an excellence far surpassing any that humanity of itself
could attain. God Himself could not by the richest endow-
ment confer on a creature so great an honor. But having once
bestowed it. He has taught us through Christ the true value of
human life. The Incarnation not only reveals God to man;
it reveals man to himself, showing him that his real worth is
beyond anything that he could conceive.
From this exalted dignity man has been brought down by
various theories and systems. Materialism has taught him that
his soul is only a fiction; evolutionism reminds him that he is
descended from the brute; and other philosophies insist that
his value is found not in his individual life but in his absorp-
tion by the State. By different paths these theories lead to the
same conclusion: the whole meaning of human existence is
confined to earth from which man comes and to which he
returns.
As long as such ideas remain in the sphere of speculation
they are not apt to cause bloodshed. Philosophers as a rule
prefer to stay at home and let their theories in some diluted
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1918.] INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS 297
form be tried out by the multitude. But when, as in the present
instance, application follows theory with vigor and consist-
ency, the result astounds the calmest mind. Although
psychology has told us much of the motor processes which
thought involves, of suggestion and of the instinctive tenden-
cies that stir the crowd to action, the significance of these
facts does not seem to be fully appreciated. Tell the people,
in the name of science, that they differ from the lower animals
only in degree, drive home this notion by emphasis and re-
iteration, develop a plan of education that takes the child back
to the supposedly primitive state of his half-human ancestors
— and what will be the natural result? The sense of human
dignity will be diminished, and the claims of man*s higher
faculties to dominate his conduct will be questioned or re-
jected. Reason and will, in consequence, expend their
activity in serving the lower tendencies. They relax the
inhibitions that otherwise would hold in check the prompt-
ings of passion and impulse, and at length they make the
natural the norm of action without discriminating between
that which is worthy of man and that which means
degradation.
In the lower orders of life, the instinct of self-preservation
is not restrained by altruistic feelings. Regard for the wants
of his fellows is no part of the animaFs consciousness. Hence,
where needs and interests clash, there is but one mode of set-
tlement: the stronger must prevail. Human life also has its
rivalries, and it often involves a struggle for existence. The
question then arises: shall competition among men be tem-
pered by motives and considerations superior to the demands
of instinct, or shall the law which governs the animal world
be extended to human relations?
The latter alternative, as recent happenings show, has not
only been tacitly admitted; it has been openly advocated and
carried into practice. This is the principle underlying the
assertion that the stronger nation must fulfill its high destiny
by destroying the weaker. And once this becomes fixed in
the national mind, it is easy to understand the spirit with which
war is conducted. No means however drastic, no excess or
wantonness or treachery can be condemned so long as it helps
to conquer.
In this case, survival implies two very different things.
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298 INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS [Dec,
The first is that the victorious nation has proven itself greater
in man-power, in resou^rces or in military science, or in all
these together. The second is that it has used its power with-
out scruple or mercy; it survives because, in the struggle, it
divests itself of its humane character and conjoins the intelli-
gence of man with the ferocity of the brute. Any doubt as to
the meaning of fitness is dispelled by the logic of f actis.
Writing of Darwinism, Wallace argued, as against the
theory of Natural Selection, that it does not account for the
origin of moral perceptions, since any animal in which these
first arose even in elementary form, would have found itself
at a serious disadvantage and would have perished in the
struggle. The argument of course assumed that justice and
sympathy were characteristic of man, and Wallace, though he
denied their origin by evolution out of animal feeling, would
probably have agreed that they become more pronounced as
the human race advances. If evolution proceeds from the
lower level to the higher, we should expect that these human
qualities would become more firmly established as the index
of fitness. But the philosophy which led to this War has set
up other standards; a nation qualifies for survival by ridding
its soul of the slightest inclination towards mercy, or chivalry
or regard for its own solenm pledges. It would seem, then,
that evolution is reversing its direction, and turning back to
the earlier condition. The finer human traits are niere in-
cidents in the process; they must eventually disappear, and
their passing will be no loss but rather a gain to the nation
that shall have reached the highest point of its evolution.
Whether believers in evolution or not, a goodly number of
persons will shrink from such a conclusion. From more than
one people an energetic protest has gone out against the doings
by which the philosophy in question gets concrete expression.
In the ordinary human view, those denunciations are whole-
some signs. They encourage the hope that having learned by
experience the ultimate meaning of certain philosophical ideas,
the world will cast them aside, and for its guidance adopt
others that are more in accord with the dignity and true prog-
ress of mankind. At any rate, it should now be clear that we
cannot reasonably teach men that in their essential nature
they are brutes, and then expect them to behave as something
better.
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1918.] INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS 299
The situation, in brief, is this: we are not willing to accept
as our measure of worth the mere fact of survival. On the
other hand, we do not now foresee the day when men shall be
80 perfect in righteousness and intelligence that conflict will
never arise. Can anything be done to prevent a repetition
of what is now taking place? Can we lay hold upon this
course of human events and make it move upward instead of
downward? Many persons believe that we can, and they are
showing their faith by their works. But can they or any other
human agency interfere with the process of the world and its
laws? If they call for reforms and appeal to the nobler ele-
ments in man, they evidently suppose that men are free to turn
from evil to good, that the will can hold back against pressure
from the past and go in the way of its own choosing. But what
if the supposition be false?
A widely-accepted theory maintains that each action of
man is as fully determined as the events of the physical order
and that freedom of the will is a myth. The same inevit-
able causality that rules the material world is supreme in our
thoughts and volitions. We deliberate and decide, make up
our minds and change them, rejoice in our deeds or regret
them — thinking all the while that we are acting freely. We
think so because we know little of the real causes that operate
within us, and less of their antecedents. With fuller knowl-
edge of our past, the illusion of freedom would disappear.
The determinist is quite capable of asserting his liberty
and of fighting in its defence. If reminded of his philosophy,
he would say that he is fighting to be free from outward re-
straint; but if true to his theory, he should have to add that
his will is not free to choose between fighting and staying at
home. Consistency again would require him to admit that
the will of his enemy is subject to the same law, and that,
strictly speaking, neither of them is entitled to praise or to
blame. The valor of the one and the atrocity of the other
are equally devoid of goodness and badness.
People in general are not familiar with the subtleties of the
problem of freedom, but its practical bearing is open to all.
If a man could not help doing what he did, he evidently is not
responsible; and if human conduct in general is bound to be
just what it is, no moral quality can be ascribed to it any more
than is ascribed to the movements of a machine. Not only
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300 INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS [Dec.,
the sense of freedom but the sense also of duty, of honor, of
obligation is an illusion. I may keep my promise or break it:
which I shall actually do is determined by forces beyond my
control. And the same is true, on a larger scale, of the agree-
ments that are "" binding " on nations.
How far Determinism has entered into modern thought
may be seen most plainly in the moral sciences. A system of
ethics which refuses to take freedom as its basis, cannot con-
sistently prescribe what men ought to do; it can only describe
what they actually do. It analyzes motives and explains why
men behave thus and so under given conditions. It searches
out the origin of the ideas of right and wrong and shows how
these have developed. But it does not venture to say: this
action is right and that action is wrong. It is a positive, not
a normative, science.
As the attitude and method of ethics become generally
known, the impression is spread that scientific thought has
done away with the older distinctions and standards. And
since these have not been replaced by any definite precepts,
it would seem that either the ethical problem is insoluble or
that no such problem exists. The moral sense is gradually
dulled. Success becomes the single criterion of values.
Suppose this philosophy and its practical consequences
were generally established: what would be the result for the
world's political freedom? Apparently, a great advantage:
each individual, emancipated from childish notions of moral-
ity, would follow his own desires; he would ** realize himself."
In reality, however, nothing could be more fatal to freedom.
There is no genuine liberty without restraint, no preserving of
equal rights without the limitation of law. The need of obedi-
ence is not lessened, but rather increased, by the extension of
right and liberty. Democracy does not mean lawlessness; it
means that the duty of keeping order is laid, with a heavier
share of responsibility, upon each citizen. He has to perform
it, first of all by checking his own selfish tendencies. Instead
of fighting the law which aims at the conmion good, he has to
wrestle with that within him which seeks only private ad-
vantage. The struggle is shifted from field and forum to the
inmost precincts of each man*s soul.
There, the struggle must begin and continue in the convic-
tion that some things are wrong, not simply unbecoming or
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1918.] INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS 301
foolish or inexpedient, but sinful. They are violations of a
law which is effective for all men at all times, because it is
God*s enactment. The practical recognition of this fact is the
surest safeguard of liberty inasmuch as it makes the observ-
ance of human laws also an affair of conscience, lifting it above
the plane of individual preference and policy.
Christianity has always kept alive this sense of sin, both
as a ground of humility and as a motive for reparation. It
could not do otherwise seeing that Christ is the Redeemer, as
well as the Teacher, of mankind. He became man to atone for
the sins of men. In its ultimate purpose, the Incarnation, as
it reveals the dignity of man, reveals also the full significance
of his disobedience and his utter helplessness, as of himself, to
satisfy the claims of God's justice. Deliverance from the bond-
age of evil required the putting forth of mercy as boundless as
the omnipotence that created the world. In cause and man-
ner and effect, the Redemption is the supreme act of liberation.
It is the divinely given example of the use of power.
Having restored the world to freedom at so great a cost,
God, conceivably, might have forced the human will to keep
His law. He might have fixed upon the soul a uniformity and
necessitation as unswerving as the sequence of cause and effect
in the physical order. But this He did not do. There is no
compulsion in the service which He asks. What man gives
must be given freely. There are countless invitations and
helps towards righteous doing provided through the Incarna-
tion; yet the final choice is left with man. There is no en-
croachment on his liberty. This divine respect for human
freedom is the highest warrant of our human rights. While
it does not lessen our obligation, it makes our fulfillment de-
pend upon a new motive : ** If ye love Me, keep My command-
ments " — show that you are worthy of freedom.
In the " new commandment " is revealed the final mean-
ing of the Incarnation. If God " so loved the world," He evi-
dently wills that love shall be the dominant element in human
life; this is the essence of Christianity. But love is not the re-
sult of constraint. It cannot bei made supreme and universal
by ballot or legislation. It must be protected against the
virus of hatred and strengthened by adequate motives.
Theories and movements that tend to weaken it should be re-
garded as pests and disposed of accordingly. On the con-
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302 INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS [Dec,
trary, whatever fosters it and widens its influence should be
given the fullest freedom.
Before accusing Christianity of failing in its specific mis-
sion, it wotild be well to ascertain how far the religion of
Christ has been allowed to direct the thought and action of
mankind. To oppose and thwart it by every possible means
and then reproach it for not preventing war, is neither logi-
cal nor just. Men's hearts and souls have to be reached
through external agencies; their efforts for good must be
organized. But if, as too often has been the case, the whole
power of the State, either openly or in secret, is employed to
eradicate Christianity, while free scope is given to anti-Chris-
tian schemes, it is no marvel that the restilts are what they are.
The real wonder is that Christianity, in spite of all it has suf-
fered, shotild still be able to accomplish so much in the day
of the world's distress. No one surely will claim for agnos-
ticism or materialism the credit of having lessened the horrors
of war and prompted the measures of relief that are the re-
deeming feature of the tragedy. It may be that many who
have been most active and generous would disclaim any
religious motive whatever. If so, the only inference is that
they have been happily out of line with the philosophy which
this war expresses. Without knowing, perhaps without car-
ing, they have gone along the way that Christianity kept open.
In the tumult and the glare they have done what thousands of
men and women had been doing quietly in times of peace with-
out a suspicion of being heroes. Of philosophy these people
probably knew little; they were too busy with the Master's
work to give a thought to Pure Reason or Natural Selection or
the Mechanical Theory of the universe. They were ready to
adopt the better things that science offered, but they could not
fold their hands and wait until the ideal condition of social
reform had been attained. They had an Ideal, and they knew
how and by Whom it had been realized.
The War has been a crucial test for all doctrines that
concern the relations of man with his fellows. It has set the
fundamental issues, sharp and clear, before the world. . We
now have to choose between certain philosophical principles
and the teachings of Christianity. The decision should be just
as plain and comprehensive as the issues. Compromise will
avail us nothing. We need not expect to enjoy the benefits
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1918.] INCARNATION AND THE WORLD CRISIS 303
of the Christian spirit, if we close our eyes to its truth and our
hearts to its precepts. Shall we teach the people and their
children that life is but a struggle for existence, and then ex-
hort them to love one another? Shall we tell them in one
breath that freedom is an illusion, and in the next that we en-
tered the War to make the world free? And while they hear
from the pulpit about the fatherhood of God, shall they learn
in the school that God is unknowable? These are the ques-
tions that must be settled, if the peace that we hope for is to
rest on a safe foundation.
One lesson at least we may draw even from the aberra-
tions of philosophy: When we ask why it has set aside so
much that accords with the demands of our practical reason,
with the dignity of our himian natiure and our deepest aspira-
tions, we .are told that philosophy aims at the unification of
knowledge. Its task is to gather up the fragments of reality
and set them in one inclusive being, to exhibit all events as
items of one continuous process. Whatever stands in the way
of unification must be sacrificed; the "" passion for unity" is
the deciding factor in thought.
Whether this aim shall ever be realized, is an open ques-
tion. But what we chiefly need just now is a concert of will
and piupose. The freedom so dearly purchased must not be-
come a license for new machinations against the peace of the
world. A league of nations, an alliance of peoples imder the
banner of justice and freedom — these are obvious necessities.
What sort and measure of success they are to achieve will de-
pend, not so much on the letter of international agreement as
on the spirit in which it is accepted. This is the real bond.
Shall it be based on material interests or shall it go down into
the souls of men?
Christianity has the answer, and Christians at this time
will do well to ponder its meaning. *' That they all may be
one, as Thou, Father, in Me and I in Thee, that they also
may be one in Us: that the world may believe that Thou hast
sent Me.** The opportunity is here, and with it a great re-
sponsibility.
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THE ROAD TO CHRISTMAS NIGHT.
BY LUCILLE BORDEN.
HY are you crying so bitterly?"
"Tve lost my way because the mist lies
blindingly across the field. The birds no longer
sing, and the flowers droop witheringly. There
was a time long ago when the sun's rays played
down on the waters and lifted shining paths from them to
heaven, but even the sun has ceased to shine, and the dull
waters have no life in them. In the cities, life is a parody,
one's heart sickens and would die for the loathsomeness of it
all. What wonder that I weep ! "
"Listen!"
A sound rose out of the East. If all the concentrated
beauty of a perfect human voice were gathered in one single
instrument, that was the music that drifted to us then.
There were no words distinguishable at first, then as the
sound drew nearer I heard them, wonderful uplifting words
that gripped my soul and held it with their ineffable promise.
Something in my brain thrilled to the truth that this prom-
ise would bear fruit, and that when it did, tears of sorrow would
be transformed into tears of joy, the outlook of humanity in
its entirety would be changed, and to some would be revealed
a thing unspeakable so far: an intensity of joy in suffering.
All this somehow the voice brought with it, though I could
not explain how.
"What do you hear? You seem to be listening to some-
thing. Is it the sighing of the wind only? "
" Make way! Make way I I am the voice of one crying in
the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord! "
As I repeated these words that came to me, the mists about
us that had formed a blinding wall rose up higher and higher
till they lost themselves in the clouds. Hills whose peaks had
lifted to the heights, sank down in reverence and melted to
the plain. Where there had been hollows, wild grasses and
bright flowers had sprung suddenly without my seeing when,
or how.
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1918.] THE ROAD TO CHRISTMAS NIGHT 305
"Every valley shall be filled, every mountain and hill
shall be laid low."
Then, and only then, I knew it could be none other than
the herald of the Lord that had been prophesied.
I thought, naturally, that the herald of a Lord so power-
ful would come in great state and magnificence, but though
I strained my eyes to see, I could see nothing at all. The voice
kept on, and after a while it grew nearer and nearer.
Then where the flowered field blended to the sky, some-
thing stood silhouetted against the dawn.
"What do you see? Your eyes have grown so bright,
surely you see someone, something? *•
" Only a youth, outlined like a reed on the horizon. He
is coming towards us.**
"But who is it? What does he represent?"
" You will not believe me, but I am certain it is the herald
of the Lord."
" Alone, and poor? "
" Alone, and poor."
No pageantry, no great state, nothing at all as I had
thought it would be; only a youth tanned by the sun, brown
and lean.
For staff he carried the slender branch of a tree broken
as it had grown, with a little transverse piece across the top.
His hair was long, and his body spare to emaciation was
covered with a wolTs skin. There were rude sandals on his
feet. He looked so young, so pitifully delicate that the thought
crossed my mind : I was glad his feet were protected from the
rocks that might lie in his path. He read my thoughts for he
answered them, though not in words. He gave me to under-
stand that if he were to tread on iron nails, and if those nails
would pierce his feet till fountains of blood gushed forth, it
wotild be as nothing to suffer for One Who would one day spill
His blood to bring peace to the world, " One," he seemed to
say, "the latchets of Whose shoes I am not worthy to
loose."
"Does he mean the Lord, the King that is to be of the
Jews?"
" Yes, of the House of David."
As he passed on, the herald raised his staff. I followed.
He led me forward through space, backward through time
?0Im cnor.-— 30
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306 THE ROAD TO CHRISTMAS NIGHT [Dec,
to the year that he himself was bom. It was ahnost a partak-
ing of the timelessness, the placelessness of Infinity.
Because I had been in great trouble. One had sent him to
me, that through my trouble I might lead others to where His
comfort eased my pain, so vast is the pitying human heart of
Christ, the King!
" You have seen Him. I read it in your face."
"Yes."
"Was it magnificent, glorious as you expected?"
"Not as I expected."
"You are silent, and disappointed. Is that why you re-
turned so soon?"
" I am not disappointed. It is not why I returned. Soon?
I have been away two thousand years."
"You told me long ago you would like to live for the
King that would be called Christ, the Lord. Do you still wish
toUveforHim?"
" I wish to live for Him, die for Him, live again to be for-
ever with Him."
"Why did you leave Him then? "
"I have not left Him."
"But you came back! "
"To lead you to Him."
" Does He know that you exist? If He is God, why should
He trouble for anyone so insignificant as you or I? "
" He knows."
" Did He look at you at aU? "
"He sees."
"Did He speak to you?"
" He speaks."
" You were going back to the year the herald and He were
bom; how cotild a Child speak?"
" God speaks from the ages."
" It is a hard saying that the Child, the King, and God are
One."
" Perhaps when I have told you all that passed you may
see more clearly, though until the veil falls you will never see,
quite."
" Speak quickly then, for it is growing dark, and night may
come before you will have had time to tell me what you can."
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** Come, listen. It was on your account that I came back.
I could not have told you before because of the noise and con-
fusion there has been in the world, but now that distracting
things are all shut out with the twilight, we will go into the
fields again, just you and I. We will turn our faces to the East
and walk reverently, for last night One was born, so holy that
all the land is sanctified.
*' Stupidly enough I had looked for glories more than
golden with the coming of the King, and with this expectation I
followed the path that leads to Bethlehem all through the day
I went away from you.**
" Were you not very tired? **
** I sought Him Whom my soul loves. I was not tired.
** Even after sundown I walked on and on. For long hours
I saw my way clearly over the hills because the Eastern dark
is slow to fall.
^ Would you believe me when I tell you that instead of
darkness coming as it ordinarily would, a great light rose up
before me? Thinking it might be the glow from thousands of
torches carried in His honor, I hurried towards it. Up it lified,
up and up over the place where Bethlehem should lie. It was
a luminous body shining out over the whole world, I truly be-
lieve, that night.'*
"Was it like the sun?**
** No, nor like the inoon. It must have been a star, but
such a star as one might dream the angels bear, as sanctuary
lamp before the throne of God.**
"Did it glimmer at aU?**
" No. It hung still, almost as if it waited for someone to
follow. Then it would move upward, onward, and stop again
to wait I followed. It led me into the noisy city where the
crowds were terrifying. I would have been badly frightened
if I had not felt the protecting influence of my star, and I knew
no harm could come to me where the King might be. I asked
one of the guards where He was to be found.
" * King? What king do you seek? * he asked insolently
enough.
"*He is born tonight. King of the Jews,* I answered
eagerly.
" One of the others held a lantern to my face and laughed,
calling out, * Tell her to take her mad questioning to Herod.*
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308 THE ROAD TO CHRISTMAS NIGHT [Dec.,
** I was tempted for an instant to lose confidence, but the
light of the star fell across my breast and brought back
courage."
" Tell me about the city.'*
^^ It was filled with people gathered together to be enrolled.
Most of them were finely dressed in velvets and cloth of gold
and silver, with many precious skins of beasts. Even the trap-
pings of the camels were wonderfully brilliant. The men serv-
ants who sat on the ground and in the courtyards, gambled and
mocked and drank and jeered. I felt certain not one of them
had ever heard of the God-Man Whose star shone still above
and just beyond the city.
**The innkeeper where I stopped to ask about the King,
said I was mistaken, and that had any great Personage been
coming to Bethlehem, he would have been among the first to
know about it. I explained about the Babe that was to be born
there and he laughed in my face. He said that in his inn were
many descendants of the House of David, who with their ret-
inues filled every nook and comer. The man's pockets were
evidently well filled, and his prospects good because he seemed
in great good humor, and began to joke and make fun of the
people who had tried to force their way upon him.
•• * There was one couple, quite conmion people,' he told me
with a laugh, ' who came a long way. The woman, a mere girl,
was riding on an ass, and her husband was dusty and grimy,
and limped along on a staff that curiously enough seemed to
be entwined with fresh lilies. When I told them there was
no room, I thought the woman would faint. Instead of abus-
ing me, the man explained that they had many relatives in the
city, but as their houses were full there was no room for them.
Indeed,' the man laughed maliciously when he added this,
*had they been wiser, they would have offered me more money,
and I could have put them up some way or other, but they did
not, so I let them go.' "
"*Did you offer them no wine, or water?' I asked,
shocked at his unkindness.
" He closed the door in my face without another word.
"My whole soul yearned to the lowly couple who had
come far and were not made welcome. Looking up to my
star I saw that it began to move slowly on, so I abandoned my-
self to its guidance without further question."
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" Where did it lead you? ''
''Beyond the gates in the opposite direction from the
place where I had spoken to the guards. I might have known
the narrow confines of a narrower city could never be the
birthplace of a King of kings.
** On and on we went. His star and I, while all creation,
hushed mysteriously, waited. Then up from the surrounding
fields and desert that stretched beyond, rose great moving
masses of white, and when I came closer I saw that they were
sheep, led by the shepherds."'
"Then?'*
" The higher rose the star, the more slowly it moved for-
ward.
" When it had almost stopped, floating shapes seemed to
emanate from its light, and blending with the ether of the air,
drifted to earth, as if they too were biding their time.**
** Just what were they like? **
"Translucent clouds out of a moonlit night, hardly vis-
ible. When they came closer their whiteness was dazzling and
I saw them taking actual form, winged creatures, resplendant,
glorious. One greater than the rest moved apart bearing a
mighty sword sheathed, and there was one that led the way.
Not a word was said or sung then, but I knew them.**
"You Aneu; them?**
"They were Michael and Raphael, fighter and leader,
archangels of heaven.**
" Were they very beautiful? '*
"Most beautiful. Indeed, He Who was to be bom that
night could be none other than He Who was the Expected of
the ages, for none other could conimand the heavenly hosts.**
"Then?**
" Four of the spirits faced to the four comers of the earth.
Through silver triunpets they blew a call and the four winds
answered.
" Three times they blew, and loudly. Then round about
on every side rose a mighty soimd, and all the air was filled
with spirits singing with one glorious triumphant voice :
" 'Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace to men
of good will.*
"Kneel down with me ' and listen while I try to tell you
what followed.
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310 THE ROAD' TO CHRISTMAS NIGHT [Dec.,
" It was the revelation of the star."
"Was it still shining after the Child was bom? "
" Had it only been what it seemed at first to be, it would
have faded at the coming of the King."
" Then it wasn't— just a star? "
" If only I can make you see! It was vision of the burning
fire of love that broke through the boundaries of heaven and
earth.
"Through the Holy Spirit, light, through the breast of
God the Father, love, its gleam pierced a little man-made
cave to the Sacred Heart of a new-bom Babe, incarnate Faith,
Hope, Charity.
" There will always be those who seeing as it were through
a glass darkly, will never know it as anything but just the
star of Bethlehem. But to those of us who knelt in the fields
on the holy night the star's real significance was made clear."
"And that is?"
" The union of Father, Spirit, Son, never separated, always
One.
" Holy, Divine, eternal Godly Sacrifice. For one infinitesi-
mal space of time, flashed over us the reason for incarnate
Immolation, sublime Achievement, for Jesus, the Highest One,
Son of the Most High God."
" How did this knowledge come to you? "
"With the soul's vision, for by that time the light was
too brilliant for unveiled human eyes to face. It was with
the eyes of the soul I saw what I saw, and I shall never
forget.
" The beam from the star raised itself up through itself,
bearing within itself higher and still higher as it left the
earth the actual tangible acceptance of the sacrifice of the
Redemption. It lifted itself as the chalice of the Ofifertory is
lifted, then was raised through the blue vault and beyond it
straight to the Father and Spirit. It held the union of the
divine Trinity intact, not separated from the human heart
of the Babe of Bethlehem."
"Was it borne entirely beyond your sight?"
" All that I can tell you is, that from whatever power of
vision God gave me at the time, it disappeared. When it had
quite gone, I rose and followed the shepherds who had gone
ahead to the cave.
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''The feeling of awe that came over me, there on the
threshold of life itself was so great that I could not raise my
head at first. After a while I took comrage and looked up.
"I saw a manger, and straw. Beside it knelt two in
adoration. I knew the manger to be the first tabernacle, but
did not dare turn my eyes to the Treasure that lay within if
" What was she like, the Mother? ••
" No words could do her justice. She seemed very young,
only about sixteen.
'* If a lily in its first loveliness had blown from the hands
of its Maker, and taking root in a desert had beautified all that
bloomed near it, or that came in contact with it, that was Maiy,
the little Maid, His Mother, most exquisite being God had ever
fashioned.
** When I try to tell you of her utter sweetness I am lost
in contemplation and am dumb. Her dress, soft and white,
was woven from the wool of lambs, and over it she wore a
mantle, blue as the sky in May.
"The night was bitterly cold, even for the two. What
must it not have been for the Treasure of the manger? '*
"And the other? '•
" Joseph ! If you have ever seen blended in one man's face
all that is best, kindest, gentlest, strongest, most understand-
ing, purest and most lovable, that was Joseph, into whose keep-
ing had been given Mary, and the carpenter's little foster-Son
Jesus, the King.**
"It is of the King I am burning to know. Surely you
looked at Him? •*
" I found my King a tiny Infant lying on clean straw. He
was wrapped in the swaddling clothes prepared for Him by
His little Mother. The love of her pure heart, the adoration
of her soul, the worship of her entire being were the gold and
precious things woven into the simple garments that covered
Him — ^not quite, for unlike other children of His place and
day, the arms were free, and when I first saw Him, they were
reaching out, so that He made a cross. I thought that it looked
as if He were taking all the world into a divine embrace, and
I knew He even meant those, back in the city, who had rejected
Him. O, He was sweet,, but there are not words sublime enough
in any world to half express the sweetness of Him!
" A chill wind blew through an opening in the roof and
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312 THE ROAD TO CHRISTMAS NIGHT [Dec.,
the cold swirled all about the entrance. Had it not been for
the warm breath of the ox and the ass that stood in the shadow
of the cave close behind the manger, the cold would have been
unbearable."
" Try to tell me about Him, even if only a very little? '*
" Can the least of creatures paint a likeness of God?
** His skin was as white as milk. Pale roses touched His
cheeks. The ringlets on His head were burnished gold.
*'I knelt far off behind the shepherds. They had the
greater right to go closer to Him, for they at least had * kept
themselves unspotted from the world.'
"Whatever dross had ever entered my soul, whatever
worldliness had touched my heart, whatever sin had ever
crossed my path, had risen in all hideousness to hold me out
from the presence of the sinless ones. How I hated that dross
and that worldliness, that sin! How I would have died a
thousand deaths to be made white as the lambs that in their
innocence pressed close about the Child.
" Then, then He looked at me.
"He opened His divinely beautiful eyes and looked at
me.
" They were like His star, God's eyes lighting the soul to
Himself, wide to the heights, open and alive to the bitter, bit-
ter depths, seeing everything, understanding, pitying, for-
giving.
" At that moment was born to me a love so mighty that I
would have melted away in His presence had He so willed."
" What did He do when He saw all these things of which
you tell me?"
" He wept. My little King wept. It was / who filled those
lovely eyes with bitter tears, I who caused His tender lips to
quiver with the pain of my ingratitude, I whom He had led
to the very door of His house. In my despicable weakness I
had put the weary load of my own wrongdoing on the gentle
shoulders already weighted with the world's weight of evil.
"Let me tell you something horrible; I knew in my soul
that I had been among those who were to have crucified the
Babe of Bethlehem."
"Knowing this how could you keep on living? "
" Listen. A sheep dog wandered out and lay down close
beside me. In my misery I wondered how it could, and put
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my arm about it, and buried my face in its neck» and cried bit-
teriy. I thought my heart would break.
"* Then, a hand was laid gently on my shoulder. Through
my tears I saw that someone stood beside me.
** It was the little maid. His Mother.
** She smiled at me. Though I was among those to crucify
Him, she knew the Heart of her Son! She smiled. It was as
if the sun had risen through a storm. She smiled, and took
me by the hand, and led me in. Her feet made no sound when
she walked but her mantle blew against my face and cooled it.
^ Without once hesitating she led me to the manger, but
when I reached it, I could only fall on my knees to sob out the
contrition that was killing me.
'^Oh, the wisdom and the knowledge and the power of
God Who selected Mary out of all the ages of the world to be
His Mother!
^ She stooped and lifted her Baby in her arms for me to
see. And I saw that the tears in those starry eyes were tears
of pity, not reproach, pity not for what He might suffer through
me, but for what I was suffering through my own fault.
" I said she lifted Him up, but I did not tell you all. There
is infinitely more. She laid her Treasure on my breast. His
divine head rested on my heart. His peace spoke to my soul.
** When she took Him back, she left Him with me, for all
the ages."
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CATHOLIC DOCTRINE ON THE RIGHT OF SELF
GOVERNMENT.
BY JOHN A, RYAN, D.D.
RESIDENT WILSON has many times declared
that the terms of peace must recognize the right
of all nations, large and small, to choose their
own form of government and their own political
rulers. The same demand and principle has
been sanctioned by the Allied countries, and by certain impor-
tant elements in Austria and Germany. Here in the United
States, substantially the whole population accepts this doctrine
as axiomatic, and would have done so in the absence of any
statement by the President. We still subscribe, as we always
have subscribed, to the statement in the Declaration of In-
dependence, that *' governments derive their just powers from
the consent of the governed.*'
To what extent is this political doctrine in harmony with
the principles of the Catholic Church? Has it ever received
anything like formal approbation? May a Catholic apply this
democratic principle to the case of those small nations that are
denied the right of self government by some of the European
powers?
No formal, official declaration has come from the Church
on any of these questions. She teaches that government of
some kind is necessary for human welfare, and is therefore re-
quired by Divine Providence. The Scriptural basis of this
teaching is most definitely stated by St. Paul, in the thirteenth
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: "Let every soul be
subject to the higher powers; for there is n6 power but from
God and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore, he that
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God." In his
encyclical, ''On the Christian Constitution of States" (/m-
mortale Dei) Pope Leo XIII. wrote: "Every civilized com-
munity must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no
less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has conse-
quently God for its author. Hence it follows that all public
power must proceed from God. . • . The right to rule is not
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necessarily, however, bound up with any special mode of gov-
ernment. It may take this or that form, provided only that it
be of a nature to ensure the general welfare.'*
The words of St. Paul cited above might, indeed, be under-
stood as expressing the doctrine that the actual ruling per-
sons in any country always have a right to obedience from the
subjects or citizens. According to that interpretation, no peo-
ple not even one that had been subjected by force, would ever
have the right to withhold submission, or to strive for " self-
determination.'' The existing government would always be a
morally legitimate government. Happily, this is not the inter-
pretation put upon the words of the Apostle by the Catholic
Church. The authoritative Catholic understanding of the pas-
sage is found in the quotation from Pope Leo XIII. The lat-
ter speaks of authority as coming from and sanctioned by
God; he does not say that the concrete form or the personal
bearer of authority has in every case divine authorization. He
is discussing the abstract right to rule, not the concrete right
of any particular person who happens to occupy the position
of ruler. The "power" and "powers" of which St. Paul
speaks are to be understood in exactly the same sense. They
refer to the abstract right or authority, not to the concrete gov-
ernment or governor. Whether the person or persons who are
actually in control of a given country do or do not possess this
abstract right, is a question that cannot be decided by refers
ence to the words of either St. Paul or Pope Leo. Hence their
statements cannot be used against the theory that every peo-
ple has a right to determine the form and personnel of its
government.
While the Church has made no pronouncement for or
against the right of national self government, her competent
private teachers, the moral theologians and canon-
ists, have discussed the question at considerable length. As we
have just seen from the words of St. Paul and Leo XIH., the
ruler derives his right to rule from God, Who is the source
of all authority. Immediately, therefore, we face the ques-
tions : how does this governing authority descend from God to
a ruler? how can we know that it has actually been conferred
upon an existing king, president, or parliament? Theologians
and canonists have dealt with these questions in considerable
detail.
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316 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Dec.,
As regards the maimer in which the right to govern
reaches the first legitimate ruler of a State, the majority opin-
ion among Catholic writers is that stated by Cardinal Bellar-
mine and Francisco Suarez. The work of the former on this
subject was written in the last quarter of the sixteenth cen-
tury; that of the latter in the first quarter of the seventeenth.
BeUarmine's doctrine may be summarized as follows : Political
authority in general comes directly from God to the whole
community. Since God has not given it to any one in par-
ticular, there is no natural reason why it should reside in one
rather than another of many equal individuals. Inasmuch
as the community is unable to exercise this authority directly,
it must transfer the function to one or to a few persons. The
community, the '' multitude,*' also has the right to determine
the form of government, whether it is to be a monarchy, an
aristocracy, or a democracy, and, for a legitimate reason, to
change any one of these forms into another. While the author-
ity is, indeed, from God, it becomes particularized in one or
more individuals through human counsel and choice.^
This doctrine was far from acceptable to the defenders
of the *' divine right of kings," which was claimed by more
than one monarch in the days of Bellarmine. James I., of
England, was so displeased and disturbed by the declarations
of the Roman Cardinal that he took the trouble to write an
attempted refutation. He contended that the king did not
derive his authority from the people, but from God im-
mediately. Against this assertion the Spanish theologian,
Suarez, wrote several chapters in his Defensio Fidei Catho-
licse. He pointed out that the opinion enunciated by the King
of England was '' new and singular, invented to exaggerate the
temporal and to minimize the spiritual power;" and that the
doctrine of Bellarmine was ** the ancient, commonly accepted,
and true teaching." Supreme political authority, he maintains,
is given by God directly to the political community as a whole,
inasmuch as He made men of such a nature that they need
to have a political organization. There is nothing in the nature
of things to show that this organization should take the form
of a monarchy or an aristocracy, nor that the ruling authority
should be located in any given person or group of persons.
Political authority resides in the community as a whole, and
>De Laieii, ch. ▼!.
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may be transferred by the community to one or more persons.
Whence it follows that no monarch has ruling power immedi-
ately from God, but through the medium of the human will
and human institution.^
Suarez concludes this part of his argument with the state-
ment that this doctrine is not new, nor invented by Bellarmine,
and he gives a long list of theological and canonical writers in
proof of its universality and antiquity. Otto Gierke, a distin-
guished non-Catholic authority, tells us that, ''an ancient and
generally entertained opinion regarded the will of the people
as the source of temporal power. . . . Indeed, that the legal
title to all rulership lies in the voluntary and contractual sub-
mission of the ruled, could therefore be propounded as a
philosophic axiom."* According to Dr. A. J. Carlyle, "the
fact that in mediaeval theory the authority of the king is
founded upon the election or at least the recognition of the
community, does not in truth require any serious demonstra-
tion.*' * Although Cathrein rejects the doctrine of his fellow
Jesuits, Bellarmine and Suarez, he admits that it was held by
almost all the Schoolmen.' Meyer concedes that " many Chris-
tian teachers" of the Middle Ages held that kings were not
immediately appointed by God but mediately through the elec-
tion or consent of the people; however, he maintains that these
writers did not all clearly profess the opinion that the
" mediating " act of the people consisted in transferring to the
monarch political power; he contends that the expressions of
some of them merely meant that the people have the right to
determine the form of government and designate the person
who is to rule.®
These qualifying observations are not of great practical
importance. In the first place, he should have said " all Chris-
tian writers," for he does not mention a single exception to
the general fact that mediaeval opinion denied that political
power comes to the ruler immediately from God. In the sec-
ond place, if it be held that the consent of the people is always
a necessary prerequisite to the assumption of political power
by any person, it is of no practical significance whether the
people be conceived as handing over to the ruler, authority
* Ub. m., cap. 11.; cf. De Letfibus, Ub. m., cap. U.
•Political Theories of the Middle Age, pp. 38, 40.
* History of Medieeval Political Theory in the West, toI. HI., p. 153.
•Philosophia Moralis, no. 496. • InstituHones Juris Naturalis, H., 350, 351.
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318 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Dec^
which God has deposited with them, or as designating the per-
son upon whom God will confer the authority. In either sup-
position God does not bestow authority, nor does the ruler re-
ceive it, until the people have somehow given their consent/
To sum up the historical situation : down to the nineteenth
century, Cdtholic moralists and jurists, with the exception of
certain adherents of Gallicanism, were unanimous in holding
that the consent of the people was required to make the posi-
tion of a ruler morally legitimate; and the majority of them
maintained that the people had a right, not only to select the
ruling person, but to confer the ruling authority.
The insistence of Suarez upon the doctrine that authority
comes to the ruler only through the people, was to some extent
due to the circumstances of his own time. Even before the
Reformation, a tendency had appeared among some monarchs
to claim authority directly from God. Kings who got into
conflict with the Pope made this claim in the hope of strength-
ening their position; for if their authority was conferred upon
them by a direct divine grant, it was on as high a plane as
that of the Pope himself. This was the jposition taken, for
example, by the rebellious imperial princes of Bavaria in a
document addressed to the Pope toward the middle of the
fourteenth century. In passing, it is worthy of notice that the
monarchs who set up such a claim used it to exaggerate their
own power, not only as against the authority of the Roman
Pontiff, but as against the rights and liberties of their subjects.
They were gradually approaching that claim of absolute power
which was reached by many post-Reformation monarchs, but
which '' was wholly foreign to the Middle Age.*'* In resisting
these pretensions, the* Popes of the later Middle Ages not only
were defending their own spiritual and moral prerogatives,
but in a very effective way protecting the rights of the people
against royal encroachment and absolutism. Even Lecky
admits that the power exercised by the mediaeval Popes over
secular princes was " on the whole favorable to liberty."'
This exaggeration of royal authority became much more
general and more excessive after the Reformation; for the
Protestant monarchs were impelled by religious as well as
political motives to exalt their power as compared with that
, * Cf, Balmez, Prottitantiim and CathoHetiy in their Effects on the Ctvtlixation of
Europe, pp. 305-311.
*CA Gierke, op, eit., pp. 35 et $eq, * Rationalism in Europe, toI. 11., p. 143.
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of the Pope. In this they derived powerful assistance from
the teachings of the Reformers, who declared that secular
princes ruled by divine right. *'In fact, the religion of the
State superseded the religion of the Church. Its first form
was the Divine Right of Kings. Luther and MachiaveUi were
two of the most important factors in the change.*' ^* Since they
denied that their ruling authority was limited by either the
Pope or the people, the Protestant monarchs naturally claimed
that it came directly from God, quite in the same fashion as
that of David and Saul. James I. declared that his power was
at once civil and ecclesiastical.
This doctrine, declared Suarez, is '' new and singular, and
invented to exaggerate the temporal and to minimize the
spiritual power." He saw clearly that if the doctrine of James
went uncontroverted it would have the effect of injuring
the prestige of the Church in every nation whose ruler,
whether Rrotestant or Catholic, made such a claim. There-
fore, he stated the doctrine of the indirect derivation of civil
authority, of its transfer to the king by the people, in the most
systematic and convincing form that it had received up to his
time. Fortunately he was able to show that such had been the
traditional teaching of both theologians and jurists all through
the Middle Ages; but the powerful religious motive that lay
behind his argimient cannot nor need not be denied.
In precisely the same way, the special circumstances of
their time have been largely instrumental in determining many
Catholic writers of the nineteenth century to depart from the
doctrine of Bellarmine and Suarez. The superficial resem-
blances between this doctrine and the theories of popular sov-
ereignty associated with the French Revolution and with sub-
sequent revolutionary movements, seem to have impressed
these nineteenth century writers as a grave danger to civil
order and to the stability of royal dynasties. Hence they have
turned their backs upon the traditional teaching that authority
comes to the ruler only through the people. The principal
names in this group are Haller," TapareUi," Liberatore,"
Meyer," Cathrein," and Cronin.*^ All but the first and last of
^Prom Gerson to Grottus, by John NeyiUe I^ggis, p. 71.
^ RtMtaurttiion dier Staatswis$ensehaften, 1820.
^Saggio teoreHco di diritto natarale, 1850. » InstttuHoneM Ethiem, 1887.
^liuHtationei Jnris NaturaliM, 1900. "Philosophta MondU, 1900.
» The ScUnct of Bthie$. 1917.
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320 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Dec.,
these are, like Bellarmine and Suarez, members of the Society
of Jesus. On the other hand, one of the ablest recent defen-
ders of the traditional doctrine is likewise a Jesuit, Costa-
Rosetti."
That the apparent support given by the older doctrine to
popular sovereignty and to the overthrow of monarchs has
been a powerful motive in the rejection of that doctrine by the
writers cited above, is clearly established by their own asser-
tions and admissions. Taparelli intimates that Suarez and the
other ancient exponents of the traditional doctrine would
probably have modified their views had they lived two cen-
turies later, in the midst of the havoc wrought by popular
revolutions; and he expresses his astonishment that many
should continue to boast of the sovereignty of the people and
the inalienable rights of man to govern himself.** Meyer de-
clares that in our age we ought to beware of defending doc-
trines which lend support to the ever increasing opposition to
the monarchical form of government.*'
Nevertheless, all these writers defend the traditional doc-
trine against the charge that it is equivalent to the social con-
tract theory of Rousseau. They point out that the two doc-
trines are similar only superficially, inasmuch as both attribute
the origin of civil society to a social compact, and teach that
political authority resides primarily in the whole people. But
these principles are very diflferently interpreted in the two doc-
trines. According to Suarez, political government is a natural
necessity, and a community is not free to dispense with it;
according to Rousseau, primitive men were under no moral
obligation to organize themselves into a political society. Ac-
cording to Suarez, many of the individual's rights come from
nature and from God; according to Rousseau, they all pro-
ceed from the social compact. Suarez maintained that politi-
cal authority is derived ultimately from God who confers it
upon the people, while Rousseau held that it rests in the peo-
ple ultimately and fundamentally. In the doctrine of Suarez,
political authority rests in the people as an organic whole, or
community; in the opinion of Rousseau, it is merely the sum
of the rights of the individuals and is shared by each as an
individual. There are other important differences, which need
not be stated here.
»Philosophia Moralis, 1886. ^Op. eit, nota 79. "Op. tff., n.» S7i.
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Now the fact that the traditional doctrine may be mis-
interpreted and abused so as to give countenance to unsound
revolutionary principles, or even to unjustified rebellions, is
not a sufficient reason for discarding it, any more than the fact
that the theory defended by the more recent Catholic writers
can be, and has been, wrested to the support of despotism and
absolutism is a sufficient reason for adopting the older doc-
trine. Indeed, it is a fair question for debate whether the harm
done to religion and to human welfare by the abuse of the
more recent theory has not been greater than that resulting
from the misapplication of the doctrine of Bellarmine and
Suarez. In any case, the really important question is the ob-
jective soundness of either doctrine, and not its accidental
consequences.
The Catholic writers who reject the theory of Suarez ap-
peal in the first place to history, pointing to the well-known
fact that the first rulers of many tribal and patriarchal so-
cieties did not owe their position to any sort of pact between
themselves and the community, and contending that the lat-
ter gave no genuine consent to a transfer of political authority
to the former. Nevertheless, Suarez declares that in such cases
implicit consent sufficed, and that the people really gave this,
inasmuch as they made no objection when the patriarchs grad-
ually came to exercise political as well as domestic authority.
This was surely eff'ective, even though passive and informal,
consent; for if the people had not been satisfied they would
have off'ered opposition. The second historical argument used
by the modern writers, is that in some primitive societies the
ruler obtains authority by the simple fact that he is the only
one that is capable of governing; therefore, it is unnecessary
and unreasonable to suppose that the people have a right to
give or withhold political power. Unfortunately this argu-
ment is sometimes presented in terms that would justify mere
physical force as a determinant of the right to rule. Cathrein
declares that in some communities the patriarch was the one
man fit to govern because he would not submit to any other
ruler, and because he possessed sufficient physical power to
make his refusal effective.^" The German Kaiser need not
go beyond this principle to justify his government of
Belgium.
^'Op. cit., no. 502.
VOL. cviii. — ^21
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When, however, Cathrein lays stress upon the moral and
intellectual prestige and qualifications of the patriarch, as the
basis of the latter's exclusive right to govern, his argument is
at least worthy of respect. If there have been, and the
hypothesis seems not unhistorical, primitive societies in which
only one man was capable of governing with even a minimum
degree of efficiency, it seems reasonable to say that only that
man had the right to exercise political authority, and therefore
that the people had no right either to confer or withhold such
authority. Since the sole purpose and justification of govern-
ment and titles of authority is the welfare of the people, it
would seem that when this end can be secured only through
one man, the people have no reasonable choice in the matter.
They have not even the right to make their consent decisive in
the selection of the person.
The second or positive line of argument against the
Suarezian theory takes the form of a direct attack upon the
principle. It denies that the title of rulership is ever bestowed
by God upon the whole people, except in the rare case in
which they exercise the authority themselves; that is, in a pure
democracy. Political authority, says Dr. Cronin, is an attribute
of the ruler as such, just as domestic authority belongs to the
position of the parent.'^ Where, then, did authority rest be-
fore it became attached to the patriarch, council or king? No-
where. It is not like a physical entity that must have a local
habitation before it can come into a person's possession. It is
an attribute which attaches itself to the ruler through the
occiurence of certain particular events, just as parental
authority attaches itself to the father and mother by the fact
that a child is bom to them. They then receive the authority
from God. In similar fashion the legitimate ruler receives his
authority directly from God.
This argument and the latter part of the second historical
argument, summarized above, seem to be convincing. More-
over, there is another line of reasoning which seems to reen-
force these arguments and to weaken very seriously, if it does
not entirely destroy, the cogency of the Suarezian doctrine. It
leads to the conclusion that the central principle of the doc-
trine is gratutious and unnecessary. Why should we assume
that God gives authority to a king or a president through the
» Op. ctL, n., pp. 499-503.
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people? Why should He not confer it upon the accredited
ruler directly? Only one possible reason can be brought for-
ward in support of the theory of indirect transmission. It is
that this method is somehow required for the welfare of the
people.
With the exception of the right to life, all natural rights
are merely means to the attainment of some necessary per-
sonal or social end. Thus, private property and government
are required for the reasonable life and development of the
individual; hence he has a right to acquire goods and to have
the benefit of a government. But the power to receive politi-
cal authority from God and to transmit it thence to the ruler, is
not necessary for the welfare of the community. Even if we
were to assume that the consent of the people is in every in-
stance a necessary condition to the legitimate reception and
exercise of political authority by the ruler, we are not logically
driven to the conclusion that the people must become the de-
positary and transmitter of that authority. It is enough to
assume that they have the exclusive right to designate the
ruling person, and that God invariably bestows the authority
directly upon the person thus designated.
Some of the opponents of the Suarezian theory have con-
tended that it was rejected by Pope Leo XIII. in his encycli-
cal Diuturnum, and by Pope Pius X. in his letter condemn-
ing the Sillon; but the contexts of the expressions used by both
Popes show that they were refuting the eighteenth century
theory of popular sovereignty. Neither of them makes any
clear allusion to the doctrine of Bellarmine and Suarez. It
is quite unfair and unscientific to read into two isolated senr
tences a condemnation of a doctrine which was taught by the
great majority of Catholic moralists and jurists for upwards
of seven centuries. Therefore, it cannot be seriously main-
tained that the traditional doctrine has been superseded by
the official authority of the Church. We are still perfectly
free to adopt it if we are convinced by the reasons urged in
its favor.**
We have to admit that the traditional doctrine is very
attractive to the believer in political democracy. It seems to
provide a simple and obvious weapon for refuting the preten-
sions of autocracy. And it immensely enhances the dignity
>■€/. Cotta-RosettI, op, eiU PP* 628-630; Meyer, op, cit, pp. 370-372.
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324 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Dec,
of the people, by making them the depositary of a most im-
portant moral prerogative. It is particularly pleasing to
Americans, and above all to American Catholics. For the re-
semblance between it and certain well-known clauses in the
Virginia Declaration of Rights, as well as in our national
Declaration of Independence, is obvious and striking. These
documents declare that governments derive their just powers
from the consent of the governed, and that the people have
the right to alter or abolish any political rule that becomes de-
structive of the true ends of government. Suarez declares that
if the power of the ruler be not proximately or remotely derived
from the people and community it is not just " and that when
the monarch conv^ts his government into a tyranny, the peo-
ple can revoke the grant of authority.**
Indeed, it may be persuasively argued that these two
great Declarations have come more or less directly from
Suarez or Bellarmine or both. Thus, Mr. Gaillard Hunt, of the
Library of Congress, declares that Thomas Jefferson derived
from Bellarmine substantially the wording in which he stated
these famous doctrines. In the opinion of Mr. Hunt, '' it should
be a satisfaction to Catholics that the fundamental pronounce-
ments upon which was built the greatest of modern revolu-
tions found their best support in the writings of a Prince of
the Church.*'** An Irishman, Professor Alfred Rahilly, goes
further, declaring that, while Catholic scholars " have largely
forgotten the great seventeenth century exposition of Christian
Democracy, the influence of Suarez, working through English
Whigs and Puritans and culminating in the American Declara-
tion of Independence, is once again inspiring men toward
freedom.*'**
Nevertheless, if the theory that political authority is
transmitted to the ruler by the people is unprovable on
grounds of logic, and unnecessary as a basis of democracy, it
should not command our assent merely because it has done
valiant service against the autocracy and tyranny of a James
L» a Louis XVI., or a George III. Our political philosophy
should be based upon necessary and universal principles. Let
us then consider on their merits the following questions : What
is the true basis of the claim that every people has a right to
*»De Keijibtts, ni., cap. iv., par. 2. ** Defensto, HI., 3, 7.
» The Catholic Historical Review, October, 1917, p. 289.
"• Stuf!k-», March, 1918, p. 21.
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determine the form and personnel of its own government?
How far is this claim justified?
The doctrine of Bellarmine and Suarez, so far as we have
considered it in the foregoing pages, applies directly to those
communities only that are at the beginning of their political
history. It deals with a people that is about to have its first
government and its first ruler. Confining our attention for the
present to situations in which a government is about to be set
up, we shall find that the questions just asked cannot always
be answered in the same way. Let us take first the case of a
semi-civilized tribal community that has hitherto possessed
no social organization except that which necessarily grew out
of the association and relations of men and women who are
united by the bond of blood under the authority of a supreme
father or patriarch. Now that they are becoming more numer-
ous, the tie of kinship more slender, and their life more settled,
the more intelligent among them are acquiring political con-
sciousness. They are beginning to see that order and security
cannot be maintained unless the patriarch, or someone else,
exercises those additional functions of authority that are
called political. Now it may happen — historically it has hap-
pened — that the existing patriarch is the only man in the com-
munity who is capable of giving a government that will have
even elementary efficiency. Th^ alternative to rule by the
patriarch is downright anarchy.
In such circumstances the only reasonable solution is the
exercise of political authority by the patriarch. Even though
the community should not consent, should oppose his authority
by physical force, his moral right to rule seems to be impreg-
nable. Since the patriarch is the only one capable of ruling,
he is the only one who has a moral right to rule. The people
have no right to refuse their consent. Why? Because the
rule of the patriarch is necessary for their welfare. To con-
tend that they have a right to reject the patriarch, is to assume
that a right may exist which has no rational end, or rather
which leads to an end that is positively irrational, that is,
anarchy. There can be no such right. As noted on a preced-
ing page, the supreme determinant of human rights is human
welfare, the welfare of the people; but this requires that the
patriarch should exercise political power. Therefore, he
has the moral right to exercise it, and the people have no
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326 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Dec,
right to prevent him. And his authority comes directly from
God.
Let us now consider the case of a savage or semi-savage
people that possesses some rudimentary show of political
organization, but that exhibits conditions little better than
those of anarchy. Life, limb and property are always in
jeopardy, and there are no such institutions as schools or
churches. Although the territory occupied by this people con-
tains natural resources which would be of great benefit to the
human race, the native rulers are unwilling or unable to pro-
vide those public safeguards which are necessary to exploit
and utilize these great natural bounties. Suppose now that a
civilized power desire to intervene in the affairs of this im-
potent conmfiunity in order to set up a stable government, and
to render the natural resources available for the satisfaction
of human wants. We shall assume that the intervening nation
will, as rapidly as possible, educate the natives and introduce
civilized institutions, including some degree of local self-gov-
ernment. We shall further assume that the natural resources
of the country will be utilized and developed with adequate
regard to the rights and welfare of the occupants of the sub-
jected territory. Finally, let us assume that in consequence of
this beneficent, though forcible, intervention, the native popu-
lation will at the end of one hundred years be immeasurably
farther advanced toward civilization and satisfactory social
conditions than they would have been if left to their own de-
vices. All the foregoing suppositions are within the reach of
actual achievement by a civilized nation that is truly hiunape
and Christian.
In this situation the outside nation has surely the right to in-
tervene and impose its government upon the helpless com-
munity. The latter has no right to oppose or resist, no right to
choose some other government, no right of "self-determina-
tion." And the sufficient proof that no such right exists is to
be found again in the end of all rights, human welfare. The
welfare of this people will be hindered instead of promoted by
the attempt to govern themselves; therefore, they have no
right to make such an attempt.
It must be admitted that the civilized nations which have
imposed their rule upon savage or semi-savage people have
not, as a rule, carried out the enterprise in the spirit or with
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the results assumed above. Nevertheless the abuse of a right
does not operate to destroy the right. If it did, we should have
to deny that any people has any right to democratic institu-
tions, since the latter have been quite frequently manipulated
to the injiuy of the people and the violation of human rights.
All that we are concerned with here, is the general principle
that uncivilized, and perhaps partially civilized, peoples some-
times lack the moral right of self government. It is no part of
our task to justify the historical acts of national injustice that
have been committed in the name of the principle.
Turn we now to the case of the American Colonists after
the surrender of Comwallis at Yorktown. The victorious army
has determined, we will assume, to make General Washing-
ton emperor. Let us assume further that he and his associates
could have set up the imperial form of government at the cost
of little bloodshed, and could have given the new political
community a somewhat more efficient government than the
one that actually came into being after the adoption of the
Federal Constitution. Nevertheless, the people did not want
either the empire or the emperor. They would yield only to
the superior force exerted by the army.
In this case there is not a shadow of doubt that the im-
perial government would have been morally illegitimate.
Washington would not have derived from God the authority
to govern. For the refusal of the people to consent to his
rSgime would have rendered beneficent government impossi-
ble. Within a few years it would probably have been over-
thrown by armed insurrection. A people that had made such
sacrifices to rid themselves of British autocracy, would not
soon have submitted to another form of autocracy. Since the
imperial government could not have promoted public welfare,
it would have lacked the one indispensable element of justi-
fication.
On the other hand, the people of the Colonies were capable
of determining for themselves and of maintaining a form of gov-
ernment that would promote their welfare to a reasonable de-
gree. Therefore, they had a right to make such a determina-
tion. To justify this right we do not need to recur to the
Suarezian hypothesis that the people were the despositary of
political authority, and had a right to confer it upon whom-
soever they chose. Their right of self-determination had am-
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pie moral and logical support in the fact that their welfare,
their personal and social development, would in the long run
be better promoted by a government that they themselves set
up than by one that they did not care to have.
Yet we have assumed that "Emperor" Washington and
his associates could have provided an administration tech-
nically more efficient than that of the young republic. Why
should the likes and dislikes of the people be decisive in the
matter of political rights? As well might one ask, why should
individual preferences be decisive as regards the right of pri-
vate property? If men would only agree to share goods in
common as do the members of a religious community, they
could all lead happier, more efficient and more virtuous lives.
Nevertheless, the Church teaches that men have a right to in-
dividual possessions, because the likes and dislikes, the pas-
sions, ambitions and weaknesses of the average man render
private property necessary for his welfare. Now the longing
for political freedom, the desire of communities to determine
their own governmental forms and persons, is so fundamental
to human nature, so bound up with human welfare, that rea-
son requires it to be satisfied. No such powerful considerations
could have been urged on behalf of the claims of Washington
had he sought imperial power.
To those of us who believe in a democracy, the foregoing
argument is powerfully reenforced by the superiority of a
republican form of government. We hold that an imperial
rule not only would have been incompetent and ineffective,
owing to popular dislike, but that it could not have provided
as large opportunities for individual development and social
progress. A people that strongly claims the right to deter-
mine its form of government will usually desire to embody in
it a large element of democracy. Hence the right of a self-
determination is considerably strengthened by the fact that
politically competent peoples will, as a rule, utilize it to estab-
lish that form of government which is peculiarly suited to de-
velop individual initiative and capacity, and thus to promote
to the utmost individual and social well-being.
What was true of the American people in 1783, is true to
a greater or less extent of every people that has developed a
political consciousness, and that possesses the political
capacity to make provision for and maintain a fairly com-
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petent government. The very fact that they want to select
theu* own polity, that they will be profoundly dissatisfied until
they are enabled to do so, and that the forcibly imposed gov-
ernment will consequently be unable to give them a beneficial
administration, are sufficient reasons to validate their right of
"self-determination.'* Even when the alien rule has the
capacity to give a more efficient government, as regards the
technique of legislation and administration, this advantage
may be more than neutralized by that governmental in-
efficiency which results from the lack of popular consent and
cooperation. In such a case, a technically less efficient pop-
ular government may well produce a higher degree of
efficiency in terms of adequate human welfare. Therefore, a
politically conscious and moderately capable conununity has
always the right to make its consent a necessary condition
of political rule. A regime that does not have either the ex-
plicit or tacit consent of the people, will lack moral justification
simply because it will not be able to fulfill adequately the
supreme purpose of government, the welfare of . the
people.
Obviously it is impossible to define in exact terms those
qualifications which fit a people to choose its form of govern-
ment and which give it the right to make its consent a neces-
sary condition of morally legitimate sovereignty. We know
that some peoples are clearly incapable and that some others
are clearly capable of giving such authoritative consent; but
between these two classes there exists a wide " twilight zone."
We can, however, lay down a few important general prin-
ciples. If a people has already had some experience of self
government, either entire or partial, that fact will of itself
create a strong presumption in its favor. Where there is no
moral certainty that the people are incompetent to make their
own choice, they should have the benefit of the doubt. Even
though the popularly established government should remain
relatively incompetent for several years, it might in the long
run prove more beneficial to the community than an alien
rule that was more efficient technically. The republics of
South America are apt illustrations of this principle. In cer-
tain rare cases an alien rule might be preferable for a time, be-
cause it was seeking primarily the welfare of the subject peo-
ple, and striving honestly to fit them for self government. The
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330 EMPTY HANDS [Dec,
Filipinos under the control of the United States are a good
example.
In general, however, we must bear in mind that the art of
self government is well worth learning by any people, that it
must be learned mainly by intimate and painful experience
rather than by artificial instruction from without or from
above, and therefore that the strong desire of a people to de-
termine their form of government goes far to outweigh the
technical superiority of alien rule. ^
[to be concluded.]
EMPTY HANDS.
BY MMITIN T. O'CONNELL.
I COME with empty hands, Lord,
Apleading at Thy throne —
These palms held goodly gifts once —
Thou gavest all, 1 own.
But I was like the man's son
Who squandered all his gold —
So freely were they given
They seemed too cheap to hold.
Oh, would that I had kept them
Unbroken and unmarred
As Mary kept the white box
Filled with the precious nard.
But 1 come with empty hands. Lord,
A beggar to my King,
1 should not seek, I know. Lord —
1 should be offering.
Still Thou art K^ng and all things
Must have in bounteous store.
And so I come apleading
To have just one gift more.
Tomorrow will be Christmas —
Dear Lord this gift 1 pray:
That 1 may know the value
Of Thy gifts 1 flung away.
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PISA AND PISAN ROMANESQUE.
BY EDITH COWELL.
I T is hinted that Mr. Townsend Coyne — one of the
enigmatical threads of Mr. James' characteristic
maze. The Sense of the Past — had, of all Italian
cities, a preference for Pisa. The reason for
this choice is, with the author's usual economy
of revelation, withheld from us. We can only guess at it. Was
it for love of those "lonely and secret" monuments which
pulled at Rupert Brooke's heart-strings, those wonders of archi-
tecture which rise with almost dramatic suddenness from that
Irish-green meadow, bright with daisies, close under the
shadow of the long, low city wall? Was it for the more homely
reason of a climate notoriously benign? Was it — here, I
think, we approach the solution — to leave behind the many-
headed multitude, that this dying man, who knew he was
dying, journeyed from Florence to spend his small store of
weeks and days in that one Italian city which the tourist has
elected to neglect?
One muses — ^but not sadly — on this caprice of the tourist.
Pisa is so loveable. Why is she so little loved? Again we can
but draw a bow at a venture. Every city set upon a hill has
spells to bind men's hearts — and Pisa is a plain-town. She is
also too generous of her treasure. The one magic meadow
which is the platform of her glory is too plainly visible from
the train. How many aspiring tourists " do " these monu-
ments without leaving their corner-seats? Why should they
move? They can see enough to talk about, in the large manner,
when their circular ticket brings them in the fullness of a few
short weeks back to their suburb.
Also, it is true that outside that incomparable meadow,
Pisa is not particularly simpatica. It is but a well-kept city,
four-square, with comfortable buildings, white, with green
shutters. Well-kept is a weak point here, as it was with the
Maison Van Claes, whose trim and polished cleanliness gave
it a dryly honest and becomingly respectable look which, says
Balzac, was apt to chill romantic minds. So it is with Pisa. A
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332 PISA AND PISAN ROMANESQUE [Dec.
few holes in the stocking — a few gaps to allow the wind and
the sun to impose their colors, and the trailing green leaves to
twine — and the thing would be done. However, the Pisans
think otherwise. A stitch in time is their proverb — and a good
balance at the Savings Bank. So their city is as bright and
shining as a new pin. Long may it be so. The tourist in search
of the romance which is denied him at home, brings money no
doubt, but he also brings tea-shops, golf-links, rubber baths,
and an Anglican church, all things innocent enough, and some
of them admirable in their own place, but as offensive to the
genius loci of a Latin city as the hurdy-giu:dy which plays the
Merry Widow under the arches of the Colosseum.
There may be other reasons for the small popularity of
Pisa. It is to be observed, for instance, that though she has
been the nursing-mother of many holy men and women whose
names are dear to God and the Pisans — there is that St. Senior,
who is said to have ordained St. Patrick — she has reared no
saint who claims universal devotion. And after saints come
artists. Siena has many, and Florence more than many.
Pisa has her Guinta and his boasted priority, but how many
tourists have heard of him? It is different when we come to
sculpture, and the great name of Niccolo Pisano. But then
sculpture, for some reason, is not popular. To the multitude,
art means pictures — and there are comparatively few pictures
at Pisa.
It is like the provoking reticence of Mr. James not to tell us
at what hour his Townsend Coyne made that last journey. The
point is quite important. Every ancient city has its hour, when
its rich casket is unlocked, and its spikenard poured forth. At
Venice it comes at sunset, when behind sullen brooding domes
and fretted marble palaces liquid amber and rose melt into
deep crimson and proud purple. At Pisa it comes in the
morning, when the silver veil of dew still hangs before the
green mountains which hide Pisa from Lucca, her ancient
enemy.
And, besides the hour, there are other things we would
have had Mr. James make manifest. First, at what gate this
man returned to his beloved city? This is, save one, the most
important, and for this reason : in every historic city two spir-
its stalk abroad, the spirit of the past and the spirit of the pres-
ent. The difference between them is like that between the
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thoroughfares of the Strand, and the cool valleys of Western
Ireland. In Pisa the second spirit has unattractive qualities.
It is commonplace, commercial, a trifle cunning. It makes a
raid on every unfortunate visitor who, in his innocence,
chooses to arrive at Pisa by rail, and to enter the city through
the south gate leading into the inevitable Piazza Vittorio
Emanuele. For this reason one would like to feel sure that this
dying lover, come to rest in the city of his heart, took care to re-
turn by that other gate — the Porta Nuova — through which he
would pass, in the twinkling of an eye, from the gold and pur-
ple vineyards of the Pisan plain to the vision of all the loveli-
ness that Pisa has to offer.
Yes, one does really hope that, for the second spirit is in-
tolerably importunate. It bids (and sometimes with threats)
men buy, bearing down upon them armed with terrible alabas-
ter monstrosities, from one franc fifty upwards. One hopes the
poor invalid escaped that ordeal; th^t to meet him there was
but the other spirit of days long past whose weapons are olive
branches, and who only speaks of peace — not the sleepy, misty
peace of an English Sunday afternoon, but that peace which
the world cannot give, neither can it take away.
Indeed, if it was truly for peace that this worn pilgrim
craved, he did well to come to Pisa. There is at Marly, says
Hilaire Belloc, a fountain hung with silence. Well, then, here
at Pisa we have a meadow hung with peace. For if there is one
quality which distingmshes the Pisan Romanesque from the
more showy efforts of the Renaissance style of architecture, it
is that sense of peace which is the outcome of harmony and
simplicity of design, and the complete and humble subordina-
tion of every part to the whole. It may well be so; for in these
monuments whose outline is as clear and unbroken as the
curves of Peter*s Barque, we have the concrete expression of
a Catholic world, as yet unshaken by the fiery trials of the
period which brought not only Renaissance, but also the so-
called Reformation.
Therefore — a last request — ^we would, most of all, have
liked to ask with what viaticum this traveler was to tread the
dark valley? Reading between the lines, we may suppose that
he possessed, and took pains to develop, the disturbing gift of
the sense of the past to that dangerous degree which brings
the soul into close touch with the spirit world. He was not a
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334 PISA AND PISAN ROMANESQUE [Dec,
Catholic then and, even for aesthetic reasons, that is a pity.
For if it is good for the lover of beautiful monuments like
these of Pisa to know, not only who built them, but also for
what purpose, by whom they were served, who was to wor-
ship in them, and what manner was to be his worship, it is
even better, for more perfect enjoyment and understanding,
to share that worship.
There is little in these Pisan monuments into which non-
Catholics, however cultured they may be, can really enter.
They belong to a century with which all but Catholics are com-
pletely out of touch. They belong, in spirit, as well as in time,
to those ages which the vulgar still call dark — ^presumably be-
cause they were lit, not by the electric light of science, but by
the small red lamp of faith. The story of the founding of the
Pisan Cathedral, the first of the four monuments, is one the
simplest Catholic can appreciate. Three years before William
of Normandy first trod the green and gold meadows of
Pevensey, Pisa won a great victory over the Arabs at Palermo
(1063). Being vainglorious, they wished to record their tri-
umph; being pious, they wished to give thanks. This being
the case, their thoughts turned almost inevitably to building,
for building was in the air, like an epidemic, in the eleventh
century. We know why. You remember the gardener at the
Clapham Hermitage, the residence of the godly Mrs. Newcome,
who was a "Scotch Calvinist of the strictest order, only
occupying himself with the melons and pines provisionally,
and until the end of the world, which event he could prove, by
infallible calculations, was to come off in two or three years'
time at farthest?"
By calculations equally inspired, the world was to have
come to an end in the year of grace one thousand, for which
reason few men in the tenth century felt an impulse to build.^
But no sooner was the fatal day past, than they crept out again
and felt the sun, and Christendom, says the old chronicle, put
on a white robe of new churches. None was more lovely than
that cathedral which was raised at Pisa in honor of the " Mag-
nificent Queen of the Universe, Ever Virgin and Most Worthy
Mother of God, Advocate of Sinners.'* We do not know by
what hands it was built, nor after whose design. There was
> It is true that the great cathedral of Tours was begun in 999, and that in France
generally a good many churches date from the tenth century. But this was prob-
ably from necessity, in order to replace those demolished by Scandinavian pirates.
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that Buschetto, who seems to have been a relative of Mrs.
Harris, about whom authorities loved to dispute. We need
not trouble about him if we adopt the labor-saving theory that
this, and every other great monmnent from the tenth to the
fifteenth centuries, was the work of the rather mysterious
Comacine Masters. For a long time these architects and
builders seem also to have belonged to the family of Mrs.
Gamp's friend; but there is a lately-developed idea that they
formed one large single fraternity, descended, it is thought,
from the old Roman building Collegium: that their guild
'^hybernated in the Dark Ages, emerged in the Lombard
period, and found their wings in the full Gothic of the Renais-
sance; and that in it men of every race — ^Romans, Lombards
and Greeks in large numbers especially during the Iconoclast
persecutions — ^found their place, each bringing his special gifts
and traditions.*' The work of such a guild would carry its mem-
bers wherever the services of expert craftsmen were desired.
They would accompany St. Augustine to Canterbury, St. Boni-
face to Germany, and the Emperor Charlemagne to France.
It is even suggested that after being called by the great Irish-
man, St. Finbar, bishop of Lucca and founder of her prosperity,
to work there, they crossed the Irish Sea at his bidding, and
erected the Round Towers and Crosses of Ireland.*
It is easy to imagine how, if such a world-famous guild
did exist, the city fathers of Pisa prompted by zeal and pride
and a well-filled treasury would tell each other that the best
was always the cheapest in the long run; how they would vote
unanimously in favor of approaching the Comacines with a
suitable offer; how, after the usual preliminaries (or we might
call it haggling) the bargain for their services was made; and
how, when it came to a question of the style in which the pro-
posed cathedral was to be built, it was decided to spare no
expense to have it very handsome. The marble columns taken
from the enemy were to have a prominent place; this and
that feature of the different foreign monuments which had
most impressed the Pisans in the course of their commercial-
traveling all over the globe, were to be incorporated, so that
this cathedral of theirs should combine every sort of splendor,
and be one of the wonders of the world. It is probable, too,
>For an elaborate exposition of this theory respecting the character, scope and
origin of the guild, see Cathedral Builders, by Leader Scott London: Sampson Low.
Martton ft Co., Ltd. Second edition, 1899.
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336 PISA AND PISAN ROMANESQUE [Dec.,
that they would wish, for municipal reasons, and to avoid
heart-burnings, that certain local craftsmen should be allowed
to have a finger in the pie. If so, there would be no difficulty.
These would be only too proud to be granted membership in
the great guild so richly endowed with privileges by the Popes
that its members were known as Freemasons. It was the cus-
tom, we are told, to welcome such new associates, who would
form the nucleus of a new branch. However that may be —
and it may well have happened somehow in that way — the
result was one of the most glorious specimens of Romanesque
architecture.
The qualities of Romanesque architecture are strength,
gravity, and that simplicity which is the outcome of a rigid
obedience to elaborate canons. The result is a certain severity,
which casts a gloom on some people's minds. "' It is natural to
see a certain likeness between the heavy vaulting that over-
whelms and darkens the church and the leaden cope that
seems to weight the soul," says a French writer, M. Emile Male,
in speaking of the great Romanesque abbey churches. Ah,
monsieur, you have not read your Lovelace ! Maybe the great
abbeys of the day, with all their seclusion and elaborate dis-
cipline, seemed havens of rest and order in comparison with
the chaos and struggle of the world outside their high walls;
and that to many their yoke was easy, and their burden light,
in comparison with the price to be paid for freedom in those
disordered times. Stone walls do not a prison make; at any
rate there was comparative safety within those sober strong-
holds. If the windows of these monastic buildings were small
and sparse it was not from a monkish dread of sunlight, but
because, first of all, it was necessary to build strongly against
frequent attacks from Scandinavian pirates, for instance,
whose name was as dreadful to that century as Napoleon^s
was to another. For this reason, too, and not because they
loved gloom, did the Romanesque architects build such mas-
sive walls. Of course the result is chilling to many people —
the sort of people who complain of what they call the coldness
and artificiality of our great liturgical hymns, with their ad-
mii'able reticence, their sturdy faith, their sterling piety, and
manly patience.
Even that able and wayward aesthete, Huysmans,^ who
•We may assume, I think, that Durtal spells Huysmans.
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did at least love the Liturgy, calls the Romanesque style the
La Trappe of architecture, built only for penance, and the reci-
tation of the penitential psalms. He compares it unfavorably
with the more effusive and gracious Gothic, accusing it of be-
ing a convert from paganism ill-accustomed to the forms of
Christianity. Finally, he considers the Gothic an allegory of
the New Testament, while the Romanesque is the " image in
stone" of the Old Testament. Following up this character-
istically whimsical idea, Durtal expresses a desire for a style
which, by combining the symbolical attributes of both styles,
would give us " the whole of Catholicism." I believe Huys-
mans did not know Italy at all well, and surely he cannot have
known Pisa, for the Pisan monuments — the Cathedral, the
Baptistery and the Leaning Tower — do really combine the
strength and restraint of the one style with the cordiality and
sympathy of the other. If the country churches of Normandy
are the most uncompromising of Romanesque buildings, these
Pisan specimens are the most approachable.
We need not imagine, however, that this delightful modi-
fication of the traditional Romanesque principles was due to
any desire to give expression ta some longing for freedom
from accustomed restraint, either religious, social, or aesthetic.
We can account for it by recalling a prosaic point often and
curiously forgotten by people who write upon architecture,
viz: the exigencies of the situation — the question of site, of
the materials available, of the style most adapted to the soil
and to the surroundings, and so forth.* The Pisans were men
to understand these practical points very well. For the rest,
we know they had but two wishes — to record their triumph,
and to give thanks for it. If their cathedral was bright and
sympathetic, instead of sober and severe like the two great
abbey churches at Caen, it was not because the Pisans were
intoxicated with a new love of beauty. It was rather because
of the radiance of the white marble which they drew from the
Carrara quarries near by, and of the brilliance of the sapphire
Italian sky, compared with the duller surface of the rougher
Caen stone, and the sombre climate of the rainiest province
in France. Likewise, the adoption of foreign features —
Greek, Arabic, and so on — was no indication of any leaning
*It is eren possible, as Frencli arcliitects have suggested, that the vaulted roof
was first thought of as a protection against fire t>y the Scandinavian pirates.
VOL. cvin.'
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338 PISA AND PISAN ROMANESQUE [Dec.,
towards Byzantine ideas, or Arabic philosophy. It was simply
the result of a very human desire to " go one better *' — ^just as
the extraordinary building activity of the Third Rome is
prompted partly by a childish determination to show Florence
what the Piedmontese can do when they give their minds to it!
Whatever they expected of their cathedral the Pisans were
satisfied. We know that, because scarcely was it consecrated
when they began (in 1152) to build the Baptistery, remaining
faithful to the same architectural principles, save that the old
octagonal form was abandoned in favor of a circle so perfect
that it is a bell in sound as well as in shape. Often, passing by
the open doors, I have heard a sonorous chord, as from a
mighty organ. It was the sacristan singing the notes in rota-
tion, that the harmony of their lingering echoes might edify
the tourist. A certain Diotisalvi, a half-mythical personage
with a knowledge of Greek architecture, perhaps because the
Comacines had lately been employed in Sicily and the King-
dom of Naples, was the architect of this glorious dome, whose
slated roof, stained by wind and rain and sun and tinted like
a pigeon's breast, stands out brilliantly against the huge
masses of white marble.
After the Baptistery, and also of the same superb material,
came the Leaning Tower. It is rather difficult to say much
about this building, except that, as Dickens has said, it cer-
tainly does lean as much as the most sanguine tourist could
expect. For a long time it was supposed that this eccentricity
was the result of a feat of engineering gymnastics, erected per-
haps as a sort of poster to catch the eye of the cosmopolitan
crowd who thronged the streets of Pisa in those days when her
name was a power from Spain to Babylon, and from Aix-la-
Chapelle to Carthage; when her ships sailed proudly over the
whole of the Mediterranean, and broke the power of Sardinia,
Corsica, and the Balearic Islands; when her law courts were
established at Acre, Joppa, and Jerusalem; Antioch, Damietta,
and Tunis.
Another theory was that the Leaning Tower was built at
this angle by a hunch-back architect who desired, sar-
donically, to perpetuate the memory of his deformity. This
idea is rather far-fetched. It is now commonly believed that
the leaning is the result of some engineering defect, through
ignorance of the character of the soil. For the rest, the tower
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is circular, and is completely masked by short white colimins —
some of the famous booty, no doubt. It has no parent, and no
offspring, and there is a certain insipidity about it, compared
with the rugged beauty of the campanile of SS. Giovanni e
Paolo in Rome, and other Romanesque bell towers. One day
the Leaning Tower will lean no longer. Let us hope it will
imitate the Venetian campanile, which "even in dying still
behaved like a gentleman,'* killing no one in his fall. May
the day when the Pisan bell tower falls be far distant; not be-
cause it leans — only the silliest tourist cares about that — ^but
because of the many centuries it has called the faithful to
Mass, since the Adorable Sacrifice was first celebrated in the
Cathedral in the presence of Pope Gelasius IL " The modern
is good; the eternal is better," said one Fogazzaro, who suf-
ifered much because he afterwards forgot this profound truth.
Canterbury and York, they too have forgotten; but Pisa still
remembers.
We do not know how the proud Pisans would have stood
the test of the Renaissance; whether, like the Sienese, they
would have clung to the old paths, and so be left behind, to
brood and dwindle; or whether, like the Florentines, they
would have hurried forward to pluck the danger-sweet fruit
of the tree of the New Learning. We shall never know, be-
cause, before that time of testing had come, Pisa's sun had set.
It had set because she had put her faith in princes, and be-
cause a fatal day had dawned when the princes of the house
of Hohenstaufen had expiated their crimes, and had drawn
Pisa, their vassal, down with them into obscurity. That day
came when he was lying in his cradle whom the world hails as
its greatest genius, forgetting, in the strange way it has, that he
was the pupil and the whole-hearted disciple of a system of
philosophy which some are fain to consider a grotesque aber-
ration of the intellect. In 1266, after the battle of Benevento,
there lay in agony beside the " green river " Liri that prince
into whose mouth Dante has put some of his divinest lines:
I am Manfredi. . . .
My sins were horrible: but so wide arms
Hath Goodness Infinite that It receives
All who turn to lt.»
With Manfred fell the Empire, and with it Pisa. Today
*PurgatoTio m., 112 et seq.
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340 PISA AND PISAN ROMANESQUE [Dec.,
far from being one of the great world republics, she is a
provincial city of secondary importance, engaged quietly in
commerce, on a mediocre scale. "He who would see the
glories of Pisa, let him go to Genoa,*' says the proverb. Like
many proverbs, however, it is false. The glories of Pisa are
still her own: her cathedral, her baptistery, her bell tower,
and, lastly, her cemetery.
You must have suspected that there was real solid piety in
the hearts of men, who, even in the day of their triumph, re-
membered to evoke Our Lady under her title of Advocate of
Sinners. So, too, it was with them, in their hour of trial.
When, in the middle of the thirteenth (and to Pisa disastrous)
century they decided to build their Campo Santo, they con-
ceived the pious fancy of having its dimensions correspond
with those of the ark of Noe. Not only that, but they took
trouble to instruct the captains of certain ships bound (no
doubt for trading purposes) for the Holy Land to return with
a full cargo of earth from Calvary. In this holy soil they
wished that the citizens of Pisa — saint and sinners, mag-
nificent and humble, aged and little ones — ^whose bodies
were laid aside in expectation of the resurrection should rest.
Followed a strange and lovely result. Every month of May
marvelous blue blossoms, of a kind unknown in Italy, opened
star-like eyes among the narcissi and forget-me-knots which
gather lovingly round the dead in the sweet Italian way, and
for want of knowing their name the Pisans, in their pious
fancy, called them the Tears of the Holy Mother. They may
still be discovered there, it is said, by those who are in Mary's
secrets. I have searched, but I have not found them. Instead,
at sunset, when the pale moths were abroad, I have found and
plucked the long straying branches which cover the low walls
and bend down to brush, with delicately tapered and scented
fingers, the still homes of the faithful dead. Honeysuckle is
the English name; but in Pisa they call it the Little Hands of
the Madonna.
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ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA.
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
XII.
HE Palestinian doctrine of salvation was the
Crown without the Cross. One of the things to
which Jewish expectation looked when the Mes-
sias came was the complete reconstitution of the
heavens and the earth. This renewal had been
foretold by the prophets,^ it was lengthily described in later
Jewish writings,* and won for itself a place of no small impor-
tance in the literature of the Rabbis." All things were to be
delivered from their present state of corruption, and restored
to spiritual purity and splendor by the strong right arm of
Divine power, acting, it was thought, in the worldly interests
of the chosen people. A transiSgured Israel, a New Jerusalem,
a Messias-King reigning in state over a world reorganized and
rebuilt, these were some of the glories expected when the old
order of history changed.
There is much mention of " thrones " and of " judgment,"
in connection with the world's remaking;* and an occasional
reference to the " pain " that will seize the Gentiles when they
see " that Son of Man sit on the throne of His glory." ^ The
Greek word employed to translate this racial doctrine of sal-
vation has the primary sense of " physically restoring," ^ and
there is nothing high or holy associated with its use in most of
the literature of the times. What must we think, therefore,
when we find this accusing expression in a text of the First
Gospel? Is not the mere fact of its presence the clearest proof
that the author is reviving Rabbinism, and not reporting Jesus?
Who but a Jewish-Christian writer, freely mingling the old
with the new, would ever think of weaving into his narrative
such an unmistakably Palestinian statement as the follow-
ing: " Amen I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in
the regeneration (?) when the Son of Man shall sit on the
throne of His glory, you also shall sit on twelve thrones, judg-
Usalas Ixv. 17; Ixvi. 22. 'Enoch xci. 16, 17; 4 Esd. tII. 28.
> For references, see Life and Times of Jesust Edershelm, U., 343.
«Oan. Til. 9, 10; Apoc. zx. 4. 'Enoch Izll. 5. * IlaXtTTtvto^
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342 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Dec,
ing the tribes of Israel?"^ Is he not looking for the rebirth
of the world when the Kingdom of Heaven is inaugurated?
Does he not believe that the end is nigh? Many scholars are
of this opinion. It see^is to them the only possible supposi-
tion for scholarship.
The verse is embedded in a most impressive context.® It
is the closing days of the ministry in Peraea. A young ruler,
probably of the local Synagogue, and a man of wealth and
station, impetuously throws himself at the feet of Jesus, say-
ing: "Good Master, what must I do to possess eternal life?"
Jesus leads him through the whole table of the Command-
ments to the positive precept of love of neighbor, which the
law enjoined. The young ruler frankly replies that he has
" kept all these things from his youth," and asks what is fur-
ther lacking. Whereupon Jesus tells him that detachment
from wealth is the one thing still most needful to perfection.
" If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give it
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven : and come,
follow Me." The youth's countenance fell. He was one that
" had great possessions," and he knew of nothing in the law
compelling a choice between the highest good and the things
that stood as barriers to its winning. Aghast at the thought
that following meant forsaking, his ardor dampened, and he
withdrew from the Lord's presence, sorrowing. Upon his leav-
ing, Jesus spoke to those about Him of the difficulties of de-
tachment and sacrijQce, especially in relation to wealth, which
He declared an almost insuperable obstacle to entrance into
the Kingdom. This comment surprised th6 disciples as much
as the youth's departure. The official theology described the
affluence and bliss of the Messianic Kingdom, and poverty was
not naturally to Jewish liking. Is it any wonder, then, that
St. Peter should ask what return lay in store for all their sacri-
fice? If the faithful were not to have their worldly goods in-
creased, what would the guerdon of their complete self -giving
be? To which Jesus makes answer in the verse already quoted
about the " thrones," supplementing it by the general promise
that whosoever leaves parents, relatives, children, or lands for
His name's sake shall receive a hundredfold of compensation
in this world — ^*' with persecutions," • too, says St. Mark — and
inherit " eternal life."
TMatt. six. 28. *Matt. xiz. 16-22; Luke xyiil, 18-30; Mark x. 17-23
•Mark x. 30.
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When did the author of the First Gospel expect the re-
demption of this promise? Did he think the Twelve were to
sit on thrones immediately after the inauguration of the King-
dom at the end of the Jewish age? That would make the in-
cident a clear retouching of the old Rabbinical view that the
Jewish people were to judge the nations when the Messias
came. It would also prove the author a firm believer in the
proximity of the Lord's Return in glory, to punish the wicked
and reward the good. But from what we have seen in the
course of the present investigation, this could not have been
the thought intended. No Synoptic writer has left us a more
un-Jewish picture of the future peopling of the Kingdom than
the author of the First Gospel; none has incorporated into his
account so large an amount of material openly at variance
with the roseate expectation of the times; and none has taken
such pains to acquaint the reader in detail with the corrective
teaching of Jesus and His manner of combating the false views
in vogue. Nay more, the trend of the evidence thus far gath-
ered is against our so supposing. In the thirteenth chapter,
the author goes out of his way for language to let his readers
see, that an age of the Gentiles is to follow the age of the Jews.^®
He does so again in the sixteenth, although the verb which he
uses to emphasize his dissent from Rabbinism has been
strangely taken to indicate his surrender to its creed." The
thirteenth chapter is filled with the idea of a Judgment indefi-
nitely put off to the harvest time of the Messianic Era;^^ and
one of its verses expressly gives us to understand that there is
to be no reign of the just in the Kingdom of the Son of Man;^'
a statement which compels us to assign the verse about the
" thrones " to a period not included within the historical dura-
tion of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
It is antecedently improbable, therefore, that the incor-
porator of the special promise to the Twelve looked for its
realization on the morrow of the Kingdom's opening. A writer
who speaks in one place of the postponement of the Judgment
is not likely to have so far forgotten himself, in another, as to
announce or insinuate its near approach. He is engaged on
**Matt xlii. 10-43. Cf. St, Matthew and the Parousta, Thb Catholic Wobld,
March, 1918.
" MiXXetv.— Matt xvi. 27. Cf. St, Matthew and the Parousta, The Catholic W<mLD,
February and April, 1918.
»Matt xUl. 30, 41, 43, 51, 62. "Matt. xili. 43.
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344 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Dec.,
something quite other than an attempt to revive pre-Christian
opinion, or to galvanize Rabbinism into the false semblance
of renewed life; and that something other is conspicuous all
through his pages, not new or strange to the present case. It
is the desire to prove Jesus the fulfillment of all the prophecies
concerning the King of Israel and the Saviour-Lord of men.
That is why he reports Jesus, not as denying the truth of tlie
predictions about Renewal and Rulership, but as announcing
their deferred fulfillment. Expected at the beginning of the
Messianic Kingdom on earth, they were not to be realized until
its close; a corrective piece of teaching quite different from the
Palestinian expectation that history was not to continue after
the Kingdom came. It is not surprising, therefore, to find
this twofold prophecy reasserted elsewhere in the New Testa-
ment pages." Its reassertion is due to Him Who came not to
destroy, but to fulfill; and so far from being Rabbinism re-
vived, it is simply one of the many instances in which Jesus
announced the fulfillment of prophecy in a new and un-
expected manner. His eschatology proclaimed the continuance
of history and the spread of His word through the whole in-
habited earth, before the consummation came. It did not
identify the beginnings of the Kingdom with the world's final
rebirth.
The fact that the First Gospel, when read forwards, moves
on a difi'erent plane from Rabbinism — the plane of deferred
realization as distinct from immediate fulfillment — ^is of prime
significance, and in the nature of a leading light. It takes the
promise to the Twelve out of all its supposed associations with
near time. Even if " regeneration," " renewal," " restoration,"
in the physical and cosmic sense, were the proper rendering
of the Greek, one might still claim, and with goodly show of
reason, that the thought behind the phrase is un-Rabbinical
and Christian. A prophecy postponed and a prophecy ex-
pected to come to pass shortly, are quite diff'erent eventuali-
ties for the human mind, meaning in the one case that history
is to continue, and in the other that it is to cease or become
transformed. A New Jerusalem on earth and a New Jerusa-
lem " coming down out of Heaven from God " ^^ are not neces-
sarily references to the same event, or hints of an identical
expectation. It is quite possible to use current language and not
>« 2 Peter ill. 13. Apoo. nl. 1. » Apoc. xzl. 2.
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1918.] ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA 345
intend it in the current sense. What is true of the far future
may be expressed in terms once associated with the near,
without contracting any taint of error in the process. So that,
even if we were textually compelled to admit that St. Matthew
had the renewal of the heavens and the earth in mind, when
he recorded the special promise of Jesus to the Twelve, critics
would still have to prove that he was referring to the begin-
nings of the Kingdom, and not to its consimimation. Their
thesis that the thought expressed is Judaic and not Christian,
would still be as far from establishment as ever.
Fortunately we are not in such textual straits for proof.
There is another passage in which the author of the First Gos-
pel quotes the same prophetic phrase, '* sitting on the throne
of His glory," and it reveals the connection of events which he
had in mind : " When the Son of Man shall come in the glory
of His Father, and all the angels with Him, then shall He * sit
on the throne of His glory;' and before Him all the nations
shall be gathered." ^^ The resurrection to Judgment is un-
questionably meant, and there is not the slightest reference to
the world's renewal. Must we not translate in like manner the
promise to the disciples, and read it as follows : " Amen I say
to you, in the resurrection to Judgment, when the Son of Man
shall sit on the throne of His glory, you also shall sit on twelve
thrones, judging the tribes of Israel? " If St. Matthew be suf-
fered to act as his own interpreter, through the cross-reference
just mentioned, there is no other conclusion for scholarship to
draw. We venture to assert, therefore, that "regeneration,"
in the Palestinian sense of the word, is not the proper render-
ing of the Greek. Though commonly accepted by modern
critics as the correct translation, its accuracy is far from being
exegetically established. Even were we to grant that " physi-
cal renewal" is the thought everywhere intended — a conces-
sion not capable of establishment — nothing of consequence
would follow. The First Gospel does not represent the re-
newal and the resurrection to Judgment as immediate. It
distinctly portrays them as events postponed."
Does a passage somewhat kindred in St. Luke point to the
"restoration" as immediate? The Lord is assuring the
Twelve of future dominion in reward for their persevering
"Matt XXV, 31.
" St, Matthew and the Parousia, Thb Cathouc Wo«lo> Ifarch, 1918.
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346 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Dec.,
loyalty, and He is quoted as saying: "You are they who have
continued with Me in My trials; and I appoint to you, as My
Father hath appointed unto Me a Kingdom : that you may eat
and drink at My table in My Kingdom; and you shall sit on
thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." " The interest-
ing feature about this passage of St. Luke's is the textual posi-
tion of the promise. In the most ancient manuscripts — the
Sinaitic and the Vatican — it is reported as an independent
utterance, over and above what was said before.^* Jesus has
just been contrasting the pagan notion of lordliness with the
Kingdom of Service which He came to found.^® He declares
that He has appointed to the disciples an historical Kingdom
on earth, and invested them with regal power, that they may
eat and drink at His table in His heavenly Kingdom. This is to
be their immediate reward, independently of their futiure
wielding of the staflF of rulership. Loyalty in suffering, service,
and trial will win them a place at His banquet table of eternal
life. Not until all this has been said, do we find mention made
of their sitting in judgment on Israel for its rejection of the
word. Clearly, it was not of any immediate event that Jesus
spoke or His reporters understood Him to speak, when He
promised that they should "sit on thrones." The promise
referred to the consummated Kingdom at the end of the
Messianic Era, not to the inaugurated Kingdom at the begin-
ning, as Palestine expected.
That this was, indeed, the reference becomes even more
clearly apparent when we look into the literary environment
in which St. Matthew locates the promise. The context preced-
ing is taken up with the idea of " eternal life," and the laying
up of treasure "in Heaven;"" the context following with the
Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard.^^ The thought flows
steadily in an anti-Rabbinical direction. Laborers coming into
the vineyard at a later date are to enjoy rewards and privileges
equal to those conferred upon the first to enter. There was,
in other words, no special and exclusive advantage in being
alive at the time of the Christ's coming — a thought dear to
the heart of Israel, which expected Him to come but once and
stay forever. Future disciples entering the Kingdom at the
eleventh hour would receive the same denarius of eternal life,
>*Liike xxil. 28-30. » xoA xoO^otaOt, not xoOf^aOc Lul^e xxil. SO; Matt. xlx. 28.
» Luke xxU. 24-27. » Matt xlx. 16, 21. " Matt. xx. 1-16.
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Jesus tells them; it is not the times or seasons that count, but
acceptance of the call, and this call will continue to be issued
over and over again, unto the Vineyard's closing hour. God
has no chosen people but the willing and the heeding.
What have we in this Parable of the Laborers in the Vine-
yard — corrective teaching, or the reassertion of Palestinian
eschatology? Professor Allen thinks it is the latter. Its mean-
ing is merely that "when the Kingdom comes (at the end
of the Jewish era), God will give to all that enter His service
the eternal life which He has promised them."^ Can this
statement be fitted to the text or context? Is not the thought,
rather of a Final Judgment deferred, of cm, historical Kingdom
coming, in which the nations are to share, before the time of
the consimimation? It is clear from kindred material in St.
Luke that an historic process is meant. " There shall be the
weeping and the gnashing of teeth, when you shall see Abra-
ham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the King-
dom of God, and yourselves cast out. And they shall come
from the east and the west, and from the north and the south,
and shall sit down in the Kingdom of God. And behold, they
who shall be first are last; and they who shall be last are
first." '* In the text of St. Matthew, the Saviour's statement
about "the last being first and the first last'* is made the subject
of the parable that follows, as may be seen from the explana-
tory particle in the first verse,^** and from the repetition of the
phrase explained, in the last.*' The paying-off of the labor-
ers, beginning with the last, and the murmuring of the early
comers at this equality of treatment,*^ are un-Jewish pictures
of a Kingdom that shall recruit itself from among the nations
— a Kingdom in which no Divine favoritism is to be shown the
" chosen people."
The Saviour is here correcting the current idea that sal-
vation is the special privilege of the Jew. St. Peter had asked
Him about the recompensing of the Twelve in the resurrection
to Judgment. The Lord tells him that " the Twelve shall sit
on thrones, judging the tribes of Israel," and then balances
this promise by the larger statement that those entering the
vineyard at the eleventh hour (5:00 P.M.), shall receive the
same reward as those who entered in the early morning. It
»St, Matthew, W. C. Allen, p. 214. ^Luke xili. 28-30. » ydtp Matt xx. 1.
» « Thus shaU the last be first, and the first last." Matt xx. 16.
"Matt XX. 10-11.
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was the exact opposite of Palestinian expectation, this admis-
sion of the Gentiles and exclusion of the Jews; this deferral of
the Judgment until the last as well as the first had an oppor-
tunity to enter the Kingdom and be saved. It is corrective
teaching, therefore, not Jewish eschatology, which we find set
before us in this phrase and parable. The "'sitting on
thrones " is an event postponed from the Kingdom's opening to
its closing days. It embodies the new teaching of Jesus that
salvation is to be individual and private as well as public and
glorious. The former, immediately; the latter, when the Mes-
sianic Era ends.
An interesting question remains. Did the Lord ever ex-
plain what He meant by His "coming in glory," as He ex-
plained what He meant by "coming in His Kingdom?" It
does not seem likely that He left His disciples to their own
resources on a matter of such deep concern as the nature of
His Second Coming; and the seventeenth chapter of the First
Gospel appears as the occasion when this much-needed in-
struction was supplied. " And after six days " — a detail that
shows how the Lord saw and pitied the bitterness of their
disappointment at the thought that He was going to die —
"Jesus taketh unto Him Peter and James, and John his
brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart
And He was transfigured before them. And His face shone
as the sun; and His garments became white as snow. And be-
hold, there appeared to them Moses and Ellas talking with
Him. And Peter answering, said to Jesus : Lord, it is good for
us to be here; if Thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles,
one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. And as He
was yet speaking, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them.
And lo a voice out of the cloud saying: This is My Beloved
Son, in Whom I am well pleased : hear ye Him. And the dis-
ciples hearing fell upon their face, and were very much
afraid." ^^ It was, indeed, " good to be here," as Peter said,
for this was the atmosphere of Jewish expectation, the veriest
incarnation of its hopes. No wonder he proposed the raising of
three monuments to the two who had led, and to Him Who was
expected to lead, the people of God's choice out of their house
of bondage. The new faith and the old nationalism were
struggling for the mastery in Peter's soul, and it was the lat-
»Matt xvli. 1-9.
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ter that found a tongue. Let us not press inquiry further. His-
tory is full of like examples, and our own times are crimsoned
with the issues of the struggle.
What was the purpose of the Transfiguration? To mani-
fest His indwelling Divinity to these chosen three? To rekin-
dle confidence in minds disheartened? This, surely, and some-
thing more, besides. Jesus had just divided His "' coming in
glory *• *• from His " coming in His Kingdom." He had just
informed the Twelve that it was the latter, not the former
event, which the generation was to see. More disappointingly
still. He had just predicted His own death and theirs.*® Occur-
ring in such a context of shattered hopes, His statement that He
was one day to return in glory stood doubly in the need of
proving; it could not merely be mentioned without show of
proof. And so the Lord transfigured Himself before them, not
only to reveal His Divinity, not only to hearten the future
preachers of His word, but, over and above all this, to offer
them a concrete and visible demonstration of the way and
maimer in which He was yet to come in glory for the con-
summation of His Kingdom. The vision would stand them in
good stead, later, when, before a hostile audience that denied
all Scriptural warrant for the idea of a Second Advent, they
could testify from their own personal experience that they had
been witnesses of the glory in which the Lord would return
as Judge. Neither they, nor the hardened public soon to hear
the strangeness of their word, were to be sufifered to think
that the Lord's right arm was shortened, because it forbore to
strike. The purpose of the Transfiguration, therefore, was to
create intellectual conviction no less than to foster moral cour-
age; to let the disciples actually behold the glory of the Father,
in which, when justice had her patient, tardy day, the Son was
finally to come.*^
Nor is this interpretation ill-founded. We have the ex-
press testimony of St. Peter — one of the witnesses present—'
in its support. Critics of the rationalist school have long won-
dered why it was that the Prince of the Apostles, when chal-
lenged for proof that the Lord was again to come, should have
made his appeal, not to the facts of the Resurrection and
Ascension, but to the mysterious incident of the Transfigura-
»Matt. XTl. 27, 28. "Matt. xvl. 21, 24, 25.
**■ This Is the Interpretation of St Chrysostom. Horn. 57 In Matt., in initio.
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350 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Dec,
tion, instead. The difficulty ceases in the interpretation above
offered. St. Peter understood the Transfiguration as a demon-
strative proof of the Final Coming. His words in reply to the
Judaizers plainly show that such was his understanding of
its significance. " For/' he says, " we have not followed cun-
ningly devised fables, when we made known to you the power
and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were made eye-
witnesses of His glory. For He received from God the Father
honor and glory, this voice coming down to Him from the mag-
nificent glory : * This is My Beloved Son in Whom I am well
pleased: hear ye Him.' " "* St. Peter then goes on to add that
he has a " stronger word of prophecy " in the fact of the Trans-
figuration than the False Teachers can hope to claim by their
private interpretation of the Scriptures.**
Such was the answer of St. Peter to the Judaizers and
mockers, who were attempting to prove from the prophets that
no Second Coming of the Christ had been foretold of God.
It is a most enlightening piece of testimony. The Chief of the
Twelve engages in no exegetical controversy, to establish from
the prophets that the Lord is again to come. Nor does he
point to the Ascension as guaranteeing the credibility of the
Apostles who had preached the Second Advent. His appeal is
to a fact of personal experience — that ecstatic scene which he,
with James and John, had witnessed on Mount Thabor. Who
shall say, therefore, in view of this pointed declaration by an
eyewitness, that the understanding of the Transfiguration as
an acted proof, an anticipative revelation of the Lord's power
to come in glory, is without secure exegetical footing in the
New Testament Scriptures?
We have come to the end of our long investigation, and this
first series of studies is finished. Its particularly new results
are easily siunmed up for the judgment of the critical. The
opening study made the claim that St. Matthew's Gospel was
not the restricted Palestinian world-view, which it seems to be
to many, under the microscope of scholarship. The first proof
offered to substantiate this audacious claim was the discovery
of the meaning of MiXXstv. It is not used in the sense of the near
future at all, but to express the prophesied necessity of the
actions or events narrated. The result of this initial discovery
was another of equal import — the fact, namely, that the Lord's
" 2 Peter 1. 16-18. " 2 Peter i. 19-21.
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" coming in His Kingdom " and His " coming in glory " are act-
ually set before us as disconnected events, in the New Testa-
ment text. With the detailed establishment of this fact, the
precise nature of the Lord's method of teaching disclosed itself
to analysis. It was foimd that the Saviour taught the new
under cover of the old, filling the current phrases of prophecy
with a sense not had before.
" The end of the age;" " the Parousia;" the " coming of the
Son of Man in the glory of His Father with the angels;" His
"coming on the clouds;" His "coming in the name of the
Lord;" and His "coming to the individual at the hour of
death," are all typical instances of making a phrase that had
but a single meaning in the usage of the times, carry several
distinct shades of significance to the hearers. The Synoptic
writers have left us every indication — grammatical, textual
and critical — that they are reporting this very method of edu-
cation, and asking us to see its wonders with them, eye to eye.
What from the point of view of literary criticism, seems like a
mere gluing-process of editorial conmient, as, for instance, the
many reported reactions of the Pharisees to the Saviour's
words, is in reality a description of the counter effects of the
new teaching, and not a recondite problem in the mechanics
of composition. The clearing-up of the pedagogical element
in the text led to the most surprising discovery of all — the ex-
act nature of the questions asked and answered on the Moimt
of Olives. These were found to be Christian questions, not
Jewish queries; and the Great Discourse of the twenty-fourth
chapter fell at once into the simplest and most natural of
divisions.
Through not undertaken with an apologetic view in mind,
the investigation now brought to a temporary close offers ma-
terial for a Christian apology of no uncertain value. So far as
the writer's knowledge goes, this is the first time that proof
has ever been offered of the disconnection which the Gospels
establish between the end of Jerusalem and the end of the
world. Hitherto the attitude has invariably been to concede
the connection, and to apologize for it, either on the ground
that the Lord spoke of the destruction of Jerusalem as the
figure and type of the end of the world, or that the Evangelists,
without affirming, nevertheless expressed, the common opinion
of their time. A third possibility — to say no more — now opens
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352 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Dec.,
up: His never having connected the events in question; His
never having been reported to that effect!
The corrective teaching of Jesus has been a commonplace
of Biblical study from the beginning. Friend and foe alike
have detected its existence in the Gospel pages, and at the
present writing there is a discernible tendency to study Pales-
tine less and Jesus more. But what has escaped observation
all along is the sweeping extent to which this corrective teachr
ing of the Lord was carried. The present writer frankly con-
fesses that for years he never looked for it in the phrase of
prophecy: the coming of the Son of Man; and not till over-
whelming evidence revealed it there as elsewhere, were these
studies undertaken to establish the truth of its presence. Final
judgment rests, of course, with the Church; and to that tri-
bunal, all that has been said or claimed is dutifully submitted.
Several questions are affected by the results reached, and
among them the date of the Gospels. The composition of any
of the Synoptic writings much before 70 A.D. has been denied
of late, because of the so-called ** small Apocalypse " ** exist-
ing in all three, and set down for a common source from which
the several writers drew. Professors Wendt, Weiffenbach,
Pfleiderer, Schmiedel, Wellhausen, Holtzmann, Loisy and Mof-
fat, to mention no others, post-date the appearance of the Gos-
pels, largely on account of this supposed "Synoptic
Apocalypse." Their position will have to be reviewed. The
texts quoted to prove the existence of this subsidiary source
are really Christ's reported teaching to the contrary. The cor-
rected and corrective phraseology of the Synoptics has been
mistaken for a tract of the apocalyptic propaganda in vogue
about the year 70, when the war clouds were gathering over
Israel, and the long promised "end" seemed nigh. Only a
very small fraction of the texts thus incriminated is apocalyp-
tic; and even in this small fraction, the end of the world is not
portrayed as impending, but as indefinitely postponed.*^
Those who think that " in a private conversation with two or
three disciples, Jesus would speak in a sustained style of
MMatt xxlv. 6-8; Mark xUi. 7-8; Luke xxl. 9-11; Matt xxiv. 15-22; Mark xlil.
14-20; Luke xxl. 20-24; Matt xxlv. 29-31; Mark xlii. 24-27; Luke xxl. 25-27, 28.
"Matt xxlv. 29-31; Mark xili. 24-27; Luke xxl. 25-27, 28.— Nor Is Luke xvUi. »—
"Shall the Son of Man coming find faith on the earth (?)?"—« reference to the
Final Advent. It should be translated *< in the land/' not '< on the earth.*' See ixl
T^<; yfi^ in Luke xxl. 23. The ** Son of Man coming " means the destruction of Jeru-
salem h xdcxtc.
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eschatological commonplace,'* or be actually reported to that
effect, have made " a tether out of a hair," and missed the dis-
tinctive psychology of the Gospels, in their excessive devotion
to the principles of literary criticism.
The Saviour had to teach His new doctrine of the King-
dom in current phrases that had long been wrested to another
meaning. The thought in all minds, the phrase on all lips, was
" the drawing nigh of the Kingdom of God," and the ** com-
ing of the glorious Son of Man." Jesus begins His ministry by
preaching the former; He continues and ends it by a long
educative process in regard to the latter. Because He used the
current expressions to convey His new revelation — He would
have secured no hearing had He done otherwise — critics leap
to the conclusion that His employment of the terms of the day
reveals the source and limitation of His personal knowledge,
and affords a clue to the intelligence of His reporters. On
this fallacious criterion a whole mountain of adverse criti-
cism has been reared, which topples at once with the detec-
tion of the fallacy that contributed to its rearing — the fallacy
of confounding a chosen means of expression with the thought
actually expressed. Take the sum of the quotations of Jesus.
A mere glance will suifice to show that even if the language
employed be Palestinian, the thought behind it is of an alto-
gether different origin, plane and range. Let us gather these
texts, with no attempt at order. The originality of their ap-
plications is not diminished, but increased, by a random
gathering.
" So shaD it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man shaD
send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His King-
tiom all scandals and them that work iniquity." •* " Then
shall the just shine as the sun in the Kingdom of their
Father." " " The Son of Man shall come in the glory of His
Father with the angels; and then shall He render to every man
according to his works." •* " Amen I say to you, there are some
of them that stand by, who shall not taste death, till they see
the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom." ^^ "To him that
hath (My word of the Kingdom), it shall be given, and he
shaU abound; but from him that hath not, even that which
he hath shall be taken away." *« " If I wish hun (St. John) to
remain till I come, what is it to thee?"** "He that perse-
»Matt xlil. 41. •'Matt xiil. 43. "Matt xtI. 27.
»Matt XTl. 28. «*Matt xUl. 12; xxv. 29. «Jolm xzl. 22.
VOL. cnn. — 23
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vereth unto the (?) end, the same shall be saved.** ** ** Where
the body is, there shall the eagles be gathered.*' *» *' He that
saveth his life (by denying Me), shall lose it; and he that
loseth his life (for confessing Me), shaU find it.** ^ ** But there
are first who shaU be last, and last who shall be first.** ^^
" Amen I say to you, in the regeneration when the Son of Man
shall sit on the throne of His glory, you also shall sit on twelve
thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.** ^ "" You shall not
see Me henceforth until you say: Blessed is He that cometh
in the name of the Lord.** *^ " But if the master of the house
knew at what hour the thief was coming, he would have
watched, and not have allowed his house to be broken
through.** ** " Be ye therefore also ready, for at an hour that
you think not, the Son of Man will come.** *• ** Let your loins be
girt, and lamps burning in your hands; and you yourselves
like unto men who are waiting for their Lord when He shall
return from the Marriage Feast; that when He cometh and
knocketh, they may open to Him immediately.** ^ ** But when
the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the angels with
Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His glory, and all the
nations shall be gathered before Him.**** Who would dare
maintain that this entire assemblage of texts referred to the
Second Advent, or was understood as so referring by the ex-
ceptionally acute people, to whose " apperceptive masses ** the
Lord addressed His word?
And that suggestive picture: "The Lord said to My Lord:
Sit Thou on my right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy
footstool***^ — a picture repeated before the judges at the
trial, in the impressive words: " Furtfcermore, I say to you,
you shall see the Son of Man sitting ** on the right hand of
Power and coming on the clouds of heaven,** ** — ^what is this
but a pictorial and summary denial of all that Palestine ex-
pected concerning the King and the Kingdom that were to
come? His sitting at the right hand of the Almighty and His
" coming on the clouds ** at the same time, are so expressed
«Katt xxiv. 13. «Matt xxiv. 28. ««Matt xvl. 25.
«Luk« xlU. 30; Matt xlx. 30; xx. 16. «Matt xlx. 28.
«Miitt. xxlli. 39. «Matt xxlv. 43. «Matt. xxlv. 44.
»Luke xU. 35, 36. "Matt xxv. 31.
"Matt, xjtli. 44. Gomp. St Paul, 1 Cor. xv. 25. 8cf ydp sMv 6oBT(Xc6ttv. AltoBph.
i, 22 and Vn. vlU. 6.
"The thougbt behind the Hebrew imagery— " slttiiig at the right hand**— ip
tspreme judicial power. "^Matt zxri. 64.
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as to signify His reigning in Heaven and the progressive tri-
umph of His Kingdom on earth. The grammar of the verse
definitely settles the fact that the ** coming on the clouds ** ** is
progressive, not a single event; and if the reader will consult
the Lord's answer to the second question of the disciples on
Mount Olivet: "What shall be the sign of Thy coming (in
Thy Kingdom) ? " " he will find that the answer of the Master
is much broader than the discipular query. The four who put
the question understood the *' coming'' as a single event —
the destruction of Jerusalem. The Saviour does not take it in
this limited sense. He speaks of it as the progressive announce-
ment of His Gospel in the whole inhabited earth, and declares
that there shall be much false teaching even to the very end.*^
He forecasts the history of His Kingdom, not only during the
Jewish period, but beyond it to the consummation of the Mes-
sianic Era; and He treats Jerusalem as a mere incident in the
world-process that is still to be — a fact which St. Matthew
distinctly brings out, by inserting three additional verses which
he previously omitted when describing the future history of
the Kingdom unto the end of the Jewish times.""
It is not to His Second Advent, therefore, but to the visible
triumph of His Kingdom, that Jesus is referring, when He de-
clares that His participation in Divine power and honor will be
made manifest to His judges from that time forth.^^ The High
Priest rose and rent His robes at this assertion. It was nothing
short of blasphemy in his holden eyes. And the second part of
the Lord's avowal — the reference to His "progressive com-
ing on the clouds " — ^was equally disconcerting. Expert that
he was in the literature of prophecy, Caiphas could not have
failed to notice how the Lord had divided the vision of Daniel,*®
disconnecting the '* coming on the clouds " from the expected
** earthly reign of glory," and rejecting eschatology for his-
tory I Jesus solemnly affirmed before His judges that He would
reign in Heaven and triumph in His Kingdom on earth. His
"Compare Apoc 1. 7 with Matt xxvl. 64. "Matt xxiv. 4-14.
"Matt xxlT. 11. Compare Matt xxvi. IS. Nor is St Paul's use of x96(ao^
against vm here. "Matt xxIt. 10-12; x. 16-23.
" ix' JfpTC. Matt xxvi. 64. Three times used by St. Bfatthew in the same sense.
Matt xxlil. 99; xxvl. 29; xxvl. 64. St Luke has: dxb toG vuv. xxlt 69. Cf. The
Theologg of the New Testament, Stevens, p. 158; 5/. Mark, Gould, p. 252; and
Professor Allen's embarrassment at the grammer of the Tcrse. St. Matthew, Allen,
p. 284.
" Dan. Til. lS-14.
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356 ST. MATTHEW AND THE PAROUSIA [Dec^
was not the world- view of the folk who sat in judgment on His
word.
Of all the pictures in the Gospel, this of the sitting and
the coming is the most far-reaching and instructive, especially
when put through the double test of verification which we
fortunately possess in the Lord's interpretation of the Dixit
Dominus dnd in the manner of His answer to the second ques-
tion of the disciples on the Mount of Olives. // a prichi le
Royaume, mais c'est Vtglise qui est venue, says Loisy; and so
long as the existence of a Synoptic Apocalypse was admitted,
it seemed a dfficult matter to prove scientifically that Christ
identified the "Kingdom" and the "Church/* But with the
disestablishment of the supposed Apocalypse, and the dis-
covery of history where eschatology only was thought to be,
the two terms, so long kept apart by criticism, instantly re-
joined each other, and the apparent gap between them closed
of itself.** Jesus preached the Church, and it was the Church
that came. The Kingdom and the Church are one !
Christ spoke of His " coming *' in four different senses. He
said that the Son of Man would come in power at the end of
Israel; in glory at the end of the Messianic Age; in salvation
or rejection to the individual at death; and — as has just been
shown — ^in His historical Church, the growth of which He as-
sured His judges they would see from that time forth. Such
are the results which the present investigation has found, after
distilling each conclusion, drop by drop, through a triple process
of analysis — grammatical, contextual, and critical. In the opin-
ion of the present writer, whatever may be the fate of par-
ticular parts of the investigation, the main line of the thought
discovered will actually be found present in the Greek text,
inwoven into its very fibre, and not read into it from without.
It is not a question of who saw it, but whether it is there. And
for its being there, we have the express assurance of Jesus,
Who taught us to look for its presence in advance. When He
first transferred the phrase "end of the age," from the Old
Kingdom of Israel to the coming " Kingdom of Heaven," the
Twelve were so surprised that they asked Him for an explana-
tion. Jesus gave it. He told them that " every scribe instructed
« Matt XTl. 18, 19. Notice the identlflcatlon of <* My Church " In ▼. 18 with the
" Kingdom of Heaven " In ▼. 19. Compare xviii. 17. — ^The supposition that St Mat-
thew was written late, because it would take some time for the first Christians to
realixe the dilTerence between the 6omXt(aJ and the hxXtfsioi is without foundation.
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in the Kingdom of Heaven is like to a householder, who bring-
eth forth out of his treasure new things and old. •* It was the
description of His method of teaching. He would use the old
phrases of prophecy in new senses. He would fill the old bot-
tles with new wine. And the present investigation, above and
beyond all things else, shows how masterfuUy He redeemed
His pledge.
A BLAZE OF SILVER.
BY CAROLINE D. SWAN.
In the dim autumn morn I sought the place
Where bides the Blessed Presence evermore.
Where children bow and penitents adore.
The world was silver, as I neared apace
That blazing Centre! For a frost, to grace
That Sacrament of love, had gone before
My poor, unwary soul to win it o'er
To purer vision and more glad embrace.
For every grass-blade, every feathery spray
Dead blooms and stars irradiant glistening white
Caught the first sunbeams, till the shining way —
First filmed and then be jeweled — was a sight
For Seraphim, who view with loving eyes
Each gleam that links our world with Paradise.
"Matt xlli. 52.— pux0i}TcuOc(c. "Every scribe who hath become a disciple in the
Kingdom of Heaven.**
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THE FOOL OF GOD.
by charles phillips.
The Persons:
Francis of Assist
Pietro Bernadone, his father.
The Bishop of Assisi.
The Chaplain of San Damiaho.
Scribio, a clerk.
Antonio, a beggar.
Basilio, a leper.
The Scene:
A summer morning in the cloth-shop of Bernadone at Assisi. A
view of the town through the Gothic window at back. Doors,
right, and left — at right, opening to the warehouse; at left
to the street. Back centre, a*tall desk, littered with papers
and samples of cloth; also a high bench before the desk.
(Scribio is heard singing off stage, in the warehouse. He enters
with a broom, sweeping; and crosses to the street door.)
Scribio: So what care I, whatever befall,
God's in His Heaven over all,
For Him I do whatever I do.
And make a song about it tool
There Messer Dustheap! There my dancing
dandy!
And out you go, out in the merry sunshine
To ride on the morning wind. Why, Messer
Francis,
Who taught me how to sing — he says himself
There's no time you can find the Good God quicker
Than in the early morning. So! — ^away! {He
sends the dust flying.)
(Enter Pietro Bernadone from the street, in the face of Scribio's
dust-cloud. He storms in angrily.)
Bernadone: You noisy dog! You lazy hound! What mean you.
Pitching the dirt of the floor in your master's eyes?
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359
And so you're at your sweeping at this hour, eh? —
When every other shop in the street is open
And humming long ago! (He tweaks Scribio's
ear.)
Scribio: 0» master, master.
Be not so hard upon me ! Master, master,
I'm but a poor young clerk —
Bernadone (going to the desk) : Ho ! Clerk, indeed —
With last night's dust still on the counting table !
Can I not trust you for an hour? By the saints,
I can trust no one more! Clerk-r-good for nothing!
Servant — a stupid ! And the two in one
To make a fool ! And then, to cap the bargain,
A son that's fool and good-for-nothing both!
What are you mumbling there? Some of the
prayers
That gadabout Francis has been teaching you,
I'll warrant!
Scribio: Nay, 'twas but a little song
I was remembering —
Bernadone: Ay, songs — and prayers —
'Tis all you're good for since that pious gabbler
Of mine came home. I would to Heaven he'd
stayed
In France, with his troubadours, nor ever come
.Chanting his chants about my dizzy ears
To wear the old days out of me! Where is he now?
Where is young Francis now? Speak! fool!
Scribio: Nay, master,
I do not know! I heard him in the dawn
Go singing by the window. 'Twas just sunrise.
And he on the road that takes you from the town
Out toward the forest —
Bernadone: Ay, that's it, that's it —
Off making serenades to the birds of the wood.
And I here breaking my palsied back to lay
A fortune by for him! I'm done with it!
I'll put an end to this today! Be off!
Find him and bring him here! Did I not tell you
That I must ride this morning to Foligno?
Scribio: Not to Foligno, master? Why, you said —
Bernadone: Another word like that from you, you stupid.
And I'll clout gou to Foligno, all the way.
And hand you back to your beggar of a father!
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Scribio:
Bernadone:
Scribio:
Bernadone:
Scribio:
Bernadone:
THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec,
Scribio:
Bernadone:
No! master! no! O! what have I done now»
What have I said? Please, Messer Bernadone!
Then keep your mouth tight — and remember this :
Whoever asks you, whosoever queries,
Your master's ridden to Foligno. So!
You understand me?
Ay; — but master — master —
But me no buts, but see that yonder door
Into the warehouse there is left unlocked —
Ajar — like that — do you mark? I'll keep my eye
On you, remember!
But the Bishop, master?
The Bishop himself may come today; and what —
What may I say to him?
I'll bishop you!
Was ever a half-wit so half-made as you!
What think you then I ride to Foligno for
If not for this — ^your Bishop and his coming?
Have I not told you, ay, a dozen times?
You are to say to him, your master's ridden
OCT to Foligno. Let me hear you say it !
Come now! Speak up — as if I were his lordship
The Bishop of Assisi! Come — "Your Lordship,
My master has gone — "
" Your Lordship " — Nay, but master.
And if you go not to Foligno, sir.
Though you do say that you do go to Foligno —
Why sir, is that not telling a lie? And Francis,
Young Messer Francis, only yesterday.
Talked of the sin of l3ring.
Saints in Heaven!
Am I to endure a witless goose like this?
May I not ride where I list, you fool, or stay
Or go as I will, or say I go or come,
Without some mumbling priest to sit upon it,
The saying or the going? If the Good God
That you're so fond of prating of, perforce
Must send to me this double-dark aflliction —
A fool for a son, a simpleton for a servant,
May I not keep an eye on them, to save me
From beggary — ^and bishops, with their funds.
Their chapels and their building and restoring?
I've nothing for your bishop — nothing, nothing!
Therefore I've ridden oflf — ^gone for the day.
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You hear? You understand? And mark you
this—
If you do by the wink of an eye betray me,
Or let that door be closed, you'll whine for it.
You cackling hen ! Now get you gone and fetch me
That brother fool of yours ! Hark ! There he goes.
Like a loud clown singing along the street!
(Francis is heard singing in the street. He enters, bringing with
him into the dusty shop a burst of sunlight and radiant sum-
mer air. He is a comely youth, richly dressed in the best
fashion of the day.)
Frtmcis: God's in His Heaven, what care II
For Him I live, for Him I'd diet
Or joy or sorrow come my way
ril make a song about it I
(He stops short on seeing his father.)
Oh— father—
Bernadone: Well! And it's time you put an end
To your unseemly noise. Get to your tasks!
Here is the desk piled with accounts and letters.
And you in the streets, like some mad troubadour
Shouting your psalms!
Francis: Nay, good my father, listen!
'Twas not a psalm. Twas only a little song,
A song of my own making. See — ^it goes
This wise at first —
Bernadone: You and your songs! Be silent!
You'll split my ears — ^you'll break my heart! Be
still!
Once I could find no key to keep you in
Gadding about, carousing in the night;
Now 'tis the busy daylight that you spoil
With noise and idleness !
Francis: Not spoil, my father!
Twas but a little serenade of joy
I'd sing to our good Father God in Heaven
To pay a little for the hours I once
Was wont to waste at night with rioters,
Sinners and folly-makers —
Bernadone: Done! Have done!
Begin me now none of your pious prating!
Get to your work here ! And look you» keep to it !
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec,
I'm oflf to Foligno for the day; {To Scribio) Re-
member
Foligno — for the dayj Come! To the desk!
Here's a whole sheaf of letters in the French —
Let your poor learning leastways earn me a penny!
And here are accounts upon accounts to check;
And there'll be custom humming too, today.
And keep the beggars and the paupers out!
ril have none of your rags and tatters here,
That are forever at your heels. Come now —
To work!
Francis: But father, is not this the day
The Bishop was to come —
Bernadone: What? Am I never
To hear the end of the Bishop? I liave nothing
For him or his ruin of a chapel — so
I'm to Foligno (to Scribio) for the day, you hear?
(He starts away.)
Francis: So be it, father. All is well! The keys?
Bernadone: The keys? Think you I'll leave the chests wide
open
For you to spill for any mendicant
Comes crying at the door? There's coin enough
There in the desk to serve the day's trade out.
To work now! Both of you! (He goes out leading
Scribio off by the ear,)
Quick step, you witless !
Francis: Yes, father, yes! Alas, but my poor father —
That he should always be in anger with me!
Good Messer God in Heaven knows I strive
To please him — ^yet he hath no faith in me.
No faith, no trust! 'Tis only in his riches
He puts his faith. O, were I not a man.
My father, I could weep for you, to think
What grief, what care, you put upon yourself
For sake of a little silver profit! — This!
(He fingers a handful of coins on the desk.)
Nay, but 'twould serve me better, and serve him
To pray for him, not weep for him !
(The street door opens stealthily, and Antonio, a beggar, enters.
He peers shyly about, then comes forward, touching Frcuicis
on the arm.)
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THE FOOL OF GOD
363
Frtaicis:
Antonio:
Francis:
Antonio:
Francis:
Antonio:
Francis:
Antonio:
Francis:
What, you?
It is my poor Antonio of the Wood!
What has befallen you now?
Good Messer Francis,
Only that I — that I am hungry again.
I have had naught to eat since yestereve.
But did I not give money — ^ay, and food —
To you last night, Antonio?
So you did,
God blessing you for it! And the food — ^you saw
How hotly I did relish that!
But the money?
There was another hungrier than I,
In sorrier rags, — a leper by the road.
A leper? By the San Damiano road?
Blessed Antonio, how you do shame me then!
For I too saw that leper by the road
This very morning, I in the sunlight singing;
Passing him by — and yet so loathsome to me
His running sores, so dread the ghastly pallor
Upon his deathly face, I turned me away.
Blind to his misery, deafening my ears
To all his sorry moaning. I turned — I ran —
I threw him not even a little coin.
And you gave him your all! So shall I give
My all to you! (He gives Antonio his purse, the
beggar protesting.)
Nay, all, Antonio, all !
How could I ever sing to God again.
Did I not give you all, remembering
How richly you've outdone me in charity?
Messer Francesco, nay, not all, not all !
One silver bit's enough; for there be others
More needy even than I —
Then you, my brother.
Shall be their almoner. Nay, you must take it;
And go and share it with others as you will.
Make haste now! Someone comes! Mayhap my
father;
(Francis puts Antonio out the street door as Scribio enters from
the warehouse.)
Francis: You, Scribio! See how you set me trembling.
For thinking 'twas my father had returned
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec,
To catch me giving alms! — so sorrily
Doth he distrust me. Hath he ridden away?
Gone to Foligno?
Scribio: Ay, he's gone — ^he's gone!
Did you not hear his horse a-hoofing it
Out in the court? Did you not hear the clatter
The master made of it, that you might know
He's gone to Foligno for the day — ^Foligno,
And nowhere else!
Francis: . What mean you, Scribio?
Nay, I heard nothing — save the Voice of God
Shaming my selfishness! Antonio
The beggar of the Wood was here again.
Scribio: You did not give him money, Messer Francis?
O, have a care of what you do this day.
Good Messer Francis —
Francis: Why, you do mean something —
What is it, Scribio? You are distressed.
For my sake you are troubled! Ah, I see —
My father has set poor Scribio to watch
Upon me while he's gone! Is that it?
Scribio: Nay —
On my good word it is not that, young master I
You would not think that your poor Scribio
Could spy upon you?
Francis: But one must obey.
And one must tell the truth, good Scribio.
Scribio: But I am telling the truth, good Messer Francis —
That is— I — O, forgive! I am afraid!
Francis: Nay; one should be afraid of the devil only!
Scribio: I am afraid mayhap Messer your father —
Might it not then befall that he would change
His mind about Foligno? Or— or might he
Remember something that would bring him back —
What am I sasring!
Francis: You are saying folly.
Folly, good Scribio! You know my father! —
If to Foligno he would go, then mark you
To Foligno he will go — and for good gain!
Rest you assured of that! Besides, remember
The Bishop is abroad today to gather
Funds for the ruin of San Damiano:
Therefore my father profits prettily
Out of the Bishop's way! Moreover, see —
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THE FOOL OF GOD
365
All is secure! There is the chest — secure!
The keys — secure! saie on the road to Foligno!
I know my father !
Scribio: Ay, but have a care
Of what you do, of what you say!
Francis : Rest easy !
I'll have a care — thanks to my father's care !
Nor think you that I want in reverence :
Tis not my father's lack of love for me.
But his too ready love for gold and gain,
That doth assail my soul with bitterness ! —
That greed that putteth hunger on the famished.
Strips the poor beggar of his shivering rags —
Ay, and would strip the very sanctuary
To leave it all unroofed ! It is that greed
That sets its ferret eye upon me, go,
Come, sing, pray, toil, or do I what I may!
So, watch me close, poor Scribio.
Scribio< Nay, nay!
Francis: What harm then can I do, unless I break
Open the chests and take my patrimony
Therefrom, to give the poor?
Scribio: What are you saying?
Good Messer Francis, do not that I pray you !
Francis (laughing): Scribio! Have no fear! So — there, I
promise !
I will not break the chests!
Scribio: That would be — thieving!
That would be robbery!
Francis: But no — it would not:
By my own right, and by my mother's right,
There are a thousand florins there in gold
That I may do with as I please —
Scribio: Good master.
It is the devil tempting you !
Francis: One thousand
Bright golden florins! Mother of God, I would
I had them now — today — (A knocking is heard at
the street door.)
Scribio: A customer!
Frcaicis: Quick, to the door!
Scribio (opening the door ceremoniously): Enter, good sir, and
welcome
In Messer Pietro Bernadone's name —
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec.,
{Basilio the Leper enters: his face is deathly; his bared breast,
his hands and his arms are scarred with the ghastly sores
of his disease.)
Basilio: Unclean! unclean!
Scribio: You? You? Out with you. out!
You filthy thing!
Basilio (turning away): Unclean! Unclean!
Francis {thrusting Scribio aside): Nay, nay!
Comeback! Comeback! O Scribio, you also
Turn him away! I too, unhappy man,
I too once turned a deaf ear to your cry,
Forgive me; Brother Leper!
Basilio: Touch me not!
Nay touch me not! I am unclean! unclean!
'Twas but to speak my gratitude to you
I dared to step upon your doorway here.
I am Basilio, whom Antonio
Helped with your charity.
Francis: But still you tremble
And shiver in the cold! So — ^you shall have
A cloak to cover you. (Francis takes off his own
cloak and puts it around Basilio.)
Tis yours, my brother. •
And warmly may it shield you from the wind.
Scribio (with a fearful eye on the warehouse door):
I do beseech you, have a care, young master!
Basilio: Ay ,sir, the lad is right: I must not take it!
Yet who would touch it now, since it hath touched
My sorry foulness!
Francis: I would! I would! Nay,
The cloak is yours; and by this selfsame token
You shall know how I grieve because, unthinking.
Once I did turn away from you and coldly
Refuse your poor beseeching.
Basilio : I am unclean I
Francis: And you shall also give to me a token
That I may know how you have pardoned me.
(Francis kneels to the leper.)
Say that you pardon me; for 'twas against
The merciful Christ Himself, Who healed the
lepers,
I sinned when I did pass you by!
Basilio: Nay, — nay-
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Scribio:
Francis,
Basilic:
Scribio
Francis
Scribio
Francis
Scribio
Francis
Scribio:
Francis
You must not kneel to him! You must not touch
him!
He is my brother. He shall see my spirit
Broken, and all my wicked pride cast down!
Good Brother Leper, kind Basilio,
Grant me one favor, and I shall remember
. You and your name in gratitude and gladness
Forever and forever! Let me embrace you.
Even as Christ Our Saviour would have done: (He
embraces Basilio and kisses him,)
Ah, now, indeed, I know I am forgiven!
Nay, let me go! It is against the law!
I am unclean! I am unclean! Unclean! (He
breaks away from Francis and runs out.)
(closing the door after him): Ugh! May the saints pre-
serve you and purify you.
Good Messer Francis! Saw you ever such sores.
Such black corruption in a face?
(enraptured): I saw
The light of Christ's face in his countenance!
Yea, 'twas the Christ Himself Who smiled upon me
Through those so sorrowful eyes — 'twas Christ
Himself!
(listening at the warehouse door): What if your father
even yet should come.
Returning on us?
Ah — my father! Yes,
He would be very angry, Scribio:
He would not understand. (He returns to the
desk.)
What said my father
Of these two bills 'gainst Baron Cosimo?
See, they are due this day and date. Perchance
It was for this that he went to Foligno?
(still with ah ear to the warehouse door):
Ay, Messer Francis, ay; perchance it was. (There
comes a knocking outside the street door and
• a**Halloor)
A customer!
Belike, another beggar!
Give him a mite, then, if it be a beggar!
But sec, I've not a farthing left — ^unless.
Indeed, I draw upon my patrimony, (He takes a
few coins from the desk),
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec.,
And so I shall! Here, give the poor man this,
Scribio!
Scribio: No, I dare not, Messer Francis! (The
hallooing is heard againJ)
Francis: Take it, I bid you, and make haste!
Scribio: Well, well!
'Tis not my doing! And whoever he be.
He's a proud beggar, with his hallooing
And pounding at the gate! (Exit.)
Francis (writing at the desk and counting off more money):
So — it is charged
Against my patrimony. Am I not
A strict accountant! (Scribio reenters, carrying a
bag of money, and grinning broadly.)
Scribio: There's your beggar for you ! —
Old Baron Moneybags, no less, and he
Riding a steed that paws the sun for fire !
The bill — the bill of Baron Cosimo!
Francis: The Baron Cosimo himself? (He takes the
money and signs the bills.)
Scribio: Nay, not himself:
Some underling who calls himself a steward.
And would not put his foot out of the stirrup
To bend his neck under a common door!
The way he tongued at me ! Give him his bill
Ere he comes riding roughshod through the win-
dow!
Francis: Then show him — thus: the full account is can-
celled
And stricken out; and there, my father's grazia,
Signed with my name — my best of flourishes !
And make him your most courteous bow. Be
quick! (Scribio hurries out. Francis counts
the money.)
Francis: Two thousand florins — gold — bright yellow gold!
O little shining suns of fortune.
What wealth of happiness could you not bring
To many a hungry, many a suffering soul f
And you were mine, so, presto, should you go —
Ay, like a shower of sunlight in the dark —
To make the wretched smile again through their
tears,
To make the grieving and the heavy-hearted
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Look up and laugh once more! Two thousand
florins —
Why, twice my patrimony! And what if I
Should take you — now? Is it a wrongful thought.
Good Messer God?
iScribio enters.)
Francis: What think you, Scribio:
Would it be wrong — ^is it a wrongful thought —
That I should take out of this money-bag
The sum of my own patrimony?
Scribio (terrified): What—
What are you saying, Messer Francis? Oh,
What are you thinking of? (He runs to the ware-
house door, where he stands listening in
fright.)
And would you have me sent away and driven
Back to my drunken father in Foligno?
Francis: Nay, my good Scribio, why take such fright?
Why should you be driven back to Foligno?
How came it too, I wonder, that my father
Met not the Baron's steward on the road?
He'll be surprised — O, he'll be pleased, I'll warrant.
When he returns tonight and sees the gold
I've taken in ! Yet half of it is mine.
Half rightly mine, did I but claim it. See —
How I've divided it. Look, Scribio —
Scribio: O, have a care!
Francis: See, all of this is mine —
Less this small silver, counted for the coin
I took for the beggar — who is yet to come !
Scribio (giving Francis the coin): I had forgotten it. I would
not touch it!
Francis: One thousand florins for a patrimony. . . .
Always my father is displeased with me;
From morning until night there is a cloud
Of anger on his countenance against me.
Or if I sing — or if I pray — ^the same!
He does not love me. It were better that I
Once and for all were done with it and gone !
Yet, scold as he might, when I was wont to ride
With gallants and carousers of the town.
Spending his gold like water for gay dress,
Feasting and folly, giving the night hours o'er
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec.,
Scribio:
Francis:
ScriMai
To empty nothingness, the day to sloth —
Still did he take a pride in me» and talked
Of knighthood — and of purchasing a title!
O, folly, folly! — to spend my heritage
On trappings and a crest, when with it now
The hungry might be fed, the naked clothed;
Ay, and an altar even be set up
In San Damiano's ruined fane — an altar
Where the sweet food of Christ's divine bright
body
Would nourish hungry souls ! He laughs at that.
He frowns on that. And so, because the Bishop
Would ride abroad today to beg an alms
For that dear fallen sanctuary, my father
Perforce must also ride abroad — ^to hide!
To hide him in Foligno for the day!
I am ashamed. O Scribio, I would
My patrimony were, indeed, mine own.
Free in my hand — that I might go unfettered
To live the life I'd love ! Here I'm not wanted.
'Twere better far I get me gone from here!
Nay, Messer Francis, Nay! What would become
Of Scribio, and you were gone? You only
Are kind to me, you only are gentle, good —
Messer God in Heaven, make it plain!
Is this but a temptation of the devil;
Or is it in truth Thy Voice that calls to me?
O, Scribio, pray for me ! I am afraid !
1 know not what to do. For I have come
Upon the crossroads of my life; nor know
Whither to turn : or shall I still stay on
Serving my father, ever in displeasure;
Or shall I speak him plain, demanding from him
My heritage — and go? — and so, be done!
If but some sign were given me; — if only
The Bishop, indeed, were come, were near me
now —
He who so intimately knows my soul.
My every thought; who guides me, counsels me. . .
So! I will go to him! You, Scribio,
Shall care for my father's shop the while I run
Up to the Bishop's house —
No! no! You shall not!
I'll not be left alone! What if your father
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THE FOOL OF GOD
371
Should now, indeed* return, and find you gone?
Gone to the Bishop's house? Or what if robbers —
Francis: What, robbers in the daylight? Scribio!
Then we shall lock the doors. (He goes to the
warehouse door.)
Scribio: Not — not that door!
O, not that door, good Messer Francis, no !
It must be open — to — ^to air the shop !
Francis (locking the door): Surely your wits have flown you,
Scribio!
To air the shop? There's the street door for that!
Keep a close eye on it; make your best bow
To every customer.
Scribio (distracted): Oh, Messer Francis!
Francis: There's someone coming now! Go on —
Scribio (opening the street door): Yes! Yes!
Enter and welcome to the shop of Messer —
Oh! Oh! It is the Bishop! The Bishop himself!
(Scribio kneels in confusion.)
Francis (duly greeting the Bishop) : Good my Lord Bishop, bless
your son Francesco!
Bishop: Arise, my son. Blessings upon this house
And all who bide in it.
Francis (greeting the Chaplain): And warmest welcome
To the good Chaplain of San Damiano.
Bishop: Alas, San Damiano! — that it has
Nothing now left to it but its good Chaplain :
No roof, no altar — even its walls are falling.
Soon it will be a sorry ruin indeed.
Unless the faithful who so long have found
Soul-shelter in its hallowed sanctuary
Shall join together to restore it — mend
At least its broken roofs!
Francis: Let me be one
To help. Lord Bishop ! See! My hand is strong.
My arm is able. Let me be ainong
The workmen who shall make San Damiano
Rise beautiful before the sun again.
Its spires to catch the light, like signals burning
From Heaven's topmost towers!
Scribio: You, Messer Francis?
Nay, my Lord Bishop, you will not permit it !
His hands are far too fine for such a task!
Francis: They can be roughened at no better toil.
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec.,
Bishop: It is not workmen that we are in need of —
Nay; for an army of stout toilers waits
The word that forthwith, summoning them in.
Shall set them singing at their tools and trade,
Giving them honest bread for honest labor;
It is not workmen that we need, but money.
And for the want of it, good men go hungry.
And God is mocked!
Francis: O, money, money! Then
Let me give money, if so with my hands
I may not toil, set timber upon timber.
Stone upon stone. I have my patrimony —
Bishop: It is your worthy father I have come
To see, my son. He is a man of riches.
His trading prospers, and God's blessing seems
To rest upon his roof. Assuredly
Out of his bounty he will give to us.
May we not speak with him?
Frcuicis: He is not here;
He is away, my lord —
Scribio (speaking loudly, for the ear of Bernadone) : Ay, he has
gone
To Foligno for the day!
(The warehouse door is rattled. Scribio starts toward it, but
Francis detains him.)
Francis: Nay, it is nothing!
Good my Lord Bishop, and I beg of you
That you shall put a very special blessing
On Scribio here, to cure him of his trembling.
He is afraid of even Brother Wind
Whispering at the keyhole!
Scribio: Messer Francis!
Bishop: So? To Foligno then your father's gone?
Was it not Messer Bernadone's horse
We saw then in the courtyard as we entered?
Francis: It could not be; for at an early hour
My father rode away; and not till nightfall
Will he return.
Bishop: We counted heavily
Upon his help; for now we are in straits!
Not only do the workers wait upon us.
Crying for bread; not only does the church.
Fallen to ruin, shame us all our days;
But now our treasury is emptied all
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THE FOOL OF GOD
373
With giving of alms and feeding of the poor —
Yet by this hour tomorrow the money-lenders
From whom we long ago were forced to beg
Loan upon loan — ^tomorrow they must be paid !
And, save your father, there is no one else
Whom we may turn to in our hour of need :
For all have given of their means but he —
Even the poor have offered up their mites —
Even Antonio, the beggar of the Wood —
Yes, and Basilio the wandering leper —
Brought their poor farthings! Yet there still
remains
A thousand florins to be paid.
Francis: A thousand —
One thousand florins, to be paid? The sum
And total of my patrimony! So!
It shall be paid ! It is a sign, a sign ! (He rushes
to the desk and begins to scoop up money,
pouring it into a bag.)
Bishop: A sign? What can you mean, my son?
Chaplain: My lord.
May it not be an answer to our prayer?
Francis: It is a sign from God! Ay, and an answer
To my prayer and to yours. Good my Lord Bishop,
You entered here this morning on the heels
Of my desire for you; is it not so.
Good Scribio? For I had scarcely said,
" O that the Bishop were but near me now
To counsel me in my perplexity;"
And I had scarcely turned my face to go
In haste to your own house — ^when lo, you entered
There at the door! So, out of a blue sky
This selfsame morning came this bag of gold —
Enough and more to pay me my heritage.
Which waits upon my mere demanding it.
I shall demand it then; and it shall be yours!
Yours for San Damiano— for the poor —
Yours as you will!
Scribio (holding tight to the warehouse door) : O, Messer Francis,
wait!
Brother Wind doth make an unholy noise
Here at the keyhole! (He listens to Bernadone
whispering vociferously through the keyhole,
struggling to get the lock turned.)
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec.,
Francis : It is yours,
My Lord. (He offers the money.)
Bishop: Hold, my son, hold; and are you sure, indeed?
And is the money yours, indeed, to give?
Francis: To the least counted scruple it is mine —
Mine, and I want it not, ru have it not;
Mine, or to give or keep. O, let me give it.
Straight to our Father God, and Fll be happy!
Scribio (still struggling with the door): No, Messer Francis!
. . . Yes, I am opening it! (Bernadone bursts
the door open and storms angrily in.)
Bernadone: Open, I say . . . Well, and what foll3r's this? (He
strides to Francis, seizing him by the shoulder
and laying his hand on the money-bag.)
Pardon, Lord Bishop; but this son of nunc —
Francis: His lordship hath not been saluted, father!
Bishop: All in due time, my son.
Bernadone: Yes, in due time!
We'U setUe first this talk I hear. What means it?
Whence came this money?
Francis: From Baron Cosimo.
You scarce had ridden to Foligno—
Bernadone: Well —
From Baron Cosimo? How comes it then
That you so freely are dispensing it?
Lord Bishop, you belike would call me rich,
And count on me for a fat purse to give?
Yet how, I ask you, may a man keep roof
Over his head — much less, mend chapel roofs ! —
With such a fool as this to call him father? —
A son who*d spill my coffers on the wind
Fill every beggar's paw with my good silver
Stuff every beggar's belly with my bread —
Bishop: Peace, peace, my son ! There is no need of anger.
Bernadone: What! When a lad whom you perforce must leave
To watch your trade, doth lose his wits like this?
And were it not yourself that is to gain
You'd call it thievery!
Bishop: My son, my son.
Keep guard upon your tongue, lest it offend!
Francis: It is not thievery! It is my right!
It is my patrimony, that the law
Awards me, give or hold it as I will.
And hold it I wUI, or give it I will—
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THE FOOL OF GOD
375
Francis:
Bernadone
Bishop:
Francis:
Chaplain:
Bernadone
Bernadone : No ! Never !
What? Shall I see the money I have hoarded
And guarded for you, tossed into the street?
Take it. Lord Bishop! Take it I beseech you!
San Damiano shall no longer shame
Your reverent name, nor toilers cry in vain
For work, for bread!
Enough !
Not thus, my son —
I cannot take it thus. Let there be an end
To anger and to quarreling; let us take
Counsel with calmness —
You then, Father Chaplain!
It is not meet.
No, and it shall not be!
Francis (casting the money at the Bishop's feet}: Still will I give
it! It is mine to give! (He throws himself
into the Bishop's arms.)
And take me too! My father does not love me.
Bernadone (picking up the money-bag): My lord, you will not
countenance such folly!
The boy is mad ! Ay, verily, he's mad !
Bishop: I know my Francis ! Nay, he is not mad
Good Messer Bernadone. . . . But I cannot take
Your gift, dear son. God's blessing must be on it.
Freely and gladly given —
Francis: So it is!
For it is mine to give — my heritage,
' None to dispute it!
Bishop: But remember, son.
When that an heir shall choose his heritage.
And from the family coffer take that share
Which is his own by right, he must abide
For all time by his choice.
Bernadone: Ay let him bide
Upon his choice! Let him remember thatl
So! Let him take his patrimony now
And go — see how that tastes ! — ^without my board
To feed him on the fatness of the land.
My feathers to lie abed in!
Francis: Good my father.
Nothing I more desire! I make my choice:
Give me my heritage and let me go!
Bernadone: You hear him, all of you? You witness it?
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THE FOOL OF GOD
[Dec.,
Francis: They witness it. Give me my heritage.
Bishop: Not in the heat of haste, my son!
Francis: Why, no! —
For I have thought upon it heavily.
It v^as for this I v^ould have gone to you
This very day. I ask my heritage.
Bernadone: Then take it, and I wash my hands of you!
Mark you all that — I wash my hands of him!
And let you every one of you see to it.
That he shall not come whining back to me
This time tomorrow, begging for my bread!
Francis: God feeds the birds! I'll make me a little nest
In the dear hollow of His hand !
Bernadone: Enough !
And riddance to you — and we'll have this signed
And sealed. Lord Bishop, according to the law!
Come, look to it! There with your name, young
fool!
And witnesses — we'll have our witnesses!
Bishop: Think and consider well, my son. This is
The full renunciation of your rights
And every separate and collective claim
That may be yours, now or in time to come.
Save this, your heritage.
Francis: I understand;
I do it gladly of my own freewill.
Bernadone: There shall be an accounting, too! What gave you
These beggars here this morning?
Francis: Only my purse —
My own purse, and my cloak. (He removes his
tunic and the jewelled chain around his neck,)
But you shall have
All that is left to me — and this — and this! (He
bares his bosom.)
Let me go naked to my Father God,
Even as I came from Him!
Bishop (wrapping his cloak about Francis): You shall be
clothed !
And ever the warmth of God's love shall enfold
you!
Francis: May we not go. Lord Bishop, now?
Scribio: No, no!
Sweet Messer Francis, do not leave me so!
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Bernadone (spinning Scribio across the room) : You get to work,
you fool!
Francis: Good Scribio,
Have patience. Some day you shall follow me,
And we shall be together, brothers once more.
Bernadone: Brothers! Birds of a feather — fools, fools, fools!
Francis: And will you not my father, bless my going?
Or say me some farewell?
Bernadone: Vm busy now!
ril count my money first. How do I know
How sharp you've cheated me!
Bishop: My son, my son!
Bernadone: My son! — and he's a fool! A fool, a fool!
Bishop (standing beside Francis in the open door, the sunlight
flooding them): He who for God's love is a
fool, is wiser
Than tongue can tell ! The sweetness of his name
Shall never perish from the earth. The light
And radiance of his memory shall shine
When brightest gold is rusted all away.
And sharpest wits of sharpest money-changer
Are dust in a forgotten gravel!
Bernadone (bending over his accounts): Fools! Fools!
[curtain.]
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IN AN OLD MARYLAND MANOR
BY MARGARET B. DOWNING.
T was an evening of oriental splendor, with the
sun a golden disk hanging from shifting clouds,
and the light resting on St. Marie's City in the
brilliant colors of old glass. Everywhere
gleamed the water — the river, fringed with pur-
plish hillst rushing from the north — islands here and there
dappled in the current, long slender capes protruded into the
stream and bold promontories rose sheer from the banks.
Then gradually the channel widened and deepened as the
brooks and smaller rivers poured in their tribute, until, at
St. Marie's, the bay stretched out majestically to receive the
grain and tobacco-laden ships and bear them out to sea. On
the plateau above the steepest bluffs, the city reclined like a
queen on her throne, and the river, breaking into glistening
waves, parted in two swift streams and encircled her with
protecting arms.
The year was the year of Our Lord, 1675, with the month
and day alike declining, and the month perforce December,
since it was that good day of all the days of the year, Christ-
mas eve. The harbor which lay about the city like the crescent
of a new-born moon, presented a scene of unusual activity.
For, though the agents of my Lord Baltimore proclaimed all
times propitious for the adventurer to the Palatinate, the
wisdom of forty years held the weeks between Martinmas and
Christmas as the last in which ships could safely pass the lower
capes. But a day past, the royal fleet from London had appeared
in the bay and, with the utmost expedition, the ships could
not discharge their cargo and make ready for sailing home-
ward before Twelfth-night. But it had been a clement winter
and mariners have ever loved to tempt fortune.
Obedient to the laws of the Province, the fleet had ridden
at anchor one mile from shore and during two full tides. Mes-
sengers had landed with state papers for the Governor and fat
bags of letters and packets for the planters. The port dues,
one-half pound of powder and two pounds of shot, had been
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stored in the fort against hostile invasion, and all these obliga-
tions discharged, the fleet even now in the glow of the golden
sunset, was riding under full sail into the harbor. Letters had
come on the ships, which dispatched by swift horse through
the country, had the effect of a stone dropped suddenly into a
quiet lake. Life was ru£Qed to the farthermost manor holding
patent under the Lord Proprietor, and it seemed as though a
goodly part of the male population of the Province had gath-
ered on the pebbly shore. A great shouting rose, as the pas-
sengers touched land and friends pushed forward to conduct
them to the sailboats in waiting or to rowboats or to horses, as
the need .might be. Many soberly-clad stewards seized on the
wrong guest and laughingly exchanged him for the rightful,
and many strangers stood by anxiously, fearful of being over-
looked in the medley.
Such a one — a young man robed in the habiliments of a
gentleman, yet of sombre fashion compared to the rich silks
and velvets of the manor lords of Maryland — kept close to a
small group of men under the protection of the Master of the
pennant ship. They were men of grave and reverent mien and,
without gainsay, the most important who had come by the
fleet for, without a struggle, the crowd gave them free way to
the lord of St. Egbert's who, with his steward and retainers,
was waiting to receive them.
" Reverend Sirs," said the shipmaster, with a bow which
would have been creditable at court, "I have brought you
safely through the perils of the sea and with God's blessing.
Now, I confide you to the lord of St. Egbert's and may he as
safely conduct you through the perils of this land, and all
present say, * Amen.' "
A hearty shout answered and those near dropped on a
knee and asked a blessing. And my lord, challenged by the
shipmaster, answered in clear ringing tones heard to the outer
edge of the concourse:
*' My lords and freemen of Maryland, we have long been
orphaned in the spiritual sense but now we have a Father, and
I caU on all who hear my voice to welcome him as a father.
May we be to him dutiful children and lighten his labors and
sweeten his exile. My old friend and kinsman, Mr. John Pen-
nington from Gloucester and with him the Rev. Nicholas
Gulick and the lay brother Mark, to be house father at St.
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380 IN AN OLD MARYLAND MANOR [Dec^
Inigoes, and a cheer for their Reverences and God rest them
and brmg a Merry Christmas to Maryland.**
There were blessings and greetings mitil the lord of St.
Egbert's pointed to the darkening sky.
" 'Tis a good five miles by the water, with the tide and
the wind contrary. Cousin Pennington, you go with the stew-
ard, Ralph Beamor, and take Brother Mark. My lady and the
lads and lassies and the tenants will meet you at the landing
and fittingly escort you to the Manor. Torches must be lit
on the shores to say we shall have Holy Mass at midnight and
all things are ready. I go to the Great House with Mr. Gulick,
who will be the guest of the Governor, and say Mass at mid-
night in St. Marie's chapel and again at dawn. He then sets out
for Ascension where a great crowd will gather for last Mass.
God speed you all and again thrice welcome to Maryland, and
may you and your holy mission prosper! Come, Mr. Gulick,"
and the energetic lord of St. Egbert's, swung around and faced
towards the bluff before the boat was fairly off from the shore.
"We have a stifi9sh climb up the main road, for I misgave
whether you could ride a horse and left mine at the Gov-
ernor's."
Then, mindful of something forgotten, he stopped short,
and turning to a young farmer pressed a paper in his hand :
" I have here a bill of lading which passes my understand-
standing, for my lady or my daughter ordered naught by the
fleet." Taking the paper again, he held it to Mr. Gulick:
"See, Reverend Sir, with what piety doth my unknown
friend confide his treasure to the deep," and he read aloud :
Shipped by the grace of God and in good order and well
conditioned by one nameless here, but known to the Master
of this good ship Happy Fortune, which he commands un-
der God for this voyage, and whose name is Richard Staple-
ford, and the ship now rides at anchor in the harbor of
London and bound for the port of St. Marie's in the royal
Province of Maryland, being marked and numbered is to
be delivered in like good order and well conditioned, the
peril of the sea alone excepted, at the port of St. Marie's to
Henrietta Maria, daughter of Egbert Neale, lord of St.
Egbert's Manor. In witness thereof the ship's Master, the
same Richard Stapleford, to whom is delivered this bill of
lading. And may God send the good ship Happy Fortune
in safety to her desired port. Amen.
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** It is a worthy document, and mayhap the packet is some-
thing of great moment," remark Father Gulick.
*' Mayhap, too, it has fuddled my brains with guessing the
meaning," laughed the lord, and then to the farmer: '"Seek
out the merchandise with this bill and take it by boat to the
Manor. Doubtless some Christmas remembrance for Etta, but
whatever it is, 'tis ours, since I have the bill from Stapleford
himself, and there is but one lord of St. Egbert's, though Neales
there be in plenty. Come, my Reverend, and grant you feel
like springing up the hill nimbly, for I have kept the lady at
the Great House waiting over long for her tea."
The strange youth who had lingered aloof from the group
yet alert to its movements, crossed the road swiftly and bow-
ing before the lord of St. Egbert with easy grace, asked the
favor of a moment.
" I could not but hear that my lord and his reverend guest
are bound for the Governor's Palace. I am but now just off
the fleet and I also have a mission which takes me your way.
May I ask your condescension to join you? "
** Right gladly do I welcome your company now and your
presence in our land," answered the lord heartily. ** Do you
come as an adventurer, or on ship businoye^*/^ ^'^turn within
the fortnight? " '^
" As yet I cannot answer your question as frankly as '4is
put," replied the stranger. " I have come because of a vow but
though I have letters from the Lord Proprietor whom I visited
in Yorkshire, addressed to his deputy. Governor Wharton, I
must part company with you when the road passes the land
attached to St. Marie's chapel. Then I pray you point out the
nearest path to the burying ground. I make my devoirs there
before I go to the Palace."
Both the lord and the priest looked at the speaker keenly.
He was of robust stature and of fair height, his age seemingly
about twenty-five. His step was firm and springing, and he
held his head up with the fire of a war horse. His eyes were
dark almost to blackness, and they looked strong and straight
into the eyes of those who questioned.
" Tis a sad pilgrimage on Christmas eve," murmured the
priest. " But it is often so in life. We must weep for those
we have lost, before we may rejoice with the living."
The stranger bowed low but made no response, and the
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382 IN AN OLD MARYLAND MANOR [Dec.,
lord, though his thoughts were busy, forebore to intrude.
Pointing to a mulberry tree, that stood off the road, he ex-
plained:
** Under this tree, my friends, good Mr. Andrew White cele-
brated the first Holy Mass on Maryland soil, and that on the
day the Pilgrims landed^ The Indians have ever stood in awe
of the spot, as where the Great Spirit rested, and to this day,
it is for them as holy as it is for us. We built a statehouse
later, but they would have none of that. Governor Leonard
Calvert made all his treaties under this mulberry tree, and
even yet all proclamatioi^s which concern the Indians, must
be nailed thereto. They pay no attention to what is fastened
on yonder walls." He pointed to the low squat house they
were passing.
"An ugly house, it must seem to you accustomed to the
elegancies of London, but it stands for vast courage and high
principle in the men who built it. My wife's father was of the
Pilgrims who came by the Ark and the Dove, and was of those
who helped build this statehouse. He stood against its having
a chimney, for that meant it would be turned into a tavern like
those in Virginia and hereabout. So *twas built without a
chimney, and Go^iecpior Leonard Calvert was wrothy of a truth.
He would come fo'die council table wrapped up in blankets
libe an Indian sachem, with a big flannel nightcap over his
wig and his feet kept warm by stones heated in the stable yard,
a sight to make one roar even at the memory. Betimes, the
councilmen consented to have a chimney built on the outside,
but they made covenant that no man should as much as mull
a tankard of ale before the fire. My good father could quaff
his drink with all, but he was strong against muddling the
heads of the lawmakers with potations brought ceaselessly
from the tap-room. But here. Sir, is the line where the land of
St. Marie's chapel crosses that of the Great House, and yonder
you can see the white path which leads to God's acre. Can I
make your way more plain? " he asked coiu'teously.
But the stranger declined further directions, and with a
hearty hand shake from the lord and a blessing from the priest,
he strode into the shadows which led to the cemetery.
When the lord of St. Egbert's had swallowed his tea and
was making ready for the ride through the forest, the Gov-
ernor's lady beckoned him into the hall :
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^ My Iord» who is ill, bade me say he has tidings of great
moment for you, and if you ride this way tomorrow to drop
by and hear the letters. And a Merry Christmas for all at the
Manor, and *tis more than we hope to have here, with my lord
in the hands of the chirurgeons and being bled every day, and
Sister Rozer with sick children and moaning that our mother
tarries in Yorkshire with Lord Baltimore instead of in the
Province with us.'*
** News of moment for me," mused the manor lord as his
sturdy horse plunged through the wood, '' and I make guess I
have but lately talked with the man who brought it. He has the
tongue of an Englishman, but his looks and his ways are
foreign."
In 1675, Maryland Province had passed from the rude
pioneer stage into an existence full of elegance and comfort.
The present lord of St. Egbert's, kinsman and ward of his
wife's father, had torn down the square log cabin which had
sheltered the family for almost forty years, and built a man-
sion of stately proportions of yellow brick fired in the kilns
by the river. A flight of wide stone steps led from the bank
to the pillared porch; and passing in from the wide hospitable
vestibule, the transition period seemed quite as evident. The
hall was furnished with deep cushioned chairs and soft rugs
were strewn on the floor, and, at the far end a great open fire-
place yawned half way across the room. The Yule logs
burned brightly. Pewter and stoneware had passed from the
dining room, and on the buffet gleamed silver and glass and
carven flagons of precious metals and tall goblets of crystal.
Just before the lord entered, my lady had been explaining
to her guest, Mr. Pennington, that the young people called the
logs. Yule, but as a matter of sentiment only.
" As a truth, from the hour the breezes blow chill from the
river, logs crackle merrily on this hearth. 'Tis the boast of the
manor lord that his fire is never dim nor the latch of his front
door ever fastened. All the buildings on the plantation are
safely chained over night, the stables, the granaries, store-
house, dairies and pantries and the steward locks the keys of
the padlocks in the strong box. But the front door stands
open by day and by night, and if the weather be cold the fire
bums on the hearth. There is food and drink on the side-
board, and the wayfarer may enter and refresh himself and go
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his way and none will question. Tis a custom we prize more
than another, for we have it from the first who came to the
wilderness. But our Etta has a spicy fir which she calls the
Yule logs, and she saves them all through the year against
Christ-tide. She says, while these Yule logs biu^n, dreams come
true."
Father Pennington turned from the comely dame to the
fair young girl who sat a little apart. He had noted her at
the landing, a home maiden who welcomed him with a
graciousness that turned his heart warm. He saw that she
caught her mother*s cape as it slipped and fastened it securely,
and that hers was the hand that brought hot drinks for all who
entered the house. She was the active head of the house and
my lady, so lovely in satin and lace and fine cambric, seemed
a grand lady of the coiu^t and not of the homely hearthstone.
"What have we here?" asked Mr. Pennington, his gaze
resting on the splendid carved mantle, where monsters
grotesque enough for gargoyles on some ancient cathedral held
the fire board aloft. " Surely your province boasts no artist
skillful enough for this?"
** Twas a bond servant whom my father brought from Lon-
don, and who was with us three years. He carved our stairway
which my Lprd Baltimore opines is the finest in the Province,
and some lovely little figures which we use for the holy man-
ger in the chapel at St. Marie's. You shall see it tomorrow
when you go with father to call on the Governor."
"He was a gentle lad," spoke up my lady, "and from
Southern parts. Our harsh climate here soon laid him low,
and he was ill many months before the end came, at the turn-
ing of the leaves. He had promised us a manger with all the
figures, carved by himself, even the magi, like one in his old
home — somewhere in England, we believe — but he told us lit-
tle of his past, though he lived here with us cared for, even as
a son. But here is my lord and the squires."
The lord hurried to the fire and drank generously of the
hot spiced brandy mulling on the hearth, and gave tankards
to the young horsemen shivering by the door. Then his quick
ear detected the sound of steps up the river flight.
"Hold the torches that they may see," he ordered the
steward, "*tis without a doubt the packet from the fleet ad-
dressed to our Etta, and she blushing and protesting she knows
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naught of the matter. Sit it down here my lads, and get some
tools* for the box is of stout wood and heavily hinged with
iron."
With a merry hammering and clattering the box was pried
open, and found to contain many smaller boxes stuffed well
with shavings and soft rags. These finally stripped away,
there came first a letter sealed with an imposing coat of arms
and written in large letters to ''The Lady Henrietta Maria
Neale, daughter of the lord of St. Egbert's Manor, to be hers for
all time.'* But within, no line told whence came the carved
crib with every figure perfect, the Holy Child in garments of
silk and linen, yellow with age, good St. Joseph and the shep-
herds and the Three Kings in finery pathetic from its ragged-
ness, and the ox and the ass stripped of their warm covering of
hair by the relentness tooth of time.
" It comes from the home of our bond servant," said the
young lady Etta in a low tremulous tone to her father and
Mr. Pennington. "Full many a time he described it for me, and
he grieved that he was to die before he could carve me enough
like it, but he said I should have one, and in time for our
Christmas. We must set it in place for the midnight Mass."
" Aye and we must move about quickly. For it is already
late, and we must snatch some rest before the river peo-
ple begin to arrive at the bank. For I shall be there to see
nothing imtoward happens as they land. Then after the
Mass and their Conmiunion, their first, my dear friend and
kinsman, in a dreary five years, we have a breakfast in the
great hall with all the tenants on the place and all the retainers
of the lords who come down our highway, the river, in answer
to our burQing flambeaus. Tis a gay time but fatiguing, and our
cooks and all the cooks of the near manors have been mak-
ing ready ever since we knew, of a surety, your Reverences
were on the fleet and would land before Christmas day. I
shall make ready to send you, good Father, to St. Inigoes
soon after the midnight Mass that you may be in good time for
the confessions and to say Mass at a-day dawn. Also, shall
I send for you and Brother Mark to join Mr. Gulick here for
Christmas supper and the revels of the young people. And
now to your cot, for you must be wearied well-nigh to illness."
It was a Christnias of almost perfect happiness, for as yet
the dark clouds of revolt and intrigue and bitter persecution
tOL. cvin. — ^25
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had not broken into the deluge which later fell upon the
fair province of Maryland. Barge after barge landed pious
manor lords and their families and their tenants and retainers
at the stately stone steps which led from the river. The great
hall where the altar had been erected, with the manger, em-
bowered in fragrant pines cut hastily in the dark, a con-
spicuous object to the left, was crowded as never before in
its history. Then the spiritual feast reverently completed, the
guests gathered in the dining hall where a fire as great as in
the hall threw out its welcome.
Father Pennington escorted to the river by a guard of
manor lords, had set sail with Brother Mark and many ham-
pers of good things for the mission at St. Inigoes. Then with
a noisy exchange of the wishes proper on Christmas morning,
the company sat down for a breakfast which would have been
a proper sister of the Lord Mayor's banquet in London. It was
a complaint of the housewives in Maryland that, so bountiful
was their fare all the year through, there was nothing left
with which to make merry in a special manner on Christmas
day. Great sides of beef had been roasted, and whole pigs,
fresh and smoked, awaited the skilful knife of Ralph Beamor,
the steward. Crisp brown turkey and ducks were laid on plat-
ters on the buffet; hot drinks in vast pitchers were passed
about and good home-made bread and cakes of brown
sugar and spices. For the Marylanders of 1675 were a sturdy
race and their capacity for food, especially when the wind
blew cold from the river, is a tradition to make their descen-
dants envious. The faint streaks of light proclaimed the
dawn before the last boatload faded in the mists of the river,
and the lord of St. Egbert^s left his post at the landing and
stumbled wearily towards his bed.
" Tis a mercy we have this right joyful day, but once a
year, my Etta,'* he said jovially to his daughter, as she handed
him a last hot cup before he sank to repose. " And now let
me sleep my fill, happen what will, for I feel numb with cold
and fatigue."
So it fell out that a messenger came from the Governor's
in the early afternoon, and was ushered into the great hall and
seated honorably at the hearth and given warm drink and food
by my young lady Henrietta Maria, for my lady of the Manor
felt the effect of the night turned into day and was resting as
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deeply as her lord. He was a distant, reserved jroung man, who
held his head high and looked the questioner straight in the
face, but with a deference which stirred my lady Henrietta
Maria into the memory of something past. She entertained
him a little shyly, for her life had been passed at the Manor.
All she knew of the great world was from the guests at her
father's and the personages of renown who, from time to time,
were feted at the Great House. But it seemed to content her
guest, and the two were chatting like old friends, before my
lord, finally aroused and told of the Governor's messenger, ap-
peared in the hall.
He was not surprised to see the stranger, whom he had
directed to the churchyard, nor to have him crave a moment's
confidence, before he perused the state papers sent from the
Great House. "Only the need of His Excellency, who has
grown fearfully ill since morning, would have sent me to your
home, my lord, before I had met you at the Governor's and
told you my mission. But necessity took the affair in her
own hands and I am here. Some three odd years ago you
took compassion on a youth who besought you at the English
coast, and begged a goodly sum of money for a pressing need."
Then dropping lightly to his knee, he pressed the lord's hand
to his lips. "May our God Who shows mercy as we show
mercy, requite you for that deed of gentleness, you and yoiffs,
until your generations run out."
"Aye and I have been requited," said the lord heartily,
" he brought us more than we could give back to him, and all
. we have to comfort us is that we made the home of his exile
happy. He told me ere he died that the money which I gave
him would be paid back gold piece by gold piece, and that
what he had given us, priceless things in music and fine sen-
timent and wondrous things in carving, was in payment of his
debt for the love and comfort of our home. My daughter Etta
loved him from the first. We feared his going would sad-
den all her life. Now we know differently."
"My lord since I know you so well already, and by what
His Excellency and Mistress Wharton have told me, I shall not
offer you gold. But you see in me Deo dandum, one for whom
a life has been given, and who offers his life in retiu*n to God
and tlirough your hands. I hold myself ready to finish the
term of my foster-brother as your bond servant. Your gold
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388 IN AN OLD MARYLAND MANOR [Dec,
freed my father from a grievous load of debt and sent my sis-
ter happy across the seas with a dower to wed her Italian
lover. My father is with her, for he is penniless, though the
rightful heir of Wilton and lord of its broad domain. My fos-
ter-brother would have been a famous artist had he not gone
in my place to work out the debt made by your gold."
•* Tis Christmas day, my young lord of Wilton," said the
lord of St. Egbert's, "when we forgive all sorts of debts in
memory of the Divine Babe Who has made all mankind deb-
tors to Him and to one another. We shall talk of this later.
Meantime, you know the manger has come. You sent it. But
how, with the ELing's myrmidons in your old halls? That much
I knew from the bondman, and that he was not of the blood,
but brother by adoption."
" Aye my lord, and that is a tale for some stormy night,
when we crouch by the fire. But now the dispatches. His
Excellency is ill beyond help of the chirurgeons and he wishes
the Council called hastily, even tomorrow morning, that a
fitting man, mayhap yourself or Mr. Thomas Notley, may take
over the office of Deputy in behalf of young Cecilius, as his
father, the Lord Proprietor, may tarry another six months in
London and York. I grieve because sorely does Mistress
Wharton need the comfort of her mother, my Lady Baltimore,
in the sorrow fast coming to her."
" Well, naught can be done tonight, for we keep Christmas
apart from the worries of state, and I promised to dance with
a bride from .the Acension Manor. Tarry a moment while I
apprise my lady of your coming, and that you will be with us
until you must needs go back with the fleet."
The short winter day was closing in before the lord and his
guest joined the revelers at the big hearth. My lady who had
loved the bondman was a flurry at the arrival of his brother.
Such happenings were common enough in the Province, nobles
of high degree were often working out debts, but that such a
fine-spoken youth should come to their home was an incident
far out of the common, and to have him remain till Twelfth
night put all the young maids a-flutter. Father Pennington
and Brother Mark had arrived and were seated with Mr.
Gulick, in the blaze of the logs, to hear the tale, over and in
many versions, from Etta and her row of younger sisters and
the young misses from about the river.
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'*For a full month we hear naught but of balls and fox
hunts and fine dinners for Christmas tide, and we shall show
our young lord from London what life is in our Province/'
my lady smoothed her fine silk skirts. '* As for sweetmeats*
we near the ports, have them to our cost all through the year.
My lord orders seventy tubs of rock candy and five hundred
pounds of brown sugar, and spices and syrups to make yoii
open your eyes. We shall have dancing, and in honor of our
guest I shall permit the young people to trip about until nine.
Seven-thirty is our usual time to stop the fiddlers. But our
Etta looks very happy."
As, indeed, she did, leaning by the balustrade and point-
ing out the marvels of the carving to the stranger. What they
said mattered little — ^probably what young people have said
all through the centuries when Yule logs biu*n and mistletoe
gleams in the evergreen garlands about the sconces.
What Father Pennington said was more to the point:
" Our young lord of Wilton stays until Twelfthnight? I make
a wager he will ask you and your good lord a gift of the magi,
which it may twitch your heart strings to grant.*'
** Aye, but he comes back in the spring. He will not take
our Etta away. That he has promised my lord, but we leap
to conclusions. She never laid eyes upon him, till this day
while my lord and I were sleeping."
But Father Pennington could read deep into the human
heart and he laughed, as did the lord of St. Egbert's, who had
joined the group at the fire.
Only by visions can we live. The river still rushes from
the north, but the hills which fringe its banks are not piu*-
plish with virgin forest, but gleam golden with grain fields
and the smoke from the farmhouses curls lazily over the water.
Islands dot the channels and bold blufiTs rise sheer from the
banks. The water breaks into two streams and encircles the
promontory with protecting arms. But where is the city which
rested on the hills like a queen on her throne?
Desolation more desolate than when the white man came
in the " winged canoes " rests over what was once St. Marie's
City, and only those with inner knowledge can trace the out-
lines of the chapel, the first house of God erected on Mary-
land soil. Only those with inner knowledge can point out the
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outlines of the Great House, the dwelling of those Catholic
Governors who established the first State in all the world,
where people were governed by laws made by themselves; the
first civil government in all Christian lands, administered
under what later developed into the cardinal principles of
American liberty: the harmonious relations of Church and
State and their independence of each other. Only those
who love the glorious history of Maryland, bow reverently
before the ruins of the statehouse, where in tones which
rise full and clear above the bigotry and intolerance of the
age, freedom of conscience was announced for the first time as
man's inheritance and inviolable right.
What matter that St. Marie's City is a ruin, when such a
fragrant memory breathes through her desolate streets? When
such a halo wreathes the brow of those early manor lords and
lawmakers, what matter that their homes are lost in the
wilderness of forest and farm? It may be, as said one who
came of a race nourished at a manor like St. Egbert's in de-
livering a magnificent requiem over St. Marie's City on the
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the
Ark and the Dove, March 24, 1884, " that though the renown of
Maryland's ancient capital gives grandeur and glory to
the foundations of the American nation, and is an inspira-
tion and pride to its later annals, yet history has recorded its
birth without a smile, and written its epitaph without a tear."
But the vision of its founders, something not seen of the eye
nor felt with the hand, outlives the grandest tribute history
ever paid, and is that imperishable something which is leading
all the world towards the true liberty proclaimed by the stones
•f the ruined city of St. Marie's.
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Bevp Books.
BEAUMARCHAIS AND THE WAR OF AMERICAN IN-
DEPENDENCE. ]Py Elizabeth S. Kite. Two volumes. Bos-
ton: Richard G. Badger. $5.00 net.
OUT TO WIN. The Story of America in France. By Coningsby
Dawson. New York: John Lane Co. $1.25 net.
One of those accidents almost more curious than design,
brings these two books to the reviewer's desk together. Remote
from each other in style and perspective, Miss Kite's scholarly
monograph on a man who died in 1799, and Lieutenant Dawson's
moving tribute to the American forces in the Great War, fit
together like story and sequel.
It has lately become something of a convention, perhaps, to
speak of our debt to France. General Pershing's fine : " Lafayette,
nous voilil " is accepted as expressing our attitude, but our very
acceptance of the phrase has tended to stereotype it. No better
reminder of the reality for which it stands could be found than
these two books. In one we attend the very inception of the
scheme for French aid to which we proudly acknowledge our-
selves debtors. We trace the life of the remarkable man of whom
it is said: ** Long before the historic dinner at Metz, where Lafay-
ette conceived his chivalrous design, before even the signing
of the Declaration of Independence, Beaumarchais had planned
and worked out the details of the aid to be rendered by France,
and then literally had forced the cautious and conservative gov-
ernment of France to acquiesce with his plans." In the other, we
read Lieutenant Dawson's record of how our debt was being paid
in France. This particular point is not the purpose of his book,
however. Lieutenant Dawson sets out to interpret, with his own
keenness and generosity, the whole fighting attitude of America.
But the chapter " The War of Compassion," which details the
positive achievements of the American Red Cross in France dur-
ing the inferno of the German invasion, lingers in the memory.
Of military accomplishment, when Out to Win was written, its
author could only predict the noble promise of our men. His
eager praise of them has been brilliantly justified.
If we keep to the Jianguage of debtor and creditor in speaking
of our relations with France, what we have done may seem a large
installment on even so large an obligation. But surely we have
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392 NEW BOOKS [Dec,
owed some special amende to France in the person of Beaumar-
chais. Not Lafayette himself admired more the cause and courage
of the Americans, or rendered them more vital aid. Yet Lafay-
ette has not met at our hands with the scant and formal requital
we have accorded to Caron de Beaumarchais.
In the words of Mr. Bigelow : "To him, more than to any other
person, belongs the credit of making Louis XVL comprehend the
political importance of aiding the Colonies in their struggle with
Great Britain; he planned and executed the ingenious scheme by
which the aid was to be extended; he sent the first munitions of
war and supplies which the Colonists received from abroad and
he sent them, too, at a time when, humanly speaking, it was rea-
sonably certain that without such aid from some quarter, the
Colonists must have succumbed."
This is indisputable. Yet he worked, by agreement, under the
handicap of secrecy. When, in the first years, it suited the French
Government to appease the English ministry by opposing the en-
terprises of Beaumarchais, it did so. The enmity of Arthur Lee
was enlisted against him, to the great harm of his credit with
Congress. Benjamin Franklin was prejudiced against him by his
own " dear good friend " Doctor Dubourg, and refused altogether
to treat with him. He received nothing of the tobacco which it had
been expressly stipulated with the Colonies was to be returned for
his supplies. Finally, the famous affair of the " lost million "
was construed against him — to the no very great credit of our
Congress — and was made an excuse for not paying him anything
of the formidable sum to which he was entitled. After the energetic
and brilliant work of years in aid of the Revolutionary cause, the
net result was that he was out enormously in pocket and moral
credit in America.
This unjust situation was afterward partly reversed in 1835,
when the government paid to the heirs of Beaumarchais part of
their ancestor's just claim. But this could not cancel our debt of
gratitude to the man to whose brain and character we, as a nation,
owe so much. Beaumarchais was too large a man not to realize
how natural it was that existing circumstances should militate
against him. To the last he spoke of the Americans as " my
friends, the free men of America."
As we read the facts in Miss Kite's well authenticated biogra-
[ihy, we share her regret for the truth of the accusation: that
Americans were ungrateful, " as shown by our utterly ignoring
the services of Beaumarchais in the cause of American indepen-
dence/'
To such a state of mind, Lieutenant Dawson's serious and
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generous praise of our work in France comes very gratefully.
Never has help been more sorely needed than that given on such
a vast scale by our Red Cross in France. Before we were for-
mally at war, our relief units ** by their mere presence condemned
the cause that brought them there." At Evian-les-Bains, ** the first
point of call across the French frontier for the repatriis return-
ing from their German bondage/' the American Red Cross made
the situation endurable. ** It might have been a funeral cortige,
only there was a horrible difference: the corpses pretended to be
alive.'* Among them our great institution of mercy moved, ex-
amining, classifying, advising, helping, where possible rehabilitat-
ing. It restored ** in the affirmative with mercy, precisely the
quality which Hun fury and propaganda had destroyed with lies,
.... their belief in the nobility of mankind."
Scenes of this sort recall our purpose in the War. We did
not go out merely to pay a debt. The purpose which, under God,
it now seems probable we may have aided in partly realizing, is
larger. Its scope is the fair ideal which aims to make liberty
and justice possible for all men. But the smaller theme of grati-
tude and recognition blends with the larger one. As we have the
distinction of representing most nearly, in form of government
and national ideal, those things which the world is more and
more coming to desire, it is surely not inappropriate to consider
with them the forces which helped make this unique fortune pos-
sible for us. In the forefront of those forces stands France, and
with the foremost of the French, Beaumarchais.
HERSELF— IRELAND. By Elizabeth P. O'Connor. New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co. $2.50 net.
A delightful lightness of narrative pervades this volume. It
has all the charm of a well-read, far-traveled friend who talks
well, and never bores. It does not try to teach; it tells a pleasing
story. Like a fair, country road, it wanders here and there; is at
times a bit bumpy, but shows on every side the most interesting,
human and fascinating country in the world.
Mrs. O'Connor is more brave than discreet. She openly
confesses that she has been only one year in Ireland, and then
presumes that she knows Ireland and the Irish. Maybe it is the
woman's power of intuition that saves her. However, she does
show a breadth of vision and a sympathetic appreciation that
makes her work an interesting and fairly accurate study of Ire-
land and her people. Her attitude is not one of condescension,
but of respect and admiration for the great faith, the unselfish
purpose and cheerful whole-heartedness of the Irish.
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The book gives more of externals than of intimate intensive
study of the Irish. It might be said that it is a pleasing popular
lecture, written for the sake of telling a story, rather than of
bringing a message.
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN HISTORY. By
Salwyn Schapiro, Ph.D. New York: Houghton, Mifllin Co.
$3.50.
Mr. Sch^iro has succeeded in establishing, as regards method
and scholarship, a new and valuable standard for the fair treat-
ment of modern events in text-book form. "Believing that the
main function of history is to explain the present," he shows a
breadth of outlook and an insight superior even to that of C. D.
Hazen, whose Europe Since 1915 has been justly reputed
the best political history of its size thus far produced in
English. The prominence Mr. Schapiro gives to literature and
to definite expositions of Socialism, Syndicalism, and Feminism
are features of special excellence. In dealing with the revolution-
ary activities of the past century, he fails, at times, to appreciate the
true position of the Catholic Church, and frequently uses the
word " people " where " mob " would alone be historically
accurate. A noteworthy instance of this is his account of the
Ferrer case and of the Barcelona riots. On the whole, however,
he has shown a discernment far beyond the usual in the non-
Catholic historian. One gross error, deserving of notice, is the
statement that " Lutheran Prussia subscribed to it (the doctrine
of the Divine Right of Kings) as heartily as Catholic Spain.*'
Spain is the one country of western Europe where this doctrine was
not taught. Outside of Protestant Germany and Protestant Eng-
land, none, except the Gallicans in France and the Febronians in
Austria, ever subscribed to it. This points to the one defect of the
book taken as a whole. The author fails to render intelligible why
the Nineteenth century was so disturbed politically: why govern-
ments could find no other justification for authority than sheer
force or why liberal aspirations never succeeded in giving any bet-
ter accoiyit of themselves than by stirring up one revolution after
another. Yet the answer was not far to seek. The Reformation
had simply robbed the people of their historic rights and had
established absolutism; and if we, in this country, enjoy a liberty
wholly unlike the spurious brand so much advertised during the
past on the European continent, it is due to the fact that we in-
herit the Catholic mediaeval traditions of liberty, recaptured at
the Revolution of 1688 in England, and handed on to us by E«g-
lish Whigs.
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UNCHAINED RUSSIA. By Charles Edward Russell. New York:
D. Appleton & Co. $1.50.
Any book on Russia today suffers from sudden changes of
events. This, by the eminent Socialist leader and member of the
Root Commission, is less out of date than the majority. Mr. Rus-
sell is always a loyal American and always a clear observer. Un-
fortunately he is not well cast for the rdle of Daniel, as subse-
quent events in the Bolshevik reign of terror sadly prove.
The first thing he encountered in Russia was a distrust of
America and a lack of understanding by Americans of the Rus-
sian psychology. Both were due to German tincturing of news
items, German bribe money and our backwardness in " socialis-
tic" progress. We can understand German propaganda and
bribery, but in speaking of America as being socialistically be-
hind the times Mr. Russell falls into the pit so many of his fel-
lows encounter: he mistakes difference for progress. That we
Americans refused to fraternize with Germans, for example, is no
evidence of our backwardness in universal brotherhood. The
Russians did it under the circumstances of sudden freedom and
plenty of Teutonic money, but at the same time they refused to
extend the hand of fellowship to their British and American
brothers! The almost universal interest in sociological subjects,
which Mr. Russell claims the Russians show, does not necessarily
prove progress. We Americans are different from the Russians in
these matters, not sadly behind the times.
Another pitfall into which the author tumbles, is his failure
to see anjrthing but the dreamer in the Bolshevik. Quite an active
dreamer, one might say, when he boasts of a daily slaughter of
five hundred bourgeois, and sets a special day for a big killing!
The Bolshevik is a symbol of the transition between discipline
imposed from above by an autocratic, militaristic autocracy and
the discipline imposed by the free will of a people on themselves.
He has been freed from the one and has not attained the other;
meanwhile he knows no law. He is to be pitied — and watche'd;
not patted on the back affectionately, as Mr. Russell would have
us do.
Where Mr. Russell does score is in his analysis of the peasant,
the economic elements at work, the conditions of schools, rail-
roads, cooperative societies and women under autocratic rule
and at present. He sees clearly their possibilities and their chance
for the future in the development of a stable entity out of this
revolutionary ferment.. One certainly shares with him the plea
that, during this evolution, we " be patient with whatever vagaries
and illusions the new-born democracy of Russia may indulge \m
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while finding itself." Patient? Yes, and helpful. For our task,
now that peace has come, is to help build up the wreckage of Rus-
sia into a livable and self-respecting nation.
LIFE OF ST. JOSEPH OF COPERTINO. Translated and adapted
by the Rev. Francis Laing, O.M.I. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.00.
This, the first extended biography in English of St. Joseph
Copertino, usually called Cupertino, was translated from the
Italian of Father Pastrovicchia. It is a history of many miracles
and marvels, of wondrous flights or levitations, for God Who is
wonderful in His saints showed His power thus in the simple,
humble Friar Minor. One cannot but think he would have been
specially dear to St. Francis of Assisi, had he lived in the days of
the great founder. His uneventful life bore great fruit for souls,
so deeply marked was it with the Cross, the seal of the Master.
The translation is unfortunately poor, the English being far from
idiomatic.
CREJDIT OF NATIONS: A STUDY OF THE EUROPEAN WAR.
By J. Laurence Laughlin, Ph.D. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons. $3.50.
" The ultimate causes " of the War " are undoubtedly to be
found in economic conditions," says Professor Laughlin in his
opening chapter, even though the immediate causes may have been
dynastic ambition, exaggerated nationalism, and lust for power;
and he proceeds to explain the operation of these ultimate causes.
In the period since 1880 the world has been experiencing an un-
paralleled industrial revolution in which all of the progressive
nations have participated. The nations have made their various
contributions to industrial progress, the contribution of Germany
being due mainly to her organizing ability. Germany advanced
during this industrial revolution relatively more rapidly than the
other nations, and there appeared to be no economic ends to be
gained by war which she could not better obtain by peace. But
made ambitious by her growing power she dreamed of Mittel-
europa. Feeling that she must expand geographically to the
southeast, she was determined to prevent Russia from extending
her sphere of influence in the Balkan States and so the War came.
" It is mere deception to speak as if Germany had been deprived
of the chance for unlimited industrial and commercial growth in
times of peace, and as though she had to go to war for the right of
legitimate economic development."
The second chapter on " War and Credit " treats of the gen-
eral principles of credit, while the four succeeding chapters treat
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respectively of English, French, German, and American credit
operations since the outbreak of the War. The book is full of in-
teresting facts so skillfully interwoven with the author's money
theory, as almost to justify the optimism expressed in the preface
to the effect that ** stripped of their technicalities, these matters
can be made easy of comprehension."
The author indulges in many entertaining bits of humor in
his treatment of the rival theory to his own; that is, the " quantity
theory." But he does not inform his readers that this "obso-
lete," " archaic " and " fallacious " quantity theory still has so
much vitality left, that the majority of American writers on money
and credit prefer it to his own. He is especially incensed at the
fact that the British statesmen in their financing of the War ap-
pear not to agree with his theory of credit, but he is at any rate so
generous as to grant that their theorizing had no untoward conse-
quences.
HISTORICAL RECORDS AND STUDIES. United States Catholic
Historical Society. Volume XII. June, 1918.
The United States Catholic Historical Society does an in-
creasingly valuable work in the regular publication of these
papers. It is the reasonable hope of all truth-lovers that the
claims of historical research will be more and more generally
recognized with the progress of the years. The part played in
the historical education of the public by fair-minded and interest-
ing Catholic writers is an extremely vital one, and a generous
measure of praise is due the members of the Catholic Historical
Society, both for their grasp of this fact, and for the way in which
they act on it. Valuable and interesting reading is provided in
each of ^he eight papers which form this volume : " The Church
in the ^J^and of San Domingo," Peter Condon, A.M.; "Francis
Cooper," William H. Bennett; " Catholics in the War with Mex-
ico," Thomas F. Meehan; "Destruction of the Charlestown Con-
vent;" "Alaska in 1779,'* translated from the original Spanish
statement, by Rev. Walter Thornton, S.J.; "Pierre Toussaint,"
Henry Binsse; "The Church of St. Vincent de Paul, New York,"
Henry Binsse; "Our Diplomatic Relations with the Holy See."
GERMAN ATROCITIES. By Newell Dwight Hillis. New York:
Fleming H. Revell Co. $1.00 net.
At the request of several bankers of New York, Dr. Hillis
made a personal investigation of the charges of German atroci-
ties. He examined the records of the Commissions of Belgium,
France, Poland, Serbia and Armenia, and also journeyed through
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the devastated regions of Belgium and France where he obtained
the testimony of eyewitnesses.
The facts as he gathered them the author first used in
speeches for the First Liberty Loan. They form a recital of such
wanton cruelty as to fill the reader with disgust and resentment.
The book is a terrible record of unjustifiable brutality and ruth-
lessness. The evidence is of such a revolting nature as to chal-
lenge the imagination.
Dr. Hillis has included in his book some photographs which
add to its vividness, but seem a little unnecessary in their nauseat-
ing reality.
CAROLYN OF THE CORNERS. By Ruth Belmore Endicott. New
York: Dodd Mead & Co. $1.35 net.
The little girl in this story is one of the juvenile army who
have recently undertaken the transformation of the world. She
is left, a supposed orphan, to the care of a gloomy small-town
uncle. Little by little her presence changes the lives of those
around her until they have all learned to " look up " and be happy.
Perhaps it is its open missionary spirit which makes this book
pall a little on the reader. We have been lectured on the duty of
cheerfulness so often of late from the infant pulpit that some of
us sigh covertly for the spankable, lovable naughtiness of the old-
fashioned enfant terrible.
FANATIC OR CHRISTLVN7 By Helen R. Martin. Garden City,
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.40.
This novel is hardly up to Mrs. Martin's usual standard. The
Pennsylvania Dutch community, her own particular territory, is
again depicted, it is true, but subdued to an almost unjioticeable
background for a singularly uninteresting story. Two risters, of
opposite types of character, are in conflict for the po:»ojssion of
a fortune and a man's love. The modern, progressive, unortho-
dox "Christian," of course, embodies all the virtues, while her
orthodox sister stands for selfishness and greed. Neither type is
convincing, and the action is tenuous and unreal. We felt true
sorrow when the old Pennsylvania Dutch mother was stricken,
and no longer delighted us with the characteristic argot which
Mrs. Martin can reproduce so inimitably.
FOLLY AND OTHER POEMS. By Theodore Maynard. London:
Erskine Macdonald, Ltd. $1.25 net.
Mr. Maynard is the newest recruit of the modern mediaevalists
— that happy band, almost wholly Catholic, bent upon recaptur-
ing something of the faith, the fire and the folly of " Merrie Eng-
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land." The Belloc-Chesterton-Kilmer school it might perhaps
be called, had not Mr. Chesterton long ago repudiated that some-
what forbidding title. At all events, Theodore Maynard is worthy
•f his allegiances. He is an artist in word and metre, with a form
of feeling and a fresh originality of thought which not only pro-
\ide beautiful things for the present, but promise great things for
the future.
In this little book are songs of faith and songs of travel,
drinking songs, and songs of love sweeter and happier than our
torn world has recently rejoiced in. Probably the most striking
ef the whole collection is Laughter — a poem entirely worthy of
Francis Thompson, had Thompson's genius not been bound up
inevitably with the Divine Sorrow rather than the Divine Mirth.
But Mr. Maynard is incontestably at his best with happy
themes.
Lovers of Catholic literature will do well to give the
book a warm and wide welcome. For Mr. Maynard is not merely
a new poet: he is a poet.
CHRISrS MASTERPIECE. By the Rev. WUliam F. Robison. S J.
St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.25.
This " Study of the One True Church," is a solid contribution
to the needs of the present day. It is eminently American, ad-
dressed to the man in the street, who is inclined to look upon re-
ligion in a practical minded way, and is yet possessed of a some-
what mystic vein which renders him able to apprehend and to
appreciate the things of the spirit when brought to his attention.
These lectures portray the King to Whom His Father hath de-
livered a Kingdom; the King's Magna Charta, given to His
Church: "Go ye and teach all nations," "Some Prerogatives of
the Kingdom;" " The Primate of the Kingdom;" " The Seal of the
King's Signet," lead up to " The Bridegroom and His Bride." The
freshness of treatment retains all the vividness of the spoken
word, holding the reader's attention with oratorical power. We
trust this is only the breaking of the ground by this able and
zealous preacher.
THE PILGRIMAGE OF LIFE. • HELPS TO THE CHRISTDIN
WAYFARER. Rev. Albert Muntsch, S.J. St. Louis: B.
Herder. $1.00.
This book of spiritual reading meets the needs of life, not in
the cloister, but in the busy haunts of the world : it teaches man
to use his religion for daily wear, not to keep it for Sunday.
The work is divided into four parts: "Life's Warfare;"
" Our Spiritual Armor;" " When the Lamp of Hope Burns Low;"
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*' Thoughts for All Times." These in turn are subdivided into
sections of three or four pages— some even shorter — thus making
a short spiritual reading complete in itself, which may serve for
quiet reflection fruitful for the soul. It should equip a man to
give an ac<^ount of the practical side of Catholicism.
OUR LADY'S MONTH. By Sister Mary Philip of the Bar Con-
vent, York. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.30.
As the title indicates, this little book consists of short chap-
ters on Our Lady's titles, some taken from the Litany of Loretto,
others from various devotions. They are well suited to the use
of sodalities of the Blessed Virgin. It is a pity the verses were not
chosen from the liturgical hymns, and that the price of the book
is so high. The Rt. Rev. Bishop of Northampton contributes the
preface.
JESUS IN THE EUCHARIST. By the Rev. Ferreol Girardey,
C.SS.R. St. Louis: B. Herder. $L00.
Originally published as a series of articles, the chapters of
this book offer simple expositions of the teaching of the Church
concerning the central dogma of the Eucharist. They are suited
to the seeker after truth outside the pale of the Church, as well
as to the increase of intelligent devotion in the faithful. A special
chapter on Holy Communion contains the interesting story of
Gustave Maria Bruni of Milan, a little Italian boy of marvelous
precocity and spiritual development.
HAPPY TALES FOR STORY TIME. By Eleanor L. Skinner and
Ada M. Skinner. New York: The American Book Co.
64 cents.
Two teachers have had the happy thought to collect, adapt
and simplify for very youthful readers some of the charming
stories of the world literature. Their work has been done with skill
and judgment. By clever iteration the earlier stories are made
possible for the little reader, who is gradually led on into an en-
larged vocabulary. In the last story we find the gem in the
matrix of Maeterlinck's Blue Bird. All the artificial glitter of
his many-facetted false philosophy is lacking, and the child is
led straight to the heart of a great truth — that happiness is found
at home. But in the " Land of Memory " we experience a sense of
disappointment inevitable to the Catholic. It is not thought of
our beloved dead, but prayer for them that wakes them to new
and fuller life. But for the presence of this half-truth the author,
not the compilers, is to blame.
The Happy Tales will win deserved popularity.
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AMERICAN CITY PROGRESS AND THE LAW. By Howard Lee
McBain. New York: Columbia University Press. $1.50.
This volume contains the substance of a series of lectures
given by Professor McBain at Cooper Union in 1917. It deals
with the legal principles underlying the operation of our munic-
ipal government, pointing out in what respects the law facilitates
or obstructs the city in its endeavor to apply new policies to the
solution of existing problems. The author gives the meaning of
legislative home rule» and cites numerous cases of strict construc-
tion of the cities' charters.
He takes the stand that it would be highly desirable if the
courts would hold that any doubt against the powers of a munic-
ipal corporation should be resolved, not necessarily against the
corporation but always in favor of the public, whether for or
against the corporation. He gives a splendid exposition of the
police power, citing in it the attempts to solve the question of the
regulations of billboards and the abolition of the smoke nuisance.
Additional questions treated in a broad and sane manner are:
city planning, building heights, zoning, excess condemnation,
municipal ownership of public utilities, control of living costs,
municipal recreation, commerce and industry.
Professor McBain has performed a valuable service in this
work. Up to this time the legislatures which insist upon super-
vising the cities, to their vast detriment, have been narrow and
unjustifiably coercive in preventing freedom of action on the
part of municipalities. This clear and logical statement of the
cities* position will do much to bring about a better understand-
ing of the problems they are facing, and, perhaps, gain for them
aid in their honest attempt to solve those problems.
JERUSALEM, PAST AND PRESENT. By Gaius Gleen Atkins,'
D.D. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co. $1.00.
Dr. Atkins has taken occasion of the recent redemption of the
Holy Places by Christian arms to present us a study of the sig-
nificance of the Holy City in its four aspects: the Glory of the
Great King, the Desire of the Exile, the Despair of Our Lord, and
the Goal of the Crusader. Written in a dignified and rhythmic
prose, the book is penetrated with deep reverence and sturdy piety.
Where the author's Christianity verges on sentimentality, the
Catholic reader readily ascribes it to absence of that firm in-
tellectual position which he is accustomed to regard as the basis
of his religion of the heart. The historical narratives and vivid
descriptive reconstructions appear particularly just and exact.
It is not quite clear, however, whether, for Dr. Atkins, Jesus is
VOL. cvin. — ^26
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God, and the Bible the inspired Word of God. He possesses the
concept of the Church as a visible society founded by Christ,
vaguely, if at all, and his evident and welcomed appreciation of
the Catholic Middle Ages leaves one bewildered, since he per-
sistently refuses to look on the supremacy of Peter and the civiliz-
ing influence of the Catholic Church in those ages as patent his-
torical facts.
RICHARD BALDOCE. By Archibald Marshall. New York: Dodd,
Mead & Co. $1.50 net.
Mr. Marshall has made a reputation for himself as the spokes-
man of everyday life in rural England — everyday life in infinite
detail; and still he never permits himself to become lost in the
mazes of the inconsequential, as is the wont of many writers who
attempt to achieve the intimate touch. Not so Archibald Mar-
shall. He is a literary artist: he knows just how and when to
pass over detail, how and when to enter into it. The result is a
remarkable flavor of reality; not a strong flavor, but a persuasive
and all pervading one.
This story of Richard Baldock is a charming romance, a sim-
ple account of life's struggles and misunderstandings, with not
much plot, but with a compelling atmosphere of suspense — ^the
same suspense that makes us hang upon every succeeding word
of the narrative of a friend's life and progress. No one can set a
book like this aside, once it is begun; and yet it cannot be said to
have one single "thrill" in all its four hundred pages. But it
has characters, characters such as Dickens might have created.
And for genuine drama, it would be difiBcult, indeed, to find any-
where a stifl'er conflict than that between Richard and his
rigid, well-intentioned but utterly purblind father. There is also
a delightful mixture of book lore and nature ken in the story: the
forest remains always the background of the tale; but books and
the love of books likewise exercise their charm.
ALBERTA: ADVENTURESS. By Pierre L'Ermite. Translated
by John Hannon, with a Foreword by Fran9ois Copp^e. New
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.35 net.
This novel gives a very good insight into social and industrial
conditions in France before the War. Its theme, the curse of
abandoning the country for the allurements of the metropolis,
is not a new one to American readers, yet it is worked out so
skillfully that the story from beginning to end is one of absorbing
interest. Daniel Dietzch, a clever unscrupulous engineer, and his
partner Alberta Harmmster, an adventuress, contrive to interest
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Count Bruno de Saint- Agilbert in their railway car works in Paris.
The young Count, tired of the old ch&teau in Fleurines and fas-
cinated by the prospect of a business career, only too eagerly
offers to finance the company. He gives up everything — his
mother's love, the ch&teau, the honor of the family, and goes to
Paris to become the general manager of the company and the dupe
of Dietzch and Alberta. On the opposite end of the social scale
is Claude Routier, a humble peasant, who has been lured from
his father's farm in Fleurines by the same precious pair and
offered the position of superintendent in the factory. The ad-
ventures of the foolish young Count, the machinations of Dietzch
and Alberta, the struggles of Claude against the plotting of his
workers, combine to make this one of the most interesting pieces
of recent fiction.
The plot is not the only source of interest. All of the char-
acters are sketched in with a firm and sure hand. If a criticism
be made, it is that the secondary characters stand out too promi-
nently. Yet we would not forego the characterization of old
Mathurin Routier, grim and implacable, in his refusal to forgive
his son, and of the Countess Dowager and her niece. Luce.
Especially fine is the portrayal of the Countess, a splendid exam-
ple of the devout French Catholic mother.
- ... --,,.,- ,-^
ELIZABETirS CAMPAIGN. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward. New
York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.50.
Several of Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novels have their inspira-
tion in some intellectual or social problem of the age. In this
present novel, which deals with the reactions of various members
of English society to the demands of war conditions, she assumes
the rdle of propagandist in her country's cause. She draws a
striking picture of the different attitudes towards the War preva-
lent in England — ardent patriotism, selfish indifference, war
weariness, pacifism, in order to throw into relief the vital neces-
sity of solidarity among all ranks and classes. Her principal
theme is the process by which Squire Mannering, selfishly ab-
sorbed in the cult of the classics and blind to all sense of the
urgent needs of the time, is reclaimed from his supineness through
the good ofSces of his secretary, Elizabeth Bremerton. Before this
end is effected, however, the humanizing touch of bereavement is
needed to bring home to the squire the horror of the nation's
visitation. The subject of the story lends itself readily to a dis-
play of Mrs. Ward's special powers of describing certain types of
upper-class life, and of creating an atmosphere of culture and
scholarship. Yet some of the characters are imperfectly realized:
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Elizabeth, for all the settling of Tanagra figurines, Greek manu-
scripts, and the Winged Nike, remains a mere lay figure, and the
Squire seems impossibly fatuous. On the other hand Desmond
Mannering is a convincing embodiment of buoyant English youth.
The chief charm of the book lies in the uniform distinction and
grace of writing which are Mrs. Ward's by birthright and training.
Its greatest lack is the absence of the creative imagination that
conceives incidents and characters through sheer artistic im-
pulse, and with no conscious purpose of didacticism.
THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY. By Meredith Nicholson. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.00 net.
Mr. Nicholson's handsome volume on the Middle West is
more than a mere commentary; and yet it cannot be said to be a
deliberate or cold-blooded "interpretation." It is so genial and
frank a performance that it partakes much of the nature of a
heart-to-heart talk about "folks and things" — ^without any of
that smirk of self-complacence which so often makes this sort
of writing distasteful. Mr. Nicholson takes his Middle West seri-
ously, but not so seriously as to lose his sense of humor. In fact,
his refreshing humor renders the serious thought to which many
of his pages provoke the reader, palatable as well as digestible.
The scope of the book might well be said to outreach its de-
sign: it might be taken with very few reservations, as an inter-
pretation of the whole of America rather than a mere section of
it. " It may be," Mr. Nicholson suggests, " that American political
and social phenomena are best observed in States whose earliest
settlement is so recent as to form a background for contrast;"
and we think he is right in his surmise. Certainly he is right in
his appeal for a return to religious values, and he need have no
fear that he is " only crying vainly for the restoration of some-
thing that has gone forever."
THE SOCIAL PLAYS OP ARTHUR WING PINERO. Edited by
Clayton Hamilton. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. $2.00 net.
EXILES. By J. Joyce. New York: B. W. Huebsch. $1.00.
Between the plays in these two volumes, which come simul-
taneously to the reviewer's hand, is a span of exactly a quarter of
a century of English drama. Those of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero
were among the greatest of the "renaissance of the nineties,"
the two republished in this first volume of the Library Edition be-
ing The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.
They are not " pleasant " plays. They both deal with grave in-
fractions of the moral laws of life. But they both imply and rec-
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ognize these laws. The first play is a tragic arraignment of the
" dual standard;" the second a working out of the futility of " free
union *' for man and woman.
No such ethical sanity underlies this ultra-modern play by
Mr. James Joyce. The press-agent would link it up with greater
names, but it is Hauptman without his wandering fires of idealism
and Ibsen without his genius for characterization. The author is
so afraid of the obvious that he is timid even of the clear : hence
he commits a sin unpardonable in all playwriting, leaving his
audience hopelessly uncertain upon a vital fact of his plot.
Not that it matters particularly. Before the Great War, a
public might have been found to praise the exaggerated subtlety
and painstaking indecency of some of Mr. Joyce's lines. Today,
all this lawlessness and sensualism seem very outworn. The pity
is to see such manifest literary talents wasted on so futile a piece
of work. For life is difiicult enough to all of us : but it is not so
repulsively and insolubly involved as The Exiles find it.
FEDERAL POWERS. By Henry Litchfield West. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $L50 net.
Under the paramount necessity of war we have consented
through our elected officials to radical modifications in our govern-
ment. It would be absurd to conclude that these changes do not
carry with them tremendous possibilities for good and evil. In
fact they present one of the gravest situations that have ever
confronted the United States.
Since the Civil War, our nation has seen the gradual evolu-
tion of the Federal power, until today, in our desire to achieve
immediate and decisive results, we have endowed individuals with
powers never dreamed of by the framers of our Constitution.
The author of this volume traces the gradual centralization
of government from the time of the first Federalist party, show-
ing the gradual assumption of Federal control and the disregard
for the delimiting powers of the Constitution. He points out the
changes made necessary by war, and is frank enough to confess
their dangers. He sees before us " a possibility, with the integrity
to the State as an essential unit disappearing, that we may be
brought face to face with a one-man bureau autocracy. There is
still further danger of drifting into Socialism, which cannot de-
velop in a republic composed of independent sovereignties, but
will thrive under the aegis of a strongly centralized government."
His conclusion is that " there is still before us the task of mak-
ing that government so elastic, so completely under the control of
the people and so free from the perils of autocracy that Federal
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power, instead of being a menace to our liberties, will be a corner-
stone upon which our nation will permanently endure."
No one can over-estimate the importance of this little volume.
It is a strong presentation of a great problem, treated with
moderation and candor. It lays bare the dangers therein involved
and puts forward well-reasoned conclusions for its solution.
THE TITLE. A play. By Arnold Bennet. New York: George
H. Doran Co. $1.00 net.
Mr. Bennet's comedy makes a pleasant half hour's reading,
but we doubt if it would ever succeed on the stage. Certainly it
would not in America, where the point of the satire would be
lost. The story deals with the offer of a title by Parliament to a
British politician who has declared himself opposed to the grant-
ing of such honors. But his wife loves the idea of being called
" my lady." Therefore a dramatic clash ensues. The conflict is
worked out to a logical finish with much delightful comedy and
some clever satirical lines. Although it injures the book for the
publishers to advertise it, as they do on the cover, as equal to the
writing of Oscar Wilde in brilliancy and sharpness, it is miles
from Wilde and at times its humor is really forced.
NEW MEDIiEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY. By Samuel Ban-
nister Harding, Ph.D. New York: American Book Co. $1.60.
The condensation necessary for such a work, precludes of
course detailed treatment. The book bears evidence of effort
to deal more fairly with debatable matters, but unfortunately it
does not yet seem possible to view these two historical periods
from a point of view entirely divested of prejudice. The book
contains much of the usual self-gratulation of our age on its
material progress; as though the invention of automobiles, aero-
planes and such were the summum bonum of creation. The
volume is well provided with maps, tables, bibliographies, and
references. Among reference books The Catholic Encyclopedia
is noted as a source of valuable information! A chapter on the
present War is a useful addition.
THE NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS IN THE FREER COL-
LECTION: Part II., the Washington Manuscript of the
Epistles of St. Paul. By Henry A. Sanders. New York : The
Macmillan Co. $1.25.
New Testament students will be interested in this edition
of the Washington Manuscripts of the Epistles of St. Paul, by
Henry A. Sanders, to whom we owe the publication of the other
three Biblical manuscripts from the library of Mr. Freer, of De-
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troit* Michigan. These four manuscripts will be transferred event-
ually to the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D. C; hence
the name "Washington Manuscripts." The manuscript of the
Epistles of St. Paul, like the others, is of Egyptian origin; for
paleographic reasons, which appear decisive, its date has been
assigned to the sixth century. It is in a very damaged condition.
The legible fragments begin at 1 Cor. x. 29. Portions of all the
Pauline Epistles are present. Ten of the quire numbers still legi-
ble, indicate an original manuscript of about two hundred and
eight or two hundred and twelve pages. It contained, besides the
fourteen Epistles of St. Paul, the Acts of the Apostles and the
Catholic Epistles. The extant portions are much mutilated, but
enough remains to show, beyond doubt, that the manuscript fur-
nishes evidence almost solely for the Alexandrian text, and so
gives added weight to the younger members of the Alexandrian
group.
The text of the fragments is printed according to the line
division of the manuscript, and the missing portions of each verse
have been filled out from the text of Westcott and Hort. The edi-
tor has done his work with the utmost care, and has produced a
volume worthy of its predecessors.
OUR DEMOCRACY: ITS ORIGINS AND ITS TASKS. By James H.
Tufts. New York: Henry Holt & Co. $1.50.
There will no doubt be a wide field found for Professor Tufts*
book, especially among school teachers whose duty it is to in-
struct the youth of America in the history of our country. As a
supplementary reader in the American history class it should
prove of practical value. It will likewise make a strong
appeal to instructors in those night schools which devote them-
selves to the teaching of the emigrant. It is primarily a text-book
— a text-book of American citizenship; and its manner is inevit-
ably of the classroom and lessens somewhat its appeal to the
general reader. The author covers a deal of ground, although we
are inclined to think that he takes just a little too much time lay-
ing it out. He is to be praised for the care with which he han-
dles mooted questions of history.
THE INFERNO. By Henri Barbusse. Translated by Edward J.
O'Brien. New York: Boni & Liveright. $1.50 net.
The Inferno is trash; and trash of the cheapest kind. By a
very crudely managed, device the author of The Inferno sets a
scene which enables his hero to spy upon the intimate lives of the
various occupants of a certain room in a boarding house in Paris;
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and spying thus he philosophizes on life and its problems. But
his philosophizing is tawdry and shallow» and the scenes he de-
picts are often disgusting and seldom true to life. Not in the
cheapest of cheap libels on the Catholic Church have we ever
come across a more absurd or far-fetched piece of calumny than that
in which M. Barbusse describes the confession of the dying man.
His priest is a bogey-man of the most impossible kind: imagine
a confessor who finally strikes his dying penitent in the face be-
cause he will not confess !
The book would deserve no comment were it not being widely
advertised and circulated as a literary masterpiece and as a
philosophical document.
HOME FmES IN FRANCE. By Dorothy Canfleld. New York:
Henry Holt & Co. $1.35 net.
Mrs. Canfield's eleven sketches depicting war conditions and
war experiences in France, show real literary gift. She tells a
story so as to grip and hold the reader's attention: she draws a
vivid and arresting picture in terse and pregnant sentences; and
more diflBcult achievement still, she is able to lay bare souls and
dissect motives. Thus, Sergeant Nidart standing amidst the ruins
of his former home, moved first to frantic fury and then to black
despair, who still, for the sake of his children, rouses himself to
erect a make-shift shelter for them, and sow once again his dis-
mantled garden. The stretcher-bearer, Paul Arbagnan, who
flays everybody alive with his bitter tongue, yet is tender as a
mother to his proteges; the girl from Kansas, Ellen Boardman,
naive, enthusiastic, comically unsophisticated and yet severely
practical and capable; and Robert J. Hall and his wife, the charm-
ing philanthropists, who are really too unselfish for this sublunary
world. But all who cross her path are not shining Ariels and
Gabriels like these; she meets others of less ethereal mould: so-
ciety dames whom she satirizes unmercifully, and who, brim-fuU
of incompetence, thrust themselves into war work merely for
notoriety.
But if Mrs. Canfield's literature is good, her stoical philosophy
is thin, and incapable of soothing a pain or drying a tear. Louis
Vassard finds consolation (?) for his blindness in the thought
that he has only one instrument less than other men; and again,
a man " with understanding without a telescope, without a micro-
scope, can see more than a fool with both instruments." Such con-
siderations will never make a man resigned to be forever immured
in darkness. Curious and careful readers need only compare the
tale from which this episode is taken. The First Time After,
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with the Abb^ Klein's Mon PrStre Aueugle in his book of hospital
experiences, Les D^uleurs qui Espirent, to realize how much
more helpful and hopeful is Catholic philosophy, and that the
literature impregnated with it, gains instead of losing from the
standpoint of art.
A SOLDIER'S CONFIDENCES WITH GOD. Spiritual Colloquies
of Giosufe Borsi. Authorized Translation by Rev. Pasquale
Maltese. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.00 net.
English-speaking Catholics owe a heavy debt of gratitude to
Father Maltese for this clear, fluent translation of the extra-
ordinary writings of Giosu6 Borsi, the young Italian lieutenant
who, in the autumn of 1915, died gloriously on the field of battle
while leading his men to the attack. His course as a soldier of
Christ and his career as a soldier of Italy practically synchronized.
Until the spring of that year, in which he was one of the first of the
young officers to go to the front, he was a Catholic only by virtue
of baptism. His conversion was followed, in May, by confirma-
tion. It would seem that the grace bestowed in the sacrament kin-
dled in his soul a flame of purest penitence and love, whose white
radiance ascended with ever-increasing intensity to the throne of
God. These Confidences are just what the title implies: the in-
most thoughts, hopes and aspirations of one always speaking
directly to God of his adoring worship. So eloquent are they of
utter self-consecration and of spiritual illumination, the words
rise irresistibly in the memory: ''Being made perfect in a short
space, he fulfilled a long time.'*
THE PROGRESSIVE MUSIC SERIES. Book III. Catholic
edition. New York: Silver, Burdett & Co.
As the title-page indicates, this series is provided with a
supplement on Gregorian Plain Chant, published under Catholic
auspices. The Plain Chant section has been compiled under the
direction of Bishop Schrembs, of Toledo, and Father Huegle, a
Benedictine monk of Conception Abbey. The chants include
Hymns, Introits, Communions, Oflfertory Pieces, etc. To facili-
tate the work of teaching this portion, the Supplement of Gre-
gorian Chant is in modern musical notation — omitting the stems
to the notes — this being the nearest approach to the exact repre-
sentation of Gregorian Notation. The pages contrasting Gregorian
and Modern Notations present to the child the unfamiliar by
means of the familiar. Again, the English translation of the Latin
text makes the chant more interesting to children, who, at this
age (seventh grade pupils), have not yet begun the study of Latin.
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The keyboard in Book II. is a useful addition, enabling pupils to
become familiar with the pianoforte, the usual accompaniment
of school singing classes. Catholic schools in which this or a sim-
ilar method is in use will naturally become leaders in the great
movement towards Church music reform, so much desired by
Pius X. and Benedict XV.
THE CHILDREN OF FRANCE AND THE RED CROSS. By June
Richardson Lucas. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co.
$1.50 net.
Mrs. Lucas, the wife of one of our foremost Red Cross officials
now working in France, tells the story of the repatriation of
France's war-driven children with much success. Her book
throws new light on the vast task that France is carrying out,
and inevitably it stirs the American reader to feelings of the pro-
foundest sympathy. Without pretension, in the form of simple
letters written to her people at home, the author gives us many
moving pages, happily often relieved by a gentle humor. She sees
the priests and nuns of France with an understanding eye, and
only once, when she queries the baptizing of " war babies " in the
Catholic Church, does she fall short of a perfect comprehension
of the state of affairs in France.
HEALTH FOR THE SOLDIER AND SAILOR. By Professor
Irving Fisher and Dr. Eugene Lyman Fisk. New York:
Funk & Wagnalls Co. 60 cents.
This little book, adapted in part from the same authors'
How to Live, is filled with valuable information and correct
principles of healthful living. Most of it, however, is suited to
the civilian rather than to the soldier, and those parts that per-
tain chiefly to the conditions of military life are treated in vein
and language more proper to the officer than to the average en-
listed man.
The spirit of this little book is that of the Life Extension In-
stitute : It is better to keep well than to get well, and it is far bet-
ter to store up a reservoir of surplus health than merely to avoid
disease. The sections that will interest the soldier most are those
on camp life, the venereal diseases, alcohol (a justification of the
repressive measures taken by the government), tobacco, the feet,
flies and vermin.
It is interesting, in view of the generally approved and wide-
spread use of tobacco in the army and navy, to have this weed
characterized as detrimental, even in moderation to men on the
march and at the firing line.
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AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE. By John A. McClorey, SJ.
New York: Schwartz, Kirwin & Fauss. 50 cents.
The author's preface states that this publication is a de-
velopment of matter taught by him in the Junior English Class
of St. Louis University, and expresses the hope that it may be
of interest and profit to students of similar classes and even for
readers mofe advanced. It may be recommended to all engaged
in the serious duty of Shakespeare. It is of distinctive charac-
ter, and in small compass contains valuable stores of scholar-
ship, fine appreciations and balanced criticisms.
THE CITY OF THE ANTI-CHRIST: BABYLON IN CHALDEA. By
Richard Hayes McCartney. New York: Fleming H. Revell
Co. 50 cents.
A MODERN PHENIX. By Gerve Baronti. Boston: The CornhiU
Co.
It is quite impossible to guess at the meaning of either of
these two books. The first is a long poem, introduced by a
foreword and a preface of the most unimaginable and unintelli-
gible verbosity. The drift of the poem itself is likewise beyond
the ordinary reader. The Catholic learns that '* the most deadly
doctrine of Rome " is " the worship of Mary;" but he is consoled
with the statement that " the Pope is not anti-Christ.'* One can
say no more.
Miss Baronti's play is equally blind — a queer mixture of what
young "insurgents" like to call "protest" and what mature
people know is sheer buncombe. The author is evidently con-
scious of having written a telling social drama. But she will in
all likelihood remain alone in that belief. Publishers— especially
those new in the field, with a reputation to build up — should not
bring out such books, even to please enthusiastic amateur writers.
ABRAHAM'S BOSOM. By BasU King. New York: Harper &
Brothers. 50 cents net.
The publishers of this popular novelist's little excursion into
the field of spiritual writing, assure the reader that " this story
will bring comfort and consolation to many who are in trouble of
mind about the hereafter." We imagine, however, that a very cold
sort of comfort will be extracted from Mr. King's allegory. It
tells the story of a minister who, suffering from an incurable
disease, passes through the pangs of death — and experiences a
sort of Pantheistic revelation, in which he discovers God manifest
even in his bedroom furniture! The book no doubt is fruit of
the author's sincere desire to answer for himself and his fellows
some of the eternal questionings of the soul. But it answers
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412 NEW BOOKS [Dec,
nothing* and is, on the contrary, confusing and unconvincing,
rather than comforting or consoling. To the Christian reader,
grounded in the rudiments of faith, it cannot be anything but
absurd.
THE SISTER OF A CERTAIN SOLDIER. By Stephen J. Maher.
New Haven : Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor. 25 cents net.
The first chapter of this war-time novelette gives promise
of a rather stirring tale; but the author almost immediately loses
grip of his subject, and falls into the inevitable error of the ama-
teur — an excess of action without sufficient motivation. He gives
no reason for the well-nigh cataclysmical change that takes place
in his heroine. As a consequence his story falls flat; it is uncon-
vincing. We do not believe that our loyal and brave negro fight-
ing men, whom the story celebrates, will greatly benefit by propa-
ganda of this sort. Nor do they need it.
THE STORY OF OSWALD PAGE: A BOY FROM ARIZONA. By
Rev. Edwin A. Flynn, Chaplain, 301st Infantry, U. S. N. A.
New York : P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 75 cents.
For a gentlemanly, unassuming hero, Oswald Page, alias The
Terror, alias The Doll, from Bear Bulch, most certainly had an
exceeding adventurous career. From Arizona, his native State
to Boston these adventures carry him, and in all he bravely bears
his part, giving his young critics his credentials of heroism. Boys
are exacting in their requirements, and the boys of St. Calixtus*
Academy, a military training school, were no exception. Yet The
Golden Lark, another of Page's aliases, in spite of his feminine
appearance, wins their enthusiastic friendship and support.
Throughout he continues chivalrous and knightly, whilst measur-
ing up completely to the standard of a boy's boy.
The story contains some fine baseball scenes.
CATHOLIC ART AND ARCHITECTURE: A LECTURE TO
SEMINARIANS. By John Theodore Comes. Pittsburgh, Pa.:
Published by the Author. 50 cents.
It is encouraging to know that lectures of this nature are
being delivered to our students for the priesthood. The Church
in America is, and will be, to a large extent what our seminaries
make it; and on those seminaries must be placed a heavy share of
the blame for the innumerable sins which in years past have been
committed in this country in the name of Church architecture.
But, with instruction being given seminarians along the lines of
Mr. Comes' lecture, we can see a new future dawning — a future
which shall bring forth temples to God present on the altar of
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which we need not be ashamed. Indeed, if we judge from th«
photographic illustrations of this booklet, that future is already
well arrived.
Mr. Comes has a refreshing manner in which he drives home
truths concerning the building of Catholic churches. He says
plainly that he is ** convinced that bad modern Catholic art has
closed the door of inquiry to many who might otherwise have
been attracted to the Church;" he declares further that " millions
of dollars of Catholic money are, and have been, wasted on bad
art and architecture in this country."
MARTIAL LYRICS. Poems on the War for Democracy. By
Alfred Antoine Furman. New York: S. L. Parsons & Co.,
Inc. 50 cents.
This is a collection of newspaper verses, originally published
in a Passaic daily. Arranged according to the order of their first
appearance, they comprise a running commentary in verse on the
World War and America's participation therein. There are
occasional passages of poetic warmth in the verses and not a few
felicitous phrases. Her Soldier Boy is the best poem in the
little book — it has much feeling and a fine simplicity.
THE EXTENSION PRESS presents Christ's Life in Pictures, a
very charming collection of sepia prints illustrating the " love
story ... of the love of God," as the author. Rev. George A. Keith
states in his preface. There is a regrettable lack in the omission of
the artists' names. The volume is most artistic and should be in
demand as a gift book (price $1.00).
IN the name of all children we welcome a new edition at popular
prices of Lewis Carroll's immortal Alice's Adventures in Won-
derlcmd, edited by Clifton Johnson (New York: American Book
Co. 60 cents). The book is intended as a reader in the third,
fourth or fifth grade, and is certainly calculated to make study a
joy. The original and inimitable illustrations of Sir John Ten-
niel are well reproduced.
IN the Spiritual Guide for Priests the Rev. R. Pernin, O.S.F.S., has
" adapted to the use of priests " The Spiritual Directory of that
great saint and eminent director, St. Francis de Sales. Out of it
the Saint speaks words of wisdom and sweetness, concerning every ,
duty of the day, which " are calculated to lead priestly souls to
perfection on a sure and easy way." A recent edition of this ex-
cellent little work makes it possible for every priest to have St.
Francis as a pocket companion. It may be procured from the
Oblate Fathers, Childs, Md., at 50 cents per copy.
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The First. At the end of September an
The Three armistice with Bulgaria was signed, refer-
Armistices. ence to which was made in last month's
notes. This was the beginning of the end.
It was recognized at the time that Turkey would soon surrender.
This was indicated by the fall of Enver Pasha and the Young
Turks, by whom Turkey had been dragged into the War. Indeed,
on the twelfth of October both Turkey and Austria-Hungary
warned Germany that they could no longer continue the struggle.
On the last day of the month the armistice between Turkey and
the Allied Powers of the Entente was signed. By its terms Turkey
was deprived of all power to continue the War and of the ability
to help Germany in its continuance. Passage through the Darda-
nelles was granted to all the Allied nations and unimpeded entry
to the Black Sea. Thus the way was opened for the Western
Powers and this country to send help and food supplies to Russia.
Since this armistice was made the Allied fleets have reached Con-
stantinople, but so far no news has arrived of their entry into the
Black Sea. A battle was anticipated there between them and the
Russian fleet, which was in the control of the Germans, but the
subsequent collapse of Germany precludes all possibility of such
a conflict. Other articles of the armistice provided that all Turk-
ish forces, except those necessary for police purposes, should be
demobilized; that all ships of the Turkish navy should be sur-
rendered; that the Allies should occupy any strategic point they
wished; for the free use of all ports in Turkish occupation and for
denial of their use by the enemy. Everything gained by the Brest-
Litovsk Treaty was required to be surrendered. This involved
the further evacuation of Transcaucasia. The whole of the garri-
sons in Arabia were to be removed, thereby giving to the new king
of the Arabians the complete control of the kingdom of the Hedjaz.
The whole of the Turkish dominions was to be cleared of the
Germans and Austrians, who for the past years have been endeav-
oring to exploit their inhabitants. The Ottoman Government
accepted the severance of all relations with the Central Powers.
No provision was made in this armistice as to the disposition
of Constantinople or of Armenia. In fact, one of the articles seems
to deny the Allies any right to enter that province. There is no
doubt, however, that the Armenians vnll never again be subjected
to the sway of Turkey. For this and for the future of Constan-
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tinople, the Peace Treaty, yet to be made, will, of course, provide.
The probabilities are that Constantinople will be put under the
control of some small power. Belgium, in fact, has been named
as the future custodian of the interests of the world in that city.
No doubt exists but that the Turks will be forced to evacuate that
small part of Europe they still occupy, and that they will be con-
fined to Anatolia where they form the main population, with some
six hundred thousand Greeks who inhabit the seacoast. The
settlement of this point will be left, of course, to the Conference,
which will be held probably at Versailles to decide all questions
involved.
Another, and perhaps even more interesting question to be
settled at this Conference will be the disposition of the Holy Land.
Already several proposals are being made. One of the most in-
teresting is that which the Zionists have at heart: that the Jews
should return to the country, to possess which, they have so long
aspired, for the return to which, they have so fervently prayed.
So far no failure on the part of the Turks in carrsing out the
terms of the armistice has been noted; the German Government,
however, has raised an outcry about the expulsion from the Otto-
man dominions of German subjects.* It may be mentioned in this
connection, although subsequent events have rendered it some-
what out of date, that the road to India on the other side of the
Caspian Sea, which the Germans had hoped to secure, has been
closed by the occupation of several towns in that district by Brit-
ish forces.
The Second. In the last week of October, to the surprise
of many experts, the Italian forces began an offensive movement
against the Austrians. Considering the late period of the year,
it was looked upon as little more than a diversion of General Diaz'
forces, to prevent Austrian troops from being sent to help the Ger-
mans on the western front. Greater was the surprise, when after
a few days of resistance to the attack, the Austrians were com-
pletely defeated. Within a week, Austrian officers appeared at
the Italian Commander-in-chiefs headquarters bearing the white
flag of surrender and pleading for a cessation of hostilities. After
a few days of negotiation, an armistice was signed to become
effectual on the fourth of November. This armistice was as
stringent in its terms as the one between the Allied Powers and
Turkey. It provided for the complete demobilization of the
Austro-Hungarian army and immediate withdrawal of all Austro-
Hungarian forces operating in France, as well as in Italy; for the
giving up of half the military material in the invaded territories;
the evacuation of all the territories invaded since the beginning of
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the War, thereby freeing Albania, Montenegro and Serbia as well
as the Italian province of Venetia. A line was to be drawn be-
hind which the Austrian forces were to fall back.
This gave the Allies the Brenner Pass, thereby precluding the
chief danger of invasion and placing under their control the Tren-
tino and a large portion of the Tyrol. The long-coveted Trieste
as well as Pola, the chief naval bases of Austria-Hungary, were
included in the surrendered territory. Istria and Dalmatia and
a large number of specified islands in the Adriatic were excluded
from Austrian occupation and given over to the Allies. A very
humiliating condition of the armistice, was the power given to the
Allied troops and to those of the United States to move freely
over all road and rail and waterways in Austro-Hungarian ter-
ritory and to use all the necessary Austrian and Hungarian means
of transportation. Strategic points, at the discretion of the Allies,
might be occupied by them. By assenting to this the Austro-
Hungarian Government opened to its enemies the borderlands of
the German Empire. All German troops in Austro-Hungary were
to be sent back to their own country. A number of submarines
were to be delivered to the Allies and the United States, and all
German submarines in Austro-Hungarian waters. A specified
number of battleships, cruisers and other naval vessels were to
be delivered to the Allies, the rest to be interned. Freedom of the
Danube was to be secured by the demolition of all fortifications.
The conclusion of this armistice is a most brilliant triumph
for Italy. Many, if the truth must be told, had no great faith in
the military capacity of the new kingdom. The Austrians derided
the Italians, as organ-grinders, but from the beginning of the War
they have performed marvelous deeds in the campaign carried on
upon the summits of the Alps. For a long time they were the
only belligerent power that carried Vvarfare into the enemy's
territory, with the exception of Russia's spasmodic advances and
of the small hold which France had on Alsace. The dibAcle a
year before the recent offensive began, had seemed to confirm the
opmlon of those who had little trust in Italian help. Subsequent
©vents have fully reestablished faith and confidence. The way the
Italian troops rallied on the Piave after their disaster, and with-
stood, two or three months ago, the renewed attempt of Austria to
devastate Italy proved the Italian army had power to recuperate
from reverses. Still, nobody expected that, practically alone, they
would master and ruin the large Austrian force withstanding
them. Yet Ibis they did. True, of course, French and British as
I^VtU as United Stales troops, cooperated in the advance but their
fs were so small, that this cooperation may be considered
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as almost negligible — two British divisions, one French and a
single regiment of United States troops — on the enemy's side the
Austro-Hungarian troops stood alone without the German help
which gave them the victory at Caperato in the preceding year.
The defeat of the Austrians proved anew that the Austrians alone,
without the assistance of Germany, were incapable of winning a
single battle.
The military success of Italy, perhaps the most sudden and
the most complete of any during the War, is the more remarkable
because of her internal political situation and her external and
foreign relations. While all the countries engaged in the war,
have in their midst a number of pacifists, a small number op-
posed to war and some traitors, Italy had more than her fair
share. Forty per cent, it is said, of the legislative bodies were
Socialists, in fact, as Prince Bulow said, it was the mob which
prevailed and carried the nation by a national impulse into the
conflict with Austria and subsequently with Germany. Signor
Giolitti, the most influential politician of the country, only
nominally supported the War and made himself a centre around
which discontented elements gathered. The sufferings, of Italy,
due to shortage of food, were especially burdensome to the working
classes. The Government, therefore, had to contend with many
adverse circumstances. It is to the glory of this country that by
means of Red Cross activities from one end of Italy to the other,
and the sending of an American regiment to fight in line with the
Italian soldiers, we gave to that hard-pressed Government and
people an assurance of support and sympathy which made them
eager to prosecute the War.
In its external policy the Italian Government was involved
in differences with the Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula and with
the Greeks. Other Governments have naturally acted in defence
of their own interests; none of them have declared that, action
sacred. It was left to the Italian Premier to create what he called
sacro egoisimo and declare it the motto of the foreign policy of
Italy. This undoubtedly reacted on the relations between the
Allied Powers and Italy. Happily, the differences between Italy
and the Serbs have been reconciled by conferences held in London
and Rome during the spring of the present year, and to this recon-
ciliation may be attributed the union of the Jugo-Slavs of Austria
with the Serbians, which has contributed to the break-up of Aus-,
tria-Hungary. But there are questions, still, which may prove
hard to solve, especially as to Dalmatia and the littoral of the
Adriatic. With Greece, also, there remain several questions un-
settled: the possession of Avonla, the port guarding the entrance
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to the Adriatic, and the occupation of several islands, then belong-
ing to Turkey, taken by Italy during the war Cor Tripoli. These
islands Greece claims, as having once belonged to her. This is
one of the many knotty points to be brought up at the forthcom-
ing Peace Conference.
In this connection, it would not be right to pass over with-
out mention, the wonderful achievements of the Serbians in the
swift reconquest of their own country. Starting from near
Monastir in six or seven weeks they regained, with some help from
the French and British, the whole of Serbia and retook not only
Nish but also Belgrade. When it is remembered to what straits
the Serbians had been reduced by the united forces of Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, its army having been driven out
of its own country and forced to take refuge in Corfu with a force
numbering less than one hundred thousand men, the reconquest
effected by the same army in so short a space of time will be
looked upon as one of the most marvelous achievements which
history records. The military skill and clear political vision for
the future of Prince Alexander, the Regent of Serbia, greatly con-
tributed to this success, as did also the help of the Jugo-Slavs of
Austria, who joined the ranks of the Serbian army.
The Third. The third armistice was preceded by a some-
what prolonged period of note writing between President Wilson
and the German Government. On the fifth of October, Prince
Maximilian of Baden, the new Chancellor of the German Empire,
asked the President to lay before his associates in the War the
petition of the Government of Germany for an armistice. It now
comes to light, from a quite recent speech of Prince Max, that in
doing so he acted on the demand of the military authorities against
his own better judgment. These authorities, he said, informed
him that the army was in such a plight that it could not hold out
for twenty-four hours. This, however, proved untrue. It is the
opinion of the late Chancellor that, had he been allowed to pursue
his mystifying manoeuvring for peace, he might have secured
better terms. The note writing went on for about four weeks. At
the end of that time the President, satisfied that the conditions he
had laid down were accepted, passed Germany's petition on to the
Allied Powers. That Mr. Wilson should have entered into com-
munication with a Government which he had declared to be with-
out principle or honor, caused considerable anxiety in this country.
But as each answer to the German Chancellor grew stronger and
the demands made by the President more imperative, confidence
was restored. It is worthy of note, in view of this anxiety, that the
demands upon which he conditioned his action were mor^ Stria-
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gent than any the Allies had ever thought of making, involving,
as they did, interference in the very constitution of the country,
and to such a degree as to make requisite considerable change of
that constitution. To a lesser demand with regard to the gov-
ernment of Cuba, Spain, although impotent, refused consent and en-
tered into war with this country. Germany, however, made what ap-
peared to be such changes in her constitution as the President
asked for, and also accepted the terms laid down in the President's
addresses. Thereupon, the President passed Germany's applica-
tion on to the Allied Powers. The Premiers of these Powers met
in Paris and formulated the terms of the armistice. The German
Government was informed that if it would send representatives
to Marshal Foch, these terms would be communicated to them.
Accordingly, on the eighth of November, German plenipotentiaries
presented themselves at the place appointed. It is reported that
in addressing Marshal Foch, the German plenipotentiaries said:
''Marshal, the German army is at your mercy." Whether this
wi^s said or not, such was the fact. The exit from the situation
in which they found themselves was so narrow that Marshal
Foch's next blow would have annihilated the enemy's army.
Seventy-two hours were allowed for consideration of the terms
given them, and within a shorter period, they were accepted.
The principal points were as follows : the complete evacuation,
within fourteen days of the signing of the armistice, of the occupied
countries — Belgium, France, Alsace-Lorraine and Luxemburg;
the surrender to the Allies of a large amount of military
material, exactly specified in the armistice; the evacuation by
Germany of all the territory on the left bank of the Rhine of
which she was possessed, making the Rhine the border line be-
tween German territory and that now to be occupied by the Allies
(moreover, several bridgeheads on the right bank of the Rhine, not-
ably Mayence, Ck)blentz and Cologne, are to be occupied and gar-
risoned by the Allies; so they may cross the river into Germany,
should they judge it necessary) ; a line is to be drawn east of the
Rhine from the boundary of Holland to that of Switzerland — ^part
of the way at a distance of twenty-five miles and the other part
about eighteen and a half miles — ^to indicate a neutral zone; am-
munition and railway materials in the evacuated districts are to
be delivered to the Allies and care is taken to provide against the
poisoning of wells and other attempts that the enemy might make
to cause injury to the occupying troops. To the army of occupa-
tion the right of requisition is given; and the expense of its main-
tenance in the Rhineland is to be paid for by the German Gov-
ernment.
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Passing from the western to the eastern front the armistice
provides for the withdrawal of the German troops from all ter-
ritories which before the war belonged to Russia, Rumania or
Turkey. Germany is prohibited from making any requisition of
food in any of the districts hitherto occupied by her troops, and
free access is given to the Allies either through Danzig or up the
Vistula for the purpose of conveying supplies to the populations
of those districts or for any other purposes. The iniquitous
treaties forced upon Russia and upon Rumania at Brest-Litovsk
and Bucharest are to be abandoned. Capitulation of the Ger-
man forces operating in East Africa, the last of the colonies upon
which Germany has maintained her hold, is stipulated. Since the
signing of this armistice, word has come that this capitulation
has taken place. No provision is made as to the disposal of the
rest of the German colonies but this, of course, is a matter which
will come under the cognizance of the Peace Conference. The
armistice goes on to provide that the gold taken from Belgium,
Russia and Rumania is to be immediately restored.
Turning to the naval conditions of the armistice, the sur-
render to the Allies of all submarines is required; the disarmament
and internment, in ports selected by the Allies, of the six battle
cruisers, ten battleships, eight light cruisers, including two mine
layers and fifty destroyers of the most modern type, is another
of the conditions imposed. The Russian war vessels seized by
Germany in the Black Sea are also to be handed over to the Allies
and the United States. Free access is to be given to the Baltic
Sea and all German ports necessary for securing that free access,
are to be placed in the hands of the Allies. The existing blockade
conditions set up by the allied and associated Powers are to
remain unchanged, and all German merchant ships found at sea
are to remain liable to capture. No transfers of German merchant
shipping, of any description, to any neutral flag, may take place
after signature of the armistice.
The terms of the armistice stipulate that it may be de-
nounced by either one of the contracting parties by giving forty-
eight hours' notice to that effect. There is, however, so little
likelihood of any such notice being given that confidence may be
felt that peace has been finally concluded. The terms, as will be
seen are, indeed, very severe. The Foreign Secretary of Ger-
many declares them to be fearful. They only carry out, however.
President Wilson's conditions for laying before the Allies the
petition for an armistice. This condition was that such armistice
should place Germany in a position to render it impossible to re-
sume the War, even if she wished to do so. After signing the
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armistice, it would have been more fitting had Germany proceeded
to act according to its conditions without pleading for mitigation
of the terms she had accepted. But this does not seem to be the
German way. Signs, indeed, are manifesting themselves so clearly
of an attempt to make an appeal ad misericordiam to the people
of this country that the Department of Justice has issued a warning
against the new German propaganda. No instance has been re^
ported of any violation. The Allied armies, American, French and
British, have begun their march into the districts hitherto occu-
pied by the German troops. The French have entered Alsace
and have been received with every manifestation of delight; the
Americans have occupied the districts of Briey and Longwy noted
for their iron mines, from which during the War the Germans
obtained so large a supply of iron. The British are advancing
through Belgium and have got as far east as Charleroi. The Bel-
gians have reentered their capital, Brussels, and their seaport,
Antwerp, which the Germans had vowed never to give up. Ger-
man battleships, the best and newest that Germany had, have
steamed out to surrender themselves to the Allied fleets of Great
Britain, France and the United States, thereby putting an end to
the struggle for world dominion for which Germany so long made
preparation. The vessels thus surrendered are said to be worth
three hundred and fifty millions, but this is nothing compared
with what Germany will have to pay Belgium and France, to say
nothing of Poland and the East.
A short time ago it would have been impos-
Germany. sible to believe that changes so many and of
such immense importance as those which
have taken place in Germany could have been made. The attempt to
render the Government more democratic and to place it upon a
popular basis, made by Prince Maximilian of Baden, was doomed
to failure because as it rested upon the Kaiser's will, so it could
be revoked by the same will. It soon became evident that
the change must be made by the people as a whole. This
was recognized by the Social Democrats, the Liberal Parties of
Germany and also by the new Chancellor, Prince Maximilian of
Baden. They, therefore, combined to call upon the Kaiser to
abdicate for himself and his family, which, after considerable
hesitation, he consented to do. He named Prince Maximilian
Regent, until steps could be taken to ascertain the mind of the
nation as to its future form of government. The Prince, follow-
ing the recognized parliamentary methods of countries con-
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stitutionally governed, called upon a member of the most numer-
ous party in the Reichstag to become Chancellor and form a gov-
ernment.
The member was Herr Ebert, one of the Majority Party
of the Social Democrats. Herr Ebert proceeded to do so, but so
various have been the accounts received of the personnel of this
government that it is hard to speak definitely of its real char-
acter. It was first announced that it was to be composed ex-
clusively of Social Democrats, both of the Independent Party and
of the Majority Party. A further announcement added to the
Social Democrats three members representing the Middle Classes.
Still another announcement, the latest so far received, is that the
Cabinet is to consist of two Conservatives, two National Liberals,
two Social Democrats and three whose party affiliations are not
known. The Government thus newly formed has, by its own
authority, changed the franchise: giving to all men and women
alike who are twenty years of age the right to vote. This change
seems very arbitrary and should have been left to the Constituent
Assembly which has been called for the beginning of February next.
The elections are to take place in January. Those chosen will
have the power to decide the future of Germany : whether it is to be
a republic or a monarchy, and to draw up a new constitution.
Meanwhile, throughout various parts of Germany Soldiers and
Workmen's Councils have been formed — ^by what authority and
with what power it is hard to say. It is to be hoped that they do
not presage a period of Bolshevik rule in Germany. Apparently
this is feared by the present German Foreign Secretary, as in one of
the appeals he has sent to this country, he pleads for a mitigation
of the terms of the armistice in order to save Germany from " star-
vation and anarchy."
With the Kaiser, or soon after him, the King of Saxony was
deposed, followed by the disappearance of the King of Bavaria.
The King of Wurtemburg also abdicated, professing his sincere
desire to conform to the wishes of his people. The Grand Duke
of Baden adopted the same course, but, it is stated, has resumed
his crown. Grand dukes and princes too numerous to mention,
have either abdicated or been deposed. Thus has the German
Empire fallen.
Austria-Hungary is now no longer any-
Austria-Hungary. thing more than a geographical expression.
The plan proposed by the Emperor for a
federation of the various nationalities came too late. Nothing
less than independence was declared to be sufficient to satisfy the
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national aspirations of several of the various races. By a curious
coincidence, the declaration of independence of eighteen Slav
States, comprising Czecho-Slovaks, Poles, Jugo-Slavs, Ukrainians,
Uhro-Rnssians, Lithuanians, Rumanians, Italian Irredentists, Un-
redeemed Greeks, Albanians and Zionists, was made in Independ-
ence Hall at Philadelphia, called the cradle of liberty. These States
are not all, indeed, in Austria-Hungary, as the list just given
. shows, but they comprise almost the whole of the non-German and
the non-Magyar subjects of the former empire, and number some
sixty-five millions. Soon after, the Czecho-Slovaks held a national
council at Prague and declared Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia a
republic; of this republic Professor Masaryk will be the president.
A short time previous, the party in Hungary of which Count
Karolya is the head, attained the object of its prolonged strug-
gle : complete separation from Austria. What form of government
will be adopted, has not yet been decided, but Count Karolya has
been named Governor. Although the Allies had recognized the
Czecho-Slovaks and the Poles before they had attained their in-
dependence, the Holy Father was the first to enter into friendly
relations with these States. The Jugo-Slavs, comprising Croats,
Serbs, and Slovines, will be some time struggling for that
independence to which the other Slav races aspire, but they
seem not to be so well organized as are the rest, nor perhaps
so united in purpose. The Croats, it is said, are unwilling to
be completely separated from Austria, and have even
voted in their legislature for a continuance of the union.
There is, however, a strong opposition to this, a large
party wishing to throw in their lot with the Serbs and Slovines.
The Poles in Galicia have manifested their desire to be united
to their fellow Poles in what was once Russian Poland, while
the Ruthenians in the same province, seek union with the
Ukrainians. This leaves only the Germans dwelling in Aus-
tria unaccounted for. These Germans occupy the provinces of
Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Salzburg, the Tyrol and Vorarlberg,
Styria, Carintha and Carniola, and number between eight and
nine million. They, too, have taken their destiny into their own
hands and have formed a republic. The Emperor Charles has
been forced to abdicate. Thus one week has seen the end of the
houses of Hapsburg and HohenzoUern.
Whether the Gcrman-Austrians will elect to form an in-
dependent nation or throw in their lot with Germany is a ques-
tion. The latter seems probable. Rumania, now freed from the
Germano- Austrian yoke, has taken up arms (not having been
included in the armistice) to free the Transylvanians over whom
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424 RECENT EVENTS [Dec,
the Magyars have long dominated. Such is the chaotic state of
what was formerly Austria-Hungary.
In that part of what was once the Rus-
Riundii sian Empire, over which the Bolsheviki
still hold sway, chaos, anarchy, and
bloodshed continue. The tenth of November was publicly fixed,
by Lenine and Trotzky, for a massacre of all the bourgeoisie, but
whether this was done or attempted, is not known outside Russia.
Over what part of Russia the Bolsheviki rule still extends, it is
impossible to define with accuracy, so many self-determinations
are being continually made. At Omsk, in Siberia, there appears
to be in course of formation a government which is drawing to
its support the best men to be found in Russia, and which has for
its object the overturn of the Bolshevik rule and the coordination
of all the diverse elements into which republican Russia has been
dissolving. With this government of Omsk, the Ufa government,
referred to in last month's notes, has amalgamated, and it is pro-
posed to hold, at an early period, a Constituent Assembly for the
purpose of making the Constitution for Russia which was prom-
ised at the beginning of the Revolution. Military operations of
the Allies in Eastern Siberia and in the northern government of
Russia have not been heard of. This is doubtless due to the fact
that winter has set in and rendered them impossible. By the
terms of the armistice, Germany is required to evacuate all the
territory which was Russian at the beginning of the War. This
included Lithuania, Courland, Livonia, Esthonia, Poland and part
of Ukraine. Courland, Esthonia, Livonia, and the Oesel Island,
have, by their councils, decided to form one state. About Lithuania
nothing has been heard, but from Poland the Germans have not
only been expelled but the Poles have advanced into German terri-
tory by taking possession of Posen, the capital of that part of
Poland which Germany took at the time of the partition. No other
change appears to have been made in Poland, the Council of Re-
gency still being in existence. This Council, however, seems to
have taken steps to liberalize the constitution which was im-
posed upon the country by its conquerors.
November 19, 1918.
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With Our Readers.
THE great World War is ended. The victory that we fought and
prayed for has come. Peace reigns and it is a peace worth
the fighting — that will bear untold fruit for the welfare of man-
kind. With its coming our hearts are joyous and thankful. Joy-
ous that victory has crowned our arms; that the long struggle is
over; that our soldiers may return to their own; that the oppor-
tunity is given to the nations of the world to live in amity. Thank-
ful that our country entered this War which really was fought for
the democracy of the world; thankful to our sons who gave their
lives on the field of battle; thankful to the fathers and mothers
who sent them forth; thankful that our armies and the armies of
our Allies have made safe the democratic institutions of our own
country and secured their safety for other nations.
4( 4( ♦ ♦
ALL our gratitude finds its way to God through His Beloved Son,
Jesus Christ, Who is both the King of Nations and the Prince
of Peace. We of this country can find a special consolation in
the noble — if it is proper to use the term in speaking of our-
selves — manner in which we entered the War and carried
it on.
We made the declaration that we would accept no indemnity;
we would ask no pecuniary or territorial reward. We officially
stated that we sought the destruction of that government which
had made such a War possible.^ We were determined to make it
impossible for that same government or for any government ever
again to deluge the world with fire and crime and death. We
officially declared that we did not seek the destruction or the un-
doing of the German people. We waged a war in the interest not
of ourselves alone but in the interests of humanity; and we were
determined that the German government and the German people
should forever abandon that autocracy which made both it and
themselves a menace to the world. These are the great aims and
the high purposes that we have sought.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
PEACE has come. With the blessings come larger duties and
greater responsibilities. No one will deny that the problems at
home will rapidly grow great and numerous enough to call for all
the intelligent and sympathetic leadership that we possess. The
nation gave itself up to the military and all that the military
asked. Every civil agency was commandeered; life in almost
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426 WITH OUR READERS [Dec^
every one of its departments was disjointed. Emergency needs
and emergency measures were supplied and carried, without de-
bate or argument. Millions of our sons left work at home. Wages
grew to fabulous sums. Women and girls filled positions that
had always been occupied by men, and received an income which
they had not even dreamed of a year before. Many have been
trained in industries that must cease or be greatly curtailed with
the ending of the War. Others will be unwilling to abandon posi-
tions in favor of the returning soldiers. The price of food has
soared immensely, as well as that of clothing and other necessities
of life. We face a unique situation and one immeasurably grave.
Wages will go down; but food prices vnll probably go up.
Millions of our men must be transferred from the military
to the civil life. To do this in normal times vrithout serious dis-
turbance to the social and industrial body would be difficult; to do
it now will be a significant test of the enduring and stabilizing
power of our democracy. One need not view it with alarm but
one must consider it thoughtfully and seriously.
* * ♦ *
TE believe that the vast majority of our soldiers returning from
abroad will come back with a deeper seriousness, a worthier
concept of life and its duties, of our country and her mission. War,
like adversity, blesses its servants. They have faced death for a
treasure, they will never see it questioned without opposition; they
will never see it endangered without resistance. They will un-
doubtedly broaden and deepen our own sense of democratic govern-
ment and that will be well; for democracy, if static, is dead.
There are many evils of privilege, of industrial slavery, here in our
own land which must be lifted. Both vigilance and vision are
the requisites for a true democracy. The protests of the returning
soldiers will be the stronger and the more widespread against the
wrongs and injustices that aflQict the body politic. These wrongs
have been augmented during their absence by the profiteer at
home both in high and low place. Not contentedly will they view
the fact that others have made money while they have sacrificed
much. It is not fitting that they who fought should now be com-
pelled to beg. We must not witness any such evidence of the
ingratitude of republics.
♦ ♦ ♦ *
THE social evils and the political injustices at home will be more
evident than before to the returning troops. The good fortune
in material welfare that has come to many at home, will not con-
tribute to their contentment. Those who have been materially
bettered will find it hard to make the sacrifice that peace entails;
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1918.] WITH OUR READERS 427
and refusal to make it will create a situation pregnant with jeal-
ousy and unrest.
To these we may add the feeling and even conviction by
which many are tempted to guide themselves — that each in-
dividual may be a law unto himself. Of course they would not see
this explicitly, but they employ it as an implicit basis of argu-
ment. It will eventuate not in a better and truer democracy, but
in anarchy and chaos. All of us must be ruled and guided by
those principles of justice which are not subjective but objective,
which bespeak the common welfare, which execute justice and
which are the immutable foundations of social well-being, of order
and of progress.
- To see a particular law which is unjust and inadvisable wiped
out may well be a cause of rejoicing; to see a government de-
stroyed that has been the parent of injustice and cruelty may
rightly give satisfaction; to witness the onward progress of de-
mocracy may well be cause of congratulation. But to view with
content, and even with rejoicing, the overthrow of all law and
government is as fatal to democracy as it is to absolutism.
Those who wish to see Germany dismembered and made a second
Russia are very shortsighted in their support of democracy. They
are to be numbered as its enemies, rather than its friends. The
evil that affects Russia may spell the ruin of all civilization. The
Bolsheviki began with overthrowing all law; they did away first
with property, then with all social distinctions; they have denied
religion its rights and morality its claims. They have abolished
marriage; legalized promiscuous sexual intercourse and made
children the wards of the State. They have wiped out home and
the individual dignity of both the man and the woman, and have
blazed the wide trail that leads to national dishonor and national
chaos. They began by betraying their country and they have
continued in their self-appointed course. We made the mistake
of encouraging them at first, because we thought they were an
organized orderly movement against the autocracy of Russia. We
have realized our mistake and will do all in our power to win Rus-
sia back to the ways of order and of peace.
4t ♦ 4c 4t
BUT while kings fall daily and we rejoice at the spread of de-
mocracy, let wisdom temper our enthusiasm and guide our
speech. We are too apt to ascribe to other nations the same
training in, and understanding of, democracy that we have our-
selves. It is generous but it is not always warranted. Self gov-
ernment is the hardest of lessons to master. We have been at
school for over a century. It is sufBcient for the average Ameri-
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428 WITH OUR READERS [Dec,
can to read President Wilson's address to Congress after the
reading of the Armistice terms to see that democracy cannot be
learned by a people over night; that a people suddenly possessed
of unlimited political power will not know what to do with it;
that we must wait and work in patience and in sympathy ere
other people, unaccustomed to democracy, learn the lesson and
the light that we have given to the world.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE old order changeth, giving place to new. The constitutions
of nations have radically changed and will change. For-
tunate will the world be if they accept as their model our own Con-
stitution which insures both liberty and justice, and which has
begotten in the hearts of our people respect for duly con-
stituted authority and an undiminished love for freedom.
4c ♦ 4t 4c
EVEN here in our own land democracy will find new and further
expression, interpretation and definition in law and statute.
Now, more than ever, it is necessary for us as a people to rehearse
the principles upon which our Republic is founded and by thought-
ful foresight, by constant sympathetic study to reach into the
future, anticipate the critical problems and help solve them
by the guidance of those immutable revealed truths, which from
the beginning have been the sole safeguard of civilization and of
humanity's welfare.
OUR gratitude should be extended to our President for the deep
religious note which characterizes his Thanksgiving Day
proclamation. He does not forget to ask the people to return
thanks to Almighty God. His message in a singular way bespeaks
the Catholic teaching concerning sacrifice and our humble rela-
tion as creatures to God. We should ask forgiveness and do
penance for our sins: we should petition God for His favors: we
should worship Him and thank Him for all His gifts. American
democracy, through its present recognized leader, gives in a few
paragraphs a most significant lesson to the world of today.
The Proclamation in full is as follows :
It has been our custom to turn in the autumn of the year in praise
and thanksgiving to Almighty God for His many blessings and mercies
to us as a nation. This year we have special and moving cause to be
grateful and to rejoice. God has in His good pleasure given us peace.
It has not come as a mere cessation of arms, a mere relief from the
strain and tragedy of War. It has come as a great triiunpb of right.
Complete victory has brought us, not peace alone, but the con-
fldent promise of a new day as well, in which justice shall replace force
and Jealous intrigue among the nations. Our gallant armies have
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1918.] WITH OUR READERS 429
participated in a triumph which is not marred or stained by any
purpose of selfish aggression. In a righteous cause they won im-
mortal glory and have nobly served their nation in serving mankind.
God has, indeed, been gracious. We have cause for such rejoicing as
revivifies and strengthens in us all the best traditions of our national
history. A new day shines about us, in which our hearts take new
courage and look forward with new hope to new and greater duties.
While we render thanks for these things, let us not forget to seek
the divine guidance in the performance of those duties, and divine
mercy and forgiveness for all errors of act or purpose and pray that
in all that we do, we shall strengthen the ties of friendship and mutual
respect upon which we must assist to build the new structure of peace
and good will among the nations.
Wherefore, I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, do
hereby designate Thursday, the twenty-eighth day of November next,
as a day of thanksgiving and prayer, and invite the people throuf^out
the land to cease upon that day from their ordinary occupations and in
their several homes and places of worship to render thanks to God, the
Ruler of nations.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the
seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done in the District of Columbia this sixteenth day of November,
in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and eighteen, and
of the independence of the United States of America' the one hundred
and forty-third.
THE simple declaration of these fundamental religious truths
brings at once to the world the thought of that power — the
Papacy — which has preserved them for the world through all the
centuries of change, of doubt and of denial. The world is begin-
ning to see that the philosophy which guided Germany was utterly
wrong. A significantly prophetic article in The Catholic World
.of August, 1909, by J. Prendergast, S.J., foretold what has hap-
pened. The War was one of might and State absolutism, against
conscience and individual freedom. The world was forced to
assert the conscience of humanity, to champion the inalienable
spiritual rights of man against the materialistic and autocratic
claims of Germany.
♦ ♦ ♦ *
WHATEVER is to be, if the world is to prosper politically, must
be built upon the spiritual, that is upon a sense of the in-
dividual worth of man as a rational being and the dependence of
the individual and of nations upon God. Searched deeply enough,
the foundation must be religious. The union of victors may be
strong enough to endure for a while: but the self-interest that
begot it will inevitably be weakened and destroyed by the course-
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430 WITH OUR READERS [Dec.,
of human events, unless there is a motive above self-interest, a
motive supreme and spiritual to which the conscience of the peo-
ples of these united nations will respond. It must be strong
enough to outweigh self-interest: it must be powerful enough to
make us look beyond material welfare: it must be independent
of the nations that go to form the international league.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
WE cannot, in this day of the world's history, name a power of
this character which all would willingly accept as a final
arbiter, when the nations themselves disagree. But the sole
power that even approaches it is the Papacy. Time and again in
history the Pope has successfully filled the rdle. He is by his very
position independent of nations. Throughout this War, as our
record of Current Events has shown, he was the first to protest
against unjust invasion, the first to recognize legitimate aspira-
tion for national independence.
The spiritual power and the spiritual influence which he can
contribute, is necessary for the success of permanent peace and of
an enduring league of nations. We have fought for the spiritual
rights of man. The historic protagonist of those rights should
sit at a peace table where the future of the world is to be de-
termined.
THE War has emphasized the need for trained workers in wel-
fare activities demanded by the mobilization of our great
armies in the camps and in the factories. The need for trained
workers is increased, rather than lessened, by the cessation of
hostilities. For incident to demobilization and reconstruction, far
more difBcult problems have come to the fore. To do its part
toward meeting this need, the National Catholic War Council has
recently founded at Washington a Training School for the women
who will be sent out under its auspices into domestic and foreign
fields. Some of the graduates will render service in the Visitors'
Houses, others in congested industrial centres, and the remainder
will go overseas to work among the refugees of France and
Poland.
* ♦ 4t ♦
THE curriculum of the school includes the following courses:
The religious, social, and patriotic inspiration of war and re-
construction activities, with a survey of the field and of the agencies
at work; domestic science; child and family welfare; first aid,
home nursing, and care of convalescents; girls' clubs and recrea-
tion; bookkeeping and records; military organization, law, cus-
toms, and courtesies. The plan of studies consists of lectures
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given by the resident staff and of field work in Washington and
vicinity.
The first group of students reported for registration Novem-
ber 25th. They live at the school throughout the whole course
of intensive training which, for this first session, lasts six weeks.
The title of the school is " The National Catholic Service School.''
It is situated at Massachusetts Avenue and Twenty-third Street,
Washington, D. C. The main office is that of the National Catho-
lic War Council, 930 Fourteenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C.
The school is launched under the auspices of Trinity College.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
IF woman's part in the winning of the War was great, her part
in winning the victories of peace will be far greater. Without
surrendering her title to the queenship of the home, she is destined
to exert an ever deeper influence upon public life and the common
weal. If Catholic womanhood is to contribute its share to the
great task of social betterment that lies before American woman-
hood, it must train for its work, enter the field and take its part
in leadership — not a selfish leadership that seeks personal ends
and private advantage, but a leadership fired with zeal to con-
tribute the best in Catholic social principles and action to the
common welfare. But leadership comes not by haphazard, how-
ever well-meaning intentions may be. It comes through willing-
ness to do hard work cheerfully. It comes by training.
A'
N intimate, personal picture of Joyce Kilmer is presented in
the forthcoming Memoir by Robert C. Holliday, published by
George H. Doran Company. It gives in fresh, living colors a por-
trait of the man. Concerning the deep influence which his Catho-
lic faith exercised upon Kilmer, the author has the following esti-
mates: "Then his fluid spirituality, his yearning sense of re-
ligion, was stabilized. What is the ' secret,' as we say, of all that
has been told of his ability? His courage, his mental and physical
energy, were, manifestly, unusual. But his character, in the
Faith that he embraced, found its tempered spring. His talent was
a winged seed which in the rich soil which had mothered so much
art found fructification. . . . And, once a Catholic, there never
was any possibility of mistaking Kilmer's point of view; in all
matters of religion, art, economics and politics, as well as in all
matters of faith and morals, his point of view was obviously and
unhesitatingly Catholic. Considerable as were his gifts and skill
as a politician in the business of his career, the veriest zealot
could not say that he did not do the most unpolitic things in the
service of his Faith."
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•'•.'V.Of *•
r JANUARY 1919
X-*- TOE
atholie^OFld
^^Roman'and Utopiaa More'* Theodore Maynard 433
Catholic Doctrine of the Right of Self Government
John A. Ryan, D.D. 441
The Chaplain's Story Edited by I. T. Martin 455
The Earliest Theorists of Russian Revolution
F. Aurelio Palmieri, OSA., D,D, 477 (
The Spires of St Patrick's /. Corson Miller 487
The Sword of the Spirit Blanche M. Kelly 488
War Risk Insurance and the "Carry-On" Margaret B. Downing 501
Village Churches Charles L. O'Donnell, CS.C. 512
Prejudice Unconquered William H. Scheiftey 514
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THE
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Vol. CVIII.
JANUARY, 1919.
No. 646.
"ROMAN AND UTOPIAN MORE."
BY THEODORE MAYNARD.
He who bore
King's wrath, and watched the sacred poor,
O Roman and Utopian More!^
ORE is not only one of the problems of literature
but also of life. As M. Henri Br^mond says of
him: "At first sight he is entirely profane.'*
Here is a pagan who kept his soul as an anchorite
keeps his cell; a graceless satirist, to whom noth-
ing was sacred, living a secret life of prayer and mortification
possible only to a soul full of grace; a lawyer-politician with a
hair shirt under his robes and chain of office; a Voltair A'eady .
to go serenely to the lions ! Doubtlessly there are some good mQof
in parliament. God-fearing and honorable citizens; but can we
imagine even the humblest secretary of state scourging his
bleeding body in a silent room of Downing Street? Even if
so wildly improbable a saint existed in public life, would he
carry his heart with More*s spirit of daring laughter? I fear
that if such a man fasted, his press agency would see to it that
the fact should be known. The trumpets would blow in the
market-place — ^for the headlines declare the glory of the great,
^ Charles WUllams, The Wars,
Gopyrl^t 1918.
VOL. cvin. — 2%
Thb Hissionabt Socibtt of St. Paul tbb Apostlb
IN TBB State of New Toak.
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434 ''ROMAN AND UTOPIAN MORE" [Jan.,
the journalists show forth theh" handiwork! Even opening a
church bazaar is useful (and used) for the gaining of publicity.
Such piety is always portentously pompous.
More, however, hid faith under the cloak of good-fellow-
ship, and his boon companions were not allowed to remark his
austerity. The company who held their sides at his jests,
could hardly suspect that the jester's heart was abiding quietly
with God. The cap and bells covered the crown of thorns.
Gayety goes so commonly with sanctity that it would be diffi-
cult to discover a saint without it. But the mockery of More is
another matter and raises a stranger problem. Laughter, ex-
cept among holy people, puts holiness at a discount, but the
English wit covered up his piety, not only with hilarity (a dis-
guise usually effective enough) but with railery, nay, almost
with ribaldry.
It would be a psychological mistake so to analyze a man's
character, as to separate his intellect from his emotions. If I
point out the same paradox in More*s intellectual as in his so-
cial life, I do so to show his unity. For the convenience of
criticism, however, it might be as well to note that More seemed
to be a man of divided intellectual allegiance. In his mind
irreconcilables agreed. Of all the humanists, he was most
human and most typical of his time. In him the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance met and kissed each other. Great Latinist
as he was, he wrote Greek better than Latin and thought in it
better. The pagan poets and the Fathers of the Church shared
the hospitality of his soul. He could turn from the reading of
Lucretius to lecture in St. Lawrence Jewry on St. Augustine's
De digitate Dei. But his irony was so Greek in its spirit that he
might have written Plato's sentence on a foolish disputant: " I
saw then, but never before, Thrasymachus blush, after he had
acknowledged that justice was virtue and wisdom, and injus-
tice was ignorance and vice."
Ruthless critic of ecclesiastical abuse as More was, his
satire was never so severe that he was not ready to recall it
should scandal arise. When changing circumstances had made
the reading of the humanists' writings dangerous, he could say:
"In these days, in which men by their own default miscon-
strue and take harm out of the very Scripture of God, until
men better amend, if any man would now translate Moria into
English, or some other works either that I have myself written
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1919.] ''ROMAN AND UTOPIAN MORE'' 435
on this, albeit there be none harm therein, folk yet being (as
they be) given to take harm from that that is good, I would not
only my darling's (Erasmus') books, but mine own also, help
to bum them both with mine own hands, rather than folk
should (though through their own fault) take any harm of
them, seeing that I see them likely in these days so to do."
To the making of More many things — all admirable —
contributed. From the strict, honorable, though somewhat
parsimonious house of his father. Sir John More, the judge,
he passed at the age of fourteen to the palace of Car-
dinal Morton, the Chancellor; and of this kindly, shrewd and
humorous old man he has given us an affectionate picture in
the Utopia. Morton was wise enough to see genius in the en-
gaging boy, who at his entertainments knew how to make more
impromptu merriment than the professional players, and
delighting in his wit, was in the habit of prophesying to his
guests that, " This child here waiting at the table, whoever shall
live to see it, will prove a marvelous rare man." With such
encouragement and patronage More went to Oxford, which he
left two years later at the age of eighteen, a finished scholar
and the friend of the greatest scholar of the day.
But not even early fame, or the notice of such a man as
Erasmus, or the new heady wine of the Renaissance sufficed to
take away from the brilliant youth a longing for the cloister.
What the Carthusians failed to win, the Franciscans nearly
succeeded in snatching, and it was not until More was twenty-
four that he married, acting upon the advice of Colet, his con-
fessor. The young lawyer, returned at about this time to Par-
liament, soon made his mark, and though he had incurred the
displeasure of Henry VII., the succession to the throne of his
son opened out the path of success for the feet of the saint.
His public life is not the subject of this essay, so I will do no
more than mention the fact that his ability as a lawyer and
diplomat gained for him before he was fifty the summit of his
worldly career, the office of Lord Chancellor. I am more con-
cerned here with the man than with the politician; with the
patient, pious, humorous saint and martyr; with the wit and
the philosopher than with the diplomat whom Henry chose to
pick his chestnuts out of the fire.
Throughout all these years of incessant and multifarious
public concerns. More had been leading the humble and mor-
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436 ''ROMAN AND UTOPIAN MORE'' [Jan.,
tified life of an ascetic. Though he was the father of a family
and the ruler of a large household, he managed, by stealing
time from the bed and table, to write his books. When we
remember his engrossment in public affairs, the demands of
the King upon his leisure, and his habits of prayer, it is miracu-
lous that so much should have been written. It could only have
been accomplished by a man of the most regular life and
sweetest temper.
A wit is always in demand, and social intercourse with a
king cannot be avoided — even in those rare cases where the
wit desires to avoid it. More, who found that being excessively
popular in the court had its drawback in the fact that he could
never get home to his wife, moderated his gayety, in order to
lessen the King's desire for his conversation. How this was
done we do not know. It must have been a difficult and deli-
cate piece of diplomacy that succeeded in gaining his release
from the court without giving offence. Even a king less in-
telligent or less ardent for amusement or less imperious than
Henry would have to be managed with very careful tact under
similar circumstances. But More gained his end and spent
quiet days in Chelsea. There the affable Henry would come,
inviting himself to dinner. After walking in the garden with
the King's arm round his neck — a mark of intimate royal
friendship accorded only to himself — ^More was shrew enough
to whisper in Roper's ear his estimate of the favor of princes :
*• I find his Grace my very good lord, indeed . . . howbeit, I
may tell thee, I have no cause to be proud thereof, for, if my
head would win him a castle in France (for then there was war
between us), it should not fail to go."
Not yet had the Grand Turk shown himself and the future
Chancellor was still basking in the sun of Henry's geniality.
But he held his honors with a loose hand, for riches and public
distinction were never sought by him. Dearer was his quiet
scholarly life amidst his family, enlivened by an occasional
visit from Erasmus with its riotous evenings of jocular Latin
conversation. Lady More must have felt rather uncomfortable
in having to listen to the laughter which greeted jest and
counter-jest in a language she did not understand; but Mar-
garet Roper and More's other children, having been brought
up on the classics, must have enjoyed the conversation of the
hilarious scholars. Poor Lady More! The worthy, worldly.
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middle-aged, unimaginative woman was not quite the ideal
wife for her husband. Yet of her, Erasmus, with whom she
could hardly have had much in common, was able to say some
words of rich praise, adding for the glory of More's considerate
courtesy : ** He loveth his old wife " (she was his second) ** as
well as if she were a young maid."
In this atmosphere, full of unpretending piety, and of
decent domesticities, the Utopia was written. Of the difficulties
in the way of its composition, the author speaks in the intro-
ductory letter to Peter Gilles, when he begs pardon for the
delayed manuscript. This intriguing work has been largely
misunderstood, because it is difficult to make sure how much of
it may be taken as representing More*s own opinions. Other
Utopians, Plato or Swift, or Bellamy or Samuel Butler — ^with
perhaps the exception of the last — ^made their point of propa-
ganda quite clear and their meaning unmistakable. But More,
in the typical chapter on Utopian religion, does not always
leave the reader certain as to whether he is speaking of the
ante or pre Christian Faith of the happy kingdom. Twice he
warns the unwary against too hasty a conclusion: "For we
have taken upon us,** he says, "to show and declare their
laws and ordinances, and not to defend them;*' and again in
conclusion : " As I cannot agree and consent to all things that
he (Hathloday) said ... so must I needs confess and grant that
many things be in the Utopian weal-public, which in our cities
I may rather wish for, than hope after.** The Utopia is so
often misunderstood, I imagine, because not one out of ten
of its readers knows the Dialogue of Comfort. In that book the
speculative and apparently skeptical turn of More's mind is
balanced by his explicit faith and confidence in God. There,
is the Utopia explained.
To me the amazing thing is the way in which the piercing
modernism of More*s political and economical criticism is
controlled by the sobriety of his revolutionism. In the phrase
about " sheep-eating men ** with which he summed up the dis-
aster of the change which had come over farming, when
pasturage was substituted for tillage, and again in his condem-
nation of the rapacity of the rich and in his foreshadowing of
collectivism, he was handling highly explosive stuff. But he
would have men exercise moderation. "If you cannot even
as you would remedy vices, which use and custom hath con-
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438 ** ROMAN AND UTOPIAN MORE" [Jan.,
finned, yet for this cause you must not leave and forsake the
commonwealth; you must not forsake the ship in a tempest,
because you cannot rule and keep down the winds. . . . But you
must with a crafty wile and a subtle brain study and endeavor
yourself, as much as in you lieth, to handle the matter wittily
and handsomely for the purpose, and that which you cannot
turn to good, so to order that it may not be very bad."
To the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation we must
turn for the essential More. This, his last book, was written in
the Tower during his imprisonment, and gains a tragic inter-
est from that fact and because, during the latter part of the
composition, a piece of charcoal had to serve for pen. The
high courage and constancy of the man are evident upon every
page of the book; and its humorous sagacity and the knowl-
edge we have that, in it, the actual process of consolation may
be seen at work in the author's own soul, make it one of the
most priceless of all writings. This is almost the only treatise
on consolation that really does console, for there is nothing
academic about More's spirituality. A monk, who is one of the
most famous preachers of the day, once assured me that if he
had to be shipwrecked on a desert island with only one book,
it should be the Dialogue of Comfort. And yet the volume is
so neglected that a modern biographical dictionary of litera-
ture does not so much as mention it!
More was not a mystic, except in the secondary sense in
which every Christian is a mystic. There are no raptures or
visions in his experience; for though he belonged to the Mid-
dle Ages in his faith, his temperament had the classic ration-
alism of Greece. His devotion never soars very far from the
earth, and had no extravagance or ecstasy. Acute, with the
subtlety of the Renaissance, and sensible with the humorous
common-sense of the English, his intellect bore the stamp of
the law and feared imaginative flights. To this strong soul,
consolation had to be reasonable, not emotional. He knew his
danger to a hair's breadth and fought the legal battle for his
head with all the forensic skill of the law-courts. He was un-
der no illusion. The purpose of the King and the means of
escape were as clear as daylight to his clear mind. True to
himself he went to the scafi'old with many jests, but the trans-
ports of other martyrs were foreign to his nature. He balanced
the gaining of the world against his soul — and gave a lawyer's
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verdict. The world, the flesh and the devil strove with their
lonely antagonist and failed.
Three things stand out in the Dialogue. The first is the
close Presence of God, and upon that More builds: "If you
be part of His flock, and believe His promise, how can you be
comfortless in any tribulation, when Christ and His Holy Spirit
and with them their inseparable Father (if you put full trust
and confidence in Them) be never neither one finger breadth
of space, nor one minute of time from you? '' Warring against
this Presence are the treacheries of sin. It would not be easy
to find a saint who has written more usefully upon the varied
resources of the devil. His analysis of the sins of 'sloth and
pusilanimity and scrupulosity and pride, show a man who has
met and recognized them in his own experience. Of riches-^
and More had been a moderately rich man — ^he has a special
fear: "Then were there, I ween, no place in no time since
Christ's dayes hitherto, nor as I think in as long before that
neither, nor never shall there hereafter, in which there could
any man abide rich without the danger of eternal damnation,
even for his riches alone, though he demeened it never so
well."
Above all, there shone from More during these last days
the certainty of his apostolic Faith. The last word of a con-
troversialist with the Lutherans was that, when differences of
religious opinion arose, he would rather be on the side of the
saints. Speaking of purgatory he says: "Though they (the
Protestants) think there be none, yet since they deny not that
all the corps of Christendom by so many hundred years have
believed the contrary; and among them all, the old interpre-
ters of Scripture from the Apostles* days down to our own time,
of whom they deny not many for holy saints, that I dare not
now believe these men against all those. These men must of
their courtesy hold my poor fear excused, and I beseech our
Lord heartily for them, that when they depart out of this
wretched world, they find no purgatory at all, so God keep
them from hell."
Adamant as was his own conviction on the subject of the
oath of supremacy. Sir Thomas More never made the slightest
attempt to persuade any other man to his own way of think-
ing. The title assumed by the King of " Supreme Head of the
Anglican Church " had been qualified by the amending clause,
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440 ''ROMAN AND UTOPIAN MORE" [Jan.,
" So far as the law of Christ allows;'' and many Catholics took
what was then the defensible course of acknowledging it, when
accompanied by the qualification. More would never say
that they were wrong to do so, but his reason and conscience
forbade him the compromise. He weighed the evidence, like
the lawyer he was, and then went to his death for what seemed
the trivial and pedantic point of a flaw in a title deed! Even
when his judges sneered at him for having no wish to live,
urging him to condemn the law outright, the prisoner would
only add with proud humility: ** I have not been a man of .such
holy living as I might be bold to offer myself to death, but God,
for my presumption, might suffer me to fall.'' Martyrdom
was not of his own seeking, and the legal skill More displayed
in the battle he made for his life, would have gained him
acquittal from any but such a foresworn tribunal. Not until
his sentence was passed, did he break his reserve or explicitly
declare his opinions.
With that relief to his soul, the saint's old gayety came
back to him. To his judges, his wife, his children, even to his
executioner he showed a manner oddly mixed of serenity and
whimsicality. He went placidly to the scaffold, jesting all the
way, and, having kissed the headsman, said the Miserere psalm
and received the martyr's crown from the hands of his Re-
deemer. Twenty years previously he had described the death-
bed traditions of the Utopians: "They think he shall not be
welcome to God, which, when he is called, runneth not to Him
gladly, but is drawn by force and sore against his will. They
therefore that see this kind of death do abhor it, and them
that so die they bury with sorrow and silence."
There is a strange consistency about this man. His com-
plexity lay only in the subtlety of his intellect; his motive was
always single. Without the impetus of romanticism or
enthusiasm, his integrity remained steadfastly unshaken. Out
of Holbein's canvas he looks at us, wearing his habitual ironic
smile; at once the greatest and the most homely Englishman of
his age; the satirist who is the plain man's saint.
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CATHOLIC DOCTRINE OF THE RIGHT OF SELF
GOVERNMENT.
BY JOHN A. RYAN, D.D.
|N the last issue of The Catholic World we dis-
cussed the case of those communities which are
in political transition, and about to obtain or
establish a new government. Such are primitive
peoples just emerging from the nomadic state,
the American Colonies at the close of the Revolution, the
Philippines at the end of Spanish rule, and present-day Russia.
By confining our attention to such cases we have been able to
consider the right of self government in itself, without refer-
ence to the claims of a ruler who has been for some time in
actual possession. Let us take up now the more common case
of a people that already has a government, but that wishes to
set up a new constitution through the expulsion of the present
ruler, or, at least, through a considerable curtailment of his
powers. Does the right of the monarch cease, as soon as the
people have definitely decided that they want a change? Ob-
viously the question has no reference to those countries whose
constitutions permit and authorize the people to make such
changes in a regular and legal manner. What is involved is a
transformation of the constitution itself by other than consti-
tutional procedure.
For centuries the great majority of Catholic moralists
have thought that when a regime degenerates into tyranny;
when it is inflicting serious and long continued injiuy on the
community; when, to quote St. Thomas Aquinas, it seeks the
welfare of the tyrant rather than the welfare of the people,
the latter have a right to defend themselves against this
unlawful aggression, and, if necessary, to depose the tyrant.
This right of resistance, of self-defence, includes the right to
use physical force, to make an armed revolution, in certain
conditions, namely, when legal and pacific means have proved
ineffective; when there is a reasonable probability that the out-
come will be satisfactory; and when the judgment concern-
ing the tyranny of the government and the probability of suc-
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442 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Jan.,
cessf ul resistance is shared by the larger and better portion
of the community.*
However difficult these conditions may be of accurate ap-
plication to a particular case, they are all obviously necessary
to render reasonable an armed revolution. They are de-
manded by human welfare, by the welfare of the people them-
selves.
Suppose, however, that the people have no grievance that
amounts to tyrannical oppression, and that they do not intend
to oppose the existing government by force of arms. Suppose
that they desire a republic because they know that this form
of government is capable of giving them greater opportunities
of self development and social progress. So far as the mere
technique of government is concerned, and the maintenance
of peace, order and security, the republic will, we assume, be
only slightly more efficient than the monarchy; but it will pro-
mote the welfare of the masses to a greater degree, and will
make the people more contented with their political insti-
tutions. In a word, the question is between a tolerably good
government with which the people have become dissatisfied,
and a better one with which they will be satisfied. And we
assume, further, that the desire for a republic is shared by a
substantial majority of the people, and has survived so many
obstacles and disturbing circumstances, that it represents not a
temporary whim but a profound determination. In these cir-
cumstances have the people a right to bid the monarch to de-
part, and to use the device of passive resistance to compel his
acquiescence? To put it in other terms, has his moral right to
rule come to an end?
Apparently Catholic moralists would answer these ques-
tions in the negative. Even when the grievances of the peo-
ple are considerably greater than we are assuming, most Cath-
olic writers seem to think that a sufficient remedy can be found
in the device of passive resistance which is designed to cor-
rect but not to expel the reigning monarch. Even Suarez did
not concede to the people the right to recall authority from the
monarch arbitrarily. King James I. had raised, against the
doctrine of Bellarmine, the objection that if the people in
truth confer political authority upon the ruler, they may, at
any time, . withdraw it, if necessary, by armed rebellion.
^ C/. Cronln, The Science of Ethics, U,, 542.
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1919.] THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT 443
Suarez rejected this inference, asserting that when the people
have once transferred the ruling power, they cannot licitly re-
voke it at will. If they have set up a hereditary monarchy, they
are obliged to leave the ruling authority with the monarch and
his heirs; and the succeeding generations are likewise bound
by this original transfer and compact. In the opinion of
Suarez, a political community is a moral person, continuing
through an indefinite number of generations; consequently the
acts of one generation bind all those that come afterward.
Hence, a later generation can revoke the original grant of
power only when the monarch violates some of the conditions
expressly stated in the original compact, or when he has
gravely abused his power to the serious injury of the people.'
This hypothesis, that all the generations of a people con-
stitute one moral person, bound once for all by the action of
the first generation in setting up a hereditary monarchy, is
obviously a pure fiction. It has no basis in the nature of things.
It can be defended on only two possible grounds : the welfare
of the royal family, or the welfare of the people. Inasmuch
as the members of the reigning house can find other ways of
getting their living, their welfare is not necessarily bound up
with the exercise of kingly power. Nor is political authority
like private property, which the possessor has a natural right
to transmit to his heirs. On the other hand, the existing gen-
eration is a better judge of the kind of government that will
promote its welfare, than was the generation that originally
made the grant of political power to the royal family. There-
fore, the latter was incompetent to make the grant irrevocable.
Turning to later Catholic writers, we find their opinions
on the right of the people to change the form of government or
the ruling authorities partially stated in their discussion of a
usurping ruler. They maintain that a person who has got
possession of a government by force, does not forthwith be-
come endowed with the moral authority to govern. This is
obviously correct. Any other theory would make might the
determinant of right. When, however, the rightful ruler can-
not be restored, the public welfare will sooner or later de-
mand that the rule of the usurper should be regarded as legiti-
mate. It is not reasonable nor beneficial that a people should
•Defensio Fidel CathoKcm, m., m., 3, 4; also De Legtbns, m„ JJl. 7;
IX., 4.
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444 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Jan.,
live indefinitely under a government that is without genuine
authority. Now the general teaching of recent Catholic
writers seems to be that the rule of the usurper cannot become
morally legitimate before the end of two or three generations.
After a period of that length, the new government will pos-
sess authority by the title of prescription; for time and circum-
stances have made it clear that the unjustly deposed monarch
will never be able to recover his political power.
Cannot the usurping government be legitimized at any
time by the consent of the people? The answer of these writers
is a decided negative. According to Dr. Cronin, whose view
may be taken as typical, ''in the case of a monarchy or an
aristocracy, the people are not the authority from whom con-
sent is to be sought; and as long as the monarch or ruling
aristocracy is in existence, it is on their authority and by their
consent only that legitimation can be affected. During that
period, too, the people are bound to refrain from giving their
consent to the new regime, or doing anything that would
directly help to consolidate the usurper's position." When,
however, the fallen dynasty has shown itself utterly unable to
recover its power, " we may regard the people, in default of
anybody else, as a kind of residuary legatee of the dethroned
monarch, with a right to choose the ruler." •
The people have no right to legitimize the government of
the usurper, since ruling authority is not in their hands. It
rests with the deposed monarch. Whence did he derive it?
From his royal parents immediately; from the first person in
the royal line ultimately. Whence did it come to the original
king? It might have come from the people by election, from
his position as patriarch, or from some other combination of
facts and circumstances which rendered his exercise of politi-
cal power reasonable. Whatever the particular title, source or
justification of the authority exercised by the first person in
a hereditary monarchy, the right to rule remains with the
royal descendant until he has lost it through the long process
of prescription. Until that process is completed, the authority
does not lie with the people, and cannot be conferred by them
upon by the usurper. Such is Dr. Cronin's argiunent.
It is not conclusive. Nor does the position against which it
is directed depend, as he says, upon the assumption that the
*0p. cit„ n„ 533. 534.
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only title of political authority is the consent of the people.
We can concede that, in the case of a certain hereditary mon-
archy, the original king obtained his first authority without the
consent of the people, because he was the only person in the
community morally and intellectually fit to administer a gov-
ernment; and still we cap, without any violation of logic, con-
tend that the present generation has the moral right, in some
circumstances, to turn against the deposed monarch and to
make legitimate the government of the usurper. Why and
when have the people this right? Because the supreme end of
government and the fundamental justification of every title
of authority is the public welfare; as soon as this comes to
depend to a substantial degree upon popular acceptance of the
usurper, his rule becomes morally legitimate.
Dr. Cronin himself says:* "In the long run it is the
welfare of the people that must be allowed to determine all
such issues, and must decide all questions of right between the
opposing governments.*' Now it is precisely this general prin-
ciple that justifies the people in supporting, and authorizes
them to legitimize, a usurping government any time after the
preceding one has been deposed. History informs us that the
attempt of a fallen monarch to regain power has not infre-
quently been regarded with studied and sullen enmity by the
people, while the rule of the usurper has promptly obtained
their deliberate adhesion and active cooperation. If the new
government is at least as competent as the old, the attitude of
the people becomes of itself the determining factor of their
welfare. In these circumstances, the welfare of the people
is bound up with their acceptance and consent; if given to the
rule of the usurper, it makes that rule morally legitimate. Dr.
Cronin*s contention to the contrary is based on two assump-
tions, one of principle, the other of fact.
The first of these assumptions is that the political right of
a hereditary royal house is closely akin to the right of private
property. In common with the more recent Catholic writers.
Dr. Cronin enlarges upon the ruling right of the deposed
monarch in such terms as to convey the impression that his
moral claim to the sceptre is about as strong as his claim to
his house or his hat. The wrong done the ruler when he is
deprived of his throne, is represented in such a way as to sug-
^Op. eiU n., 526.
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446 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Jan.,
gest that it is only slightly, if at all, different from that which
he suffers when he is robbed of his household furniture.
To whatever extent this assumption may be latent in the
minds or argiunents of the Catholic writers we are consider-
ing, the simple truth is that the governing authority of the
monarch is in no sense proprietary. It is entirely fiduciary,
conferred upon him not at all for his own benefit, but solely for
the good of the community. When it ceases to promote the
latter end, it may properly be transferred to someone else by
any process that is reasonable, as the deliberate adhesion of the
people to a usurping ruler who can provide at least as good a
government as the one that has been overthrown.
The assumption of fact underlying Dr. Cronin's conten-
tion is that to concede the people the right of legitimizing the
new government before the dethroned royal house has lost all
hope of regaining power, would not really promote the public
welfare. It is assumed that the people are constitutionally
prone to sanction political changes without sufficient reason;
that they are easily liable to be mistaken in their evaluation of
the usurping government; and, therefore, that their consent
to it would, in most cases, be given unwisely. In a word, the
assumption is that this theory of the right of popular deter-
mination and choice, as between the new and the old gov-
ernments, gives too much encoiu-agement to the social forces
that stir up and make unjustifiable revolutions.
The existence of this danger must be admitted by all
students of political history. Whether it be so great and so
pervading as to render unreasonable every immediately pop-
ular acceptance of a usurper's rule, is a question that men will
answer differently. Those who look with an unfriendly eye
upon the general theory of democracy, and who distrust the
political capacity of the people, think that the history of revo-
lutions furnishes sutficient reasons for denying to the people
any such right or moral authority; those who believe in de-
mocracy, and who hold that moderately enlightened com-
munities can be trusted with more political power than
they have historically been permitted to exercise, see a smaller
amount of social and political evil in those same revolutions,
than in the governmental incompetence and injustice the peo-
ple would suffer if they never exercised the claim to legitimize
at will a competent but usurping regime. The Catholic
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writers who take the former attitude, are greatly affected by
the evil results that have followed popular insurrections from
the time of the French Revolution. Those of us who cling to
the opposite opinion, believe that we weigh these disturbances
in a more accurate balance, and with a more just regard to the
good that they have involved and sometimes concealed. We
think that, in the long run, the people are likely to be quite as
good judges of their welfare as any fallen king.
At any rate, we are supposing a case in which the public
welfare actually will be furthered through an immediate pop-
ular recognition of the rule of the usurper. The assimiption
that, even in such a case, the people have no such legitimizing
authority because they would sometimes abuse it, is, to say
the least, not demonstrated. It is supported by no adequate
basis of fact in the realm of either psychology or history. It
has no more value than the assumption that no man has a
right to function as king, because many monarchs have grossly
abused their great power.
In passing, it is worthy of note that the theory which we
are opposing was implicitly rejected by Pope Pius VII., in
1804, when he crowned Napoleon Bonaparte as Emperor of
the French, during the lifetime of the brother and heir of
Louis XVI. Evidently the Pontiff did not think it necessary
to await the disappearance of the third generation of the
legitimate house. Incidentally, Napoleon h&d previously ob-
tained the formal adhesion of the French people.
To resume the argument of the last few pages : if the rea-
soning and assumptions of recent Catholic writers are insuf-
ficient to prove the moral incompetence of the people to legiti-
mize the rule of a usurper, as soon as it is evidently more con-
ducive to public welfare than that of the deposed monarch, we
are undoubtedly free to hold that the people have such a right.
Therefore, they have also the right to command an inefficient
king to depart, and the right to replace his government by a
republic or a constitutional monarchy.
Obviously the comparative inefficiency of the existing gov-
ernment and the probability of getting a better one, should be
greater in the latter case than in the former. Stronger reasons
are required to justify the expulsion of a monarch now in pos-
session, than the rejection of one who has been already ex-
pelled, and who could regain his throne only by bloodshed.
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448 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Jan.,
But such reasons have existed and still exist. Suppose that
the German army and people had refused to obey the mobili-
zation order in 1914, and had made a practically unanimous
demand upon the Kaiser to abdicate, in order that they might
set up a republic or a truly representative constitutional mon-
archy. That action would have prevented this frightful war,
and saved the whole world from the menace of Prussian mili-
tarism and autocracy. Suppose that every other people suffer-
ing from royal incompetency and lust of conquest, had acted in
the same way. Is it not at least probable that the evils result-
ing from such popular enterprises, and the abuses of the prin-
ciple underlying them, would have been less disastrous than
those which have followed the failure to adopt this course?
The views of recent Catholic writers on the question be-
fore us are further deducible from their discussion of the
right of the people to change the political constitution. They
are probably well represented by the statements of Father
Meyer. In his opinion, it is morally wrong to abrogate a con-
stitution or to make a change in its essentials, unless the
process have the consent of the ruler and of all the civil classes
of the community. In support of this proposition, he advances
the practical argument that the opposite principle would give
free license to revolution, and the theoretical argument that
every legitimately established constitution is based upon at
least an implicit contract, formed by all the civil classes, and
therefore terminable only by the consent of all.'
A sufiBcient reply to this contention will be found in a brief
examination of its implications. If a constitution can be licitly
changed in its essentials only when all civil classes of the com-
munity consent, an essential modification of a monarchical
constitution in the direction of democracy has rarely, if ever,
been morally right in the past and can rarely, if ever, be justi-
fied in the future. Such a change means a lessening of the
authority of the king or of the aristocratic element. Now, it is
one of the commonplaces of history and of hiunan nature that
no privileged governing class ever willingly surrenders any of
its power. If Father Meyer is right, the British people did
wrong a few years ago when, despite the protest of the House
of Lords, they deprived that body of some of its most important
constitutional authority.
• Instttntiones JurU Natnralis, H., 434-436.
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1919.] THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT 449
If Father Meyer is right, the majority in the German Reich-
stag would perpetrate an immoral act should they some day
acquire sufiBcient courage to compel a modification in the Ger-
man Constitution whereby the Chancellor would become re-
sponsible to the Reichstag, and the Bundersrath be shorn of its
dominant power in the governmental system. . These changes
would bring the world much nearer to a just peace, and they
would be one of the greatest guarantees of continued peace;
but they would affect " essential *' articles of the German Con-
stitution, and they would not be willingly accepted by the
Kaiser or the nobility or the dominant Prussian element.
Therefore, they would be contrary to justice, according to
Meyer's principle.
His practical argument in favor of the principle is, that
unless a constitution be thus safeguarded against the popular
will, " all stability of public institutions will be rendered im-
possible, and there will be a sort of permanent and legal right
of revolution." This dire consequence does not logically fol-
low. It is one thing to say that the people have a right some-
times to diminish to an essential degree the constitutional pre-
rogatives of the monarch or the nobles, and another thing to
assert that they may properly do so in a moment of popular
passion, or without a grave reason. Obviously a change of this
magnitude becomes reasonable only when it is required to pro-
mote the public welfare, or the rights of a particular class, and
when the desire for it is deeply rooted in a substantial majority
of the people. The curtailment of the power of the British
House of Lords by popular vote in 1911, is an excellent illus-
tration.
If the rejoinder be made that all nations do not display the
restraint of the British, the obvious reply is that every political
principle is liable to abuse. The problem is one of comparison
of opposite dangers. If the people be conceded the right to
change the constitution against the wishes of the royal and
aristocratic elements, they may exercise the right too
freely, with bad results to social peace and order; if they are
denied the right, they will frequently be compelled to endure
indefinitely a considerable measure of political hardship.
Father Meyer sees vividly the evil consequences of the former
situation. We take the liberty of suggesting that they are not
as great as those that would follow from a rigid application of
VOL. cvni. — 29
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450 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Jan.,
his own principle. And we believe that this suggestion is sup-
ported by the verdict of history. The injuries wrought by gov-
erning classes secure from popular control, have been con-
siderably greater than those resulting from inconsiderate pop-
ular curtailment of the authority of kings or nobles.
Meyer's theoretical argument in support of his position is,
that every long-established constitution rests upon either an
implicit or an explicit contract among the different classes of
the country. Like the irrevocable grant of authority assumed
by Suarez, the hypothesis of an implicit contract binding vari-
ous political classes to make no essential change in the con-
stitution except by general agreement, is a pure fiction. Neither
from history nor from ethics can the assumption be verified.
An explicit contract of this sort is very rare, as Meyer himself
admits; and even it could reasonably be abrogated by the peo-
ple of a succeeding generation in the interest of the public wel-
fare. Why should a contract made by a generation now in the
grave, be morally binding in a purely political situation?
When we contend that the people have a right to abolish
or curtail the political powers of the nobility or the monarch,
we assume that a determining majority of them have, for a
long time, firmly believed that such a change would promote
considerably the public welfare. Their attitude represents no
mere ephemeral fancy or caprice. It is based upon a matured
and settled conviction. As already noted, this attitude consti-
tutes in itself a powerful obstacle to the effectiveness of the
present government, and a considerable help to the success of
a new government. And we have in mind a civilized people
that possesses a moderate amount of political consciousness
and political capacity.
It should also be kept in mind that we do not claim or con-
cede the right to make a bloody revolution, in order to effect
the desired change. The case that we are considering is not
sufficiently critical to justify active and forcible resistance.
The issue is not that of a good versus a tyrannical government,
but of a better versus a poorer one. Therefore, we maintain
that the people have merely the right to bid the relatively in-
efficient monarch to depart, and to enforce that demand by
peaceful measures of passive resistance. To be sure, the pos-
session of such a right by the people, implies an obligation on
the part of the monarch to acquiesce and abdicate.
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When we speak of the people, we mean an entire political
community. They might constitute an independent sovereign
State, such as Spain or Denmark; or a subject but historically
distinct nation, such as Ireland or Poland. To either of these
political situations, our theory is fairly applicable. But it does
not fit a segment of a substantially unified nation or State.
Such a division might be constituted on racial or religious
lines, as the Orangemen of Northeast Ireland; or on geogra-
phical lines, as the States that seceded from our own political
union more than half a century ago. Without traditions of
national and political independence, these sections have not
that need of a separate government which is deeply felt and
tenaciously cherished by a historically complete nation. More-
over, they are not justified in considering the matter merely
from the viewpoint of their own welfare. They are obliged
to take into account the good of the country or nation of which
they are an incomplete element. Secession and independence
for them might cause irreparable injury to the dominant and
determinant element of the nation. On the other hand, all
their peculiar interests, whether of race, religion, or locality,
could be amply protected and secured by an adequate measure
of local autonomy. To this they have a moral right.
With these qualifications understood, we repeat now the
proposition that we advanced a few pages back: the people
have a right by peaceful methods to change the form and per-
sonnel of their government, specifically to curtail or abolish
the powers of the monarch or the nobles, whenever they be-
come cognizant of the fact that such action would considerably
promote the public welfare.
Let us now apply briefly this proposition to some of the
peoples and countries that are today asserting the right of
"self-determination.'* The Belgians have a right to complete in-
dependence because they are capable of self government, be-
cause they would never be satisfied with German rule, and be-
cause there is not a shadow of reason for denying them the
right To contend that the safety or economic welfare of Ger-
many required some degree of control over a part of Bel-
giimi, for example, Antwerp, is to make an assertion that is
utterly groundless. All the reasonable agreements or facilities
needed by Germany can be obtained from Belgium without
any element of political control. One nation does not need to
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4S2 THE RIGHT OF SELF GOVERNMENT [Jan.,
dominate another politically in order to trade with it. Indeed,
if Germany and some other nations of Europe had not pursued
a policy of erecting trade barriers between themselves and
their neighbors, the present war would, probably, never have
been provoked.
Ireland is in substantially the same position as Belgium.
The welfare of her people requires that she shall have at least
a liberal measure of home rule; therefore, they have a moral
right to at least this degree of self government. Have they a
right to complete independence? Yes; if the determining and
competent majority earnestly desire it, and believe that it is
necessai'y for their welfare. There is no serious ground for the
assertion that an independent Ireland would be a menace to
the safety or welfare of England. Nor has the English domi-
nation of Ireland been rendered morally legitimate by the de-
vice of prescription. According to the principles defended
throughout this article, the mere lapse of time does not legiti-
mize a government against the deliberate will of a politically
competent people; for such a rule is incapable of attaining the
supreme and single end of government, namely, the public
welfare. Therefore, the Irish people have a moral right to
whichever form of autonomy they prefer, either Home Rule
or absolute independence.
What is true of Belgium and Ireland is likewise true of
Poland and Bohemia. Both these nations were for a long
period of time self-governing, and both possess definite and
tenacious traditions of political autonomy. Whatever meas-
ure of self government they want now, they have a moral right
to obtain, since this is necessary for their welfare. Nor would
the reasonable interests of their former political masters, Aus-
tria, Germany and Russia, be endangered by their complete
independence.
May the same be said of the other racial groups within the
kingdom of Austria-Hungary? The most important of these,
and the one that is now the subject of most discussion, is the
Jugo, or Southern, Slavs. It is clear that they have a right to
that measure of local autonomy which is necessary for the pro-
tection of their social, economic, racial and linguistic interests.
But they are now demanding complete political independence.
Is this a reasonable demand?
Fifteen or twenty years ago, the majority of fair-minded
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students of politics would probably have answered this ques-
tion with a conditional negative. K Austria and Hungary con-
cede to the Jugo-Slavs full local autonomy and full protection
of all their racial, linguistic, and other peculiar interests, that
is all that they can reasonably claim. On the one hand, all
their genuine needs as a people will be satisfied; on the other
hand, both their own welfare and the welfare of the Empire
will be better promoted and safeguarded through such an
arrangement than through complete political secession and
independence. And it must not be forgotten that the interests
of the Empire deserve some consideration. Such, we may con-
fidently assume, would have been the answer of even
democratically minded authorities.
Today, however, all is changed. The Jugo-Slavs will ap-
parently not now be satisfied with the most generous measure
of home rule under the crown of Austria-Hungary; the gov-
ernments of Austria and Hungary cannot be trusted to deal
either justly or generously with their subject peoples; and the
Empire has forfeited its claim to be permitted to remain the
great world-state that it was before it gave its practical ad-
hesion to the Prussian doctrine of force in 1914. Neither man-
kind nor the constituent peoples of the Dual Kingdom would
be benefited by the conservation on the old lines of either
Austria or Hungary. Should the former be so reduced as to
comprise only its Germanic element, and the latter so as to
contain only Magyars, the outcome need not be regarded witli
apprehension. It would be saddening for those who worship
the glory of a political name, but it would probably be a good
thing for the Germano-Austrian and the Magyar peoples.
After all, they, like the other racial elements in the Empire, are
the main consideration. Therefore, we conclude that the Jugo-
Slavs have a right to complete independence.
K the people of Alsace-Lorraine desire to be reinstated in
the governmental system of France, they have a moral right
to this arrangement. It would promote their welfare, and
it would be very gratifying to the people of France. Suppose,
however, that they desire to become independent of both
France and Germany. Have they a right to the fulfillment of
this desire? If this question were asked at the close of the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870, it would demand a negative an-
swer, since independence at that time would have been unjusti-
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fiable secession by an incomplete political element. The lapse
of fifty years might, however, have so diminished the interests
and claims of France, imd so increased the political and so-
cial consciousness of the two provinces, as to render reasonable
a demand for complete independence. The proposition seems
to be at least debatable.
As a summary of this and the preceding article, we submit
the following propositions: The official teaching of the
Church is, that political government is a natural necessity for
society; that the authority of the legitimate ruler comes from
God, and that each of the three forms of government, the
monarchic, the aristocratic, and the democratic, or any of the
usual combinations of the three forms, is in itself morally law-
ful. According to the doctrine of Bellarmine and Suarez,
which has in its favor more Catholic writers of authority than
any other theory, political authority is derived directly from
God by the people, and is by them transmitted, either explicitly
or implicitly, to the ruler. But we have given reasons to show
that the political rights of the people can be fully safeguarded
by the theory that, instead of conferring authority upon the
ruler, they merely designate him, and that the person so desig-
nated receives his authority directly from God. This right to
choose their own form of government and ruler, is inherent
in every people that has the capacity to provide for or main-
tain a fairly competent government.
As regards the right of a people to change the existing
form of government, recent Catholic writers exaggerate the
right of the actual or the recently deposed monarch. The rea-
sonable conclusion seems to be that a politically competent
people have the right to modify essentially their constitution
and even, by passive resistance, to force a monarch to abdicate,
when they are unwaveringly convinced that they can provide
a better government, and when this conviction corresponds with
the facts. The justification of this proposition is to be found in
public welfare. Finally, the principles developed in our study
indicate that substantially all the small nations of Europe are
justified in their claims to " self-determination.'*
[the end.]
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THE CHAPLAIN'S STORY.
Letters from France of a Knight of Columbus Chaplain.
EDITED BY I. T. MARTIN.
JN the year seventeen hundred and eighty, when
the struggling young American colonies were
battling with the tyrannical George III., an ex-
pedition sailed from the shores of France. It
came to America, by order of the King of
France, to cooperate with the forces of General Washington.
The expedition was headed by Lieutenant-General Vimeure
Jean Baptiste Donatieu, Comte de Rochambeau, and its result
is the United States of America. To the gallant sons of France
who came to the rescue in that hour of peril, America owes her
liberty.
On the fifth day of July, in the year nineteen hundred and
eighteen, a convoy with thousands of American soldiers on
board, crossed the seas, headed by a steamship named
Rochambeau. Like its intrepid namesake, the ship put out to
sea, the Stars and Stripes and the Tri-Color of France thrown
to the winds. Thus blazing the way, the Rochambeau led the
standard bearers of America to a safe port in French
waters.
On board were men of many nations. Alpine heroes, re-
turning from a triumphant tour of America, Polish soldiers,
enlisted to wrest tyranny from its throne, Chinese interpreters,
homesick but determined young Americans, and clergymen of
almost every denomination. Among them was a Catholic
priest, young in years but old in wisdom, who had volunteered
to go over as a Knight of Columbus chaplain. As pastor of a
church in a western college town, he had seen his boys called
to the colors, one by one, until the stars on the service flag of
the little Catholic church grew to be a great cluster. Then he
decided to add one more star to that flag, and to lend
one more effort to the cause — but we must let him tell his own
story.
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The Voyage.
My cabin was on the promenade deck; my cabin mate, a
Hebrew from Manila, on his way to France, in the interest of
the Red Cross. Sauntering about the ship, I noticed a man with
Irish blue eyes, wearing the uniform of France, calmly smok-
ing his pipe as he looked out on the placid sea. I saluted him
in his native tongue, and we soon came to a mutual under-
standing. The man was a Breton, which accounts for the
Irish eyes, and to my intense surprise and delight, I learned that
he was also a priest. But if I was happy in my discovery,
I think that Father De Mar — fighting in the ranks of the far
famed ** Blue Devils " — ^was even more so. He told me of the
long weary grind of three years in the trenches, of his life, his
mission to America, his furlough, and now — ^back again for duty.
He told his wonderful story with the cheerful optimism and
matter of fact heroism so characteristic of the French soldier.
One day out from the Statue of Liberty, I erected my little
altar, and invoked the Sacred Heart in the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass, to take the voyagers under His special protection. I did
not forget the benign and calming influence of that great friend
of the wanderer — Mary, Star of the Sea — and, as though by
magic touch of heaven, the things that seemed so hard and
irksome, became easy, and the clouds in the skies disappeared
— broken by the sunshine into columns of blue and silver.
Thus the Rochambeau sailed the wide sea without fear, for the
Lord of sea and sky and land was with her.
The steamer was in mid-ocean on Sunday, July 14th, the
day that commemorates the Fall of the Bastile. At seven that
morning. Father De Mar — the " Blue Devil " — offered Mass on
an upper deck, about sixty people receiving Holy Communion.
Between the decks, later in the morning, with the blue sky as a
canopy and the calm green sea as a background, I celebrated
Mass, more than five hundred gathering to attend the service,
and a hundred or more of the boys in khaki kneeling to re-
ceive the Bread of Life.
Time and space vanished under the magic spell and I was
carried back to the land of roses. It was as though the little
children of St. Mary's were on board, singing their Sunday
morning song. Never before have I experienced so impressive
a scene, and there were tears glistening in the eyes of everyone
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in the congregation, kneeling that bright morning to adore
their God and to bespeak His mercy and compassion.
A calm sea and clear weather prevailed throughout the
voyage. Gloom did not rule. Alarms of submarine attacks
failed to dampen the ardent spirits whose mission filled them
with a fervor for France and Liberty, aptly sjrmbolized by a
journey begun on the day after our Independence Day, and
ended soon after the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastile.
First Days in France.
The steamer Rochambeau landed in Bordeaux, historic
old city of France, Tuesday evening at night-fall. The quiet
old city is full of new life — ^modernized owing to the influx of
our countrymen. Entering the harbor, the imprint of Ameri-
can enterprise and efficiency is everywhere in evidence. The
French are the most courteous of people and seem to vie
with one another in lavishing kindness upon the Americans.
On our way to Paris — ^between the two cities — ^we saw
some of the most fertile country of France. The hand of war
has not touched it, nor marred its beauty. It is the old chateau
country of the long ago, and it still retains the beauty of archi-
tecture that has survived since feudal days.
We passed through Poitiers, ancient see of France, which
witnessed the beautiful life and sad death of St. Martin;
through Orleans, once triumphantly delivered by Joan,
Maid of Domrdmy, the saviour of France. Ajad then
Paris! Who shall describe it? Mightier pens than mine have
failed to do justice to the beauty of this great heart that throbs
in the breast of France. The night of my arrival, aeroplanes
made a raid on the city. The beUs sounded the alarm, but the
raid was of short duration. I looked upon it in the nature of a
reception, and was not in the least alarmed. There are places
of shelter on the streets of Paris — ^subways and ceUars — ^which
serve as places of safety on such occasions, but since that first
night I have not found it necessary to use them.
The evening after I reached Paris found me working in a
near-by hospital. After giving spiritual consolation to the
wounded, I went into the bathroom and remained there until
seven-thirty the next morning — ^bathing the boys and helping
as best I could to alleviate their sufferings.
The heroism, courage and grit of our American boys is
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wonderful. There are no soldiers in the whole world so brave,
so fearless, so manly. I have bathed their wounds, lit their
cigarettes and arranged their pillows, and in return it was
always a smile of thanks or a merry quip from the youthful
soldier. An army with men of such morale and courage, such
genuine fortitude, can never taste defeat. God will surely reward
their sacrifices with victory. We are driving ahead and soon the
world will ring with the praises of the American soldiers. To-
day I talked with a Frenchman whom I met on a street-car,
and he could discuss nothing else but the brave Americans.
" The soldiers of the United States are wonderful,*' said he,
and such is the general opinion of our gallant boys, from the
gates of Paris to the sunny south-lands. They know no fear,
and suffering and death have no terrors for them. I have
met boys from every State in the Union, except dear old Ore-
gon, but in a short time I expect to run into the lads from the
Golden West.
The work of the Knights of Columbus is only just begin-
ning, but it is appreciated to the full, for theirs is a work of
charity and love, without a price tag. The Knights seek only
the comfort of the boys and the reward which God has
promised to those who help freely. No personal aggrandize-
ment iooms up in the limelight, no material profit is looked
for, and, thank God, everyone in France knows it. France
loves the Knights of Columbus, America is proud of them, and
the boys — well, to note the smile of joy when they behold the
old familiar emblem, is to know that gratitude will be indelibly
stamped upon their hearts long years after the memories of
the World War and its tragedies shall have Jaded away. To
see the Knights at work — ^professional men and men from
every walk of life — helping wherever they are most needed,
and then to realize that they are animated only with the love
of God and their fellow-man, is a sight never to be forgotten.
Last night I had a long talk with a New Yorker who
had been a fellow passenger on the Rochambeau. He had
been up the line where the big guns are booming, and life has
taken on a new coloring. He has decided to join the Knights of
Columbus unit, and is happy to be able to lend his services to
his country as a Knight of Columbus worker. His valet, a
native-born Frenchman, emulating his master, also volun-
teers as an interpreter for the organization.
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Paris is filled to overflowing with victims of the enemy
guns. In the hotel where I am staying, there is a Frenchman,
a charming yomig fellow, temporarily abiding there while
his family is out of town. The youth lost a leg last Good Fri-
day, when the church in which he was making the Stations of
the Cross was shelled. This is one of the tragedies met with
almost constantly here.
It is Sunday morning in Paris and there is an air of quiet
and peace in this beautiful city, in strange contrast with the
surroundings. The church bells are ringing, calling the faith-
ful to Mass, and the crowds, clad in the sombre garments that
bespeak the silent sorrow of the heart, are hastening to the
altar. I have just returned from the Madeleine, where I offered
Mass, and I shall never be able to express the thoughts that
came surging through my heart, as I entered the vestibule and
beheld the beauty and grace of this majestic monument to our
Divine King. There are other churches more beautiful, but this
is the first one I have been privileged to enter in the city of
Paris.
Paris, peaceful in the bright sunshine of the ^emi-tropics !
How difficult it is to realize that out on the front, the boys
from home are smashing and whacking their way, driving the
Germans towards Berlin. Brave, historic Paris, that in days
gone by has borne the burden and the heat of the conflict
without a quiver, and that now, despite the booming of distant
guns, stands undismayed and wears its wonted aspect of calm
reserve and masked power!
LriTLE Boy Blue.
This Sunday morning, I went to the Church of the Sacred
Heart, builded on a hilltop, overlooking the city of Paris. It
was a beautiful morning, the sun shining and the air pure and
clear. The landmarks of Paris, old and new, unfolded them-
selves like the pictures on the screen of a moving-picture. The
hill on which the church is built is called Montmartre — Moun-
tain of Martyrs — ^because St. Denis, who brought the gift of
faith to the Gauls, was beheaded there. The crypt under-
neath marks his place of execution. A stained-glass window
represents St. Denis holding his own head in his heads, while
on his shoulders rests the head of our Blessed Saviour.
Before the light of Christianity struck the hilltop and
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made it golden in the light of faith, it was called Mont de Mars
— ^Mountain of Mars — because Mars and Mercury, the pagan
gods, had their temples there. It was here, too, that St. Igna-
tius of Loyola and his companions presented themselves at
the doors of the sanctuary, while one of their number —
Father Le Fevre — offered Mass in the little crypt. Then the
little band received Holy Communion from his hands, pro-
nounced their first vows and so laid the foundation of that
great religious organization — the Society of Jesus.
Today, for me, is like all other days, a round of duty and
love which I am glad to be able to perform for those I love.
I never knew of the innate bravery, self-sacrifice and strength
of our boys, until I learned to know them here in the danger
zone. This morning I met a boy from Portland, the first Oregon
boy I have met since I came to France. He was in the hospital,
poor fellow, and how his face lighted up when he discovered
that I came from his State. He asked me how I left the dear
old town by the Columbia River; if the orchards were as white
as ever in the springtime, and the fields as green along the
Williamette. I thought of the old song: "Gee, but it's good
to meet a pal from your old home town," and if my work
meant no more than the little bit of sunshine that I brought
to this boy's heart, I would feel amply repaid.
Yesterday T spent in a hospital, where I heard confessions
all the afternoon, and wrote letters for the boys. Among
others, I heard the first confession of a little boy, a slender lad
of sixteen, with blond, curly locks and a wistful smile that
went straight to the heart. I shall always think of him as
" Little Boy Blue " — torn away from his toys and the trappings
of childhood. The little fellow had been baptized when a baby,
but had never been a practical Catholic. I heard his confes-
sion and gave him Holy Communion. The lad has been shot
through the back and stomach, shrapneled in his right arm
and leg, and he hasn't much of a chance. But he is so brave,
poor " Little Boy Blue," that with the calm quizzical smile of a
seasoned warrior, he tells you that he is "only slightly
wounded," and will soon be able to return to the ranks! Such
wonderful optimism and good cheer, under adverse circum-
stances, I have never before witnessed. They are all like " Lit-
tle Boy Blue," suffering with a smile! The Germans are pay-
ing dearly and now recognize the metal of our boys. We are
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driving them back, and, no doubt, ere this reaches you, you
shall have heard of our great successes at Chateau-Thierry and
Soissons.
Besides ministering to the spiritual needs of the boys, I
am a sort of Jack-of-all-trades, and have even, on occasion,
donned the barber's apron and gone at the work in true bar-
ber fashion, not omitting the steady flow of conversation ! The
boys declare that I am a number one barber, and have prom-
ised to set me up in business, after the War is over, in a one-
chair shop of my own !
Tomorrow I go to a town far away from the scene of bat-
tle, where there are a number of camps and a hospital, but
where there has never been a chaplain.
The First Crusaders.
Eight hundred years ago, two hundred and thirty-nine
bishops, several thousand leaders of men, and men at arms,
assembled at Clermont, France, and were joined by a vast con-
course of people from all over Christendom, in answer to the
call of Urban II., a son of France, at that time the reigning
Pope. In the sixteenth session of this council. Urban having
heard from the lips of a pious hermit the recital of the misfor-
tunes that had come to Jerusalem at the hands of the Mussul-
mans, addressed the inmiense assembly that surrounded his
throne. He recaUed the exploits of Charles Martel and
Charlemagne and exhorted the people not to be content with
defending their country, but to go forth to the Orient, kill the
wild beast in his lair and avenge the glory and honor of Christ,
outraged in the profanation of His holy places.
"It is Jesus Christ Who calls you to His defence," said
Urban II. " Let not ties of home keep you at your fireside. Re-
member the words of your Saviour : ' He who loves father or
mother, brother or sister, or earthly goods or possessions more
than Me, is not worthy of Me.' *'
Never was human response given like to that which leaped
forth from the crowd at Clermont that day. " God wills it,"
they cried, and all Europe heard the echo of that cry. The
continent was lighted up by the holy fire of that enthusiasm,
and the great movement of the Crusades was born.
Today something similar has taken place. The Mussul-
man from the North, descendants of the vandal, are making
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war on the ideals of modem civilization and are desecrating
the hearths and homes of civilized people, wrecking at once the
altars of their homes and the altars of their God. The cry of
Joan of Arc rings out to the four winds of heaven, even to the
shores of far-away America, and has awakened a ready re-
sponse in the hearts of the people. They have come from afar
— ^brave lads from the United States — severing home ties and
hearth ties, like the Crusaders of old, ready to defend their
high ideals with their blood.
It is rather a strange coincidence that I should be the first
Knight of Columbus to come to this city in an official capacity,
to the place where the knights of old, worthy Crusaders of
other days, had their beginning.
This is a land of wonderful churches. Everywhere they
dot the towns and villages and even the little hamlets. Today
I was present at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which dates
back to the fourteenth century. Mass was offered up for the
success of the Allied arms, and a priest, one of the faculty of
an old college neat* by, sang O Salutaris Hostia. His beau-
tiful voice filled the hymn of adoration and love with so much
pathos, that all eyes were wet with tears at its conclusion.
Everything speaks of God up here in the hills, the spires
of the churches reaching up to the ethereal blue until they
appear to touch the skies. It is all like a dream to me, and
yet there are moments of stem reality, when the roseate hues
of dreamland vanish completely and one sees only the other
side of the silver lined cloud. But one cannot see the beautiful
fields smiling in the smnmer sun, the luxuriant harvest fields,
the vines and the orchards, without thinking thoughts that are
full of joy, and thanking again and again the good God.
Yesterday as I came through on the train, I passed a num-
ber of our boys, seated on a platform, singing the songs of their
native land. With France as their sentry and her beautiful
southern sky as their audience, the boys sang " Annie Laurie,"
and " Auld Lang Syne," while away back from the rear of the
platform, came the old plantation melodies — ** Old Folks at
Home," and " Old Black Joe."
Keep the home fires burning, while your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away, they dream of home.
There's a silver lining, through the dark cloud shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out, till the boys come home.
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Soldiers — ^longing for home! I well understood the pathos
that lay behind the words, and the waves of tenderness that
surged within their hearts as they sang in a make-believe, care-
free manner. It is not the shells or the fire of the enemy that
cause the keenest agony, but the severing of home ties and
the absence of the old familiar faces.
The Old College.
Tonight at ten o'clock, I am sitting by the light of a sput-
tering candle in an old college in one of the quaint sections
of Clermont-Ferrand.
This old dip has strange ideas and persists in making
eerie shadows on walls and ceilings, and painting ghostly
shadows on tables and chairs, and the old building itself dates
back, God knows how long. The city is steeped in ancient his-
tory, and buildings that we call old would be very modern
here. This old college has five hundred pupils during the
school year, but now they are on vacation, and at the kind in-
vitation of the superior I moved in here, finding it preferable
to the average French hotel.
I know you would never close an eye were you domiciled
here for a night, for it is a veritable haunted house. There
are long corriders winding in and out, and doors that lead to
the land of nowhere. Stone stairways galore and circular
stairways that keep on circling to seemingly endless heights,
are everywhere in evidence. I have not yet come to the end
of half of them.
Yet withal, the place has its advantages. Down below,
one flight, is our Changeless Friend and He has only a tiny red
light to dispel the gloom, while I have a large candle.
I am beginning to manage the French a little better, and
I have lots of fun with the French children. They take kindly
to the Americans and come to them demanding chewing gum
and other trifles, in perfect English. I have no difficulty in
making the children understand, and I believe it is because we
both look at things in the same light, while with the grown-
ups I have all sorts of linguistic difficulties.
I have been busy every minute of the day, but I can look
back upon a good day's work. Starting things has always been
hard for me, but today I systematized a lot of work and, with
God's help, with great results. I told you I was the first Knight
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of Columbus to start the work in this part of the world, and
when the boys see me their eyes light up with joy. Most of
them have never seen a Knight of Columbus, much less a
chaplain, since they have been over here. The insignia of the
Order means everything to the boys, for they know that it
stands for square dealing, charity and generosity without a
string.
I visited a beautiful place today, a hospital in the heart of
the hills. It used to be a pleasure resort in the good old days
when the world enjoyed the blessings of peace, but now all the
pretty hotels bear the sign of the Red Cross and have become
institutions of mercy and love. I also visited a large aviation
camp and saw the bird-men soar into the clouds. Could I
have heard the sweet song of the Irish skylark, the allusion
would be perfect. In this and the neighboring town I visited
today, there are chiu^ches standing, in good repair and in
active use, though they date back to the eleventh century!
There are two such churches to be precise — one here and the
other in the neighboring city.
The front of the hotel in which I had been staying in Paris,
was blown out by " Big Bertha," the German long-distance gun,
two weeks before my arrival in the city. The same blast par-
tially destroyed a statue on the outside wall of the Church of
the Madeleine. The beautiful windows have been removed
from Notre Dame, to a place of safety, but I think the activities
of " Big Bertha " are at an end as far as Paris is concerned,
for she had to go with her bosses when they beat a long re-
treat at Soissons-Thierry.
I often long for butter, of which I am very fond and which
I have not eaten since mid-day on the fifth of July. I would
like a cup of coffee, too. United States manufacture, and I
would like to see what milk or white bread looks like. These
are some of the little inconveniences that come to me, but what
are these to the sacrifices that the boys are making who bear
the American standard through No Man's Land, towards the
gates of Berlin. Surely and certainly, with the certainty of
death, we will piu^sue them. The Kaiser and his satellites no
longer laugh at our "puny army of untrained men.*' When
they remember Chateau-Thierry and Soissons, the smile be-
comes a look of frozen horror and fear. So well it may, for
the boys have determined that when they again look upon the
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Statue of Liberty, the House of Hohenzollern shall be no
more.
Next week I expect to be going far afield, and very soon
will be donning the gas mask and other like accoutrements.
But it is all in the work of the day, and whatever is, is best.
It is a long grind, but right must eventually overcome might.
The Woods of the Marines.
Tonight there was a boxing tournament at the arena.
There were American, French and English soldiers, all making
merry for a little while. During the interval, we saluted the
Stars and Stripes and the Tri-Color of the French Republic.
There were several good bouts, and one Knight of Columbus
secretary acted as referee, while another presided at the piano.
Four French and one American General were present, and tiers
upon tiers, up to the very roof, were lined with the boys from
New York, Chicago, Portland and San Francisco. How the
boys did whistle and sing the airs of the dear land they love so
well! Cares were cast aside and they were just boys — afresh from
school, with the prospect of a long vacation ahead. Grim,
fighting men were they, courageous to the very core, but with
the hearts of children and the eager faces of youth.
It is a privilege to write in ink once more, and I am in-
debted for this fountain pen to a patient here in the hospital.
I met him only a few days ago, but he is probably the most in-
teresting man in the hospital. As a journalist of note, he has
pitched his tent at various times in the far places of the world,
and the story of his life would make interesting reading. He
comes of a good family and has had the advantages of educa-'
tion, environment and everything that makes life a joy, and
toni^t he is a private in the ranks of America's great army.
I think this is the most wonderful thing I have experienced,
the democracy of our army. Every man is on the same level,
and Tom Jones, the banker, is perfectly willing to take orders
from Lieutenant Smith, who probably drove the milk wagon in
his home town. It takes nerve and grit and self-discipline and,
above aU, self-sacrifice, to make such a condition possible, of
course.
Sunday afternoon I visited the old Cathedral at Clermont-
Ferrand. It is of mediaeval architecture, bordering on Gothic,
and strange faces and gargoyles peer out from the heart of the
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stone. Dim, shadowy aisles lead to the main altar, and high
above is the arched ceiling, inlaid with carvings and decorated
with many paintings. So high is the ceiling that one feels like
a tiny speck on the landscape, in comparison.
Back of the altar is a magnificent stained-glass window,
and as I knelt in this sacred place, where even the low mur-
murings of the street were hushed, a shaft of sunlight poured
in through the petals of stained-glass, coloring church and
statues and pillars, making them glow like living things.
At this particular moment the priest was opening the door
of the Tabernacle in preparation for Benediction, and as he
raised the ostensorium into position the wandering shaft
caught him up in its rosy tide of color. His vestments threw
back the colored sunlight in a spray of red and gold and crim-
son, which, in turn, were reflected from the golden home, set
in pearls, where Jesus is watching. It was a moment I shall not
easily forget, but soon the sun brought another petal, and the
cool shadows of twilight again enveloped the throne of the
Most High. In a far-away place there seemed to be a sound of
distant music that throbbed and trembled, now with a note of
triumph and again as if the sorrow of crushed hearts were
concentrated in the breathing of a mighty organ. Sad, pale-
faced women, garbed in black, occupied most of the chairs in
the church, while here and there, throughout the edifice, were
the khaki uniformed boys from home, kneeling in prayer.
Before the altar of the Sacred Heart are banks upon banks
of photos, pictures of sons, fathers, brothers and sweethearts
who are out somewhere in No Man's Land. It has all a re-
ligious meaning, a consecration, as it were, of the lives they
cherish, to the great Heart of love that consoles and pities. For
four years the photos have been piling up, until now they num-
ber many thousands. Kneeling before the altar and scanning
the silent faces on the photos, I wondered how many were
silent forever.
My mind continued traveling along these lines imtil I
saw the vision of Soissons, Chateau-Thierry and Belleau
Woods, with its thick line of graves that mark the resting
place of the men that knew not fear: Belleau Woods, which the
boys pass with bared heads, as a loving tribute to the Marines
who lie at rest in* its leafy shadows, with the requiem of the
winds playing over their lonely gravis.
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Oh, Belleau Woods, mothers' eyes are strained towards you
during the still watches of the night, and mothers' tears are
falling in silent accompaniment to the music of your rustling
leaves. They are no longer called Belleau Woods, but are
spoken of reverently as the "Woods of the Marines." The
names of its heroes will be emblazoned forever on the honor
roll of America as the greatest army of true soldiers
that ever carried the colors of the United States of America!
Last night I spent with some of the boys that came here
from the Sixty-ninth of the Rainbow Division. I would not care
to wear a German uniform across the lines from that grand old
Irish brigade. They are wonderful, and if I could tell you the
story of their pluck and their loyalty to comrades, I would
have you telling the wide world how proud you are that you
came from that fine old fighting race. It is always a smile, and
never a tear, with the Sixty-ninth, even when their lips are
drawn with pain.
Modern Warfare.
This is the fifteenth of August, the Feast of the Assump-
tion. The French have a great veneration for this day and here
in Clermont and Royat, the order of the day is songs, speeches,
flowers and band concerts. The day is hot — the hottest since
I came to France — though it is usually cool here in the moun-
tains.
This morning I offered Mass for the boys in the little
Church of the Sacred Heart, and there were six other Masses
there, so you see how well are they provided for here in the
army. I saw more French receive Holy Communion today
than I have seen at the altar since I came to this country.
The boys tell me that they have prayed more on the
western front than they ever prayed before in all their lives,
and that this is also true even of the boys that never professed
religion at home. Several instances are on record of Protestant
boys seeking absolution in their hour of dire need, and seeking
also to make confession of their whole lives to the Catholic
chaplain.
Of course, you have been following the list of casualties
and know that we have lost many men. Walking through the
wards of the hospital, one breathes in the horrible deviltry
of war. But if we had losses, be sure that the Germans had
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theirs. The fifteenth of July, I think, was the great turning
point of the War, for what looked that morning like a great
German drive to the gates of Paris, turned out to be an over-
whelming defeat. By nightfall the Germans were fifty miles
away from their objective point, going north to the tune of the
guns of our American troops.
I was in Paris that night, and I saw more of the War in
one hospital than I could see had I been on the actual battle
lines. You have no doubt read of the effects of mustard gas
and the other inventions brought out by this Great War. But
reading and seeing are entirely different matters. There never
before has been warfare like this, and wounds of such nature
and magnitude have never been inflicted in the previous wars
of all history.
Take mustard gas as an example. A man — usually a mere
boy — is charging across No Man's Land. He is hot with the
heat of exertion and excitement, and the perspiration is stand-
ing out in beads over his entire body. Suddenly, there is a
noise similar to the pop of the cork in a champagne bottle, and
all around him deadly columns of insidious mustard gas be-
gin to gather. He feels nothing just then, because his gas mask
is properly adjusted and none of the gas reaches his lungs.
But when the heat of the conflict has passed, that boy is one
mass of burn from head to foot, and where the body is moist,
the burn is deepest.
I have seen many cases of shell shock, very strange mani-
festations of disordered nerves, machine gun and shrapnel
wounds, and everywhere examples of heroism beyond my
power to describe. The other day I attended a lad of nine-
teen, without legs or arms, thanking God that he was not
killed, thankful that it was not worse! Patient, uncomplain-
ing, optimistic American boys, longing for a glimpse of home.
Ten months in the trenches — what a world of sacrifice!
The heroism of the Catholic chaplains, too, is wonderful.
Father Brady, Father De Valles, Father Boucher — all over the
top with the boys — over and over again — the admired and be-
loved of the entire American army!
The Bird-Man.
Last night I heard confessions at the aviation camp, and
the day's work was at an end about eight o'clock. The light of
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day was beginning to wane, and the twilight shadows were
creeping silently over the crest of Puy-de-D6me when I secured
the privilege — a concession granted to very few — of going up
into the blue sky of Clermont-Ferrand. The twilight shadows
were deepening when I stepped into the observation cage of the
army aeroplane — a great big bird with wings that looked like
molten gold in the light of the departing sun.
I always longed to be a bird-man. I used to read with keen
pleasure the story of their exploits in the clouds, and now I
was being wafted afar from the haunts of man, up to the
heavens, where the handiwork of God is unprofaned and
there are neither tears nor murky shadows. How shall I de-
scribe my sensations as I stood within my bird of passage and
patted her smooth shining body? She looked like a great silver
eagle, with her steady wings poised, though never a song did
she sing. Suddenly there is a stir in the silver plumage and the
big throat of my bird began to sing in deep, metallic chords,
emphasized by the deep purring of a mighty organ. Raising
her pinions, her shining tail uplifted, she runs along the
ground as though frightened by the report of a hunter's rifle.
Faster and faster she glides, as though eager to reach her nest,
when lol tired of the slow movement of earth she unfolds her
wings and sails into the empyreal blue. For a moment I lost
my identity. I was a man of vibration and became an integral
part of my bird. A quick awakening and I saw myself, a help-
less biped, without wings, seated in the heart of a bird, seeing
with the eyes of a man, traveling with the wings of a bird, ob-
serving with the powers of human observation, and enjoying
it all with the heart and soul of an intellectual being.
What did I behold? Below, laid out in perfect lines and
colors were the homes and gardens of Mont Ferrand. Every-
thing seemed to be planned with perfect synunetry, and the
world above seemed to be even more beautiful. I was looking
down on a part of the world which is a beautiful garden, where
flowers and trees were blended together as only the great
Artist can blend them. The sounds of earth were silenced, and
there was only the purring music of my bird. The caress of
the wind was tinged with ice, but there was a thrill in its
breath as it blew across the purple mountain range of which
old Puy-de-D6me is king.
When nine hundred metres above the earth we turned in
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our course and floated over what seemed to be a phantom city.
It was old Clermont-Ferrand, birthplace of the Crusaders, the
great link in the chain that binds the France of today to the
distant past, going to sleep in the twilight shadows. There
were few lights to be seen, the outstanding points being the
Cathedral and the Church of Notre Dame that dates back to the
tenth century. How different everything looks from above,
even to the eye of man. The lamps of God were brightly shin-
ing and a semi-darkness was enveloping the earth. The pale
moon rode majestically in her carriage, with its lining of silk
of the deepest blue. The bird sang on, caring naught for sun-
light or moonlight, desiring only the thrill of flight, the
rush of the air, and the freedom of the great unmapped spaces
that lie close to the clouds.
But even birds grow tired, and soon the wings began to
droop ever so little, and the great body of the silver eagle
glided slowly back to earth. The bird no longer whistled with
the same fervor, as slowly but surely she glided back to her
nest. You have seen the skylark descend to her meadow
home, where her little ones await her coming. She comes
down gradually, lands gently and runs her head under cover
until she is safe at home. Thus did my bird descend, and
touching the ground lightly, she raced across the field to her
home. I bade her good-night and returned to the lights and
shadows of earth, with a feeling of loneliness akin to pain.
We had been in the clouds only twenty-five minutes, but
had seen so many wonderful things, that, in retrospect, it
looked like a long, long time. We had traveled over fifty
miles together, and now the tie broken by the touch of earth,
the great silver bird and I parted, probably forever!
Good-bye strong bird, eagle of liberty, your flight will soon
be over. You will not need long to keep eternal vigil to protect
the nest of your little ones, but your flights will be in the cool-
ing shadows of evening, undisturbed by the fear of the un-
relenting hunter, unbroken by the raucous barrage of the black
monsters of the north lands.
I went my solitary way, back to Royat, with the vision of
my trip to the fleecy clouds lulling me to sleep. The hour is
growing late. The strains of music from the park, where the
band is playing, are growing fainter and fainter, and taps are
sounding within the walls of our little city, so I will say good-
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night and God bless and keep you and mother and all our
friends.
The Letters from Home.
Last night I was made happy by the receipt of your most
welcome letters. It seems a long stretch between letters from
home, but once they begin to come they usually continue to be
delivered at regular intervals. The mail reaches this place
about four o'clock in the afternoon, and everyone is on the
alert, eager for news from home. When the glad messages
are received how happy are the wounded exiles! Hope is
kindled anew in their breasts, the weary days of suffering are
brightened, and the waning vitality renewed in heavy hearts,
by the knowledge that somebody, far away in the dear old
homeland, remembers and cares, and prays that they may soon
come home.
The people of the United States have no idea of the sacri-
fices and suffering entailed in the progress of the War. What
we have accomplished in the shipment of troops, and in pro-
viding for them, in building our own railroads, three thou-
sand miles away from home, in feeding not only our own great
army, but in the assistance given the other armies, in the way
of supplies and food, is a story too big for a pen like mine. The
whole of Europe looks on in amazement at the speed and
thoroughness, while it marvels at the immense resources of our
country.
It is hard and depressing here today. The atmosphere is
cloudy and the sun is a glaring bright light that burns and
withers, but there have not been many days like this. It is
unusually cool in the shade, but today there is no shade. But
if the weather so affects those who are well, how hard must
it be for the poor lads, wounded and gassed, yet traveling
twenty-four and twenty-eight hours before reaching the haven
of refuge. Five hundred boys are coming to the hospital to-
night — today they are braving the blistering heat of the sun,
on their way to this part of the world.
One thing that strikes me very forcibly is the youth of our
army, as compared with the army of France. Ours is an army
of boys, while theirs is one of men old enough to be the fathers
of our boys. Every nine out of ten Americans in the hospital
is a mere boy, while the tenth is usually under thirty. It is a mat-
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472 THE CHAPLAIN'S STORY [Jan.,
ter of wonder to the French that such boys can be such won-
derful fighters.
From a military standpoint things are certainly bright in
this land of disorder and depression. We are keeping right
on, and there seems to be no let up in the hammering we are
giving the Germans. We are harassing them on all fronts,
and our policy seems to be: keep them traveling. Many are
the tales of bravery and valor under fire told by the boys as
they lie in bed after the battle is over, for some of them, alas,
forever! They have been keyed up to such a high pitch of
nervous tension under the shock of shell and fire, that the in-
evitable reaction sets in, when the roar of the battle passes.
Lads who at the front cared not for the noise of bursting shell
and shrapnel, start in their beds when they hear the passing
honk-honk of a Ford.
I often speculate as to how long it will last, and the way
things are going now it looks as though the Germans are going
to have a job on their hands to keep up with the procession.
What great fighting the American troops have done within
the last few months, and they are still pegging victoriously
away!
War is a hard, pitiless old game, and we are all under a
heavy strain, but, please God, it cannot last long now. It is
only a question of time — ^how long it will take to insure the de-
feat of the enemy. It is difficult to hazard a time limit for the
cessation of hostilities, but men who should know seem to
think that another year will end the struggle and see victory
entwined on the standard of the United States of America.
It is only a matter of time, too, when Germany will
awaken to the fact that she is doomed. The hour of her
awakening seems near at hand, and I would not be surprised
to pick up a paper almost any evening and read that the House
of HohenzoUern had tottered and fallen to pieces, torn apart
by an enraged populace, who, after years of darkness, had
finally seen the light of the noon-day sun. A people, no mat-
ter how driven and oppressed, must sooner or later be forced to
open their eyes to the light of truth.
Fighting Father Frank.
This morning, Father Frank O'Reilly, formerly a professor
at the Catholic University, Washington, D.C., came into the
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hospital, suffering from a breakdown, caused by the inhalation
of dangerous gases. He is the chaplain of the Seventy-sixth
Field Artillery, and will be here for quite a while. Though
gassed several times and suffering hemorrhages for weeks, he
did not retire from the lines until after his regiment was re-
lieved from the front. He is on the high road to recovery, how-
ever, and his only anxiety is to get back to the regiment he
loves so well.
The boys call him " Fighting Father Frank ••— a title he
earned at the Battle of the Mame, where he offered Mass to the
roar of the cannon, anointed the dying amid a rain of shrap-
nel, buried the dead under the fire of enemy guns, and when
night fell made his bed with an old horse blanket — ^his only
protection against the elements.
His most thrilling experience was on the night of July
14th-15th, the beginning of the great German offensive. The
launching of the enemy's attack found "Fighting Father
Frank •' in an outpost position, in front of the first line trenches
of the infantry. For twenty-f oiur hours he was cut off from his
regiment by a sea of fire, the officer in command wounded
and carried to the rear. Finding himself in conmiand of his
regiment's most forward position he stuck to his post, although
importuned by a major of the nearest infantry regiment to
seek shelter. He remained at his post until formally relieved
by an order from regimental headquarters. For hours, to-
gether with several scouts of an infantry regiment. Father
Frank sat in an open shell hole while the enemy poured over
them the most intense barrage of the War. He afterwards re-
connoitered the ridge overlooking the Marne, and was one of
the fitst to report that the Germans were marching in column
squads down its southern bank. Working his way for several
miles, through a hail of shells. Father Frank finally reported
to his commanding officers, wet and exhausted, the crosses on
his shoulders turned black by enemy gas, but personally un-
scratched! When asked what he would do when strong enough
to leave the hospital. Father Frank replied :
** The command is forward ! "
The Transfiguration.
It is a beautiful day. The sun is shining and the hilltops
are golden in the morning light, especially Puy-de-D6me, a
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474 THE CHAPLAIN'S STORY [Jan.,
dear friend of mine, who has a place in my heart very close
to that of " Old Baldy *' in Eugene. I often look to his sum-
mit to get the sunshine and shadow effects as they play tag on
his head from a sky of deepest blue. I will look aloft many
times today, for it is the Feast of the Transfiguration. In the
course of the day's travels, I will see many transfigured faces —
faces that have had their Gethsemane and are now bright with
the light of Thabor. Poor sad faces that at some time in the
past were transfigured with joy, and are now dark with the
shadows of Olivet.
This morning I offered Mass in the little church among the
hills — ^in the village where the camp is situated. The hour was
early and the only lights were those of the two candles on the
altar. I talked with many of the boys, and many were the tales
they had to tell of their experience on the battle lines. One lad
of nineteen or thereabouts told me how he prayed in front of a
church, when shot and shell were tearing it to pieces, the only
piece of 'statuary untouched being the statue of Our Lady.
** Father," he said, " I could not take my eyes off her face,
though the shells were bursting around me, and there were the
cries of the wounded and the dying. The last thing I remem-
ber was the face of the Blessed Virgin, and then all was dark.'*
My round of duty is ever the same, but occasionally there
are great gleams of beautiful sunshine. A young lieutenant
here in the hospital is one of my particular friends, and he is
going to be here for a long time.
He receives Holy Communion every morning, and as I
climb the four flights of stone steps, carrying my Changeless
Friend, he is waiting and watching through the open door,
with the eagerness of an Aloysius or John Berchmans. * He is
a great, big, six-foot Irish lad from Boston, with a smile always,
no matter how hard the night has been. He will be in a plaster
cast for six months. The young fellow has seen two years hard
service, thirteen months of it in the thick of battle, living in the
smoke of machine gun fire, shrapnel and death-dealing, burn-
ing gases, and was untouched until the fourteenth day of July.
Did I tell you of the flier who went home to his God, in-
stead of to his mother, as he had planned? A young lieutenant
in the Flying Corps, after months of hard service in the field,
secured a furlough and prepared to go home. He had already
cabled his mother that he was leaving for home. The aero-
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plane had a strange fascination for him, however, and with
his observer he decided to take a farewell trip through the
clouds, before bidding good-bye to France. It was his last
flight
Grave and Gay.
I am writing this in the house of the village cur6 — a strange
old house like unto a dungeon, with tiny peep-hole windows,
dim recesses in the interior, great latticed shutters and a re-
taining wall surrounding the building, giving it the color of a
prison.
The French must have a horror of fresh air, to judge by
their sleeping rooms. And the beds of France — they bafQe de-
scription! They have great canopies overhead, and when the
bed is made the middle of it is like the hump on the back of a
camel. A great board at the end completes the mystery, and,
as if to make sure that no stray breath of pure air reaches you
while you sleep, there are the immense hanging curtains, heavy
and cumbersome. In the morning, when the sleeper unfolds
himself from the depths of his sleeping quarters, he feels as
though he had fought the Battle of the Marne anew, the am-
munition being the feathers.
Today, I saw an old lady driving a goat through the streets,
and I noticed her direct the animal up to one of the little stores
and talk with the proprietor. After a moment he came out
with a pitcher, and the old lady filled two cups by milking the
goat, poured the contents of the cups into the pitcher, collected
her money, and was on her way. No need of milk bottles in
this locality, and the milkman is the goat I
While I heard confessions yesterday afternoon, the varied
lights of the sun through the stained-glass windows danced
and played in the confessional, lighting up the picture you have
looked upon so often, the apparition of the Sacred Heart to
Blessed Margaret Mary.
Did I tell you of St. Peter's Church— the oldest in Paris?
It was consecrated by Pope Urban III. in 1136. A little ceme-
tery serves as part of the church grounds. The moldering
stones marking the graves give mute testimony of the long
sleep of those who lie beneath the branches of the trees.
Around the churches and in the courtyard are scenes
from the Passion — done in stone — old and crumbling, but
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beautiful. A group of little dark-eyed children, brown as cof-
fee berries, were playing at the foot of the cross as I caught
their attention.
" Vive VAmirique " they piped up as they came gayly to
greet me. France at the foot of the cross — torn, bleeding and
sorely wounded, but still light-hearted and with eyes looking
only to the dawn of a brighter tomorrow. May the good God
grant that the dawn is near at hand!
I witnessed a ball game yesterday afternoon. The same
eagerness, the same good-natured rivalry and the same en-
thusiasm marked the contest as used to mark the contests in
the old school yard — the same spirit, but with a different
setting.
There is a boy in the aviation camp who receives Holy
Communion every time I come there. I always think of him
as the little Aloysius of the camp, so out of place does he seem.
He is a '' bird-man," and last night I watched him get out his
machine and enter it In an instant he was up where the great,
white, fleecy clouds play hide and seek. Then, like a tiny
speck, he whirled and banked and looped the loop, and in his
youthful enthusiasm he became an air sprite. Pure and un-
tarnished as the great air spaces in which he revels, I wonder
what awaits him in the future? With my wondering, comes
that pain of uncertainty. Once I hinted at the danger of riding
the winds and the fleecy clouds, and the boy smilingly replied:
'' It is a short life, but a gay one, and with God's help I will
always be ready." He served my Mass this morning, and there
was an " I believe " and " I love " in every action and syllable.
He told me the other day that he was not lonesome, but
would give the world for the privilege of watching his mother
bake a pie and listen to her croon the old Irish melody
"Asthore."
Sometimes I feel a bit lonely myself. I wonder will I
ever again see the sunset in my dear old homeland. Will I
be able to hear the music of the voices of the children during
the noon hour? Well, God is good, though I miss the inter-
change of thoughts that can be made only in the language one
thoroughly understands.
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THE EARLIEST THEORISTS OP RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.
BY F. AURELIO PALMIERI, O.S.A., D.D.
HY is Russia a reyolutionary land?'* asked Alex-
ander Ivanovich Herzen, one of the chief revo-
lutionary theorists of Russia. The question was
answered by him in the following terms : " We
Russians, properly speaking, have never lived.
For ten centuries we have been bound to the soil, and
for two centiwies we have been going to school, engaged
in imitating the other peoples. We are just coming out
from our bonds; and we have good reason not to complain
of it. We did not inherit all the riches of the West, nor its
legacies. Our historic recollections are stripped of everything
Roman, antique. Catholic, feudal, chivalrous, bourgeois. Hence
it follows that no regret, no respect, no relic may clog our on-
ward sweep. The monuments revered by us are pure fictions :
they were forged by the politicians who believe that no respect-
able empire can exist without their artistic glamour. We take
no interest in prolonging the life of our dying members, or in
the burial service of our dead. Those questions do not mean
anything to us. We are eager only to know where the living
hide themselves and how many they are. We are the offspring
of colonists. Our forefathers had not a nation of peasants
lightly varnished. The laborers of the fields are our national
foundation and our vital sap.*' ^
So, the genesis of Russian revolution is lack of an histori-
cal past. Too late Russia undertook to occupy a place in the
festivities of the civilized peoples. Her eyes are turned
towards the future. She desires to create for herself a history
worthy of the great spiritual power of the Slavic races. She is
not riveted to the worship of any ancestral fetish.
Russia blends in her soul both the qualities and the defects
of youth. She wishes to open a new path in her dull world,
already weary of its old, artificial, well-regulated civilization.
^Herzen {Kolokol: ixbrannua $tati — The Bell: Selected Articles). Geneva, 1887.
p. 711. The Bell ii the title of the revolutloiuiry paper publlihed by Henen In Lon-
don, 1857-1869.
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478 THEORISTS OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION [Jan.,
The only way to her goal, is to declare war agamst the inheri-
tances of the past. What has been received from the past, Rus-
sia feels, should be reduced to ashes. The generation of today,
she claims, must destroy in order to rebuild.
The Russian revolution is a strange phenomenon. It starts
with violence, continues, through a century-long struggle, in
the domain of ideals, and closes with a violent rdgime.
If in other nations, the revolutionary movement is based
at times upon humanitarian idealism, in Russia its foundation
is economic. It was, and is, a revolution of the peasantry.
Strange to say, the largest empire of the world was not able
to grant to its agricultural classes as much land as they needed
to avert danger of death by starvation. So we find that the
earlier Russian revolutions were started by peasants, were the
desperate outbursts of the serfs. In 1670, the Cossack, Stenka
Razin, hoisted the flag of insurrection in the vast country ex-
tending between Astrakhan and Simbirsk, and slaughtered the
Russian boyars and landowners. Another Cossack, Pugachev,
in 1775, roused the Russian peasantry to take up arms against
their masters, and ravaged with fire and sword a considerable
part of Muscovite Russia. These revolts were not only due
to economic difiiculties, but were also a violent protest of the
peasant slaves against the cruelty of the Russian nobility, who,
at times, vied with the corrupt patricians of imperial Rome in
torturing their serfs.*
The historians of Russian revolution point out that revolts
of peasants were, to a certain extent, a daily episode in Rus-
sian social life. Such revolts took place at Kazan in 1796, 1798,
1800; at Moscow in 1797, 1806; at Tambov m 1814^ and so on, till
the abolition of serfdom.* They failed, however, to attain their
aims, for they lacked intelligent leadership. They represented
an armed protest of brutality against brutality, and, without
exception, they were drowned in blood.
To the influence of the Russian encyclopedists upon the
Russian nobility and cultivated classes, is due the rise of a
revolutionary idealism. Its germs were planted in Russian soil
'On the conditions of Russian serfs before tlieir emancipation by Tsar Alex-
ander n. in 1861, see B. I. Semenovsky. Krestianskii oopros v Rossii v XVllL i
pervoi polovinie XIX. vieka (Tlie Agrarian Question in Russia in the Eighteenth and
in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century). Petrograd, 1888.
*Krafnoe znamiia v Rosii:. ocherk istorti rtuikago raboehago dpizhenita (The
Red Flag in Russia: An Historical Sketch of the Workingmen's Movement in Russia).
Geneva, 1900, pp. 5, 6.
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in the reigns of Catherine II. (1762-1796) and Alexander I. (1801-
1825). Their earliest sower was Alexander Nikolaevich
Radisshev (1749-1802). He had studied at the University of
Leipzig, and had impregnated his mind with the new-bom so-
cial theories of Voltaire, Helvetius and Rousseau. In 1790 he pub-
lished his famous Trip from Petrograd to Moscow {Pute-
chestvie is Peterburga v Moskvu). The book was confiscated.
A few copies survived the rigor of Catherine II., who pro-
nounced the capital sentence against its author. It was re-
printed in London in 1858,* and in Leipzig in 1876.
Radisshev sets forth his philosophical opinions and de-
scribes the dark sides of Russian social life, especially the
wretched condition of the peasantry, the miscarriage of jus-
tice, the abuses of the nobility, the evils of serfdom. While
it is true that the abuses denounced by the author had already
been denounced in Russia, no writer before him had dared
to bring them into the full light of day. " I looked around me,**
he wrote in the preface of his volume : " My soul felt the pangs
of human sufferings. I turned my gaze upon my own self, and
ascertained that the evils of man come from man, and very
often because he does not look rightly upon the objects about
him.** «
Radisshev pled for a literary, scientific and artistic renais-
sance of Russia, by the emancipation of Russia from her moral
and material bondage. He defended freedom of thought, the
right of every Russian citizen to the possession of a portion of
the soil, freedom of religious worship, a just equalization of
civil power, free public education, and measures suitable for
the maintenance of social order.*
A forward step in the systematizing t)f theoretical So-
cialism was achieved by the so-called Decembrists, a political
organization responsible for a conspiracy which tragically
failed in December, 1825. The Decembrists gathered around
their flag the noblest elements of the Russian aristocracy and
higher classes. They inaugurated the era of scientific revolu-
tionary movements. By their trials they showed that the suf-
« Kniai SsherbatOD i A, Radisshev (Prince MikhaU Mlkhailovlch Ssherbatov, 1733-
1790, and A. Radisshev). London, 1858, pp. 99-396.
*A. N. Pypin. Istoriia russkot Itteratnry (History of Russian Literature).
Petrograd, 1907, ed. 3., vol. iv., pp. 177-181.
*V. I. Semevsky. Politicheskita i obsshestvennyia idei dekabristov (The PoUU-
eal and Social Ideas of the Deeemhrists). Petrograd, 1909, p. 24.
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480 THEORISTS OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION [Jan.,
ferings of the ontcasts and down-trodden lower classes of Rus-
sia, had found an echo in the hearts of the Russian nobility. In
the darkness which spread over Russia on the accession of
Nicholas It. to the throne, the attempt of the Decembrists to
create a new Russian social order constituted them the earliest
leaders of the Russian revolution, and its worthy idealists.
The Decembrists nourished no illusions as to the fate
awaiting them. The most pathetic figure among them,
Kondraty Theodorovich Rylieev (1795-1826), a poet whose
verses excited the enthusiasm of Pushkin, wrote of himself
and his fellow conspirators thus :
A dream pursues me like a shadow, day and night. It is
a dream that gives me no rest. It hovers over me either in
the mysterious silence of the fatherland's steppes, or in the
whirlwind of the battle, or in the holy churches when my
soul raises its prayer. " The hour has struck." A secret voice
whispers to my ear. I know what it says to me. The gib-
bet will be the reward of the first insurgents against the op-
pressors of the people. My fate is already sealed. But,
tell me, did you ever know that freedom was achieved
without blood and victims? I shall die for my cherished
country. I feel it, I know it. And cheerfully, I am willing
to bless my own death.
The Decembrists set to work in 1815. They founded a
secret society. Two brothers, Alexander Mikhailovich
Muravev and Nikita Mikhailovich Muravev, spread the revo-
lutionary movement among the oflScers. The secret society
was called the " League of Salvation (Soiuz Spaseniia) .*' Its
members were recruited from the Russian nobility and army
officers of high rank.^ In 1818, the League changed its name to
" League of Prosperity (Soiuz Blagodenstviia) ." . It lacked a
common programme. In its ranks were to be found moderates
who yearned only for a constitution safeguarding the rights of
individuals against the despotism of Russian bureaucracy;
political reformers who took up the cudgels for a republican
regime: radicals who advocated pulling down autocracy
^ Their complete list is to be found in a small pamphlet published in Germany :
Tainoe obishesiuo i Ih dekabriia iB25 v Ro83ii (The Secret Society and the 14th of
December, 1825, in Russia). Leipzig (s. d.) See also A. L. Dmltiiey-Mamontoy.
Dekabristg v Zapadnot SibM.: istortcheskii ocherk (The Decembrists in Western
Siberia: An Historical Essay). Petrograd, 1905.
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immediately and basing the social and administrative organiza-
tion of Russia upon a distinctly new foundation.^
The conflict between the conservative and the radical
wings dragged along for several years. The society was all
but rent apart. Its lease on life was prolonged when the
Polish carbonari decided to join the Russian revolution."
Colonel Pestel, who heroically faced death after the discovery
of the Decembrists* plot, favored extreme measures. He was
a stanch defender of a republican form of government, and
the very soul of the League. In his opinion, the Tsar would
not willingly surrender his privileges. His republicanism was
strongly tinctured with socialistic aims. At a meeting of the
League's adherents, when asked how to deal with the relatives
of the Tsar, he answered: " We must annihilate them! " The
League approved his violent measures for the emancipation of
Russia.
Pestel was of the opinion that Russian revolution ought
to take up as the first of its duties the solution of the agrarian
problem. Individual property ought to be abolished. The
soil, according to him, belongs to its laborers. It is a conmion
possession of all Russian citizens who are bound to cultivate
it, and to divide the fruits of their common toil. Communism
in land was, to Pestel, the condition sine qua non for the
triimiph of the revolution.*®
The moderate wing in the conspiracy of the Decembrists,
was headed by Nikita M. Muravev, and leaned towards the
rebuilding of Russia on a political constitution similar to that
of England. Because of the ignorance and inexperience of the
Russian masses, he was prepared to retain the aristocratic
element in the political life of the future free Russia." Pestel,
on the contrary, was a fervent admirer of revolutionary
France. His memorandum, or outline of reforms to be intro-
duced in Russia, entitled Russkaia pravda (The Russian Ques-
tion), was written in 1822, and circulated in manuscript form.
It was published only in 1906 by P. E. Schegolev. Its examina-
*G. StekloT. Istoriche$koe podgotoulente russkot sotztal-demokratii (An Hlstorl-
eal Introductton to Russian Social Democracy). Petrograd, 1906, p. 9.
•T. O. Oeherki po istorii sotzialieeskago dvizheniia v Russkoi PoUche (Essays
on the History of the Socialistic Movement in Russian Poland). Lemberg, 1904, p. 77.
^V. Bortser. Za $to lieL Sbomik po istorii polittceskikh i obs$hestoenngkh
dviihenii v Rossit (A Century of Political Life: Selected Blaterials (>>nceming Politi-
cal and Social MoTements in Russia). London, 1897, pp. 4, 5.
>< G. Alexlnsky. La Rnssie d*Bnrope, Paris, 1917, p. 139.
▼OL. evil I.— 81
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482 THEORISTS OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION [Jan.,
tion shows clearly that the writer's mind was imbued with
the theories of the encyclopedists and free-thinkers of the
eighteenth century — Rousseau, Helvetius, Condillac, Holbach,
Voltaire, Diderot, Beccaria. The strong influence of the
Esprit des Lois of Montesquieu can be traced on every page.
Some of its theories seem to have been literally drawn from the
famous commentary on Montesquieu's work by Count Destutt
de Tracy," a passionate lover of the nascent and already vigor-
ous American democracy.
Pestel believed that a federal form of government was
the best means of solving the problem of nationalities in Rus-
sia, and of safeguarding their rights in a distinct ethnical life.
Like the Russian revolutionists, he was, at bottom, a Slav. His
Slavic or Pan-Slavic tendencies, are revealed whenever he
deals with the question of the official language of Russian
federation. He declares that the Russian tongue deserves to
be the strongest political bond of union among the states en-
closed within the boundaries of Russia.
To his Slavophilism is to be traced his feeling of distrust
for the Russian Jews. Like Bakunin, he instinctively felt that
Russian Israel disliked the Slavic races. The Jews, in his view,
were a thoroughly Germanized people, a German-speaking
tribe, by traditions, education and spirit fastened to the tri-
umphal car of Teutonism. The Jews, he wrote, form a state
within the state. Russia would be able get on well, if she could
free herself from the Jewish danger. He pleaded for a trans-
planting of Russian Jews into Asia Minor, where they would
be free to realize their own political and religious ideals.^*
A temperate communism underlies the system of social
reforms outlined by Pestel. He proposes to divide into two
parts the tillable soil of Russia. One part would be the com-
mon property of the mir (commune) ; the other should be left
to its owner. The property of the mir should be inviolable.
The mir might not rent or sell its land to private individuals.
The land was to be allotted evenly among all families of five to
be found in the given community. By this method, the dearth
of arable land would cease in Russia, and all Russian citizens
would become proprietors of Russian soil."
The Decembrists blended their social aims with their
^ Commentaire snr VEsprit des Lois de Montesquieu, Purls, 1819. p« 381.
"Scmcvsky. Op, cit,, pp. 530-532,
"Burteev, Op, cit, pp. 14, 15,
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political ones. They concluded that the social revolution in
Russia should begin by the overthrow of Tsarism. From that
time on, the political programme of Socialism became a dogma
to all socialistic organizations.
L. Martov wrote: "The workingmen's party in Russia
is a socialistic one, for they acknowledge that the ultimate end
of the proletarian movement will be the extinction of the
capitalistic system of today, a system grounded on the exploita-
tion of labor. By dint of a new socialistic regime, the laboring
classes, when accurately trained, will give to society the fruits
of their common labor. The proletariat will no longer de-
liver the lion's share to those who do not toil, viz., to capitalists
and the bureaucracy. The socialist party believes that in
order to attain full emancipation, the working classes are
bound to demolish the autocratic system and the police regime.
Socialism proclaims the necessity of a popular form of govern-
ment, of a ruling power consisting of the representatives of the
masses, of men chosen by ballot, and accountable for their
actions."" "The proletariat," wrote a Russian socialist in
1902, " is the dynamite cartridge which will dash to pieces Rus-
sian autocracy." ^*
The reign of Nicholas I. marks a period of veritable strang-
ulation of Russian social and political activity. It is a relentless
struggle against all attempts at reconstruction of Russian life,
on a basis of freedom. Yet the revolutionary tide was growing.
Secret societies strove, under cover, to shatter the foundation of
Russian autocracy. In 1S47, at Kiev, the members of the secret
Guild of SS. Cyril and Methodius were arrested. The most
illustrious of them were the great historian Kostomarov, and
the national poet of Ukraina, Taras Ssevchenko. The former
was imprisoned in the fortress of Petropavlovsk, the latter was
enrolled in military service. As at the burial of his patriotic
hopes and literary life, Ssevchenko sang the beauty of his
native country in touching verses:
Dig my grave and raise my barrow
By the Dnieper-side
In Ukraina, my own land,
A fair land and wide.
^ SotxialiMty-revoUtttzionery i proletariat (Revolutionary Socialists and Pro-
letariat). Petrograd, 1907, pp. 46, 47.
^Rttsskii raboehti v revolutzionnom dvizhenit (Russian Workers in the Revo-
lutionary Movement). (Printing house of the Iskra,) 1902, p. 62.
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484 THEORISTS OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION [Jan.,
I will lie and watch the cornfields,
Listen through the years
To the river voices roaring.
Roaring in my ears.
Bury me, be done with me.
Rise and break your chain,
Water your new liberty
With blood for rain.
With sad resignation he alludes to the sacrifice of his life
for the rebirth of his beloved Ukraina :
A slave from my first bitter years.
Most surely I shall die a slave
Ungraced of any kinsmen's tears;
And carry with me to my grave
Everything; and leave no trace.
No little mark to keep my pldce
In the dear lost Ukraina
Which is not ours, though our land.
And none shall ever understand;
No father to his son shall say:
Kneel down, and fold your hands.
He died for Ukraina ! ^^
The programme of the Ukrainians does not lay much
stress upon the economic claims of Socialism. In its political
aspirations, however, it subscribes to the theory of Russian
federalism. The programme is imbued with Pah-Slavic ten-
dencies. " The guild,'* it writes, ** aims at Slavic solidarity and
the future federation of the Slavic peoples on the basis of full
freedom and national autonomy. It advocates the widest re-
ligious liberty. All the religious denominations are to enjoy
the same rights. Every kind of propaganda is forbidden, as
being useless to the cause of freedom. Catholic Slavs, how-
ever, will be lU'ged to adopt the Slavic idiom in their liturgy.
The guild does not fix the common language of all Slavs. It
seems, however, that the Great Russian language, the most dif-
fused among the Slavic races, should have the preference over
the others. The guild advocates the compulsory education of
the people, the abolition of serfdom «nd of all privileges, the
suppression of the death penalty and of all physical punish-
ment."
" L. E. Voynlch. Six lyrics from the Ruthenian of Taras Saheuchenko, London,
1911, pp. 31-32, 33-34; S. Rudyckyi. Ukraina und die Vkratner. Berlin, 1915, p. S3.
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According to Ukrainians, Russia must break her political
unity and split into several states independent of each other.
The Russian federation would embrace the following
autonomous States : North Russia, Northeast Russia, Southeast
Russia, Russia of the Upper and Lower Volga, Central and South
Malorussia, Eastern and Western Siberia, Caucasus, Bielorous-
sia, Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, Seri>ia, Bulgaria, Polish and
Malorussian Galicia. Such a dissection of Russia would not
be an ultimate one. Economic interests likely would require a
rehandling of the programme.
" The city of Kiev," writes the compiler of the Ukrainian
revolutionary plans, " ought not to belong to any State. It will
be the seat of the central diet. This shall consist of two cham-
bers, the one of ministers and senators; the other of deputies.
The general diet will be summoned every four years, and even
oftener, when expedient. Each State shall have its local diet,
a president and senate. The diet is summoned every year.
The supreme authority shall belong to a president, elected by
suffrage every four years, and to the ministers of foreign and
domestic affairs. For the defence of the federation, a small
army is to be organized. The single States need their own
local militia. All must learn military discipline in case of a
general call to the colors." " It is needless to emphasize the
resemblance of the Ukrainian programme to that now being
carried out by the Russian Jewish Soviet of New Russia.
The disastrous issue of the Crimean War, and the emanci-
pation of the serfs by Alexander II., accentuated the socialistic
claims of the Russian revolutionists. Russian social thought
during the second half of the nineteenth century, wavered be-
tween anarchical and communistic Socialism. An essentially
socialistic programme was that outlined in 1861 by a distin-
guished writer, Mikhail lUarionovich Mikhailov, and addressed
to the young Russian generation : ^* It is not the people that
exists for the ruling power, but the ruling power for the people.
Hence it follows that a government which ignores the needs of
the people, and claims for itself the exclusive possession of the
soil, caring only for its selfish aims, a government, in a word,
>*S. S. Kak. Programing politicheskikh partii. The Programmes of the Politi-
cal Parties). Odessa, 1917, p. 41; M. HmscheTskj. Tht Historical Eoolution of the
Ukrainian Problem. London, 1915, pp. 39, 40; N. Grlncenko. ideia federalixmu u
dekabriMtiu, (The Idea of Federalism Among Decembrists). Kiev. 1907, pp. 12-21.
(In Rttthenlan.)
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486 THEORISTS OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTION [Jan.,
filled with contempt for its subjects, — that government is un-
worthy of its people. The Romanovs very likely have for-
gotten that they did not descend to us from heaven. They were
elected by the people, who considered them the ablest to rule
Russia. We need no Tsar, no emperor, no lord's anointed, no
ermine cloak for the inherited stupidity of our rulers. We
yearn for a political head, who will be a simple mortal, a man
bom here below, a man who knows human life and the aspira-
tions of his people. We do not feel the necessity of an em-
peror anointed in the Cathedral of the Assimnption. The
ruler whom we seek ought to be one chosen of the people, and
their salaried representative. We require the posssession of
the soil by the whole community. Every citizen is entitled to
his lot of land. Individuals have no right to the private prop-
erty of the soil. The land is not a matter of bargain, like
potatoes and cabbages. It is desirable that all citizens give
their names to the rural conmiunes. We claim the collective
property of the soil. If our coUectivistic theory is a sheer
Utopia, it will die a natural death, it will fade away by reason
of its own inherent helplessness. The economic influence of
the West has nothing to do with our fate. We demand the
abolition of the bourgeoisie, of that estate which sprang forth in
the time of Catherine 11." ^*
The programme of Mikhailov marks only a transitional
stage in the literary history of Russian theoretical Socialism.
Russian thought could not stop half-way. The conmiunistic
system, although shadowed forth in the Russian conmiune of
old (the mir), was found to be in opposition to the notion of
an organized State. Now, it is a special feature of Russian
logic to dislike half -conclusions. According to Herzen:
"Thought, knowledge, conviction, dogma do not vegetate
among Russians in a state of theory or crude abstraction.
They do not shrink within the limits of an academic body, or
hide themselves along library shelves, or within the walls of
a prison. Without waiting for their maturity, they burst out
into the fullest light, and impetuously hurl themselves into the
arena of practical life. One would say that, tied hand and foot,
they rush out through the gateway of a circus. We Russians
can live a long time in a state of moral torpor, and mental
slimiber. But, sooner or later, our mind awakens. And then.
»V. Burtiev. Za sto Utt, pp. 25-88.
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1919.] THE SPIRES OF ST. PATRICK'S 487
— ^if it is not crushed at the very start in most depressing atmos-
phere; if it withstands the onslaughts and dangers of neglect or
destruction, then, I say, it will push on to the very last conse-
quences. Our logic is free from the repression of chains, and
from the marks of a scarred but unforgotten past. The waver-
ing dualism of the Germans, who know that life (in theory)
does not coincide with the practical spheres of action, — that
dualism contrasts entirely with the Russian genius.'* *^
Herzen is right in his psychological view of Russian
national character. Russian doctrinaires borrowed their so-
cialistic tenets from Germans and French, they developed
them, in theory, to extreme consequences; while, in practice,
they inaugurated the era of revolutionary terrorism. The
greatest and most sincere representative of that school of so-
cial reforms, proclaiming religious and social nihilism as the
nostrum for diseased and starving mankind, is Mikhail
Aleksandrovich Bakunin, to whose doctrines we shall refer in
another article.
THE SPIRES OF ST. PATRICK'S.
(Fifth Avenue, New York.)
BY J. CORSON MILLER.
In mute-tongued reverence and splendor lone,
They lift beseeching hands to God on high.
Blending their peace with the majestic sky —
A veritable pray'r of steel and stone.
Above the Avenue's proud monotone
Of Wealth that overawes the passer-by,
These shafts are wings on which hosannahs fly.
And penitential psalms are starward blown.
Like sentinels, unmoved, calm-eyed and strong.
Who guard the hidden gates of Life and Death,
They stand and drink the South- Wind's winey breath.
Surcharged with hints of Love and Sacred Song.
Of temples such as this the Master saith :
** Keep sweet My dwelling-place, here Angels throng."
«• Op, ctt., p. 719.
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THE SWORD OP THE SPIRIT.
BY BLANCHE M. KELLY.
I SHALL have had my legend," said Renan, sweep-
ing a complacent glance backward over his
career and forward to future imaginations. He
had a fine sense of gesture, and he realized that
his had always been sweeping and impressive,
that he presented an appealing appearance in garments woven
half of mockery, half of sadness; he knew that he had written
himself large across the horizon of men's minds. But the great
skeptic did not confine his predictions to his personal history.
He foretold a future when, faith in the supernatural being de-
posed, science should sit upon the throne and wield the scep-
tre of the universe. This was to be, moreover, a future of uni-
versal peace, since men, having hope for this life only, would
cherish in their hearts no higher thing for the sake of which
they would cast this life lightly away.
Time has shown Renan to have been undeniably at least
half a prophet. He has, indeed, had his legend and he and
his school left nothing undone to usher in the season of un-
belief and scientific supremacy which became the background
of that legend. But no two half prophecies ever made a whole
one, and Renan's most sibylline moment could not reveal to
him his legend's ultimate phase, could not show him a time
when one who should be flesh of his flesh and blood of his
blood would do his utmost to bring his prophecies to naught.
Long before Renan died, when he was at the zenith of his
powers and his renown, he declared that he wished to re-
nounce in advance any deviation from his position into which
he might be led at the hour of death by weakening mentality
or the consciousness of approaching dissolution, but he could
not by any means anticipate or provide against the action of
his grandson, Ernest Psichari, who first by entering the army
and then by entering the Catholic Church exalted what his
grandfather held in chiefest abomination, the sword and the
spirit, thereby becoming one of the first fruits of the Catholic
reawakening which began in France before the outbreak of
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the Great War, and which has given the lie to all false
prophecies.
The legend of Renan has invested Ernest Psichari with
so much of its glamour, and he himself was a figure of such
romantic appeal, that even in a time when heroism and glory
are almost commonplaces, his name and his story have busied
many pens. This story up to the time of his conversion he has
told in three books, two of them very thinly disguised as fiction,
and since his heroic death those who knew him have been
eager to take it up where he left off. He was born September 27,
1883, and was the son of M. Jean Psichari, a professor at the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes, by his wife, No^mi Renan. M.
Psichari being a member of the Orthodox Greek Church,
Ernest was baptized according to the Greek Rite, but thence-
forth religion formed no part of his life. Having entered
the lyc^e his faculties were developed in the atmosphere of
irreligion and humanitarianism that we should natiu:*ally look
for in intellectual circles of which Renan was the oracle. He
studied at the lyc^es Henri IV. and Condorcet, displaying bril-
liant mental gifts and a poetical temperament. At eighteen he
was writing verses in the manner of Verlaine and Mallarm^.
Later, when he was studying for his philosopher's degree we
find him commentating Bergson.
In 1902 Psichari received his licentiate in philosophy, and
at this juncture left Paris to spend a year of military service in
a provincial garrison. The outcome, to say the least, was
curious, for this son of pacifists, this grandson of the man who,
in his opposition to war, had declared that if conscripted he
would desert, found in the life of a soldier something very like
what Catholics call a vocation. Seven years later he wrote a
book called L'Appel des Armes, in the foreword of which he
says that his first experience of military service seemed to him
like " the beginning of a new life." He felt that he was " leav-
ing the ugliness of the world and setting out on the first stage
of a journey leading to unsullied grandeurs." How far he was
from dreaming what the last stage of that journey would be!
At the end of the year he returned to Paris to prepare his
thesis for the doctorate in philosophy, his subject being, per-
haps with a half remembrance of Brunetiere's still echoing
thunders, " The Bankruptcy of Idealism." But in 1904 he sud-
denly abandoned his studies and the literary career opening
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before him, and enlisted at Beauvais in the Fifty-first Regiment
of the line. He had attained the rank of sergeant, when in his
eagerness for action he relinquished it and enlisted as a gun-
ner in the colonial artillery, for in those remote days
Equatorial and West Africa were for Frenchmen the only
theatre of war. In 1906 he accompanied Conunandant Len-
fant on his mission to what Psichari, in the title of his first book,
calls Terres de Soleil et de Sommeil (Lands of Sun and Slum-
ber). This book has much of the literary grace of his later
writings, the charm of a cultured mind expressing the effect of
its contact with a primitive and alien people, but it lacks the
mature reflection and introspection developed by long sojourn
in these solitudes. The young soldier's eyes are all for Africa
the desired; he has not yet begun to look back at the land or the
civilization he has left, nor into his own soul.
This expedition took him and his companions into re-
gions hitherto unpenetrated, and through his eyes we see
the African landscape with its "" irresolute outlines like those
in a bad picture," with him we feel "the unique silence of
Africa," undisturbed by the whirring of insects or the flutter of
wings. The character of the tribesmen intrigues him as he
studies it in their manners and customs. Behind the simplicity
of their life he discerns a complexity of sentiments which he
believes to be connected with a remote and obscure past; he
recalls the hypothesis of de Maistre, according to which the
Africans are not an infant people, but degenerate survivals of
a vanished civilization, and he wonders, musing on the son-
orous names of their villages, whether this people has not
fallen from a glorious destiny. But all his reflections bring
him up short against his inheritance of unbelief, in nothing
made more manifest than in his attitude towards death. There
are his observations on the " metaphysics " of the Massas who
have only one article of belief, the immortality of the soul; 9n
the resignation of the people of Lai, " based on such a complete
skepticism as we have difficulty in growing accustomed to, no
matter how liberated we may be from ancestral beliefs." There
is his own attack of fever and the almost pleasurable sensa-
tion of the approach of this " little death," consisting in " the
annihilation of thought and will," and there is the very striking
and pathetic episode of Sama, the negro boy who attached
himself to the young soldier like a faithful dog and who died
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suddenly and silently, leaving his master gazing after him
into the " nothingness '* into which he believed him to have de-
parted.
In the course of Psichari's progress through "^fabulous
Africa," the infrequent post one day brought him, from a friend
whom he describes as " a fervent Christian and a mystic," a
card which bore the message: "I hope that from these soli-
tudes you will come back to us believing in God." On this
Psichari's comment is : ** Alas ! no, Africa is not God's country.
It is the complete triumph of the individual. Churches, doubts,
beliefs, distant phantoms of the city, how is it possible to love
you when one has known this light, when one has entered
light's very gateways? "
At the end of this campaign Psichari was decorated for
his prowess in having dispersed a large force of the enemy
with a handful of sharpshooters, and in 1907 he returned to
France. In 1909 he was promoted sub-lieutenant, and at once
set out for Mauretania, French West Africa, where he remained
until 1912. In his second and far more important book, L'Appel
des Armes, two things are evident, first, that together with so
many young men of his generation he was undergoing a spirit-
ual transformation, and second, that he was more than half
aware of the process. The dedication page bears this inscrip-
tion, significant to those who were watching the signs of the
times : ** To him whose spirit accompanied me into the soli-
tudes of Africa, to that other solitary in whom is living today
the soul of France and whose work has bowed down our youth
in love, to our master Charles P^guy, this book of our grandeur
and our wretchedness." Strange language this, of "spirit"
and " soul " and ** grandeur," from one who not so many years
before had been writing of the failure of idealism, but it was
no more strange than that which had been addressed to him in
1910, when P^guy made him the object of a " votive epistle,"
which is both a programme of the party which looked to
P^guy as to its leader, and an appeal from the converted
P^guy to the still unconverted disciple. P^guy's French defies
translation, but this letter to Psichari is one of the most impor-
tant documents in the history of the French Catholic
renaissance.
The Call of Arms (the French has the double sense of
"summons" and "appeal"), is an apology for the military
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life, not quite war for war's sake only, but as a system of dis-
cipline, a tradition, a reaction from the pacifism and de-
generacy of a creedless age. It is the story of a young officer,
Timoth^e Nang^s, who by sheer force of personality wins a
youth away from rationalism and humanitarianism to the
career of arms and all that, according to the thesis of this book,
it stands for, persuades him in short, '* to take the side of his
fathers against his father," which was, of course, precisely what
Psichari himself was in process of doing. His thesis is that
the military career is a kind of destiny, a divine vocation that
calls insistently to the soul of a man, inducing him to relin-
quish kindred and home and love and ease, and follow it in
hardship and discipline of spirit to the world's end. "It is
no great honor," says Nang&s to Maurice Vincent, his disciple,
^* to die at night in a desert, but it is an honor to have an idea,
or, if you will, although the word is condemned, a faith."
A curious feature of the work is that Psichari expresses
his own sentiments, defines his own position, now through the
mouth of Nang^s, now through that of Vincent. " Many of us,"
says the officer, to a kind of revenant whom he encounters in
Africa, " many of us have experienced the weariness of living
in a world too old. * Where shall we find,' said they, * an ob-
ject in life? Where find a rule, a law? Where find a tem-
ple still standing amid the ruins of the city?' They were
searching gropingly for a great thought and if they had more
faith would assuredly have entered the cloister, but in our
days cloisters are used for museums. I too," he adds wist-
fully, "have known such hours." It was perhaps inevitable
that this reflection of the tranquillity of order, which he found
in the military life, should lead him to a comparison with the
great prototype of discipline and tradition which is the Catho-
lic Church. " He felt that he represented a great force of the
past, with the Church the only one that remained still virgin,
still unsullied, still unstained by modem impurities." He be-
held a parallel between the unchangeable sacraments and the
unaltered observances of military life. "The army and the
Church never compromise. . . . We are both pure metal."
But it did not at all follow that in recognizing the Church
as a great tradition and disciplinary force, he saw in her the
manifestation of God to man, the holy city coming down out of
heaven from God. The Nang^s depicted by the still groping
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Psichari is described as ** a good Christian whom the weight of
his sins did not overwhelm/' and this good Christian always
went to high Mass on Sunday, partly through a spirit of con-
tradiction, partly for pleasure because he loved the cere-
monies, and partly by way of protest against attempts to vio-
late freedom of worship. This is his impression of the recur-
rent miracle he witnessed : " After two thousand years it was
the same minds and well-nigh the same gestures that were re-
peated, the same prayers, the same words it was that issued
from unchanged lips. All the effort of human thought had
failed before the sensible representation of this Crucified One.
All the philosophers and scholars were helpless before the
strange and formidable mystery of transubstantiation : this
bread (here, visible, made by human hands), this bread be-
comes the Flesh of Jesus Christ. Well-nigh two thousand years
have accomplished nothing, they have passed as a single day,
as the merging of yesterday into today or rather they have not
been at all — duration has been suspended as by special grace
for this particular article of faith."
The entire chapter in which this passage occurs is so redo-
lent of Piguy's influence that it even takes on his curiosities of
style, which are not those of Psichari's own, but over all the
pages is spread the pathos of the half-light, of that which is not
darkness only because it holds some intuition of the day. Very
beautiful with this pathos is the final chapter, which shows
Maurice invalided home to France, wearing the aureole, rarer
in those days than ours, of one who has been wounded in war.
He is keenly sensitive to all the loveliness of "ZadouZcc France,"
yet so pierced amid his enjoyment of it with the insatiable de-
sire for barbarous Africa, that he must finally turn his back
upon his love and the fair countryside and go out to the land
that has ''apprenticed him to silence." As you close the book,
which is subscribed Mauretania 1910-1912, you are aware that
this nostalgia for Africa is but the reflection of another
nostalgia, of which saints have died — ^nostalgia, for the king-
dom of heaven.
And very close upon UAppel des Armes came Psichari's
master work, Le Voyage du Centurion^ magnificently trans-
lated by E. M. Walker and M. Harriet M. Capes as A Soldier's
Pilgrimage. It is in the fullest sense of the word an auto-
biography, save for the trifling circumstance that the author
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refers to himself in the third person as "Maxence." Its
theme, its entire scheme of action, is this heavenly home-
sickness, the agonized quest of one more prodigal for his
father's house, and the joyful homecoming at the last. It is re-
markable both as biography and as a history of spiritual ex-
perience. It is essentially dramatic, on the lines of a Greek
tragedy rather than of a mediaeval mystery : God and his soul
are the protagonists, the stage is the vast solitude of Africa,
and for chorus there is the tremendous and almost embodied
silence.
Maxence, he tells us, is the son of a colonel, a cultured
gentleman, a follower of Voltaire, a translator of Horace, who
had cultivated his son's mind but not his soul. At twenty,
therefore, Maxence found himself defenceless against the so-
phistries and deceits of the world, having wandered at wiU in
the poisoned gardens of vice, troubled by a vague remorse and
overwhelmed by the mockery of a life entangled in a disorder
of thoughts and feelings. He speaks of his "dereliction," a
curiously Christian use of the word, even for one who had been
taught to " think Latin." Curious also is the fact that the osten-
sible anonymity which might naturally lead him, as it did
Huysman's Durtal, to discard the reticence with which the
first person singular is invested, never lures him beyond the
bounds of delicacy.
When the curtain rises Maxence has come to the realiza-
tion that his father was mistaken, that after all he, Maxence,
has a soul, that he was born to believe, to hope, to love, that
this soul of his is made to the image of God and capable of dis-
cerning true from false. He is aware that this soul is sick
unto death, but having grown up afar from the Church, he
knows not where to look for a remedy. Filled with a great dis-
gust for the France he knows, " a world too old," the France
Renan helped to make, he sets out with as much joy as he is
capable of feeling for the spacious solitudes of the Sahara
and the grateful restraints of military discipline. " Then be-
gan for Maxence a real life of solitude and silence. . . . For the
Rule of Africa is silence. As the monk in his cloister is silent
so the white-cowled Desert is silent." And following this ex-
ample Maxence "listened to the hours fall into eternity."
For three years he was to know " the frugality of the nomadic
life:" the rising before dawn in order to progress several
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leagues in the morning coolness, at ten the pitching of the
tents, followed by the sparse meal and the hours of admin-
istering the affairs of the Arabs. " He did not know of what
use this austerity was to him, but he was so constituted that
he preferred it to the horns of plenty proffered to him by his
own country."
He had put France far behind him, but one day there came
to him a card from the friend whom he calls Pierre-Marie, the
same whose message of hope in his conversion is recorded in
Terres de Soleil et de Sommeil, and who is now known to have
been M. Jacques Maritain, a convert and a writer on subjects
of Christian philosophy. He seems to have sought his friend's
soul with a persistence which recaUs St. Ignatius' reiterated:
"Francis, what doth it profit?" On this occasion he wrote
from La Salette, assuring Maxence that he had prayed for him
on the holy hill whose Chatelaine seemed to him to weep over
his friend. But the young centurion had before him many
days and nights of conmiunion with eternal things, riding with
naked soul where the space that is earth merges with that in
which swim the uncharted stars. It was not given to him, he
said, to see the earth convulsed before the Face of the Lord, the
order of nature reversed, the rivers returning upon their
soiu'ce and the mountains skipping like rams, but he beheld
the perpetual miracle of the order of nature sustained, he saw
God leaving everything in its place in the world which He had
created. He watched with great content the rise of the
scorpion to its place in the heavens, knowing earth also to be
in its appointed place in the highways of the firmament. And
then there was the silence, a silence which he loved as might
St. Bernard himself: "Unhappy they who have not known
what silence is. It is a bit of heaven come down to men. It
comes from incalculable distances, from the vast interstellar
spaces, from the unstirred latitudes of the cold moon." And
he knew the workings of silence " which first closes the lips
and then penetrates to the inmost soul, to the inaccessible re-
gions where God dwells within us."
In his early expeditions in Africa we found Psichari
curiously studying the customs and beliefs of the natives. Now
he is brought into closer contact with them and they become
determining factors in the history of his soul. In his distaste
for all that is modern and European he is attracted by them, by
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their religion, their philosophy, their mysticism; he strives to
read the secrets of their faces, carved by austerity and alight
with something like ecstatic prayer. Presently he discovers
two things : that he as a "' Frank," a French soldier, stands in
their eyes for Christianity, and that the theory of this world
and the next which is Christian, and therefore typically French,
is infinitely preferable to the Moslem quietism. Recoiling from
their dictum that the ink of scholars is better than the blood
of martyrs, he knows himself to be separated from them by
twenty centuries of Christianity. " He had behind him twenty
thousand crusaders — a whole people who died with their
swords drawn and prayer riveted on their lips.'* The soldier's
blood in him is stirred and with it his love for the " Christian
air " of France, and he realizes that he has reached a point
where he must decide : he must either reject authority and the
foundation of authority, which is the army, or he must accept
all authority, human and divine. He is essentially a soldier of
fidelity. Why then, he asks himself, does he reject Rome,
which is the touchstone of fidelity, and if he so loves the im-
mutable sword why turn away his eyes from the immutable
Cross?
Perhaps only at this juncture begins the real joiu*ney of
the centurion, a journey made in anguish of spirit and lowli-
ness and contrition and love, with arms outstretched not to
the impersonal Deity of the Moslems, who likewise pray in
these places, but to the Ever-Blessed Trinity, to the Father
and the Dove of the Spirit, and the living breathing Friend and
Brother of his soul, the L(M:d Jesus Christ. The dialogue be-
tween the soul of Maxence and his God is replete with the
things that are not taught by flesh and blood.
" *It is my desire,' says God, * that your house should be
in order and that you should take the first step. I do not give
Myself to him who is impure, but to him who does penance for
his sins I give Myself wholly as My Son gave Himself wholly.'
" * This is a hard thing that you ask. Lord. Can You not
first touch my eyes? '
" * Can you not trust Me for a single day? '
" * You can do all things. Lord.'
"*You can do all things, O Maxence. See how in your
mortal hands you hold the scales with the true weight and the
stamp of infallibility. I have freed you from the yoke and the
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goad. I have made you greater than the worlds since I have
given you command over Paradise which is greater than the
worlds. Now you give Me thanks for the light of the sun
which I have given you, but you do not thank Me for this gift,
which is more precious than the sun and the whole panorama
of nature. You are not grateful to Me for that high dignity in
which I have placed you. And yet there is nothing that I like
better than to see you free and bearing yourself proudly before
heaven. O Maxence, there are no bounds to your freedom ex-
cept My love.' "
There comes an hour when Maxence falls upon his knees
and utters a strong cry for mercy and light. It is followed by
many days devoted to the reading of the Gospels, in the light
of which he perceives every detail of the scheme of salvation
fit into its place as he had seen the atoms of the universe fit
into their places, and the final pages of the book seem to have
been written in a rapture of love for Him Whose holy Name
he, like St. Paul, never wearies of repeating, " Jesus the gate of
heaven and the desire of the everlasting hills.** Then come the
tears, "tears which are the third beatitude** and the first
prayer, and then, after a little, the astonished question : " Is it
then so easy to love You, Lord? *'
This is the last word so far as Psichari*s published writings
go, but others have taken up the unfinished story. When he
left Mauretania in 1912 he confided to a friend that he was
" that absurdity, a Catholic without grace.** For some reason,
explicable only by some lack on his part, he could not bring
himself to the performance of the external acts requisite for
reconciliation. On his return to France he was stationed at
Cherbourg, where he proceeded to read feverishly every book
on the subject of religion that he could lay hands on, only to
become convinced that "prayer was best.'* M. Maritain in-
duced him to accompany him to Mass, and while he declared
that he felt at home in church, confession still seemed some-
thing of a stumbling block. It was " Pierre-Marie *' who in the
end came to the rescue and arranged an interview for his friend
with the Dominican, Phre Clerissac. Within two hours all
was decided, and on February 4, 1913, in M. Maritain*s private
chapel the grandson of Renan, in the fullness of his manhood
and the maturity of his faculties, read in a clear but tremulous
voice the professions of faith of Pius IV. and Pius X., after
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which he went to confession and received absolution, the bap-
tism he had received according to the Greek Rite having been
valid. He was radiant with happiness.
On the eighth he was confirmed by Monseigneur Gibier,
Bishop of Versailles, taking the name of Paul in reparation for
Renan*s treatment of the great Apostle. " I seem to have an-
other soul," he said after the ceremony. After his fijrst Com-
munion, which took place on the ninth, he made a pilgrimage
of thanksgiving to Our Lady of Chartres — "the paschal joy of
Chartres ** as he had already called the great cathedral. He at
once entered upon a full and active spiritual life, eagerly seiz-
ing hold of all the means of grace so long and ardently desired.
" Ah, happy and thrice happy they," he had cried out during
his exile, " who by the grace of the sacraments have entered
into the gardens of supernatural understanding, happy and
thrice happy they who repose in the Heart of their God and
warm themselves at Its living flame, happy and forever happy
they for whom the whole of heaven lies in the little Host which
holds Jesus Christ." Every day, therefore, he made his medi-
tation and spiritual reading and said his rosary, and whenever
it was possible received Holy Communion. His very genuflec-
tion, it was said, was expressive of profound faith in the
Blessed Sacrament.
It has been objected that Psichari has not given a satis-
factory account of the steps by which his intellect was per-
suaded of the truth of the Catholic religion. That his intellect
was persuaded, there can be no doubt — he was not one to sin
against the light — ^but there is a sense in which his was not an
intellectual conversion at all, but a stupendous miracle of
grace. His soul was the quarry of the Hound of Heaven, and
could resist capture but not pursuit. Once taken and aban-
doning himself so completely to grace, it was inevitable that he
should feel himself impelled to further cooperation with the
Divine Will, that there should be born of his love and gratitude
a desire to make reparation for the defection of his grand-
father. Step for step he would have walked in the path from
which the spoiled priest had turned aside; with this object he
would have entered the Sulpician seminary at Issy, whence
Renan, still cassock-clad, came forth on a memorable day, and
once ordained, go down to a country parish in Brittany, and,
as one of his biographers has put it, there serve an abandoned
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altar and say the Masses so long left unsaid. But already he
began to understand the Amplius of the saints as well as to
feel that he must atone, not only for the good undone, but for the
evil done. His eyes were tinned towards the Dominican clois-
ters, and he only awaited the clear intimation of God's will
before deciding to enter there. " I feel that I shall do whatever
God asks of me,** he had said on his return from Chartres,
and in March, 1914, after what he called his " year of prayer,**
he wrote to Bishop Gibier that he was awaiting this intimation
in *' peace and silence of soul.'* Finally it was decided that
he should go to Rome and make his theological studies in the
Collegio Angelico, and eventually embrace the Dominican
" rule of joy.**
He was still at Cherbourg in August, 1914, and there saw
the dawning of that day that has changed the history of the
world. On the second day of mobilization he set out for
the battle-front. " I am going as on a Crusade,** he wrote to a
priest, ** because I feel that it is a question of defending the
two causes to which I have devoted my life.** And in this de-
fence he laid it down. Those first days of surprise and defeat
were terrible, and on one of them, after twelve hours of
terrific fighting at St. Vincent-Rossignol in Belgium, diuing
which Lieutenant Psichari had been an inspiration to his men,
he fell, shot in the temple. It was about six o'clock in the
evening of August 22d. When his men recovered his body they
saw his rosary wound about his wrist and on his lips the smile
of a great peace.
The forces of science, heralded by Renan, have had their
hour, and they have been for the most part forces of destruc-
tion. They have been used for pillage and treachery and
violation. They have robbed Death of his mercies and taught
him undreamed-of cruelties. But they have fallen back power-
less before the spiritual forces that have gone forth to meet
them. At one and the same time the Frenchman remembered
that he had a sword and a soul. At the first menace of the in-
vader the cerecloths of materialism and pacifism and irreligion
fell away, and the soul of France rose up in its splendor. It
has been given to the world to see a glorious spectacle since
then, to see the French people with one impulse taking the side
of their forefathers against their fathers, to see the churches,
crowded and the confessionals thronged on the eve of battle.
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to witness Masses heard amid tears in the mud and blood
of the trenches, to see soldiers charging the enemy with their
rosaries on their wrists, to see dying men raise themselves to
give the military salute to their Lord in the priest's hands.
Above all it has been given to the world to see the deaths. Chris-
tian and heroic, that Frenchmen, since France was France,
have known how to die.
Now it is no small thing to have been to a great extent the
herald and forerunner of all this, to have come alone to the
realization of France's Catholic heritage, to have struggled in
silence and solitude to the perception of Catholic truth, to have
laid hold on it and lived in its light when to do so meant not
only to walk somewhat apart and aloof from one's fellows, but
to deny those of one's own household. Neither is it a small
thing to have been foremost on a roll of glory which contams
such names as Castelnau and de Robien and Peguy and Lotte.
For a man's attitude towards death is the witness he bears to
his soul, and the manner of his dying is the seal he sets upon
his life. There had been a time when to die seemed to Psichari
annihilation and departure into nothingness, but there came a
night in the desert, which was the eve of battle, when he faced
the possibility of death with an altered demeanor : " Here in
front of me lies the Field of Death and it is beautiful as the
Promised Land. Here is the angel holding the Book and under
his wing the night is luminous and we stand in the reflected
light of Eternity. . . . For all the evil I have done I am sincerely
contrite and as to the little good I make no boast of it, but sim-
ply ask that it may not die but may bear the fruits of Eternity."
These words were uttered when the centurion was so near the
term of his spiritual journey that they may be taken as a nearly
adequate expression of his outlook when he came, at last, to
the end of his bodily one. And that end we have seen to have
befitted one who has so purely enrolled himself in the
immortal company of "the young, the adventurous, the
admired."
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WAR RISK INSURANCE AND THE "CARRY-ON."
BY MARGARET B. DOWNING.
NE of the supreme achievements of the United
States in meeting the actual shock of war, is
represented in the Bureau of War Risk Insur-
ance and the admirable trilogy so intimately
affiliated: the reconstruction work under the
Surgeons-General of the Army and Navy, the employment
agencies of the Department of Labor and the Vocational
Service. The Act of Congress which appropriated $176,500,000
to create the Bureau of War Risk Insurance was passed on Octo-
ber 6, 1917, little more than a year ago, and now the clerical
force is writing certificates in the four million series. The tiny
band of workers, less than forty, whom Secretary McAdoo
could hardly spare from his over-taxed aids in the Treasury
Department proper, has grown into a vigorous army of nearly
nine thousand.
This corps of workers is typical of the courage and re-
sourcefulness of the nation. From the nondescript material
which flows in after a public appeal to patriotism, the Com-
missioner of Insurance has built up one of the most efficient
and trustworthy divisions of the venerable institution founded
by Alexander Hamilton. Of the several hundred thousands
of men and women who serve the medical wing, almost ten
thousand are actively engaged in various capacities, recon-
structing the war's victims. The Federal Employment Bureau
and the Vocational Service at present have a lesser force, but
they stand prepared to increase it. These distinct branches of
social service to the nation in the abstract and to the armed
defence in particular, by one of those remarkable amalgama-
tions of resources — the direct result of war — ^have grown into
that vast national organization, " Carry-On."
At an open air meeting with the workers of the War Risk
Insurance Bureau, held last June in the park of the National
Museum in Washington, Lord Reading, Ambassador from
Great Britain, placed the rather prosaic theme in a poetic
setting, with a graceful mingling of Wordsworthian religious
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502 WAR RISK INSURANCE AND ''CARRY'ON" [Jan..
and philosophic doctrine. "There is,** he said, **but one
adequate support for the calamities of life, and that the sus-
tained belief that our fate, however sad and disturbed, is con-
trolled by a Being of infinite benevolence and power Whose
purposes embrace all loss and suffering to convert them into
good. The worthy State seeks to become the direct representa-
tive of this Supreme Benevolence, and in the War Risk Insur-
ance offered by the United States to all engaged in active mili-
tary and naval service, may be read the last word of national
benevolence founded on practical and self-respecting prin-
ciples.'* At first glance this seems extravagant praise. But
let us suspend judgment until we take a general survey of the
field. Once we have investigated the law creating and con-
trolling the insurance, compared the terms offered by the
Government and those offered by commercial or social insur-
ance companies or by state controlled insurance, and studied
the sequel of War Risk Insurance in contrast with the old pen-
sion system, we will be convinced that Lord Reading spoke, not
as a diplomatist who must lavish praise, but as a wise and ex-
perienced judge.
As a statement of pre-war insurance under differing
aspects, the following paragraphs are cited :
All insurance is in a sense social in its nature, a distinc-
tion is however made between commercial and social insur-
ance. . . . Social insurance is a working class insurance.
Here the amounts for which insurance is issued are usually
small and the costs of administration relatively large. The
result is that while this class is urgently in need of insur-
ance in various forms, the profits of the business are not
sufficient to induce commercial companies to go into it.
Moreover, some of the hazards which are borne by the work-
ing class are placed upon them unfairly and ought to be
borne by the business which employs them or by society in
general. Since the least well provided for of the workers,
will not or cannot afford commercial insurance and since
the State has no direct interest in guarding them from dis-
asters which they are likely to meet from unforeseen event-
ualities, it becomes the duty of the State to assist them to
secure insurance.^
When a workingman is killed or injured in the course of
^O'Hani, An Introduction to Economics, New York: The Macmillan Co. Pp.
245. 347.
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his employment, his family is deprived temporarily or
permanently of his income. Formerly the view was held
that this stoppage of income was solely the concern of the
family of the injured man and was a matter about which the
State and the employer need not take thought. . . . Today,
this view of the irresponsibility of the employers and the
State for industrial accidents, is beginning to be antiquated,
and as a result of this way of looking at industrial accidents,
thirty-three States have passed laws bearing directly on
workmen's accident compensation. The laws vary from
State to State but are alike in principle. They provide in
general for compensation for all injuries by accidents aris-
ing in and out of employments including full compensation
for deaths so resulting, and in many cases occupational
diseases, such as lead poisoning are included.^
In a foreword to the first bulletins distributed by the Secre-
tary of the Treasury, it is stated that the United States offers its
active military forces this War Risk Insurance as a privilege
as well as a duty. What the commercial companies would not
touch as a financial venture, namely, to underwrite small sums
for persons exposed to peril, the Government will do as a
privilege and under "terms of unprecedented liberality,*' to
quote Mr. McAdoo again. The maximum amount possible
under the War Risk Insurance provisions is $10,000, and the
minimmn is $1,000. The average age of the insured, prior to
the last selective draft, was twenty-five years. The average
amount written, to the intense gratification of the framers of
the law, has been $7,500, whereas the most optimistic hoped it
would be, at least, $3,500. The average man of twenty-five
pays for the average amount of insurance taken, $7,500, $4.95
a month or an annual total of $59.40.
It has been objected that commercial companies will in-
sure a man of twenty-five for the same sum, at a premimn rate
which is not excessive, and which will stand every sort of com-
parison with that offered by tlie Government. But the com-
mercial companies offer this rate only for normal risks. For a
man going to war, they would not accept the risk at four times
the premium usually stated. Then, with the passing years, the
burden increases for the normal man who carries commercial
insurance, and statistics prove that, at the very time when the
money is most urgently needed, when the capacity to earn
* Ibid., pp. 247, 248.
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504 WAR RISK INSURANCE AND " CARRY-ON " [Jan.,
grows less, the insurer is compelled to cease his payments and
thus loses all. The War Risk Insurance carries an excellent
provision: that if the insured returns in sound condition, five
years after the war he may place this policy, and under ap-
preciably lightened financial strain, with such commercial
firms as meet the requirements of the United States in the mat-
ter of profit and loss.
All dealings with the War Risk Insurance Bureau must
definitely end five years after peace is declared, such as
monthly installments to the totally or permanently disabled,
cash sums to the beneficiaries of the War's victims, or trans-
ferred policies to existing State or conmiercial concerns, yet
the United States Government is to remain in the field of insur-
ance as the most powerful weapon to spur the States on to more
humane and intelligent laws for the working, and therefore
exposed, class, and to curb the greed of the great companies.
Every kind of federal insurance awaits the coming of peace:
health insurance for the millions of federal employees; gen-
eral insurance for non-employment for those temporarily em-
barrassed through a cessation of demand for their work. Such
an insurance would have benefited construction workers in the
earlier years of the European War when American business
was paralyzed; it would also be an ideal insurance to keep the
wolf from the door, in times like the past five years, when
artists, graphic and textile as well as the genius of paint-brush,
pencil or chisel, have literally faced destitution. But these are
vast projects of the future, as yet too shadowy, even in the
national mind, to permit of detailed destription.
As a business venture which has recently celebrated its
first birthday, and which can niunber more than four million
patrons, with employees reckoned in the eight thousands and
the list still growing, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance makes
a fascinating study. Lord Reading said, compared to the old
pension system, which had fastened on this as well as old world
countries, it was a regeneration. American economists call it
rather a much needed readjustment. It is certainly a sociologi-
cal adjustment, when the modem warrior pensions himself
instead of becoming a pensioner on the bounty of the Govern-
ment and a drain on the resources of the country. He must
pay his allotment from the Government's monthly stipend. Be
he general, colonel, corporal or private, admiral, commander.
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sailor before the mast, or the humble scullery boy in the hold,
the amount of his premiiun for War Risk Insurance is de-
ducted before his pay envelope leaves the Treasiuy. Indulgent
mothers and other relatives may ease the burden in all ways
but this. Direct and simple methods have their value in the
machinery set in motion by the Act of Congress of October 6th.
The limited term which is set for War Risk Insurance is a dis-
tinct gain as compared to the endless years in which the pen-
sioner clung to the Government's skirts; opportunities for
fraud and perjury are diminished under the present system,
for the insured must make application where his antecedents
are under direct scrutiny; beneficiaries are clearly indicated
and rigidly investigated, thus closing avenues to deceit. To be
sure some enterprising women have married several soldiers
under different names and succeeded, for two or three months,
in drawing several family allowances, but they were detected
and punished so severely that this particular industry is not
likely to flourish.
The Act of Congress which appropriated $176,500,000 for
the War Risk Insurance, designated that $141,000,000 should be
available for military and naval family purposes. The soldier
who receives thirty dollars a month, must send fifteen to a wife
or any dependents he may leave, and to this the Government
adds fifteen for a wife and twelve for every child or other de-
pendent. This last is done whether he takes out insurance or
not. When he does avail himself of the opportunity to guard
himself and his dependents from the casualties of war, he
must pay his premiiun, as previously stated, out of the fifteen
dollars he retains, or rather he pays it automatically before he
receives his portion. As a model of simplicity, the instructions
of the Commissioner to field agents and other solicitors could
be recommended to commercial firms. Two papers accom-
pany each application : one gives the law about allotments and
beneficiaries simply and directly, the other tabulations of
premiums according to age, and the final adjustment of the
policy as paid up or relinquished. The permanently disabled
will receive the entire amount covered by the premiums,
although his family has drawn monthly sums from the
$141,000,000 set aside for the purpose. The principal is divided
into monthly sums, when it must be paid to the injured, and at
this point the " Carry-On •' steps in to safeguard the recipient
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and to save him from the perils which encompassed the old-
time pensioner.
The certificate issued by the War Risk Bureau to its
patrons could also be commended to commercial firms. It
is a modest affair, about five by seven inches, on fairly good
paper, embellished with an artistic border of light green, very
like high class premiimi certificates given at the old agricul-
tural fairs. It displays no obscurity of language, no rhetorical
flourishes, no expensive parchment, no engraved and elegant
looking script as is common with commercial firms. It is
plainly printed with the name of the holder of the certificate
inserted on the typewriter, and contains less than a hundred
words, including the three essential signatures, those of
W. G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasurer, William C.
LeLanoy, Director of the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, and
the countersign of T. R. Godey, the registrar.
As these certificates have been registered in the four
millions, it may be illuminating to give the history of certificate
number one. It bears date of October 17, 1917, the day on
which President Wilson signed the Act of Congress and car-
ries the sum of ten thousand dollars for Coke Flannagan, an
officer of the Signal Corps now in France. This initial policy
holder is the grandson of William W. Flannagan of Montclair,
New Jersey, but at present Secretary of the Farm Loan Board
under the Treasury Department. Mr. Flannagan had watched
the progress of this proposed war insurance with keen anxiety.
Just as soon as drafting operations were adjusted, after the
President's declaration of war on Germany, his four grand-
sons. Coke Flannagan, William F., John J. and Heman J.
Redfield had enlisted. With the presidental signature
making the bill a law, Mr. Flannagan saw his road clear to
putting on file four applications previously prepared by his
patriotic young relatives. To his dismay, he received in re-
sponse, not the four certificates but an elaborate explanation
from the bureau chieftains, that months before the law was
framed, there had been an agreement among them to keep in
reserve the first hundred numbers for officers of high rank, num-
ber one for General Pershing, two for Admiral Sims, three for
General Tasker Bliss and down the list graded with the pre-
cision of a court chamberlain. Neither General Pershing nor
any of those destined for honors in the mental processes of the
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bureau chiefs, however, were cognizant of this affair at any
time.
Mr. Flannagan was disappointed, but he does honor to a
good fighting name and he is of immediate Celtic ancestry.
Quite naturally, he did not give up the hopes he had cherished
without a battle. But his weapons, verbal and otherwise, made
no impression. So, fortified with his docimients, he strolled
into Mr. McAdoo's office. As a result of that ten minutes' con-
versation, the Secretary of the Treasury wrote some clear and
comprehensive instructions to those formulating the rules and
policies of the new bureau. Mr. McAdoo decided that his
mighty department was also in the world-clash that democracy
might live, and that the fiduciary institution intended to remain
stanchly democratic. Certificates for War Risk Insurance
were to be issued in the chronological order of the dates on the
application papers. From this general rule there was to be
no departure, no exceptions, no reservations, and all such ex-
ceptions and reservations were at once null. All applicants
were to receive equal treatment, from the highest to the
lowest rank, since all were equal under the law when its pro-
visions had been respected. Coke Flannagan got certificate
number one, and his cousins got numbers two, three and four.
Al|[ had joined the service in the ranks. All have already won
commissions and have served with distinction in France.
A characteristic of the war worker, which presents a
lighter side, is that no matter how small or insignificant the
rdle he fills, his duties inspire a deep sense of responsibility.
The clerk in the War Risk Insurance Bureau is inspired to
believe, and no one can gainsay the belief is well founded,
that the drudgery of the day, the forms and letters, the cards
and certificates, the files and indices, represent the invincible
devotion and solicitude of the nation to hearten the men in the
field and to keep up their morale and unflinching fighting
spirit. That they are the vital chord which links the battle line
in Europe with the Government at home is not a figure of
speech, but an actual and tremendous fact. This has worked
to the excellent end that these clerks, subjected to every con-
ceivable hardship in their daily routine, have borne all with
Spartan courage. They are crowded into quarters which
would be pitifully inadequate in normal times for five times
less their number. Those who type the filing records from the
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508 WAR RISK INSURANCE AND " CARRY-ON " [Jan.,
certificates which come from the military authorities, are so
crowded they conflict with each other in the folding and un-
folding of papers. Shoulders and elbows constantly touching
during the exhausting heat of the sununer, was a severe test
of earnestness. So imperative has it been that the routine of
the War Risk Insurance be kept up to the latest hour, that
three shifts labored in turns throughout the twenty-four hours,
each day being divided into seven hours, with a hour after each
shift for the ventilating and cleaning of the office rooms. Ten-
derly bred women have trudged through the streets in the dark
hours, fearless of harm in the performance of a noble patriotic
duty. But to the credit of the directors, women were largely
eliminated from the early morning shift, and none of the
younger working staff allowed to be abroad during the dan-
ger hours.
" Carry-On," that masterful term straight from the
trenches, has become incorporated into colloquial speech. Un-
der it all loyal and worthy citizens are linked together for use-
ful patriotic service, but it has a special application to that
body of workers gathered about the Surgeons-General, who
assist in the physical rehabilitation of the sick and wounded.
The official organ, Carry-On, is a fair-sized magazine edited
monthly by the office of tlie Surgeon-General of the Army, and
published under the auspices of the American Red Cross.
Lieutenant-Colonel Casey Wood is editor-in-chief and his as-
sistants include the most eminent in the domain of surgery and
therapeutics, as well as authors of international distinction. The
magazine is sent gratis to all engaged in recognized coopera-
tion with the medical wings and the social and vocational serv-
ices. "Carry-On" may be said to take up the thread of the sol-
dier's or sailor's life welfare at the point where the War Risk
Insurance Bureau considers its duties accomplished. It accom-
plishes the more that the national conscience now recognizes
as obligation, than it did, let us say, in 1865. The totally and
permanently disabled are the objects of keenest solicitude. As
William C. Gorgas, former Surgeon-General of the Army,
whose very name means the achievement of great deeds, wrote
in the first number of the official organ, June, 1918: "The
medical department will * Carry-On ' in the treatment and
training of the disabled until he is cured or as nearly cured as
his disabilities permit. We shall try to do our part in his resto-
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ration to health with the belief that the wounded and sick
should have the opportunity to return to civil life, capable of
pursuing a career of usefulness. This to enable him to enjoy
the freedom and happiness afforded by world-wide democracy
for which he has given his all."
Many who have given their all, have been blinded and other-
wise maimed before they were prepared for any trade or pro-
fession. Experts from the Vocational Service are given in
charge of such cases. They sound all possibilities deftly and
eflBciently before determining the actual work of training
which immediately follows the physical healing. Meantime,
experts associated with employment agencies, federal, state,
municipal and of private benevolence, rake the country for op-
portunities to place the restored in the exact post where he will
be most happy, prosperous and useful. The Secretary of the
Interior has recently thrown open tracts of frutiful land in
Louisiana and Florida, hitherto tied up by ancient French and
Spanish courts of land claims. Here are potential fortunes in
tropical vegetables, fruits, nuts, coffee and tea. The Agricul-
tural Department has experts ready to train those who elect
to become proprietors of such domain. The Departments of
Commerce and Labor have their quota of opportunities and
so, too, all the Executive Departments. And all this is in-
dependent of the great world of industry and conmiercial and
intellectual activity. It is a project as vast and pulsating with
life as the nation which conceived it. On the cover of the
official organ, Carry-On, General Gorgas has placed an acorn,
emblematic of power and dignity and slow but steady expan-
sion. All that is hoped for will never be fully realized. This
is the fate of altruistic effort however worthy, and what is to
be realized will be long and weary months in coming. But
the workers have their faces turned straight to the future, and
they will wrest from it all that is possible, in this splendid
campaign to do their part for those who have done so much.
Framers of the American War Risk Insurance selected the
Canadian Insurance Act as their model. It met their require-
ments more closely, and quite logically so, since the geographi-
cal proximity and similar climatic conditions make the two
countries as one. There is an effort to follow the Canadian
policy of investing the monthly installments of insurance paid
the permanently injured by the War Risk in an annuity, and
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510 WAR RISK INSURANCE AND " CARRY-ON " [Jan.,
to provide occupation which will prove remunerative in the
interim. It may require federal aid to do this. Without doubt
such aid will be given if the demand prove sufficient. This is
certainly a long stride in advance of the old pension system for
the maimed. The world so soon forgets a man has been a hero
and sees him simply as a cripple. But a snug income, a crip-
ple's sense of self-respect and of non-dependence, makes the
best legacy a grateful Government can devise.
" Carry-On " has even a deeper significance. It was present
in the medical mind when units of recreational service were
formed, under the direction of the Surgeons-Greneral. The
mental attitude of the patient has always a direct bearing on
his ultimate recovery, and certainly upon the rapidity of his
progress towards health. When a man has contracted
tuberculosis or has left a limb in France or been blinded, or
has suffered from gassing, it is necessary to convince him that
he has a future, before you can elicit much interest in that re-
mote period. Dreary, indeed, are the physical and mental
trails of the War. There are those who would be content to
be invalids, and invalids they will remain, despite the best that
General Gorgas and the wonderful reconstruction officers can
do. ** Carry-On " means for such to inspire hope, to arouse
flickering ambitions and to rehabilitate the mind in garments
of strength. Here is where the women of the nation can prove
worthy of the regard in which they are held. But they must
work with and under the medical artisans and not independ-
ent of them. Wherever the patient may be, in a home of
luxury or in the crudest of temporary hospitals, his complete
cure is the concern of the nation, and must be conducted along
the lines selected by those who know. Too much sympathy
is worse than an attitude of irresponsiveness. Self-pity is what
every well-wisher of the wounded wishes to kill. An in-
finitesimal approach to it must be met and turned into healthy,
inspiring channels. Fortitude and hope are the weapons which
the medical workers ofiTer, and to this end forms of recreation
are selected and the fact made obvious that each individual is
the object of care and solicitude, and that his future is being
thought out as by a tender mother and wise and judicious
father.
In a larger and more important sense, can the women of
the country "Carry-On;" in preparing and forcing on the
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public the calm and cordial reception of these men who bear
such visible tokens of their heroism. Those who have worked
in any social service, can bear testimony to the disheartening
refusals which follow the application of any person at all dis-
figured. Even a burn which left a scar, debars clerks in the
great commercial retail concerns, and the most superficial
cough or evidence of ailment often brings about a discharge in
factories or crowded industrial plants. Proprietors who ad-
here to these obsolete ideas, must be made to feel that the
public will not stand for them. They must be counciled to aid
in carrying the burden of these cripples. They are the vic-
tims of their chivalry in saving the world for all, and for the
future of the race. Not for sentimental or aesthetic reasons,
should any one be suffered to shift with impunity a part of the
burden.
If those who sigh and talk about the paternal tendencies of
the Government, who claim that the best quality of man-
hood is being sapped in these elaborate preparations to safe-
guard the returned soldier and sailor, could mingle on easy
terms with some groups of the reconstruction classes at Wal-
ter Reed Military Hospital in Washington, D. C, they would
take a more hopeful view of life. If one doubts the strong
spiritual qualities which remain untouched, after the shell of
the body has been cruelly shattered, let him visit the working
wards some afternoon when the duties of the day are ended.
There is a lad of twenty-one recently removed from the Evac-
uation Hospital which was immediately behind Montdidier,
who lost an eye, an arm and a leg at Chateau-Thierry. He
apparently received excellent care in France, because after
a few weeks in Walter Reed, he is talking of his ultimate dis-
charge and his future. He had been connected with a large
conmiission firm in a seaport city and bought crops in the
open field. His wounds, he told the doctor and vocational
trainer, would not interfere with his duties, and his em-
ployers had written him to return, just as soon as the hospital
authorities would permit. He explained quizzically that he
could always tell a good crop with half an eye and would not
suffer now with a whole eye. With his artificial limbs, which
he was learning to use better every day, he would soon get
about his work, just as though he had never heard of trenches
and the inferno in the woods of Thierry just before he was
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512 VILLAGE CHURCHES [Jan.,
struck. The sportsman-like attitude of those who have accom-
plished their part, is another hostage for their future. No
rancor, nor hatred, no bitterness of spirit. They fought their
fight valiantly on the field and with the proper weapons. In
civil life they turn to the future and its possibilities. This
attitude is the potent sign that the disabled soldier is on a
straight road towards recovery and normal activity.
In the last consideration, after the War Risk Insurance
has completed a noble part and the medical officers performed
those surgical miracles which astound the world; when the
vocational training and the recreational centres have all, in
turn, aided in the restoration of the sick and wounded, the
crowning opportunity goes to the Home Service, where the
"Carry-On*' means a sacrifice and devotion which is to re-
vivify the world.
VILLAGE CHURCHES.
BY CHARLES L. O'DONNELL, C.S.C.
Chaplain 117th Engineers, A,EJF,
God help you, little churches,
That were the help of God,
A broken-hearted host that War
* Shattered, and spurned, and trod-
You are the saddest ruins left
Above the saddest sod !
A hundred years, a thousand.
You were the holy place,
An ocean and a river
Of the white tides of grace,
Now only stones and mortar
And in the dust, your face.
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You were the happy prison ' * " . t ,
That Love's great Captive chose,
To have among His children
His house and His repose,
Where all the saints, like lilies.
Bloomed round the Mystic Rose.
O sundered bars, O broken cage,
O God that was your Bird,
No more within His secret bower
The Dove's low voice is heard;
The rain falls through your open roof
And you are all unstirred.
lonely little villages
Where never God comes by.
No nearer than the heavens.
The far and fearful sky —
Who used to dwell within you.
The Apple of your Eye.
1 speak not of cathedrals
Whose ruin robs the arts.
But little village churches
And broken village hearts
Where living faith and love abide
Though hope almost departs.
Almost, but they are minded
Of deeper than this gloom.
The age-long hours of anguish
And the dead Bridegroom,
And all in a sunny morning
An invincible tomb.
Dear Christ, these little churches.
You were their only pride:
I crawl into their ruins
As into Your wounded side.
And know that in The Church, Lord,
You evermore abide.
VOL. cvm.— 33
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PREJUDICE UNCONQUERED.
BY WILLIAM H. SCHEIFLEY.
INCE the outbreak of the War we have heard a
great deal about the new spirit of toleration and
mutual respect in France, which, it was said,
had, for the present at least, stifled all political
and religious differences. In the main these re-
ports are probably true; isolated exceptions only ** confirm the
rule." But there are such exceptions, and we find a con-
spicuous one in a recent book ^ from the pen of Reuben Sail-
lens, D.D. What makes M. Saillens' book the more noteworthy
is the fact that, having been written for English readers, it
reached a second edition at the end of six months, so giving
evidence of a certain popularity outside of France.
The subject chosen by the author was bound to appeal
strongly to the reading public. What could be more fascinat-
ing than the soul — or moral fibre, tempered and tested by a
thousand years of trial — of a brave, chivalrous people like the
French, who during the present War have added so many im-
mortal pages to their glorious history? And the reading public
was quite ready to agree with the author that the secret of this
moral fibre of France " has been the wonder of the world."
But when he comes to explaining the soul of France, he is
not so likely to keep his readers with him. Naturally the ques-
tion suggests the most complex and subtle forces, the silent
racial and climatic influences of centuries. According to M.
Saillens, however, we need not rack our brains with specula-
tion; he has solved the mystery for us apparently without
effort — perhaps by intuition. The secret of it all is one thing,
and only one: Protestantism! We confess that this explana-
tion had not suggested itself to us, for, according to the author's
own figures, the Protestants of France form only one and a
half per cent of the population. If, however, we recall that
they arc " the salt of the earth," * everything becomes as clear
as day.
To be sure, skeptics might object that the moral fibre of
*■ The Soul of France, By Reuben Saillens, D.D. London: MorftMi ^ Scott
' The Soal of France, p. 51 and passim.
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France evoked the admiration of the world as early as the
Crusades, and hence before Protestantism was known. Such
arguments the author would refute with the assertion that
Protestantism has existed in France since long before the time
of the Waldenses and the Albigenses; that in fact it is as old
as Christianity itself, probably much older.
More important still in the present case, virtually all the
great men and women of France have, we are assured, been
Protestants. Thus not only such illustrious men as Martin of
Tours, St. Bernard, and Jean Gerson » were in reality Protestant,
but Joan of Arc, " that strange mixture of Romish superstition
and spiritual independence, contained the whole Reformation
in germ." *
After these startling revelations the reader confidently ex-
pects at every moment to find such names as Urban II., Fran-
cis de Sales, Vincent de Paul, and Joseph de Maistre classed
with the " salt of the earth " rather than put in the ** Romish
pale.'' But our author apparenUy thinks that, like the Catho-
lics in general, these men have had litUe or nothing to do with
the soul of France. Even Bossuet, whom historians and critics
have for centuries associated with the spiritual life of France,
he passes over lighUy. Anyway, the reader is given to under-
stand the French pulpit orators of the seventeenth and follow-
ing centuries owed whatever litUe merit they may have had to
Protestantism.'^
Who, then, has formed the soul of France? First of all,
chronologicaly speaking, Claude Brousson, who ** really saved
the country." • More particularly, in recent times, Robert
Haldane, Charles Cook, and Mr. and Mrs. McAU. Here we
have the salt of salt in its quintessence. While others, for
instance, Henry Pyt and FeUx Neff , have done a great work in
France, the country owes the sterling moral fibre of its soul
chiefly to the Haldanes, the Cooks, and the McAlls. We get the
impression that, in comparison to them, even Calvin and
Agrippa d'Aubign6 are unimportant. Others, such as Bernard
Palissy and Olivier de Serres, whom we had thought of as illus-
trious Protestants well deserving of their country, are not so
much as mentioned.
The same surprise awaits us in what the author says of
foreign missionary work, one of the most reliable barometers
•Ibid,, p. 25. *Ibid., p. 30. • Ibtd,, p. 118. • Ibtd., p. 75.
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516 PREJUDICE UNCONQUERED [Jan.,
for measuring a nation's soul. Whereas we had supposed,
from the opinions of competent historians, that the missionary
activity of Catholic France in the nineteenth century exceeded
in extent and fruitf ulness that of all other countries — Catholic
and Protestant — combined, M. Saillens affects to have heard
only of French Protestant missions.
From these salient features of The Soul of France we get
both the measure of the book and the spirit of its author. Has
the War dissipated any of his old prejudices? Has it inspired
him with even a spark of broad-minded amity, a sincere de-
sire to see if possibly the ** erroneous doctrine ** of his com-
patriots and former opponents may not, after all, contain a
scintilla of truth? The crisis through which France has been
passing would, we think, justify a conciliatory effort on the
part of all her sons, but the impartial reader is obliged to con-
fess that no such effort is discernible in The Soul of France.
On the contrary, the book, in its attitude towards non-Prot-
estants, breathes virtually the bigoted " no-popery *' spirit of
the sixteenth centiuy. And yet the author asks naively why
men like Pascal, Brousson, and Vincent de Paul, whose only
passion was Christ, " should have lived and died so far apart
from one another! " ^
The purely literary parts of M. Saillens* book are, as a
rule, very good; but unfortunately he is never able to go far
without his sect-glasses, which, owing to their prejudices of
past centuries, at once lead him into gross exaggerations and
distortions. Nobody has any objection to an author's writing
volumes on the idols of his particular Church, so long as he
does not usurp titles to which he has no right. But a systematic
distortion of the facts of history is not permissible in a book
bearing the name of one's country, especially when, as in the
present case, it is intended solely for foreign consumption. We
know now how much harm certain frivolous authors of FrencB'
fiction did their country in the second half of the nineteenth
century, by writing merely for foreign readers. Infinitely
greater must be the harm if a scholarly book which is really
erroneous, is accepted seriously. M. Saillens doubtless knew
that in France nobody outside the limited circle of his brethren
would be " taken in " by such a travesty of history.
V Ibid,, p. 111.
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'MELIA.
BY ARABEL MOULTON BARRETT.
She paused on the threshold of Heaven;
Love, pity, surprise;
Wistful, tender, lit up for an instant the
Cloud of her eyes.
With his heart on his lips he kissed her.
But never her cheek grew red.
And the words the living long for he
Spake in the ear of the dead.
—Whittier.
ELIA sat with her back against the garden wall
of the Rectory, her knees drawn up to her chin,
her arms clasping them. Her bare toes caressed
the dust that lay thick in the quiet old street.
Overhead a palm tree rustled and trembled in
delicious tune with the wind. Looking up into it, one could see
the clusters of blossom hanging, like delicate carvings in ivory,
from their brown sheathes.
'Melia's soul was not in the palm branches: it worked like
her toes, spasmodically in the dust. Close by, to be used pres-
ently, were her shoes. They lay there side by side — the typical
shoes of the Jamaica townswoman — out at toe, down at heel,
dirty exceedingly. Her mind was absorbed in a fascinating
subject — the young woman of the present day. She herself,
having passed her first youth, had views. All middle-aged
people hold views on men and manners. Some hold just
views: some distorted views; whilst others are vague in out-
line; but, without doubt, our own particular view is, to our-
selves, the truest on record. 'Melia was proclaiming hers to
her friend, Mr. Wallace.
Mr. Wallace, as he leaned against the old gun — the old
gun, a relic of Jamaica's buccaneering days — listened with the
grave silence usually ascribed to the savant or the philosopher.
Occasionally he glanced down at 'MeUa, and his shrewd ex-
pression betokened the man who was keenly conversant with
human nature, especially the feminine side of it.
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518 'MELIA [Jan.,
** Me good Mister Wallace," resumed 'Melia, " de young gal
ob dis presant is no like young gal befo' time. All dem look
fur is money. Dis money, me good Mr. Wallace! Dis money!
It is curse and a ruination; eh, me good sah?'*
Mr. Wallace assented without alacrity. His views on life
probably differed from 'Melia's, but philosophers are prover-
bially prudent.
" Wait till I tell you, Mr. Wallace. Dis de way it go. Pick-
ney grow and grow, and de mudder dem hab all de boddera-
tion; and what bodderation like pickney? Den when dem
grow big gal so — ^ketch mos*, fifteen — dem no look to dem mud-
der. Dem go out look f e dem self, and day doant gib dem mud-
der dem gill,* so-so. Dem is really ungrateful, Mr. Wallace.
All dem look fur is money."
" So it go; so it go fe true," murmured Mr. Wallace; and he
dropped bits of stick down the mouth of the gun. A century
or so ago it had vomited flame. Perhaps Mr. Wallace was
thinking of all the gills and tups he had so heedlessly dropped
into the sea of courtship; of the many gay and heartless
maidens that had accepted bun and ginger-beer without a
thought for the suitor behind them.
" De gal dem is really bad," warmly pursued 'Melia. She was
gratified to have at last aroused Mr. Wallace's sympathy and
interest. " You know Louisa? " Yes, he knew Louisa.
"Well, she tell Richard— you know Richard?" Yes, Mr.
Wallace was also acquainted with Richard.
"" Well, Louisa tell Richard, say he mus' go steal money f e
him. What a 'ting, eh! Good fader! My, the gal bad! Steal
money. Lard! " Mr. Wallace stood erect; he no longer threw
sticks down the gun's mouth. Fire came from his. His finer
feelings were touched. 'Melia looked at him admiringly from
her lowly position at his feet.
" Louisa know who f e ax," said 'Mr. Wallace shortly and
fiercely. "Louisa couldna ax me dem kin' o' ting; me soon
know wha fe do wid him." 'Melia slid one brown hand to the
ground, and leaning on it, looked up into the man's face.
" So dem young gal 'tan Mr. Wallace — so dem Han. Dis
money! Dis money! Me couldna do 'ting like dat. Me is a
ripe woman. Me couldna do so. But," with a certain wist-
fulness, " man don't look f e sich. Dem only want to married
* A gill Is about three-eighths of a cent.
, -DTgitized by
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1919.] 'MELIA 519
to young gal." It was a difficult moment. Mr. Wallace was
evidently embarrassed. He didnH love 'Melia, but he had a
faint suspicion she loved him; and this he had no objection to.
It was pleasant to be a god, even a clay one on a pedestal, and
to have many worshippers. Still, he could imagine that to be
the exclusive property of one devotee might, through the very
exaltedness of the position, be exceedingly irksome. Mr. Wal-
lace was not what is called a marrying man. Rather he was
like the gay and gaudy butterfly that flits from flower to flower.
In any case 'Melia did not attract him. Her opinions on men
and manners might be excellent, but her appearance was dis-
satisfying. He glanced at her bare feet, her kerchief-tied head,
her wistful face. Rather he would have preferred smart shoes,
an elaborate coiffure, a saucy tongue. So there fell a difficult
silence.
The sunshine reveled in the tossing palm branches; it
rested gloriously on the huge masses of cloud banked away to
the south; the eye blinked at sight of them. A humming bird
poised daintily, with whirring wings, before the scarlet hibiscus
blossoms that hung over the wall into the road.
There was love in the air. Without doubt, Cupid, in mis-
chievous mood, was passing by. Mr. Wallace was conscious
of it. He had never heard of Cupid, but he understood *Melia
in a misty way. He looked down at her curiously. Her head
was bent, her lips compressed; she idly traced patterns in the
dust with her forefinger. Her hands were rough and worn
with much toil. She had the sad air of one who having put
out tentacles appealing for sjrmpathy and affection^ has silently
to withdraw them, meeting no response.
•Mr. Wallace's heart was touched, though he felt the posi-
tion to be one full of peril. He had a consciousness that
women, especially women like Amelia, were dangerous to the
liberty of man.
**Mr. Wallace," said *Melia softly and abruptly, "you
nebber gwine married, nuh? "
"Married!" echoed Mr. Wallace, equally abruptly, but with-
out softness. "What a big trouble you want *troiy pon me
poor buoy!" He rapped his finger-nails impatiently on the
gun. "Married no mek fe everybody. Miss Brown. It bring
fret, and war and bodderation. Fe me brudder Sanmiy, mar-
ried. He marry one brown critter from St. Ann, an' he had a
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520 'MELIA [Jan.,
h of a time. He tell me say deaf long time better. Mar-
ried a bad sumting.'*
"A true wud," murmured *Melia sorrowfully. Her tone
was a wordless protest against his wholesale condemnation of
the holy state of matrimony. He felt it to be so. Curiosity
overcame prudence.
**Hi, Miss Brown! you oughter been married long time/*
he said jocularly. " Nice woman like you disarve husband."
'Melia glanced up at him shyly with all the coquetry of her
early youth.
"Chub! 'Mr. Wallace! My! you sportify. You too make
game. Me no ole smuddy now? "
" Ole? ** echoed Mr. Wallace. " Chub! no talk nonsense! "
" I is a ageable woman, yes."
"Don't talk! If smuddy ax you fe marry you woulda
teake dem?"
" Ax me, nub? " It was pertly said, and Mr. Wallace felt
all the smartness of it. It struck him full in the face with all
the force of a bullet. He had not thought 'Melia capable of such
repartee. Many a wiser man than Mr. Wallace has given away
his life's freedom in as unpremeditated a manner. He laughed
awkwardly.
The good-natured salutation of a passing friend saved the
situation. Under his kindly and benevolent wing Mr. Wallace
escaped, with a hurried "Day-day, Miss Brown," to 'Melia.
She looked after him comprehendingly, and she continued to
muse and to wriggle her bare toes in the dust.
Mr. Wallace's mind misgave him. He felt that he had
endangered his bachelorhood. He felt Miss Brown's question,
**Ax me nuh?" hanging over his head like the sword of
Damocles. He knew nothing of Damocles save the first syllable
of that gentleman's name; and this he used pretty freely to
himself as he walked down the street in amicable conversation
with his friend.
Fate has curious surprises for some of us. It came to
'Melia in the form of her uncle — a well-to-do man in the moun-
tains. He died after a few weeks' illness, leaving all his earthly
belongings (and they were substantial) to his niece.
'Melia, with house and land, a donkey, two mules, a cart,
three fat pigs and fowls, was a very different person to 'Melia
sitting in the dust with bowed head, bare feet, and without a
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1919.] 'MELIA 521
single silver or nickel coin to tie in the comer of her headker-
chief. Mr. Wallace was one of the first to appreciate the dif-
ference; one of the first to develop a strong interest in lifelia.
'Melia was ironing clothes one Friday afternoon when Mr.
Wallace leaned over the fence, and respectfully saluted her.
He felt, to use his own words, that, ** Miss Brown was a lady to
be treated with all circumspect." He no longer felt himself a
god for her worship. It was Miss Brown who was now the
divinity — a highly gilded divinity, indeed: and Mr. Wallace's
knees involuntarily bent at sight of her sturdy figure bending
over the ironing table. She had placed it for convenience sake
under the breadfruit tree.
"'Marnin', Miss Brown. Mamin', me dear lub. My, you
look well! You look great fe true."
" Good marnin*, Mr. Wallace," said 'Melia. She spoke
with dignity befitting her altered circumstances. She felt that
a house and land, to say nothing of pigs and poultry, demanded
an entirely new Tilelia. She remembered vividly the morning
under the palm tree, and the question she had asked of him.
She still loved Mr. Wallace, and was willing to say " yes " when
the question was asked; but, at the same time, she felt that he
saw her through a veil richly decorated with a four-roomed
house, mules, pigs, and cart; and she was alive to the ad-
vantage of his gazing long. She herself always best appre-
ciated the frock which she had bought after long and careful
saving.
"My you handsome, 'Melia! " exclaimed Mr. Wallace; and
he distinctly saw the cart and mules; and he the owner of
them. ** My you good-lookin'. You yeye Han seame like *tar.
You handsome me gal." 'Melia banged the iron with some
force on the sleeves of her Sunday frock. She smiled. She
knew the compliments were addressed to the four-roomed
house, or perhaps the land or the pigs, but they pleased her.
" Chub! Mr. Wallace! You too chupid. Tek dem kin' o*
chupidness to young gal. Whey de 'tar dem? You foolish fe
true. "
" Me lub you, you know 'Melia. You is a ober and above
handsome gal. (De mule and kyart, thought 'Melia.) You is
sweet no sugar. My, you sweet." She looked up archly into
his face; she had not yet forgot the ways of youth.
** Chuh ! go way Mr. Wallace. It young gal you want. I is
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522 'MELIA [Jan..
too ageable fe trow words pon you. What me warnt wid man?
I is got me house and land an* me fowl an' me pig dem. Please
God I is gwine up next week Monday f e look *pon de place.'*
" Mek me and you walk," timidly suggested Mr. Wallace.
This was altogether a different 'Melia to she of the dust ** De
road fur," he added insinuatingly, "" and run-way man dey a
bush."
'Melia feigned just the proper amount of alarm at the
mention of the "" run-way man," and she did it so artistically
that Mr. Wallace was entirely deluded.
"No tell me! " ejaculated "^Melia, and she ceased ironing,
and looked affrightedly across at her wooer. "Whoy! me
well 'fraid f e run-way man."
" How much o'clock you dey go? " said Mr. Wallace.
" Soon, soon, befo' day clean. Me an' Lula an' Natty dey
walk."
" Which Natty dat? " asked Mr. Wallace jealously.
"Me sister pickney," replied 'Melia, instantly divining
the jealousy, and as instantly setting it on her brows halo-wise.
It was fine to be able to make Mr. Wallace jealous. The glow
of the halo made her voice gracious and sweet when next she
spoke.
" All right, Mr. Wallace. I is glad f e hab you come — ^me
well 'fraid fe run-way man." The wooer smiled expansively,
and so the matter was settled.
The excursion duly came off and was highly successful.
The house and land with its coffee, and cassava and yam-
piece were beyond praise. The pigs were friendly and grunted
appreciatively under Mr. Wallace's caressing foot; the fowls,
some half-dozen in number, fled with the clamor of fifty into
the coffee-walk under the fire of four pairs of eyes. It was dis-
concerting but convincing.
The day was a glorious one for 'Melia; to Mr. Wallace it
was Elysium. He foresaw a long reign of plenty, with the
servile faithful obedience of 'Melia. It was a delightful pros-
pect. So under the shade of a spreading breadfruit tree (also
his) the long deferred question was asked. 'Melia, a little over-
whelmed by the magnificence of her belongings and the pros-
pective management of them, answered " yes."
" It a nice place," said 'Melia, looking round her proudly,
but a little sadly. There was a doubt in her mind. " It a nice
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place." Mr. Wallace gave assent. His mind was too busy for
speech.
"It good fe hab house an' Ian*,** continued *Melia, "an*
mule an* kyart, an* pig, an* fowl, an* the lilly carffee.**
" It sweet me,** murmured Mr. Wallace.
*Melia sighed. "Me will min* you well, *Melia.** She
looked at him furtively.
"Mr. Wallace?*' She paused, then spoke with a voice
made desperate by resolve to know the worst or the best. " Mr.
Wallace, why you no ben ax me last March? It is the house
an* Ian* you lub, nub? *' Mr. Wallace's heart shriveled within
him at the direct question; but he valiantly rose to the
occasion.
"Chub! Narnsense, gal! Me lub you long time. Me will
min* you well. Me no lub you? Chub! *Wha* yeye no see,
heart no believe.* A true wud, nuh! *Melia!** He put his
arm roughly yet kindly about her. The heart of Mr. Wallace
was awakened to a new sense of duty. He determined to teach
it to throb, no matter how faintly, but to throb for *Melia.
Besides there was the house and the land. This helped the
throbs considerably. Still, *Melia was unsatisfied. Miss 'Melia
Brown and Mr. Anthony Wallace returned home affianced
lovers, and *Melia*s dignity and importance were considerably
augmented thereby.
Three months later they were married and settled in their
new home. "^Melia proved herself a true and faithful wife,
working hard early and late for the weal and comfort of her
lord and master. Mr. Wallace made a kind husband; without
doubt he did his part in the management of the Elysium he
had captured. He was kind to 'Melia, but he could not love
her. Sentiment does not play a very heroic part in the lives of
the island peasantry. 'Melia, though conscious of a want in her
life, could not put it into words. It seemed to her that Mr. Wal-
lace had married the house and land and the mules and pigs —
and then herself. But her aspirations for a different state of
things were formless. The want in her life was an enigma her
simple and untutored mind could not solve.
They had been married a year when the tragedy happened.
It came about through the pigs. 'Melia was especially proud of
her pigs; it was therefore natural that the hand of fate should
strike her through them. Mr. Wallace had long vowed a play-
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524 'MELIA [Jan.,
ful kind of vengeance against the youngest of the tribe. It was
constantly breaking through the fence into the potato-piece,
and both he and 'Melia had made every endeavor to keep it in
its own proper domain. But pigs are pigs, and potatoes are
potatoes; and the one possesses an irresistible attraction for
the other.
So it befell one unhappy morning that Mr. Wallace, un-
known to his wife, hastened out with his gun to lie in wait for
the intruder. He argued that 'Melia would be wholly consoled
for the loss of the pig when she had been induced to look upon
it in the light of pork. He himself was very fond of pork,
especially when it was pickled.
Besides, Christmas was near at hand, and good dinners
were things of necessity. He stealthily quickened his foot-
steps. Idelia was gathering chochos for market. She was
ignorant of the rapid march of events. Her apron full, she sud-
denly remembered she wanted some green peppers. Into the
open she came; at the same instant the trigger fell. The pig
fled with a squeal of indignation and surprise. Idelia received
the full charge in her thigh. She fell with a groan. Mr. Wal-
lace was by her side on the instant.
"•iMelia! Me shot you, nub? 'Melia! Me God! 'Melia!
she dead! Oh! me Lord! Wha dis come to me this day? An
the d — d pig get 'way. 'Melia! Speak, nub!" She opened her
eyes languidly. She knew she was wounded to death.
"No min*, Tony; you kyant help. No min*. Whoy!"
With a groan of anguish she fainted.
Mr. Wallace conveyed her to the hospital in that much-
prized possession, the cart, and he himself drove the mules
that were hers and his. His heart was heavy. He was realiz-
ing the worth of the woman he had married. This senseless
moaning thing huddled together at his feet in the bottom of
the cart could not be *Melia. He shuddered.
'Melia lay in great agony for several days. Amputation
was of no avail. Day after day Mr. Wallace visited her at the
hospital. Then there came the terrible morning when he was
told that the end was near.
" Tony," whispered 'Melia, " I is glad you ax me. I try to
be good vdfe, Tony. I is fateful to you. I is good wife, me
lub? " Mr. Wallace laid a rough hand on hers.
"•Melia, you is good wife fe true. Me sorry you gwine
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dead. I is really sorry de gun ketch you. De pig get 'way —
dat de wuss. I sorry de shot tek you. I sorry to me heart. Oh,
me gal, me gal ! Wha me kyan do f e you? I sorry to deat'.'*
The woman's voice was sweet in its whispered tones.
" Tony, no min*. You coulden help. No min', yah? Accidence
is accidence. No fret. I is glad eberting belong to you; you
min' me well. You quite kin* — nebber quarrel or nutting'.
Tank de Lard we lib in peace, Tony."
She uttered the sentences with short gasps for breath.
Then went on again. '' I is glad you got the house an' Ian'. I
lub you long time."
The dying eyes searched his.. Did 'Melia know even now
at this supreme hour what she had missed during that quiet
year of marriage? I cannot tell, but God be thanked that at
that awful moment it was put into the heart of the man at last
to understand ... to understand and to give.
*' 'Melia," he said, and he spoke slowly and distinctly, that
the dull ear might hear the words and hold their meaning, and
hide them away in the faintly-beating heart. **^elia, I lub
you, me gal. I lub you. Don't fret, yah! Me lub you. Wha
me dey go do widouten you? What me kyear fe house an' Ian'?
Me gwine miss you to deaf. 'Melia, you believe me? 7 lub
you. God know I lub you.'*
The eyes, already glazing in death, closed peacefully. The
words had gone home. She smiled; it was her last smile on
earth.
" I glad you ax me, Tony." It was the faintest whisper.
The man's eyes grew wet. He bent down eagerly. He kissed
her on the lips. It was the husband's first kiss of love. It
opened for her the gates of Paradise.
"The Lord tek you, 'Melia," said Tony brokenly. He
listened for an answering whisper. There was silence. He
looked into her face. On it rested a majestic peace. 'Melia
was dead.
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1
1
ST. AGNES, A TYPE AND A CONTRAST.
BY HENRY E. O'KEEFFE, C.S.P.
HEN the whole world is plunged in tumult, it is
difficult even to think with composure. One
thought, however, is dominant with the serious
at present.. It is this — that what we called
"progress" — a word, for some of us, of music
and of magic, meaning " the greatest happiness for the greatest
number," is as far away from us as it was in the Middle
Ages.
It has always been clear, to many, that the fine arts have
not developed since then: that with us every phase of archi-
tecture is but an imperfect reflection of the past; that no paint-
ings, reliefs, mosaics, no stained-glass, sculpture, no literature
in the modern world, can bear comparison with the exalted
creations of the past. However, in the domain of what we call
material genius, we discovered a definite advance. But that
very instrument which gave us heart of hope for, at least, the
physical betterment of humanity, was converted into a means
for the destruction of human life. Indeed, the course of civil-
ization has been thrown back several centuries. We find our-
selves encompassed with all the moral weaknesses of the past
— its barbarism and passion for destruction — without its vir-
tues, its hidden moral beauty, its sentiment and romance.
If in the aesthetic and material order we have fallen far
short of high standards and must revert to ancient ideals, this
is eminently true in the region of morality. Is there one spot
in this wide world, at the present moment, where the tenor of
conduct seems in harmony with the Mind of the Founder of
Christianity? Christianity is in a manner an experimental
science. It must be tried before we can judge of its results.
** Taste and see that the Lord is sweet," are the words of the
sacred writer. So we must react toward the past — to the
golden visions that still loom on the horizon, for the eyes of
faith — to the moral ideals ever ancient, ever new. When the
vision dies the people perish!
This brings us to the truth that we must again turn our
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1919.] ST. AGNES. A TYPE AND A CONTRAST 527
eyes to that eternal city hard by the yellow Tiber — ^Rome —
when sick at heart, looking for the things of peace and for the
moral heroes and heroines that never die. The world is placed
between utter ruin and restoration of law, and there is nothing
to restore it but the moral power of the Papacy. Time was
when the voice from the watch tower in the capitol of Christen-
dom might have stilled the storm of this universal conflict
which has shaken the whole world. That day is past but who
shall say never to return? " All day long have I stretched forth
mine arms to a foolish and gainsaying people but they would
not."
Yet if the living authority of authentic Christianity cannot
now, as of old, practically force itself upon a world which is
already on fire with hatred, nevertheless its moral influence,
principles, ideals cannot perish from the hearts of the faith-
ful. It is to Rome then and to a heroine of the moral order
that we come to learn a lesson and draw a contrast.
Rapt in imagination and with the light of love glistening
in our eyes, we look toward the city of the ages. From the
Porta Pia we follow the main road, the ancient Via Nomentana
which crosses the broad Delia Regina. We pass beautiful
villas until we come to the American Academy of Arts of Rome.
On the left, about a quarter of a mile further, stand the Cata-
combs and the Church of St. Agnes Outside the Walls. Even
now, it has not lost some of the evidences of an early Christian
basilica. It was built by Constantine over the tomb of St.
Agnes. It has been reerected and restored several tiipes and
finally by Pius IX. in 1856. In this church are blessed the lambs
from whose wool the pallia are woven for the archbishops of
Christendom.
This church must not be confused with another church of
St. Agnes, very rich and beautiful, within the confines of the
city. The latter was built by Pope Innocent X. near the circus
where our youthful virgin suffered martyrdom and exposure
before the populace.
St. Jerome says in one of his letters of this resplendent
figure of inviolate chastity, that " the tongues and pens of all
nations were employed in her praises. None is more praise-
worthy than she, for whose praise all mouths are fitted.*'
"Her name," remarks St. Augustine in one of his sermons,
" being interpreted, signifieth chaste in the Greek and a lamb
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528 ST. AGNES. A TYPE AND A CONTRAST [Jan.,
in the Latin language." St. Ambrose fixes her cruel death at
the age of twelve. St. Augustine at thirteen. Even though
she may have been more mature than our women at the same
age, the tender youth of her martyrdom has touched the heart
of primitive Christendom, from the fourth century to the pres-
ent day. All agree on the youth of this virgin who won the
martyr's crown. It is difficult to be precise about the time of
her death. Prudentius makes it March in the year of Our Lord
three hundred and three.
Agnes' exceeding beauty and wealth provoked the young
noblemen of the most distinguished families in Rome. She
had but one answer : that her heart was consecrated to a Lover
beheld not by mortal eyes. At that moment she could have
sung snatches of the Canticle : "' And when I had a little passed
by them I found Him Whom my soul loveth," or as the verse
in her breviary lesson puts it: "He hath sealed me in my
forehead that I may let- in no other lover but Him."
Beauty incites love, and Jesus Christ, the comeliest moral
beauty, provokes the fairest love. Our virgin and martyr saw
in Him all the strength of the man and the tenderness of the
woman. Her words in the first antiphon of the third nocturn
of her office are : " I keep my troth to Him alone, at Whose
beauty the sun and moon do wonder." Henceforward she was
impregnable to the arts and importunities of her suitors. The
bridal robes of perpetual chastity could never be for her
the habiliments of night and of death. Unrequited desire
when not perfected by restraint, may readily degenerate into
violent wrath. So they who sought her hand in marriage and
were refused, reported her to the Roman governor for a
Christian.
The poetic panegyric of Pope Damasus, however, tells us
that after the imperial edict, not of Diocletian against the
Christians, but after Decius, she voluntarily declared herself to
be a Christian. She was dragged with clanging chains before
the idols of the heathen shrine. One pinch of incense offered
before so chaste a goddess as Diana would have saved her but,
says St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, she could not be compelled
to even move her hand except to sign herself with the cross of
Christ. Thrust into the fire, she gave no thought to the tor-
ment of the flames, but sought to shield her chaste body, with
her wealth of soft hair, from the lecherous eyes of the heathen
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mob. A foul cruelty it was! Fire failed. They clothed her,
however, for her execution and loaded her with fetters but
St. Augustine avers that she went to the place of her death
more cheerfully than other maidens go adorned to their
nuptials.
** I am wedded to the Lord of Angels — and His Blood is red
on my cheeks."
" You may," said she, " stain your sword with my blood —
it is consecrated to Christ."
The faces of some in the crowd turned white when Agnes
gave her tiny hands to the iron shackles and bent her tender
neck for the stroke. Some of the spectators wept — ^she herself
shed not a tear. She quailed not. The hand of her murderer
trembled as though he were the criminal — ^but his aim was
direct. With one blow he cut her head from her body.
There is a lovely scene in one of the tragedies of the Greek
poets — ^from the Hecuba of Euripides — ^which describes
Polyxena's warm body severed from the head and rolling
down the marble steps of the altar and how, conscious even
in death of her modesty, she decently arranges her snow-
white raiment over her limbs. The blessed Agnes sings in
Matins : ** The Lord hath clothed me with a vestiure of wrought
gold and adorned me with a necklace of great price. The Lord
hath clothed me with the garments of salvation and hath cov-
ered me with the robe of joyf ulness and hath set on my head a
crown as the crown of a bride. He hath put pearls beyond
price in mine ears and hath crowned me with the bright blos-
soms of the eternal spring-time."
St. Basil and Tertullian both witness that, during those
early persecutions, Christ wonderfully interposed in defence
of maidens who pledged their virtue to Him. Lewd profligates
were seized with awe at the sight of them. So it was that a
rude youth, who rushed at Agnes, was struck blind and fell
trembling to the ground. The Holy One would not sniffer His
elect to see corruption. St. Cecilia so charged the air with
the aroma of her moral presence that Valerian could no longer
look upon her. Henry of Bavaria, Saint as well as King, closed
his eyes and knelt a slave to the virtue of his Queen.
Primitive and mediaeval Catholicism gave us thousands
who retained, unprofaned, the consecrating dew of baptism
until the sweet chrism of anointing touched the pallid forehead
yoL. Gvm. — 34
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530 ST. AGNES, A TYPE AND A CONTRAST [Jan..
of the dying. Even the senses of the body, so often the in-
struments of our humiliation, were won over to Christ.
From the graced decorum of the hair
Even to the tingling, sweet
Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet.
Only at times does the modem mind know the merit and value
of the ardor which is virginal — nor does it always appreciate
a life of atonement and propitiation. Yet the ancient Romans,
even in their period of moral decline, saw the sacredness of
these blessed things. If the vestal virgin violated her vow,
which she was to keep for a brief time, she was buried alive.
Some of the great e£Bcient leaders of moral reform in the
Church, like St. Dominic, St. Francis or Ignatius sought to cure
prevailing vice by what the world would call the exaggeration
of virtue. It is on this principle that the ideal of inviolate
chasity is so necessary for modem life. U at the breath of an
obscene word a saint would swoon away, should we not be
moved to tears not only at our lost innocence but at our reck-
lessness of speech and action? It would seem that we lose
something of the angelic virtue when we discuss it. Yet in our
modem methods of education, matters are investigated and
studied by all which should make the morally sensitive shud-
der with confusion. Modesty is only a special circumstance
of chastity, yet it is its complement and unfading flower. So
incidental a thing as a prevailing dance may indicate how our
standards have relaxed. Even the harmless instinct to enhance
physical beauty may bring about the modern indignities of
fashion.
As in the past so in the present we look to types like Per-
petua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Anastasia and Cecilia. What a
tremendous contrast. If the standards are lowered with
woman they will be lowered in a greater degree with man.
" Ye are the salt of the earth and if the salt be lacking where-
with shall the earth be salted.** " Yet the world can corrupt all
things," says Lacordaire, " even so fair a thing as a woman."
" Of all kinds of corruption," writes St. Francis de Sales, " the
most malodorous is decaying lilies." To the general confusion
which overshadows the region of thought, at present, woman
has added another complex problem. She has thrust herself
into the public conflicts of men. Into a game that is so rough
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1919.] ST. AGNES, A TYPE AND A CONTRAST 531
that she will be helpless both by nature and grace, in mind
and body. Joan of Arc, even when guarded by angelic influ-
ences, slept in her steel armor for^she was dealing with men.
After the crisis she returned to her home and to the sheep
feeding on the green grass of Domrdmy. The modern woman
must needs be thrice armed to meet the more subtle manipula-
tions of political warfare.
Because of unjust economic conditions, woman has been
mercilessly pressed into mercantile pursuits. Would it be an
exaggeration to say, since all consider it an evil, that because
of this she has lost something of the distinction of voice and
manner always an indication of that delicate moral reserve '
which is the source of woman's incomparable charm? When
the great thinker, St. Thomas Aquinas, wrote that the devout
sex was vix rationalis he did not mean that it was irrationalis.
He meant that it approaches the questions and sociological
problems of life with the heart, rather than with the head. In
the secret kingdom of that heart is bom the power which re-
deems the world. Though the heart of a woman encompasses
the world, its action is not public or external. Its influence is
subtle, moral, interior. "My heart was dilated," sings the
psalmist, "when I ran in the way of Thy Commandments."
So we hark back again to Rome and to a Roman maiden
whose heart was so enlarged by the love of Christ that it broke
forth like a flower from the fetid atmosphere of the catacombs
outside the Roman waUs. It pushed itself up through the
earth and the stones of the sacred city to bloom for us today
and forever in the garden of the moral world.
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Bew Books^
A HISTORY OF SPAIN. By Charles E. Chapman, Ph.D. New
York: The Macmillan Co. $2.60 net.
Dr. Chapman has given us in one volume of five hundred
pages the main features of Spanish history from the standpoint
of America. With his colleagues. Professors Bolton, Priestly,
Hackett and Stephens, he is attempting to correct the errors that
have crept into many an American historical manual, due to the
prejudice of the anti-Spanish, English and American schools. A
better understanding between the peoples of the two Americas
will be possible only when our scholars show a grasp of the won-
derful work done by Spain in the colonization of the West, and a
fair grasp of the outlines of Spanish history.
Emphasis has been laid throughout upon the growth of the
civilization or institutions of Spain, rather than upon the narrative
of political events, and the volume is so arranged topically that a
teacher may select those phases of development which particularly
interest him. Special stress has been laid upon the periods from
1252 to 1808, over half of the volume dealing with the years 1479
to 1808, because during this period Spanish civilization was trans-
mitted to the Americas.
The work of Professor Chapman is for the most part based
upon the Historia de Espafia y de la Civilizacidn Espanola of
Rafael Altamira y Crevea. Certain chapters are new (32, 39 and
40), the last on present-day Spain being the writer's observations
during a two years' residence there, from 1912 to 1914.
The writer is objective and impartial. Now and again he is
guilty of a few slips, owing to his ignorance of things Catholic.
For instance, it is inaccurate to state that divorce was allowed in
medieval Spain (1031-1276); that the monks of Cluny and the
Popes, had to bring the Castilian Church into uniformity with
Catholic teaching during that period; that concubinage was com-
mon among the clergy.
The professor corrects a false estimate, and declares emphati-
cally that the Spaniards are not unusually cruel and vindictive,
not lazy but excellent workers, not proud and arrogant though
possessing a high sense of personal pride. They are brilliantly in-
tellectual, highly emotional, courteous to a fault, great in litera-
ture and art, even if temperamentally averse to big business and
the pursuit of scientific discoveries.
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1919.] NEW BOOKS 538
PSYCHOLOGY AND THE DAY'S WORK. By Edgar James Swift.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.00 net.
Professor Swift's volume is an interesting and useful appli-
cation of psychological studies and analyses to the actions of
every day life. He remarks in his preface that, while the choice
of possible topics is very wide, he has endeavored to select types
of conduct fundamental to thinking and acting. In the course of
his studies he touches on learning, memory, testimony and rumor,
our varying selves; while the closing chapter deals with the
psychology of digestion. He gives interesting charts showing the
curious ups and downs in the process of learning. After a swift
mount upwards the learner soon reaches a "plateau" (i. e., a
period of standstill) where he may tarry for quite a while. The
author thinks those periods of stagnation "are caused by the
need of time for making the associations automatic." But learn-
ing cannot be rushed. There one must begin at the beginning and
build slowly; the "finish-quick institution" is a delusion and a
snare. What adds considerably to the interest of the professor's
book is the aptness of his illustrations from general literature.
Wells is quoted to show forth the disadvantages of organization,
but at the same time its necessity. Arnold Bennett's Old Wives'
Tales is quoted to show the tricks played, or rather the mirage
flung over the past« by memory. If we remember rightly this
phenomenon was beautifully called by the great Jean Paul, " the
moonlight of memory." The way inconsequent people wander
from the point is illustrated by a passage from Meredith's Evan
Harrington.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter of the whole book
is the one entitled "Our Varjring Selves." We change from
day to day, from hour to hour; frequently we are false to our
true selves, and wreck our most cherished projects. We show
sides of our character to one person that forever remain hidden
to another. In the first three pages of the chapter the works of
Stevenson, Howell and McClellan afford opposite passages in sup-
port of the thesis; further on Bancroft and Galsworthy are re-
ferred to. It seems to us, however, that there is a certain thinness
and poverty about the illustrations of this last peculiarity. Is
not literary history one long chorus of video meliora proboque,
deteriora sequor? What contradictory selves were bound up in
Bacon and Swift, in Coleridge and Shelley, in Verlaine and
Tolstoy, in Goethe and Carlyle and countless others! Of course
the trait might be illumined as with a limelight from religious
history, but probably that cinis dolosissimus is best left un-
stirred.
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534 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
PROPHETS OF DISSENT. By Otto Heller. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf. $1.50.
Under this title Professor Heller of Washington University,
St. Louis, groups studies of Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche,
and Tolstoy. " Prophet of Dissenters '* would be a more fitting
appellation for Maeterlinck. For the specious Monism of this bril-
liant man of letters, who plays the philosopher, makes its chief
appeal to those repelled by the baldness and crudity of dissent.
However much the Transcendentalism of Emerson may have
helped with other influences to inspire him, Emerson's ethics are
substantial compared with Maeterlinck's muddled blend of ma-
terialism and mysticism. Doctor Heller's claim for him, as a
spiritual guide whose teaching has stood the test of the War, is a
gratuitous statement not supported by any evidence in his essay.
He does not trace, with any attempt at clearness, the nebulous
process of transition by which Maeterlinck passed from his early
fatalism to a creed of affirmation such as his principle of self-
realization represents. With Maeterlinck as a dramatist, he deals
more adequately, showing how the mystery of fate and the ex-
periences of the inward '* deeper life " are shadowed forth in his
plays.
Two extreme types of individualism are studied in the essays
on Strindberg and Nietzsche. For Strindberg, the hallucini of
genius whose opinions were so many records of his nervous
reactions — of his "sensitiveness to pressure" — Doctor Heller holds
no brief. Yet it is notable that his fearless veracity, exemplified in
his conflicting attitudes toward life, is singled out for admiration,
while his religious conversion is condemned as flagitious.
Nietzsche is considered as " a study in exaltation." The exposi-
tion of his development from the pessimism of Schopenhauer
through the Dionysianism of Wagner, and thence through a radi-
cal theory of Evolution to the cult of the Superman, is coherent
and convincing. Doctor Heller absolves him from the imputation
of being a formative influence in the scheme of World-Im-
perialism — ^he is, it seems, too much of a poet to be taken seriously
as a statesman or politician. Yet it is admitted that he fostered,
in an unmistakable manner, the class-consciousness of the aristo-
crat. He is, however, a vital factor of modern social develop-
ment, inasmuch as he is a corrective of moral inertia, an "in-
spired apostle of action, power, enthusiasm and aspiration, in fine
a prophet of Vitality and a messenger of Hope " — all this despite
the confessed " weakness of his philosophy before the forum of
Logic."
The critique on Tolstoy is informed with a thorough knowl-
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edge of its subject His genius as an artist is freshly interpreted,
and his career is shown to illustrate the limpid Russian soul in its
religious-mindedness and its naive trend toward communism.
While Doctor Heller pays due tribute to Tolstoy's moral earnest-
ness he deprecates his radical departure in his views of art. He
also poises on a delicate critical balance the nice question of
Tolstoy's renunciation, and tests how nearly related to real pov-
erty was the simplesse of his mode of living. Altogether his
account of that great writer is one in which the reader will readily
concur.
THE PRINCIPLES OF WAR. By General Ferdinand Foch.
Translated by J. de Morinni. New York: The H. K. Fly
Ck). $2.50 net.
How the student of literature would delight if some of the
great masters had left a treatise on their own art! if, for instance,
Shakespeare had told us how to produce a drama, Milton a son-
net, Scott a ballad or historical novel. We remember, of course,
that Dante gave us De Vulgari Eloquentia, and a generation ago
Stevenson The Art of Writing. These exceptions, however, only
emphasize the rule that the Di Majores never initiate the profane
into the secrets of their ravishing alchemy. But what is denied
to the man of letters is granted to the man of war. For Marshal
Foch, the most eminent soldier of today, has revealed his methods
and ideas for the instruction of his brethren. The outstanding
feature of the present work is its limpid and transparent sim-
plicity. It is entirely untechnical, and may be read with pleas-
ure by any intelligent reader. The Marshal divides his book into
twelve chapters, wherein he sets forth the teaching, character-
istics and. methods of war: intellectual discipline, protection, the
duties of the advance guard, strategic surprise and safety, decisive
attack in battle. Already on the third page of his treatise he lays
down the pregnant principle, whose application far transcends
mere material conflicts : " Defeat ... we shall find . . . later to be
a purely moral result, the result of a state of mind, of discourage-
ment, of fear brought on the vanquished by a combined use of
moral and material factors employed simultaneously by the
victor." It may be remembered that the general professing this
creed, at the first battle of the Marne continued to attack in the
face of overwhelming forces, and his elastic tenacity won the
day. His famous message to Joffre ran : " My right is in rout,
my left is retiring, I attack with my centre." Several historical
battles are analyzed and dissected at length; and the mistakes of
the commanders pointed out. Thus the whole of the seventh
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chapter is devoted to a minute examination of the rdle of the ad-
vance guard at Nachod, a battle of the Austro-Prussian War of
1866. In this chapter the Marshal lays down another noteworthy
and striking principle, and one opposed to that advocated by other
military schools, namely, that obedience must not be slavish but
intelligent, and that the Higher Command must leave a certain
initiative to subordinates'. " It will be always thus (i. e., dis-
astrous) when the Higher Ck)mmand, lacking in broadness of view
or in strength of vsrill, seeks to substitute itself to its subordinates,
to think and decide for them. In order to think and decide cor-
rectly it would need to see through their eyes, from the point
where they stand; it would need to be everywhere at one time."
The present translation by Major de Morinni is fiovdng and
idiomatic.
THE WORLD PROBLEM: CAPITAL, LABOR AND THE
CHURCH. By Rev. Joseph Husslein, S.J. New York: P. J.
Kenedy & Sons. $1.25 net.
Father Husslein in these interesting pages brings out clearly
the mind of the Church on all the actual issues of Capital and
Labor. He treats in a clear and popular fashion Socialism, Capi-
talism, the ethics of just price, trade unionism, monopolies,
strikes, unemployment, the farm problem, the methods and pos-
sibilities of cooperation, the State and property, the woman
worker, and the social aims of the Catholic Church.
The work is an able defence of Christian Democracy, that
golden mean between the destructive extremes of Socialism and
Individualism. We recommend it highly to all our social workers,
and to the teachers in our schools and colleges.
THE PATRIMONY OF THE ROMAN CHURCH IN THE TDIE OF
GREGORY THE GREAT. By Edward Spearing. Edited by
Evelyn M. Spearing. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.75.
This scholarly monograph on the Patrimony of St Peter in
the time of Pope Gregory the Great is a most interesting study.
Its six chapters deal with the growth of the Patrimony and its
extent, its government, its organization, its relations with the
State, the collection of the revenue, and the mode of expending it
The writer has read carefully the writings of Gregory the
Great, and the works of Grisar and Za'ccaria on the Patrimony.
He is perfectly fair and objective in his treatment of the facts, and
brings out clearly the great ability of the Pope as administrator,
and his boundless charity to the poor and afOicted. It is good
to know that the vast income of the Patrimony was expended
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almost entirely on religious and charitable objects. The view that
the wealth of the Church was a fund held in trust for the poor is
mentioned from the earliest times, and was continually reasserted
by successive generations of Popes. Popes Gelasius and Gregory
both speak of the Patrimony as res pauperum, and nobly did they
carry out the Catholic idea of bounty towards Christ's poor. We
read of Pope Gregory redeeming captives, stopping the oppression
of the slaves and coloni on his vast estates, establishing
xenodochia, the old time substitute for our modern asylums and
hospitals, remitting debts, advancing loans, emancipating slaves,
supplying food, clothes, and other necessaries to individuals and
cities.
THE HIGH ROMANCE. By Michael Williams. New York: The
Macmillan Co. $1.50.
Mr. Williams' theme is his own return to the Faith that was
his by baptism, but from which, in default of Catholic home
training, he drifted away in early youth into complete indifference
and alienation. The author calls the years preceding his conver-
sion the wanderings of a man in search of his soul — ^wanderings
physical as well as spiritual. Consistent with the discrimination
drawn in his sub-title, ** a spiritual autobiography," he has appar-
ently made selection of those of his experiences that have most
influenced him. These are, naturally, widely various. They repre-
sent the reactions of the complex temperament of a journalist
and writer of fiction, obviously possessing, in full measure, the
connoted keen observation of human affairs linked with
romanticism and dreamy imaginativeness. He gives us a swift
succession of reflections, solitary self-communings, impressions
of men and things, bits of philosophical si>eculation, fragments
of conversations, and reminiscences in which names are mentioned
and personalities handled with journalistic frankness and in-
souciance. He also describes with entertaining satire the devious
ways he traversed while searching for the key to life's secret, un-
der the leadership of various ** mystagogues."
The manner in which the material is presented gives the
work a distinctive character. The author follows somewhat the
lines of story-telling, inasmuch as he refrains from the usual
open anticipations of the great climax, vicaciously re-living, as it
were, what he describes, and by his spontaneity carrying his
audience with him. This method is strikingly effective, and its
happy result is that the appeal aU similar confessions have for
Catholics is so widened as to engage and fasten the attention of
the general reader, whatever may be his religious proclivities, or
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lack of them. This advantage is not acquired at the expense of the
central subject, nor does the author's hold loosen, but rather
strengthens, when the narrative reaches the momentous turning-
point. To him, it is a marvelous tale of the supreme adventure,
the high romance. From this angle he approaches it, and he does
not fail of the impression he desires to produce.
Mr. Williams' message is preeminently that of a layman to
layman, conveyed with a high degree of literary quality, magnetic
charm, and humor. It has been his privilege to lay as a tribute at
the feet of the Church a book of marked individuality and interest.
A MANUAL OF THE HISTORY OF DOGMAS. Vol. II. By Rev.
B. J. Otten, S.J. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Ck). $2.50 net.
The first volume of this manual traced the history of dog-
matic development from the beginning of the second century to
the end of the ninth; this second volume follows that development
up to the present time. Nine-tenths of the book is devoted to a
study of mediaeval theology with a special stress upon the history
and development of the sacraments. The treatment of the Coun-
cils of Trent and the Vgtican are all too brief, but the author
pleads, in excuse, the limited scope of his text-book plan.
Father Otten's scholarly manual will prove invaluable to
the educated Catholic layman, who desires to extend his knowl-
edge of the Faith beyond the contents of his school catechism.
THE PEOPLE OF ACTION: A STUDY IN AMERICAN IDEALISM.
By Gustave Rodrigues. Translated by Louise Seymour
Houghton. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50.
Perhaps we do not really know ourselves, perhaps we are
too big a nation to get a real perspective; in any event, reading M.
Rodrigues' essay on American idealism is exactly like looking at
a very flattering photograph of oneself. We fear it has been
" touched up," that some of the lines are removed. And yet« the
study is penetrating, sjrmpathetic and vnse.
The author's opening sentence is interesting — " America has
been twice discovered; physically by Christopher Columbus,
morally with President Wilson." He continues, " In the Ameri-
can we must see, not a materialist eager for enjoyment; he is
precisely the contrary, an idealist in search of results." And the
author expands this theory in studies of personal wealth, liberty,
education, the man, the woman, the social organization, the na-
tional ideal, our international position and the League of Nations,
until he is ready to draw a final conclusion in the words, ** Ameri-
can idealism is not a theoretic idealism, conceived and formulated;
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it is a practical idealism which springs from action itself. It is
wholly in the creative impulse." Which is another way of defin-
ing what Mr. Roosevelt called "the strenuous life" — the most
American phrase ever uttered about Americans.
Some of the brightest pages of the book are those devoted to
the American millionaire and his rdle as an individual idealist.
•* Public spirit is, above all, incarnated in the very rich." Charity
in America is intelligently given. Americans do not give blindly.
Something of that same principle is evident in our international
relations: our purpose in lending a hand across the seas is the
realization of the American ideal of peace, the true fraternity
which is reached through liberty and equality. " The Puritans en-
dowed America with a conscience; owing to them she has become
a conscience-directed force. . . . All Americans are not Prot-
estants; far from it; but most of them, though perhaps uncon-
sciously, are more or less Puritans," says M. Rodrigues. He goes
on to show — ^which we hope is true — ^that the sincerity of faith in
America is not a mere consent of the mind, but is an active, prac-
tical faith. We weigh religion for its results in daily life — " the
American feels that his God is working beside him, and he works
with Him." On the whole M. Rodrigues' study is a fair portrait,
not too flattering save in some points where energetic statements
over-value a national characteristic.
6UYNEMER, KNIGHT OF THE AIR. By Henry Bordeaux.
Translated by Louise Morgan Sill. Introduction by Theodore
Roosevelt. New Haven: Yale University Press. $1.60.
He who flew away into the clouds, whose name and final cita-
tion is engraven on the walls of the Pantheon, who had more than
fifty recorded victories over the foe and innumerable others not
officially recorded, possessed all the background and the intensity
of youth from which heroes are made. Today, in France, school-
boys know his citation and record by heart. Guynemer is fused
into the soul of France.
This intimate and loving study of the young Roland of the
air, written for the boys of France, is a keen analysis of the
elements which made Gu3memer's fame possible. Neither chance
nor influence nor intuition gave him his place, but tireless applica-
tion. He was a close student of aerial engines and guns, and was
accounted among the finest technicians and marksmen in the
French aerial service. Due to his discoveries many of the im-
provements made on later French combat machines were per-
fected. His successes were based on scientific accuracy and per-
sistence. His record shows some seven hundred flights totaling
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over six hundred and sixty-five hours in the air. In addition to
these qualities was his sang froid which made him the example
of the valiant Stork Escadrille and to fliers in all the armies.
M. Bordeaux describes him as " tall and spare, almost beard-
less, vsrith an amber-colored, oval face and a regular profile, and
raven hair brushed backwards.*' His eyes burned with a great
fire, and his laughter was constant, but in combat his face was ter-
rible to look upon. Modest, of simple demeanor, refined and play-
ful, he was beloved of his family and the idol of France. After
France, his parents and his sisters were his loves. Moreover, he
was a devout and faithful Catholic.
His story is beautifully v^itten by a dear friend. The text is
a delightful piece of typographical perfection, lightened by occa-
sional iUustrations.
THE MYSTICAL LIFE. By Dom S. Louismet, O.S.B. New York:
P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.10, postage extra.
Christian Science and various forms of New Thought today
are putting forth doctrines of union vsrith God, more or less tinged
with error, and are obtaining a hearing. It is well that Catholics,
and, indeed, all Christians, should be reminded that the true doc-
trine of union with God is found alone in the teachings of the
Catholic Church. Her doctrines set forth a life of union with
God all satisfying and most simple. The mystical life treated by
Dom Louismet, is within the reach of every Christian, nay is de-
manded of every Christian, and aU that is necessary to enter upon
it is the state of grace and a little good vsrill. Catholic traditional
mysticism, according to our author, is the special soul experience
of one still a wayfarer on earth, yet actually tasting and seeing
that God is sweet.
In brief but most attractive outlines the author proceeds to
set forth the part taken in the mystical life by the most Blessed
Trinity — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost — ^by the Church
and by the individual himself. We heartily recommend this lit-
tle volume to all Christians of aU states and conditions of life. It
may be particularly helpful to religious engaged in active external
work, as the notion is current among them that the mystical life
is not for them. A perusal of this work will open before them a
vista of spiritual advancement most entrancing in prospect.
WAR MOTHERS. By Edward F. Garesch6, S.J. New York: Ben-
zinger Brothers. 60 cents net.
This newest little volume from Father Garesch^'s pen owes its
inspiration wholly to the Great War, and its appeal will not fail to
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reach the myriads who have been touched, and shaken, by the
omnipresent cataclysm of the past four years. The book is, in
large part, a celebration of the women who, like their own piti-
ful Mother and the Mother of all earth's children, have stood so
stanchly at the foot of their cross. It celebrates the war mothers;
the brave workers who passed in review on "women's day;" the
vicarious mothers whose love has reached out to embrace the
countless orphans overseas.
As inspiration of all this active idealism, one of the best
poems in the collection is sung to the glory of Jeanne d'Arc, her
** country's avatar." And as concrete example of its practice close
in our midst come the poems to Sergeant Joyce Kilmer. To him,
indeed, the poet of our own Expeditionary Forces, the whole book
is dedicated in a graceful and heartfelt tribute. The verses of the
present volume are written almost wholly in that lose but highly
musical and emotional ode-form which Father Garesch6 uses with
remarkable facility and felicity. They represent some of the
richest work the young priest has yet given us, and should com-
fort many a lonely war mother's heart.
JACQUELINE. By John Ayscough. New York: P. J. Kenedy &
Sons. $1.50 net.
Admitting, as we must, that no subsequent effort by " John
Ayscough " has equaled the rich beauty of Marotz or the splendor
of imaginativeness attained in Dromina, it is yet true that every-
thing that comes from this author displays afresh the qualities
that have given him his eminent place in the affections of the read-
ing public: the leisured, witty grace, the wisdom and humor, the
pervading sense of Divine love, the warm human sympathy, and
the delineation of character' which in each new book increases our
circle of friends. In Jacqueline we meet several such, notably
the shrewd, kindly, only half-worldly worldling. Miss Graystocke,
whose companionship lightens the tragic interest with which we
watch the noble and pathetic figure of the heroine, Jacqueline, as
she steadfastly fulfills her chosen lot of self-immolation in the
service of an insane mother. Her malady has taken the shocking
form of non-recognition of her daughter, followed by a dislike
that deepens into jealousy and murderous hate. This mental
condition is depicted with such skill as to make one inclined to
wish occasionally that it were not so well done. It is made
bearable by the author's unerring taste and the impression he
conveys throughout of the vigilant mercy of God. All that Mon-
signor Bickerstaff-Drew presents to us is welcome, Jacqueline
no less so than its predecessors.
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AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAITS STORY. By Henry Morgen-
thau. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $2.00.
Mr. Morgenthau is evidently a chess player. From the first
page of his vitally interesting book you become aware of the men
with whom he is to play the gigantic game of national honor and
human existence. You see what moves they can make, and you
watch the game grow more complicated until, hopelessly beaten
by a gang of knaves, he is obliged to relinquish his place. The
men he played against were Wangenheim, the German ambassa-
dor, Liman Von Sanders, German head of the Turkish army. Ad-
miral Veedom, the Berlin representative in the Turkish navy,
Talaat Bey, the political ** boss '* of the Young Turks, misnamed
the ** Committee of Union and Progress," Enver Pasha, dandy of
the court, and the despicable police commissioner Bedri Bey.
The intention of the game was to embroil Turkey in the War,
and its progress was clearly marked. The first move was Von
Sander's assuming control of the Turkish army and Germany's
wrath at our selling two battleships to Greece. With the second
the Turkish army is mobilized! With the third the Goben and
the Breslau are smuggled into the Golden Horn and claimed to
be sold to the Turkish navy, whereas, in reality, they were still un-
der German control. The fourth sees the lamented failure of the
Gallipoli campaign — ^lost at the last moment when the Turks were
ready to capitulate. And finally, with Turkey completely under
German domination, the massacre of the Armenians — almost a
million of them — ^finds the golden Crescent wreaking hideous
vengeance on the traditional enemy within their borders. Failure
to awaken the humanitarian feelings of those in power, caused
Ambassador Morgenthau to give up in despair and ask for his
release. He, a Jew, fought to the last for Christians who were being
massacred — fought against the domination of another Christian
power, and lost.
There is no more tragic story in all history than the murder
of the Armenians by the Turks during this War. Nor do the an-
nals of diplomacy record a braver or keener fight put up by the
representative of a Christian power for those in distress than that
waged by Mr. Morgenthau and his wife. Although Mr. Morgen-
thau records crowded days and moments, it is clearly written be-
tween the lines that many of his activities could not be set down
for the public. What he discloses forms a valuable record of a
brilliant fight for humanity. It is a record of which Jew and
Christian can alike be proud, for Mr. Morgenthau is above all
American, and as America's ambassador served faithfully in a
land of darkness.
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THE GREAT THOUSAND YEARS AND TEN YEARS AFTER. By
Ralph Adams Cram. Boston: Marshall Jones Co. $1.00.
The first of these articles is a reprint. It was published in
England in 1910, though actually written two years earlier. In
it Dr. Cram presents the theory that the really great and significant
movements in human affairs occur in periods of approximately
five hundred years; that the great thousand years of the Christian
era are those from 500 to 1500» when the ascendancy of
monasticism caused poverty, chastity and obedience to represent,
even to the secular mind, the highest ideals of life; that the modern
civilization which is the outcome of the rejection of mediaevalism
is approaching its fall with the end of this century, thus rounding
out its five hundred years; and that it can be saved from darkest
ruin only by a revival of those principles that made glorious the
Middle Age of which it is so contemptuous. In Ten Years After,
the author points out how strikingly the events of the last four
years have substantiated the ideas and forebodings expressed a
decade- ago, although he says, ** neither I nor anyone else looked
forward to the possibility of a world war as a possible joint crown-
ing and destruction of that 'modern civilization' in which we
had no confidence and for which we expressed no admiration."
His prophecies were based upon a conviction that our civiliza-
tion has become intolerable, is self-destructive, and has, in
point of fact, "collapsed through its own impossible unwieldi-
ness."
The slender volume is absorbingly interesting, written in Dr.
Cram's most fascinating manner; and its tone of vigorous, definite
constructiveness contrasts poignantly with some recent utterances
of thoughtful non-Catholics, who survey the surrounding wreck-
age with consternation but without vision, and seem, at best, un-
able to do more than " faintly trust the larger hope."
TALES FROM BIRDLAND. By T. Gilbert Pearson. Illustrated
by Charles Livingston Bull. Garden City, New York: Double-
day, Page & Co. $1.00.
Mr. Pearson is a most beguiling storyteller. These charming
tales, full of interest and fascination, hold heroes in plenty, to suit
every taste, from Hardheart the Gull to a pair of bird ghosts. The
habits of birds, from Maine to Oregon, are pictured with fidelity,
and most entertainingly. The writer has lived among birds, and
has seen that whereof he writes — ^both tragedy and comedy. The
illustrations add greatly to the value and interest of the book, mak-
ing it altogether satisfactory. Tales from Birdland will be a wel-
come gift to any boy or girl.
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HORIZONS. By F. Hackett. New York: B. W. Huebsch. $2.00.
The content of this volume is a collection of criticisms of
novels and drama, originally published in the Chicago Evening
Post and the New Republic during the last ten 3^ears. They are
sufficiently individualistic and strikingly expressed to make their
re-publication understandable; nevertheless, they do not pertain
to the enduring literature of criticism. Mr. Hackett gives
allegiance to the modem school which vaunts that queer self-
impoverishment resulting from repudiation of cultural traditions.
His views lack the width and depth necessary to interest the
reader who has no pre-knowledge of the subject in hand. He is
at his best in the second portion of the book wherein he deals
with stage productions, a department in which writing of this
evanescent character seems less inappropriate.
THE LIFE OF ADRIENNE D^AYEN, MARQUISE DE LA
FAYETTE. By Margaret Guilhou. Translated by S. Rich-
ard Fuller. Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour.
This little volume — ^it is scarcely more than an essay — ^is
interesting mainly for the side-lights it gives upon the life of the
husband of the central figure. The Marquise de La Fayette was a
worthy companion to her distinguished husband, sharing to the
full his liberal and generous ideas and interfusing them with a
piety sincere and deep. Her life was a fairly long one, checkered
by the varying fortunes into which her husband fell; she was
adored, with him, in the early stages of the Revolution, and also
shared the odium which finally settled on him, and was responsible
for his long imprisonment at Olmutz. His lot there became literally
her own, for she journeyed after him and insisted upon becom-
ing his fellow prisoner. They were finally released, after the
Marquis had been incarcerated five and his wife two years. The
death of the Marquise was a saintly one, well befitting one who
had been " so high minded, so heroic in the tragic events of life,
so kind, so affable, so simple in the daily routine, so French and
so Catholic."
TALES OF WAR By Lord Dunsany. Boston: Little, Brown ft
Co. $1.25.
The touch of Lord Dunsany's pen is at once light and pene-
trating. Beneath the artistry of his surface words lies something
macabre, ironical and sinister. He turns on the light suddenly,
gives you a glimpse, and switches it off again. His laughter termi-
nates in a scream, and his scream in ringing laughter.
These impressions, produced by previous books, are con-
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firmed by this new volume* Tales of War. He himself has been
in the War. As captain of the Fifth Royal Innskilling Fusiliers
he saw active service in Gallipoli and in France. In both areas
he was in close contact with the terrible and awesome events of
sudden death, murderous attack and the exquisite agony of men
going down in battle. The thirty-five or more sketches that com-
prise the volume are short slices of life under those circum-
stances. Some of them are very lovely, *but all have that mad echo
which runs through his plays.
Although this volume is slight and uneven in quality Dun-
sany has succeeded in doing what many men have tried — and
failed to do. For the realities of terror are rarely on the surface;
they lie below and are seen only in adumbration, heard only in
echo. The artist leaves the echo and the shadow to his readers —
an4 Dunsany is an artist.
THE OFFENDER AND HIS RELATIONS TO LAW AND SO-
CIETY. By Burdette.G. Lewis. New York: Harper &
Brothers. $2.00 net.
The important subject of the handling of the criminal re-
ceives detailed and interesting treatment at the hands of Mr.
Lewis. His books falls into two main parts: the treatment of
the criminal, and the prevention of crime.
In its practical recommendations as to concrete cases, Mr.
Lewis' book should prove valuable. The idea that punishment
shall, whenever possible, be fruitful in future good to the prisoner,
that he shall enjoy considerable normal work and recreation, the
ideas of the humane treatment, the training in gainful occupa-
tions, and, in a limited sense, the education, of the prisoner, are
sound and are supported with a wealth of defkiite illustration.
Agreement, however, on the value and soundness of some of Mr.
Lewis' social theories would not be so general. In one of his sum-
marizing sentences Mr. Lewis enunciates the principle which. ani-
mates his whole book : " Society has puttered with symptoms in-
stead of attacking causes. It has proceeded too long upon the old
eighteenth-century conception of free will and of equality. It has
assumed that all men are created and endowed with equal ability,
and that if each man is free from artificial restraints, he vsdll be
able to care for himself; therefore, that the individual is to be
fettered as little as possible, and to be allowed to develop under
conditions of free competition. These theories go contrary to
factsJ'
That many so-called offenders are apparently the product of
forces beyond their control, is recognized by all sane criminologists.
VOL. cvm. — 36
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and effort is directed along Mr. Lewis* own lines of frustration, as
far as possible: to prevent the evil effects of those forces before
it becomes too late. But to make allowance for the possible lack
of perfect freedom of choice in the actions of a section of crimi-
nals, is a very different thing from building a system of prison
reform which excludes the fact of free-will altogether. Mr. Lewis
nowhere says explicitly that his system does so, but this would
seem to be the plain implication of the quoted statement and the
whole tenor of his plan. By such a proceeding, society would re-
nounce considerably more than it gained.
The most radical proposal made is for the indeterminate
sentence. The difficulties and frequent injustices of the present
flat-sentence system are evident enough, but a system giving great
power to be vdelded at what would always be more or less arbi-
trary private discretion, may easily become the graver danger
of the two. The idea that punishment should fit offence, and that
offences may vary in inherent quality though externally the same,
has a helpful truth in it But it is a truth very easy and very dan-
gerous to over-stress.
This tendency to remove the uniform and the automatic to
the last possible degree, substituting instead highly individualized
treatment for each prisoner, is illustrated again by Mr. Levds' faith
in the expert: the psychologist, the neurologist, the psychiatrist,
the specialist in brain and nervous diseases. Without belittling the
great service of medical science in dealing with the difficult prob-
lems presented by criminals, it may be questioned whether it is
wise to build too confidently on the professional infallibility of doc-
tors and scientists. Not that the proposed system necessarily does
so; but it is a development easily possible. Science avoids dog-
matizing. Its professors are not always so cautious.
The second section of the book discusses, often constructively
and helpfully, the prevention of crime. The recognition of the
part taken by play and healthful amusement, of the function of
the normal home and the normal school, in the formation of sound
character, is a feature of the discussion. The author's educational
theory is more tentative than the principles on prison reform
laid down in the first part of the book. His plan would seem to
embody a strong criticism of the present academic system — ^too
strong, perhaps.
But Mr. Lewis' study is earnest and exhaustive. It indicates
hard work, a strong grasp of the practical aspect of the subject,
and a very active social conscience. Further, he explicitly recog-
nizes that religion has a place in the solution of the problems to
which he has set himself.
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THE CITY OF TROUBLE: PETR06RAD SINCE THE REVO-
LUTION. By Meriel Buchanan. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons. $1.35.
The atmosphere of Miss Buchanan's book is not unlike that
remarkable passage in Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale, in which
he describes the siege of Paris from the inside room of a pension.
Miss Buchanan is the daughter of the. British ambassador to Rus-
sia, so that not only is her information of a favored kind but her
viewpoint is from a reasonably safe window in the embassy. The
book lays no claim to be a political discourse on the causes of the
change of government* rather it is a book of effects. Because Mr.
Tereschenko or General Knox calls up in some moment of grave
crisis, and the embassy suddenly bristles with guards, the reader
feels close to the centre of the maelstrom, although, in reality, he
sees only the back-work. For the book is a series of impressions,
grim and tragic and at times delightful — a portfolio of color
sketches by a brilliant observer who is obviously young, and
hugely in love with life, very much a woman, delicate and well-
bred, and very gifted with power of the pen.
It is a book on how things happened, not why — ^how the old
army ofBcers looked on the shame of their country, how gentle*
women received the insults of the rabble with fortitude, how homes
were looted and passers-by murdered for the sheer joy of murder-
ing, how the speeches of Lenine and Trotzky deceived the mob into
hoping for instant bread and peace and what that mob thereupon
did, and finally, how the Bolsheviki, completely under the domina-
tion of the Germans, drove out from their country all those who
represented the Allied powers and stable government. This last
meant the withdrawal of Sir George Buchanan and the flight
of his family through Finland to the safety of the Swedish
border. The book ends with the mists of Scotland — dank, but
welcome.
To that growing library of literature on the effects of the Rus-
sian Revolution The City of Trouble is a genuine contribution.
It tells the horrible, hideous truth without attempting to mitigate,
as many pseudo-Russian authorities are doing, the misdeeds and
rascality of the Bolsheviki. It says quite frankly that in those
dark days even the churches were deserted. Before the miracle-
working icons a solitary candle would burn. Alas, since those
notes were written, the icons have been stripped from the walls
and the sacredness of worship set at naught. But vengeance will
be His, and He will take it in His own time. In His own hour He
will bring peace to this " city of trouble " and to the divided Rus-
sian peoples.
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THE STAR IN THE WINDOW. By Olive Higgins Prouty. New
York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.50 net.
The characters of this book live far from the war zone in a
small New England village, Ridgefield, Massachusetts. The main
figure is Rebecca Jerome, daughter of the family that lives in the
white house at 89 Chestnut Street. From the beginning the fates
are all against Rebecca. She lives with a miserly father, an invalid
mother, and a masculine Aunt Augusta. Cousin Pattie Patterson,
one of the restless, flashy rich, is the Providential instrument who,
by her motto " In spite of — " kindles into a flame the fire of in-
dependence which had been smoldering for years in Reba's
heart. The rest of the story deals with Reba's various escapades
in trying to free herself from the gloomy bondage of a melancholy
Puritanism. She succeeds admirably, becomes a cheerful member
of society, and emancipates, also, the Individuals of her family
from their ancestral gloom. Even the daring step of marrying
an almost total stranger, an untaught sailor, in order to secure
her liberty, turns out happily. He is a diamond in the' rough,
requiring only favorable circumstances to be completely cut and
polished. The war supervenes upon the discovery of their love
for each other, and the final chapter ends with Reba's happy let-
ter to her husband in the service.
The characterization in this story is very true to life. How-
ever, the action is so very unusual as to require great realism of
treatment to make it plausible. The story is interesting, but it is
weakened, not strengthened in probability, by its almost arti-
ficially happy ending.
HER IRISH HERITAGE. By A. M. P. Smithson. New York : P. J.
Kenedy & Sons. $1.30 net.
The true Faith, and devotion to the cause of Irish nationalism,
form the heritage into which Clare Castlemaine comes, as the re-
sult of a visit to the house of an uncle in Ireland. She is the
daughter of an Irish Catholic mother and has received baptism.
Having lost her mother in infancy, she has grown to womanhood
under the sole guardianship of her father, an Englishman of good
character, but an atheist. When upon his death her mother's
brother extends to her an urgent invitation to his home, she has
all the unbeliever's prejudice against the Church, and the average
English ignorance concerning the real conditions in the other
island. There has been no intercourse between her father and.
his brother-in-law, therefore she enters a household of total
strangers. She not only learns to share their ardent patriotism,
but by observation of their profoundly devout and vital Cathol-
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icism and its practical demonstrations, she is led to make her
submission. This portion of the book is well planned and con-
sistently developed, more so than the parts which deal with the
uprising of 1916. The work is dedicated to the memory of the
men who died on that occasion, and the tragedy is instrumental in
furthering the love story. The tone of the novel is high and its
literary quality above the average. Notwithstanding the intensity
of feeling with which its interest is sustained, moderation is
preserved.
THE LURE OP THE NORTH. By Harold Bindloss. New York:
Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.40.
The Lure of the North is a clean-cut, fascinating story of the
Canadian Northwest. The heroine after months of exciting ad-
ventures discovers, with the aid of the hero, a silver mine located
by her father many years before. The best part of the book is its
dramatic picturing of life and nature in the Northern wilderness.
The villain of the piece meets his just deserts, and the lovers
marry and are happy ever afterwards.
THE CATHOLIC HOME. By Father Alexander, O.F.M. New
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25 net.
Father Alexander presents a most reasonable and persuasive
plea for the restoration to the home of " some of its time-honored
prestige.** It addresses itself to all classes of society, the author
showing sympathetic understanding of the various causes that
have led to the present eclipse, in the general view, of the home*s
importance and influence. He points out to Catholics the neces-
sity for its reestablishment, and how this may be accomplished
without an isolating abandonment of modern ideas. Encourage-
ment for hope of a healthful reaction may be found in his opening
words: " Only when a cherished thing is in danger of perishing,
does its value appear to the many.** He sets forth this value in
thoughts so forceful and so beautifully expressed that the book
should have a place in every parish library.
YOUR BETTER SELF. By Humphrey J. Desmond. Chicago: A. C.
McClurg & Co. 50 cents.
The motif of this little brochure may best be expressed in the
lines:
Because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
It has the same heartening quality, the cheery spirituality that
characterizes the author's other books: The Larger Values, Little
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Uplifts, etc lis distinct literary flavor helps to make its counsels
more acceptable. The booklet is intended as an appeal to one's
better self, to rally one out of weak compliance with much that
is paltry and sordid in contemporary manners and morals. Mr.
Desmond plies a light discursive pen in his campaign against the
debasing influences of unbelief, the excesses of Modernism,
Feminism, Socialism, and the practice of ignoble accommodation
in matters of conscience. He pleads eloquently for an assertive
religion, which will interest itself more actively in social reform,
and states one home truth with refreshing downrightness: *'A
great war comes in an age which bows to the fallacy that
secularism should wholly control politics, and Christianity should
be ' separated * out of all influence in government." Not the least
merit of the little book is the novelty of illustration with which it
enforces the necessity of moral earnestness for any real success in
life.
THE GREATER VALUE. By G. M. M. Sheldon. New York:
P. J.* Kenedy & Sons. 55 cents.
These familiar talks with little children of the things of
greater value should be most suggestive and helpful to mothers
in showing how truly simple are the things of God and that a little
child may be taught to breathe in the life of the spirit as naturally
as the air about him.
The line drawings by Gabriel Pippit add greatly to its attrac-
tions, and show a most welcome advance over the illustrations of
Catholic juvenile literature in the past.
YOUR SOUL'S SALVATION. By Rev. Edward F. GarescM, S.J.
YOUR INTERESTS ETERNAL. By Rev. Edward F. Garesch*, S.J.
New York: Benziger Brothers. 75 cents net, each.
Father Garesch^ tells us that these volumes are to give
Catholics in the world a convenient series of reading bearing on
their own spiritual advancement, the help of their neighbor, and
the defence and spread of the Church. They consist of informal,
direct and chatty conferences on spiritual reading, meditation, the
blessings of daily Mass, prayer, the recitation of the rosary, the
reading of good books, the need of Catholic education, the love of
God and the like.
FIRST PRINCIPLES OP AGRICULTURE. Revised Edition. By
Goff and Mayne. New York: American Book Co. 96 cents.
Messrs. Goff and Mayne were among the first to publish a
manual dealing with the primary principles of elementary agri-
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culture. It is a testimony to the influence of their work that it
should still be sufficiently in demand to call for revision. The
chapters are short, the materials for illustrative work accessible,
while the colored plates and other illustrations are clear and do
really illustrate. One may wonder what is the aim of many agri-
cultural manuals: whether they aim to produce a state geologist
or a farmer, so abstruse are the scientific explanations imparted.
This little volume leaves one in no doubt of its practical purpose.
Great attention is devoted to wheat, corn, and semi-tropical fruits.
Questions and exercises are given at the close of each chapter and
a few projects to be carried out. In fine, it combines most happily
theory with practice.
NOT TAPS BUT REVEILLE. By Robert Gordon Anderson. New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 60 cents.
These few pages In Memoriam, tell the story of a life typical
of so many nowadays — completed, made perfect, though scarce
begun. All unconsciously, a simple soul epitomized God's pur-
pose in such lives saying: "We always pick the beautiful
flowers.**
This young hero had so lived that he need not fear to die,
and has left in the record of his short years a comfort and in-
spiration to his sorrowing friends.
THE REAL CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. By Mrs. W. A. King. New
York: Frederick Pustet Co. 10 cents.
In the guise of a conversation between two women, the au-
thor sets forth the Catholic position towards Christian Science,
with explanation of the reasons for this stand and exposition of
the weakness of the too-popular delusion. The argument is
clearly and forcibly put, and has the great merit of unfailing
Christian courtesy. The tiny pamphlet, privately printed, de-
serves wide circulation.
PRIMERAS LECCIONES DE ESPAf^OL. By Carolina Marcial
Dorado. Boston: Ginn & Co. 96 cents.
These first lessons have been arranged with more than ordi-
nary care to facilitate the study of the Spanish language and hold
the interest of beginners. The exercises for filling in the different
parts of speech are particularly good, as they afford opportunity
of reviewing the word with its gender, number, etc., and the various
tenses of the verb. The rendering of the English sentences into
Spanish is uncommonly free and natural. The grammatical rules
and explanations are given in English, with drill and conversa-
tions in Spanish.
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STEEP TRAILS. By John Muir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
$3.00 net.
Lovers of the West Country will be grateful to Mr. William
F. Bad6 for editing these posthumous papers of John Muir. No
one ever loved the West more than this well-known naturalist, and
no one ever wrote more enthusiastically of its life in the old days
of the seventies. This volume describes the mountain sheep or
bighorn of the Sierra Nevada, the beauties of the Grand Canon and
the Yosemite, the grandeur of Mount Shasta and Mount Ranier,
the dead towns of Nevada, and the rivers of Oregon.
IN A New Solution of the Pentateuchal Problem^ Dr. Melvin
Grove Kyle calls attention to some facts which demand con-
sideration in any attempt to solve the Pentateuchal problem. He
analyzes the legal terms of the Pentateuch and comes to the con-
clusion that, while some are of a generic nature, such as Law,
Words, Covenant, Testimony, others are strictly technical and
therefore not synonymous, v. g., Judgments and Statutes; the
term ** Commandment " is usually technical although also used
generically.
Further investigation led to classification of styles. The
character of the style depends mostly on the subject matter and
aim of the author; as occasion demands, the style is mnemonic,
descriptive or hortatory. It is the claim of Dr. Kyle that by divid-
ing the Pentateuch according to the *' kinds and uses of laws "
(the two main facts established above), the sections correspond
almost exactly with the divisions of the Documentary Theory.
If so, it is useless to have recourse to the latter hypothesis, since
the new solution is based on well established facts. Dr. Kyle,
therefore, adheres to the Mosaic authorship.
The second part of the treatise deals with some difBculties
raised by the Documentary Theory, most of which had already
been treated in the author's Deciding Voice of the Monuments.
This interesting and instructive little pamphlet is published
by the author at Xenia, Ohio. The appearance of such a mono-
graph IS welcome, for the Pentateuchal problem is still unsolved.
PJ, KENEDY & SONS have issued two publications that will be
« singularly Jielpful in the devotional life of our Catholic peo-
ple. The first is entitled The Lay Folk's Ritual. It gives both the
Latiu and the English text used in the administration of those
sacraments tit which the laity commonly assent; to this are added
the rile of confirmation; the order of the Mass; the Nuptial Mass
and Masses for the dead.
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The second publication is an attractive booklet, entitled The
Order and Canon of the Mass. Besides what its title indicates it
gives in both Latin and English a preparation and a thanksgiving.
Each of the publications includes prefaces of singular value from
the pen of Dom Fernand Cabrol, O.S.B.
The price of the first is $1.10: and of the second 30 cents.
THE PRISONER OF LOVE is a book of special devotions to Our
Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Father Lasance is the com-
piler, and the treasury he presents will be a welcome help, par-
ticularly in our visits to the Blessed Sacrament. The book is
published by Benziger Brothers, New York. In imitation leather
the price is $1.25; and in finer bindings it ranges from $1.50 to
$3.50.
WE wish to call the attention of our readers to a publication
particularly suited as a gift book for children. It is entitled
The Lord Jesus— His Birthday Story Told for You by Little Chil-
dren. The story is told in a way that will interest the. child's mind
and printed with illustrations that will pliease his eye. It sells
for fifty cents a copy and is published by The Extension Press,
223 West Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois.
PETER REILLY of Philadelphia has issued a Manual of the
Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, edited by Rev. James J.
Duffy. It gives the office of the Sodality; the office for the faithful
departed, and a collection of suitable hymns. The type is large
and the entire arrangement convenient.
GINN & CO. of Boston have brought out the " First Reader " (36
cents) of The Corona Readers, a series compiled by Egan,
Brother Leo Fassett, and based on the Beacon Phonetic System.
Others of the series will follow in rapid succession. The book is so
graded as to assist the child to independent progress, and impart
a taste for good literature early in life. Many of the lessons may
be used for the purpose of dramatization, thus aiding oral com-
position as well as expression in reading. The hymns and illus-
trations are calculated to aid memory and imagination.
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IRecent £ventd.
The reception given by the French people
France. to President Wilson shows how close is the
bond of sympathy now existing between
the two countries. In the speeches of the President of the French
Republic and of the President of the Municipal Council of Paris
voicing the welcome of France, will be found not merely evidence
of France's gratitude to this country for the assistance given her,
but also the expression of the French mind as to the treatment to
be accorded the enemy who has wrought such havoc in that
country. It is hard to say which of the two, Clemenceau or
Foch, is to be looked upon as the saviour of France from the
catastrophe which impended. To both of them the hearts of the
country have gone forth in gratitude. These two men were the
agents, but they were only the agents of Divine Providence to
save France and the world from the destruction which seemed so
near. Nor must it be forgotten that to the prayers and Com-
munions of children, Marshal Foch attributed his own success.
Doubtless he would be the first to acknowledge his further debt
to the Masses and prayers offered up by the priests who devoted
themselves to the service of France in the ranks of the army and
to the religious who ministered by the thousands to the sick and
wounded. With military operations so happily closed, France is
turning her attention to political questions. During the course
of the War neither parliamentary nor municipal elections have
taken place. Consequently it is now necessary to renew the
Chamber of Deputies and that part of the Senate whose term of
office has expired. An election to this end will take place as
quickly as possible. A question agitating the country before the
War broke out, was the adoption of the scrutin de liste instead of
the method of election by which the present Chamber of Deputies
was chosen. This is not to be revived at present, for it would
take too long to arrive at a settlement of this question, and in M.
Clemenceau's opinion, the Chamber of Deputies which has borne
the heat and burden of the day, has the clear right to the honor of
voting on the Peace Treaty. The Deputies who have been through
the fire, literally and figuratively, may confidently present them-
selves before* the citizens who elected them in 1914. In view of
the attitude of many Socialists, and for fear of the propagation
of Bolshevism in the country the Government has decided to
retain martial law for the present.
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The freeing of Belgium from the invader
Belgium* must not be passed over. Although the
event is great and glorious it may be
summed up in a f ev^ v^ords. The King and Queen, acclaimed by the
entire population, have entered successively the chief cities
v^hich have long suffered from the presence of the invader,
and nov^ Aix-la-Chapelle, within the border of Prussia, where
thirty-two German emperors and kings have been crowned, is gar-
risoned by Belgian troops. Parliament has reassembled and the
extension of the franchise to women, together with the abolition
of educational, professional and other qualifications for votes
which is promised, will place the country upon a more democratic
basis than ever before.
A new Cabinet has been formed to replace the one which has
been carrying on the Government in exile at Havre. The new
Cabinet is to consist of six Catholics, three Socialists and three
Liberals. The question has been raised, it is to be hoped not by
any very influential section, of the annexation to Belgium of that
part of Holland on the south side of the river Scheldt. Belgium,
of course, to pay a purchase price. Others go farther and vsrish to
annex the Dutch province of Limberg, which juts into Belgium on
its eastern confines. Yet others seek to restore to Belgium the
Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. It is a pity that these questions
should be raised while so many others remain to be settled. Hol-
land, indeed, has remained neutral and has perhaps been some-
what too favorable to Germany, but, on the other hand, she has
shown herself benevolent to the refugees from Belgium who have
taken shelter within her border. Anything which would cause
bad feeling between the two adjacent countries is to be deprecated.
The new year, 1919, opens with a world
Russia. made fairly safe for democracy, except in
what is called the republic of Russia. In
fact, not only is the rest of the world made safe, but appreciable
progress in democratic institutions has been made or is being
made. Of this, the adoption in our own country, by so many
States, of woman suffrage is an evidence. Great Britain, notwith-
standing the preoccupations of war has passed a franchise reform
which practically gives manhood suffrage to every male inhabitant
of the United Kingdom and, by shortening the period of regis-
tration, enables the workingmen to put a larger proportion of
their number on the list of voters than ever before. Further, by
giving a vote to women who have attained the age of thirty, some
five millions have been added to the electorate. As a result, the
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voters of the United Kingdom have been more than doubled, num-
bering some twenty millions in all. In Belgium, now so happily
freed from the grasp of the Germans, an extension of the fran-
chise is on the point of being made; fancy qualifications are to be
removed and women voters included in the list. No change of
such a sweeping character has been made or is contemplated, as
far as we know, in any other country where constitutional gov-
ernment has been established. The disaster which has befallen
autocracy in its efifort to attain preeminence, will undoubtedly
strengthen democratic institutions in all countries.
Within the Teutonic realms nothing very certain can be
predicted about democratic progress. The present outlook in-
dicates that throughout what was the German Empire and Austria-
Hungary, the nations which are to spring from the ruins, will
establish institutions of a strictly and even a highly developed
democratic character. At the present moment, indeed, there are,
provisionally, something like half a dozen republics and a king-
dom founded on the fullest representation of the people. It may
be noted how firmly the republican institutions of France have
stood the test of the War, no sign, even in the darkest days, having
shown itself of any royalist or Bonapartist attempt to restore the
monarchy. Caillaux's project to establish a dictatorship failed
utterly, leaving its author a prisoner. Perhaps the most auto-
cratic of the Allied Powers is the empire of Japan which, in-
deed, has a constitution, but a constitution avowedly modeled on
the lines of Germany. It, therefore, makes the emperor and his
ministers irresponsible to parliament. A movement, however, to
effect a change and to make the emperor's ministers responsible
to the people, is growing and has acquired such strength that, on
the last change of ministry, the principle of responsibility was
almost openly recognized.
In Russia, however, the government of the Bolsheviki still
survives, notwithstanding the many prophecies of its overthrow.
Although nominally republican, its government is as absolute and
as despotic as was the Tsar's in its worst days. Indeed, it makes no
claim to be a constitutional government in any form or shape,
until, at least, it shall have secured complete control by victory, or
the extirpation of every other class. This purpose to exterminate
every class of society possessed of any means of support except
daily labor, is openly avowed. In the cities of Moscow and
Petrograd no one is sure of his life. No trial is given to those who
have been arrested merely on suspicion, and large numbers are
executed every day without examination or defence. The ex-
cuse offered is that this method was only resorted to after the
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Allies entered Russia to preserve the rights of man. A close ex-
amination of the dates will prove this excuse false. Mur-
ders have, indeed* become more numerous since then» but they
began long before. They find their reason not merely in the
natural opposition of the bourgeoisie to the confiscation of every-
thing they possess, but to the philosophical doctrine which is at the
base of Bolshevik activities. *' Man is to be considered as the
product of conditions; the social struggle is, therefore, to be
carried on with the aim of attaining a radical improvement of
conditions. But the mental armor of the Social Revolutionaries
includes the principle that conditions are the product of per-
sonalities and that, therefore, in the first place j*esponsible per-
sonalities must be exterminated."
When life is taken thus promiscuously it is not likely that
property will be spared. Houses and furniture are requisitioned
by the Government alike from poor and rich, and, at the Govern-
ment's behest, their occupants are forced to leave- their homes and
find shelter for themselves as best they can. When what goes
by the name of government, is practising murder and robbery,
it is no wonder that the lawless classes throughout the country do
likewise. So from one end of Soviet Russia to the other, the con-
ditions of life have become almost intolerable. The prospect of
starvation adds to the terror of the situation. Yet the power of
Lenine and Trotzky does not seem to wane. Recent accounts,
indeed, indicate quite the contrary.
Bolshevik troops have been making new attempts to invade
Finland, while the Baltic Provinces now being evacuated by the
Germans, notably Esthonia, are threatened vdth invasion and
devastation, and are appealing to the Allies for help and protec-
tion. The British fleet is said to have arrived at Reval, doubtless
for the purpose of giving the asked-for assistance. A later report,
which seems incredible, is to the effect that the Bolshevik army is
advancing along a front of four hundred miles stretching from
the Gulf of Finland to the Dneiper River. It is reported to be de-
stroying everything in its path, and to have been joined by many
German soldiers who formerly occupied those districts. The
Bolshevik Ambassador at Berlin has attempted the peaceful pene-
tration of Germany since the Kaiser's abdication, but his efforts to
extend the Bolshevik propaganda have been thwarted by the Ger-
man Government.
So many small states have been formed out of Russia, in
accordance with the Bolshevik doctrine of self-determination, that
it is impossible to say accurately how much of the former empire
is under the control of the Soviet Government. The military opera-
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358 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
tions undertaken by this country in cooperation with Japan and
the western Allies, have been so successful in Siberia that all the
district east of Lake Baikal has been freed from Bolshevik domina-
tion. No word as to what has become of the Czecho-Slovaks who
were operating in this district, and on the Volga, has reached this
country. In Northern Russia, in the district south of Archangel,
owing to the mildness of the winter, hostilities between the Ameri-
can and British forces and the Bolsheviki have continued. It
would appear that success is not always with the Allies. This fact
has rendered the call for more men imperative. Within the new
states there are also internal troubles, and at least one revolution
has taken place.^ The Government at Omsk, which aspires to bring
unity to Russia and to be itself the all-Russian Government, has
had a coup-d'itat. The reins of power have been taken by Ad-
miral Kolchak. It is said this was due to dangers menacing the
safety of the state. While the change has met with the approba-
tion of the Allies, it is opposed by General Semenoff who, in
Eastern Siberia, has actively opposed the Bolsheviki for a long
time. It is to be hoped, however, that these internal dissensions
will not prevent the all-Russian Government from restoring order
to Russia. On its success many hopes have been placed. Recent
news from Russia, however, seems to regard any unassisted
attempt to form a stable government there, as doomed to failure.
Perhaps the most important question at the present time is
whether or not such assistance shall be given by this country or
by the Allies. Experts are divided on the question whether the
principles of Bolshevism will spread into Germany. Evidence
exists that they have widely permeated what was Austria-
Hungary. The spread of these principles in Germany, while
actively promoted by a small group of extreme Socialists, is being
resisted by the great body of Social Democrats. So great, however,
is the menace of Bolshevism in other countries, that men, like
Mr. Taft, consider it necessary to stamp it out before the world
can be made safe for democracy. The question is, how shall this
be done? Bolshevism as it exists in Russia will, in the opinion
of many, have to be put down by force. In our own country the
true way of preventing its propaganda will be to remove all pos-
sible justification for the application of Bolshevik theories, by just
and equitable laws. To this necessity, the best men of our coun-
try are fully alive, hence we need have no apprehension.
Of the other countries which have sprung from the former
empire of Russia, little need be said. Finland has become a king-
dom by electing a German prince as king. Since Germany's catas-
trophe, the question whether she still aspires to be ruled by one
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of the class who have proved themselves so unfit, may be thought
worthy of reconsideration. The change in government that has
taken place, General Mannerheim having become premier, may
already be an indication of a change of policy. Upon the evacua-
tion by the Germans, Esthonia and Livonia and the Island of
Oesel declared themselves one state. This example has been fol-
lowed by Lithuania, which, by a vote of the National Council, de-
clared itself a republic. Shortly before the abdication of the
Kaiser, the nominally independent Poland was made really in-
dependent and has been evacuated by the German troops.
The number of these troops on the eastern front is astonishingly
large, being no less than five hundred thousand. There are mili-
tary critics in Germany who are finding fault with the late govern-
ment for not having concentrated all these forces on the western
front. They think that thus the empire's disaster might have been
averted. The Poles seem to have lost self-control and to have
treated the troops, as they retreated through their country, with
some degree of cruelty. Although such treatment had been pro-
voked, it would have been more pleasing to the friends of Poland
had they placed more restraint upon their feelings. Reports have
' reached this country that the people of Poland have acted harshly
toward the Jews, also, even taking life. This has been denied by
Poland's friends here. Our Government and that of Great Britain
are taking steps to examine into the matter. Whatever may be the
truth on this point, it is certain that the Poles in Galicia have en-
tered into a conflict with the Ukrainians and that at Lemberg, the
capital of the once Austrian province of Galicia, the Jews have suf-
fered cruel treatment. In the Ukraine a party has been formed
to efifect reunion with Russia and to expel all Germans and pro-
Germans from the country. It has been so far successful that
the forces at its command defeated the governmental troops. The
pro-German dictator at their head lost his life.
How the world has changed may be seen from the fact that
Odessa has been occupied by French troops and Sebastopol
cleared of Germans. The Black Sea Russian fleet has been turned
over to the British and Allied fleets, which have entered the Black
Sea after crossing through the Straits of the Dardanelles. On this
occasion its forts were manned not by Turks but by British-Indian
troops, and Constantinople was occupied by the French.
The series of events which led to the fall of
7 Oermany. the Kaiser seems to have been somewhat
as follows : When the military authorities
saw that the German army was so decisively beaten that it could
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no longer resist and that a military disaster was imminent, it was
brought hpme to the Kaiser, chiefly through the action of the
Social Democrats, headed by Philip Schiedemann, that his abdica-
tion was necessary to prevent a revolution. Instead, however, of
abdicating at once, William II. sought to placate the forces ranged
against him by accepting all the maxims of responsible govern-
ment which he had hitherto most strenuously opposed. He de-
clared himself the servant of the people and that his ministers
should be no longer responsible to himself alone, but to the repre-
sentatives of the people assembled in the Reichstag. This, how-
ever, was not satisfactory for everyone knew that what was re-
ceived as his mere gift under duress, would be taken back when
opportunity offered. A strike of all the workmen in Berlin was,
therefore, called which would have produced most disastrous re-
sults. In view of this and to prevent it, the Kaiser abdicated, but
not, as it appears, by any formal document signed and sealed.
His formal abdication has been made since. It is confined to him-
self and does not involve any renunciation of his family's claims.
The claims to which the Crown Prince fell heir have, on his part
and on his alone, been formally renounced, but the door is still
left open for other members of the Hohenzollern family to make
pretensions to the Imperial Crown of Russia and to that of Ger-
many, attached to it under the existing German constitution.
When the Kaiser had disappeared, the Chancellor for the
time being. Prince Maximilian of Baden, became Regent and
acting, presumably, according to what he considered the proper
method for constituting a parliamentary government called upon
a member of the largest party in the Reichstag to form a Cabinet.
Herr Ebei*t was chosen for this task. He formed his government
from the two groups of Social Democrats in the Assembly, and
it assumed all executive powers — Prince Maximilian departed
from the scene of action and he has not since reappeared. The
first act of this new Cabinet was to confiscate all Prussian crown
lands. A few days of considerable unrest followed and a state of
siege was proclaimed, but matters calmed down. The National
Liberals and Radicals decided to give their support to the Socialist
Government that had been formed. The new Cabinet was
strengthened by the accession of Herr Waldstein, Dr. Dernburg
and Herr Mathias Erzberger, who are political moderates and of
the bourgeois party. Whether the new Cabinet formed by Herr
Ebert as Premier coalesced with that previously formed by him as
Chancellor and comprising Conservatives, Centrists and Social
Democrats, or whether they stood apart as distinct bodies is a
point difficult to unravel. Certainly Dr. Solf continued to act as
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Foreign Minister, and Herr Erzberger continued to perform oflScial
duties after the all-Socialist Cabinet had been made.
A proclamation offered amnesty to all those condemned for
political offences, the labor insurances suspended during the War
were restored, and an eight-hour day with guarantees against un-
employment was promised. ThescT measures were intended to
have a tranquillizing effect upon the labor classes. This was most
necessary, as the Executive Committee of the Workmen's and
Soldiers' Council was making an effort similar to that made in
Russia to rival the established government. These efforts were
fostered chiefly by Dr. Karl Liebknecht whose imprisonment
seems to have turned his brain. The political and economic re-
forms he wished to effect were almost identical with those of the
Bolsheviki of Russia,, and were receiving much support, not only
in Berlin but in other parts of Germany. On more than one occa-
sion force had to be used and blood was shed. The Government
made it clear that, however socialistic it might be, its Socialism
was of a different type than that of Lenine and Trotzky. Efforts
made by the latter to bring about unity of action between Russian
and German Bolsheviki were frustrated by the Government.
Although it cannot be said that there is no danger of Russian
propaganda in Germany, the danger of such a propaganda there
does not appear serious. The Germans are too sedate, too well-
educated, to follow the example set by the Russian disciples of
Marx.
Within the Cabinet itself the two factions, of the Majority
and Minority Socialists, were not in perfect agreement. The ques-
tion at issue between them was the time to be fixed for calling to-
gether the National Assembly, to make a new constitution for Ger-
many. The Minority Socialists desired to postpone calling the
Assembly, in order to effect by decree a series of reforms agreed
upon by both factions. The Majority thought this should be left
to the representatives of the people themselves to decide. They
were in the right and seem to have carried their point, for two of
the members of the Minority Socialists, it has been announced,
have resigned. If the Majority Socialists prevail, the new
National Assembly will meet early in February. It is to be elected
by universal suffrage both of men and of women. The course of
events seems to indicate the triumph of the more Moderate So-
cialists over the Extremists. In the first weeks of the Revolution
this seemed unlikely, for almost everywhere in Germany Work-
men's and Soldiers' Councils, similar to those formed in Russia, had
sprung up. It looked as if the German Revolution, like much other
German work, was to be an imitation of what other countries have
▼OL. CVlll.— 36
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562 RECENT EVENTS [Jan..
done. The present prospect is that the Moderate Socialists will be
powerful enough to resist the Extremists as well as the Reaction-
aries, and that the new Germany will receive its formation and
take its shape under their auspices. The instant disappearance
of the Reichstag, although elected by universal suffrage, is one of
the remarkable features of fhe developments which have taken
place. It has taken no part in the changes which have been made
— even less than did the Russian Duma. This may, perhaps, be
taken as indicative of the feeling of the German people towards
all who in any way supported the War.
Revolutionary proceedings in Prussia, as distinguished from
the German Empire, are very obscure. The provinces of that king-
dom on the west bank of the Rhine, with Cologne as its chief city,
are said to have declared themselves a republic. According to
another report, there is a secret but strong movement for annexa-
tion to France. Bavaria is in the hands of a Socialist committee
of which Kurt Eisner is the principal member. The steps he has
taken would seem to indicate a desire to separate from Prussia
and to establish a southern German confederation of which
Bavaria will be the head. He denies, however, any desire to dis-
rupt Germany, only wishing to free it from the domination of
Berlin. He would go so far as to make some other city of Germany
the capital. He has made a declaration of principles for the future
government of Bavaria, if he and his associates have their way.
Among these principles is the release of education from the control
of the clergy. An election is about to take place by means of which
the opinion of the people of Bavaria will be ascertained, and the
form of government under which they are to live decided. We
know nothing about the other larger states of Germany except that
Saxony has dethroned its king, as also has Wurtemburg, while the
Grand Duke of Baden has resigned. Many districts bordering on
Switzerland and the Grand Duchy have, it is said, signified their
wish to be annexed to Switzerland. Of the smaller Duchies and
Grand-Duchies of Germany, in so many of which revolutions have
taken place, space does not permit a full account.
The armistice which terminated on the sixteenth of last month
has been prolonged to the seventeenth of the present. One change
has been made : the Allied forces are to occupy not merely the west
bank of the Rhine, from Cologne to Holland, but the neutral zone
on the east bank likewise, if they so wish. The armistice will be
further prolonged until the signing of the preliminary Peace
Treaty, if such is the wish of the Allies. All of Germany west of
the Rhine is now in the possession of the British, American and
French armies of occupation as are also the cities of Cologne,
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Coblenz, Mayence, and the bridgeheads which project thirty kilo-
metres to the east of those cities across the Rhine. Alsace-
Lorraine has been restored to France, French troops having been
received by the inhabitants with every sign of joy and jubilation
on account of their release from the thraldom of forty-seven years.
The submarines, the pest of the seas, are now in British
possession while that German fleet, which was to have been the
Kaiser's instrument in obtaining world dominion, has given itself
up to his arch-enemy, many of the warships not having fired a
shot. To add to the disgrace it is now learned that when, in a
last desperate effort, the navy was ordered to go out to meet its
foe, the sailors by whom it was manned, refused to obey this order
and mutinied. This, indeed, is looked upon by many as the real
beginning of the revolution ^hich has overthrown the Kaiser
and the military caste so long in control of Prussia. No clearer in-
dication, indeed, can be given of the utter ruin of that caste.
What once was Austria-Hungary is now
Austria-Hungary. divided into three republics — ^the Austro-
German with its capital at Vienna, the
Czecho-Slovak with its capital at Prague, and the Hungarian with
its capital at Budapest, and one kingdom, that of Greater Serbia,
with its capital at Belgrade, under the rule of the aged King Peter.
Of the latter the Southern Slavs, comprising Croats, Slovenes and
the Serbs dwelling in what was once Austria, form a part. These
three republics and the kingdom just mentioned, cover all the ter-
ritories which formerly constituted the Dual Monarchy, with the
exception of those districts which were once a part of Poland.
These districts do not yet seem to be organized although of course,
they are claimed by the new Independent Poland as a part of its
territory, and have in fact been entered by Polish troops.
The Czecho-Slovak Republic is the only one which can be said
to be settled. Elections are in progress in both the Austro-German
and the Hungarian Republics to decide their future form of gov-
ernment. In the Austro-German Republic there is still ques-
tion as to whether it shall remain a distinct state or form a
part of the New Germany which is in the process of being
organized. Some claim that not five per cent of the Austro-Ger-
mans wish to throw in their lot with the New Germany, while
others say that the union between the two is almost an accom-
plished fact. This union, if effected, would so strengthen the
Germany which is to be, that it is possible the Allies may have
something to say on the subject.
The Czecho-Slovak Republic seems to be definitely estab-
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lished, with a president duly elected by a National Assembly and
a regularly constituted government formed. Its first president is
Professor Mazaryk. He has been a guest of this country for sev-
eral months, and received the news of his election while at a banquet
tendered to him in New York. The boundaries of the Republic
are already matter of dispute and cause of conflict. Two-fifths of
the population of Bohemia are Germans. The Czechs dwelling in
the districts populated by Germans, have felt it necessary for their
protection to send in Czech troops, and another Czech army has
been sent to release the Slovaks who are looked upon as an integral
part of the Czechs, from the subjection of Hungary. As a matter
of fact the Hungarian Republic finds itself obliged to defend itself
against invasion on three sides. On the north from the Czechs, as
just mentioned, on the east from tlie Rumanians who have entered
Transylvania for the purpose of effecting that union so long de-
sired, and on the south from the Serbs who have crossed the
Danube, vnth what particular object is not clear. A conflict also is
going on in that part of Austria which once belonged to Poland,
and in which there are both Poles and Ruthenians. The latter, in
concert with the Ukrainians, took possession of Lemberg and were
subsequently driven out by the Poles. Here there occurred that
slaughter of the Jews which has been the occasion of much com-
ment recently.
Nor is this the last of the conflicts arising out of the dissolu-
tion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Another, and perhaps a
more serious one, is the clash between the Italians and the Jugo-
slavs. The latter accused the Italians of having taken possession
of districts, especially in Dalmatia and Istria, which are almost
completely Slav, and also of going beyond the limits described by
the armistice. Riots have taken place in various parts, especially
in Fiume, but no actual hostilities have broken out. As it had been
thought that all these questions had been amicably settled some
months ago by conferences held in London and Rome, the break-
ing out of these differences causes much disappointment to those
friendly to both countries. There is, however, good hope that the
Peace Conference will be able to settle all the differences that have
arisen, but it will not be an easy task. Deplorable as this want of
harmony may be, all who desire the well-being of the various peo-
ples comprised in what was Austria-Hungary, feel that the break-
ing up of those dominions had become absolutely necessary. This
conviction is the stronger since light has been thrown upon the
methods of government practised by Austria-Hungary during the
course of the late War. More than eleven thousand of Austro-
Hungarian subjects were executed in order to keep them in sub-
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jection» of these some two thousand five hundred were Czechs.
To this must be added the large number who were thrown into
prison and subjected to various other forms of punishment. It
was time that this prison house should be broken open.
The recent assassination of Dr. Sidonio
PortugaL Paes has called attention to the affairs of
Portugal of which so little has been heard
since the War began. Not that there has been no political activity.
There has been a great deal of that, but of so confused and un-
intelligible a kind that it is impossible for one outside to form
any intelligent' judgment of the questions involved. There were
in Portugal as in Spain and in Italy, people who were for the
German cause. These exercised a greater or less influence against
the Allies. This did not prevent the Portuguese from sending the
France a force of some eighty thousand men who fought along-
side of the British and French, although they considerably ham-
pered the efforts of the Government. It is not necessary here to
mention all the changes that have taken place. They resulted, it
may be said, in the late President's obtaining the presidency on
December 9, 1917. This was the outcome of a revolution, which
he led, to depose the government of Affonso Costa. During his
presidency. Dr. Paes more actively supported the cause of the
Allies than had the previous Government. This caused surprise
to some, wfio thought he was more likely to favor the cause of
Germany, on account of his antecedence. The leader of the
Unionist group in the Portuguese Chamber of Deputies, Dr. Brito
Camcho and Magalhaes Lima, leader of the Republican Party, have
been arrested, in connection with the assassination of Dr. Paes.
Indignation on account of the crime is felt throughout the whole
country. Public authorities suspect it to have been planned by the
League of Republican Youth.
December 17, 1918.
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THE desire and expression of greater, fuller life is as necessary
and as natural to the individual as is life itself. We grow,
both physically and morally. Such growth is of necessity also
bound to result in selfishness, even though the selfishness be un-
conscious, unless controlled and circumscribed by a power, a
motive outside the individual — ^whether that individual be a sin-
gle person or a nation. We say a power outside, beyond and in-
dependent of the individual and of the group, outside of the
nation and of all nations united : outside, beyond and independent
of humanity itself. All men will admit the principle as a necessary
condition for saving humanity from selfishness and consequent
disaster. But many have sought the power that will safeguard
the principle, and the wisdom that will direct its application
within the confines of humanity and of human experience.
* ♦ ♦ ♦
IT is well for us to think seriously and long upon the question,
because by its solution is shaped the future of men and of
nations. If that solution is to be found within humanity itself,
then humanity and human experience is all-suflScient unto itself.
It does not need and it does not know God. It is driven back for
principles of conduct to what are called scientific ethics and so-
ciological ethics. It would demand but little argument to show
that both are not ethics: that both are sterile of ethics: that both
are but inconclusive debates and arguments equally without sanc-
tion and without definiteness. But omitting such argument, our
point is that many maintain such systems to be sufiScient guidance
for human conduct, both individual and national; and seek therein
the light that will guide humanity to progress and to the fulfill-
ment of its best ideals.
In such exposition and defence we are facing atheism, the
denial of God's existence: of God's right to be consulted in the
shaping of human conduct and human policy: of our dependence
on and our personal responsibility to God.
:(e 4t ♦ ♦
TO throw humankind back upon itself, is to plunge it into hope-
less darkness so far as the higher and fuller development of its
life is concerned. To make humanity its own god, is to make
selfishness the law of its life — for the life of God is the perfect
expression of Himself. It avails nothing to tell the individual
human being that selfishness is wrong because you must look to
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the group rather than to oneself: unless there is some living
Power to which all of the group, as well as himself, are equally
responsible. Altruism is an insubstantial seeming unless it be-
speak the Living God. Without belief in God the individual will
interpret that to be the common good which is his own particular
good and not because it is the common good. The echoes of God
in the universe are hollow, unless we believe in the Living Voice
that gives them forth.
♦ 3tc 3tC 3tC
No secure or hopeful light for the reconstruction of the nations
and the peace of the world can be found unless it is bom of
the truth of the existence of God and of our personal responsibility
to Him. Upon that truth rests everjrthing necessary for progress,
order and peace. Without it family life; respect for one another;
the dignity of marriage; respect for the law and the continuance of
government are impossible. Without it will grow the suicidal
principle that the right of government springs solely from the
people: that government and law have no divine sanction which
requires us to respect both: that God does not sanction and de-
mand obedience to a people's choice. Without it representative
government will disappear from the world, for representative gov-
erni^ent carries with it the postulate that all must obey the ap-
pointed ruler because he is placed by a people's rational choice
as the interpreter and the executor of law — and his authority
comes from God. That the people have a right to select their
ruler : that they have a right, in given cases, to change him, that
he should execute their will as legally expressed, does not mean
that his right to rule begins and ends with the people. As well
might we say that because the people change a law they also have
changed the nature and obligation of law. Once a measur^ is
enacted into law it possesses an authority that is independent of,
that is above, the people. It commands the respect and obedience
of all the people. All political parties, all political thinkers admit
this, for they wish to have enacted into law those measures that
they would like to see supreme. They recognize that law has of
itself a power above and beyond humanity, that we are all in com-
mon bound to respect and obey it, because it bespeaks the voice of
One Who will see to it that Justice is done and Who demands of
every one of us obedience to His justice and to His law.
Government founded upon any other principle is futile:
or it would be more accurate to say that government with-
out such a principle is impossible. Unless law carries with it
such a sanction, law is meaningless. And all who, because of
the faults of rulers, would empty all rule of any and every divine
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568 WITH OUR READERS [Jan.,
content, are but courting a worse disaster than any autocrat ever
brought upon his country, and preaching a gospel which, though
claiming to champion the people, really champions the loss of all
stable and enduring popular rights. From the autocracy which
has proved unworthy, they would hurl the world into the chaos
that will prove hopeless.
♦ ♦ ♦ 4t
THE wider we extend human relationships, the more evident and
necessary becomes the belief in the Power to Whom all human
relations are subject.* Strong must be the belief in such an over-
ruling Power and our obligation thereto, when family relations
are widened to national relations; stronger when national rela-
tions are stretched to international; and strongest of all when
nations themselves seek to be not only inter-related but united in
one common purpose, with one common international aim. A
union of nations such as we have witnessed in this War, when
an immediate paramount purpose is common to all, is possible —
as the facts have shown. Victory over a common enemy was the
common necessity and the common good of all because it was also
the particular necessity and the particular good for each one of
them. A union of nations such as this will endure to the making
of peace. But the peace to be made, and its worth to the \^6rld,
will depend upon the union, that is to be, of all nations. On its
face such a union will demand fidelity, even at the cost of per-
sonal and national sacrifice, to a purpose greater and higher than
any interest peculiar and special to the component nations — a pur-
pose of principle and justice transcending purely national in-
terest and welfare. Not, however, exclusive of national welfare
and principles: but bringing into subjection in times of crisis
and conflict the lower appetites of national selfishness and na-
tional greed. Unless there be such subordination the endurance
of the union is impossible.
41 ♦ ♦ *
FIDELITY to such a purpose will constitute a veritable life that
is beyond the national life : that extends and deepens that 4if e
and makes us all integral parts of the family of nations. Such a
life is the sole root of unity. A mere union of nations, unless it
resolve itself into a unity of spiritual life, cannot suffice. When
the reasons for the union have spent themselves, the union
will disappear: but if there be unity in fidelity and faith to stand-
ards of justice, of honor, of fair and equitable dealing, of mutual
toleration and concession, esteemed higher than national welfare,
or rather the essential basis of true national honor and well-being,
then the union or leggn^ of nations will endure.
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But no such unity will be possible unless the nations conse-
crate themselves to a faith in spiritual things that bespeak, in turn,
a belief in God as the administrator of justice and the supreme
Ruler of nations.
It is worth while noticing that even those who profess no
belief in a personal God, yet believe in a league of nations, are
compelled to use the language of religion and dogmatic faith in
speaking of that League. If one asks, in answer to their plea,
why he should put such faith in men and accept the uncertainty
of this League, he is told to make a bold ** act of political faith."
We do not say that such writers positively exclude belief in God
and in the eternal principles of right and wrong, but we do say
that they do not explicitly state them as absolute essentials for
the creation an& endurance of such a League. According to their
expressions the League may exist without, independent of, belief
in God: that such belief may help those who are religious, but
that those who are not, may fare just as well without it. It is
this indifference that gives an index of hopelessness to their writ-
ing. They endeavor to lift humanity to heights beyond humanity's
own power, the attainment of which by humanity unaided has,
historically, never been achieved; the attainment of which his-
torically, even with all the aids of divine faith and divine inspira-
tion, is known to be most diflScult.
:(e 4t ♦ ♦
IT is impossible to discuss of the League of Nations without using
the terms of speech born of religious faith and indicative of
its dogmatic truths. Thus we hear of "the eternal principles
of right and wrong:'* " the war of redemption:" " a lasting peace
of justice and right which shall justify the sacrifices of this War:"
" sacrifices that are the final processes of emancipation " and " the
consciences of freemen."
The very use of these phrases indicates at least the universal
desire on the part of mankind for the religious sanction which
is the only sure and enduring sanction. Faith in a League of
Nations bespeaks faith in ideals that transcend humanity and
that, in turn, bespeak at least the hunger for, the approach to
faith in God Who alone will reward those who are faithful to
such ideals: Who alone knows the consciences of men: Who
alone can adjust the scales of justice — too difficult and too deli-
cate a task for any and for all human power : Who alone will pre-
serve, as He has begotten, the spiritual truths that must inspire
and sustain such a union. As Cardinal Bourne declared in his
Thanksgiving Day sermon — " You (the United States) heard the
cry of justice, the call of righteousness, the claim of the brother-
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hood of mankind — in other words, the voice of God Himself from
Whom all these motives spring — and you have given yourself
without stint and without hesitation to the common cause/'
* * ♦ ' ♦
THE suffering and the loss which the nations have endured have
taught us to estimate more highly the blessing of peace. That
peace should endure, that every step be taken to prosper its reign,
is the earnest prayer of every lover of Christ the Prince of Peace.
Human ideals are not worked perfectly.
No human hand could ever trace a faultless line :
Our truest steps are human still.
To walk unswerving more divine.
Even through error and insufficiency does ^rod mercifully
guide the plans of men. Human wisdom or the lack or it might
lead them astray. The wisdom of God preserves them in ways
that are the secret of His own infinite love.
That the League of Nations may with equity and justice be
established and that it may insure for the future the peace of the
world is devoutly to be wished. Its very formation will multiply
the evidences of its need. And those evidences will promote that
unity which alone can give it continued life. Religion alone can be
its ultimate security. And as we desire it, so shall we the more de-
sire its security — ^belief in God: belief in God's definite revelation
to man through His Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and
like Simeon faithfully keep this truth in evidence before men.
* ♦ ♦ ♦
AND because religion plays this essential and enduring r61e,
we have felt, as we wrote in the preceding issue of The Catho-
lic World, that the Peace Conference falls short and the plans
for a League of Nations is insufficient because our Holy Father the
Pope has not been asked to sit with the one, nor consulted, as far
as we know, with regard to the other. Christian history has never
been written without him: and if the history now to be written
will have permanent value, it must be Christian.
IT is peculiarly appropriate that at this time a special octave of
prayer is asked of us, and is enriched by special indulgences
through the favor of our Holy Father, Benedict XV. This is the
octave of the Feast of St. Peter's Chair, extending from January
18th to the feast of the Conversion of St Paul.
THE Peace Conference now sitting at Versailles will leave its
mission unfulfilled unless it sees to it in no uncertain way that
long-delayed justice be done to Ireland. Whatever difficulties the
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execution of justice may entail, does not remove the responsibility.
It is not too much to say that the peace of the world depends in
great measure upon the settlement of the Irish question. We re-
print here the forceful appeal made to President Wilson before
his departure to Europe, by the Rector and Faculties of the Catho-
lic University:
"Your Excellency:
"You are about to depart for Europe, to be at the Peace
Conference vrhat you were during the trying days of war, the
spokesman and the interpreter of the lovers of liberty in every
land. The burden now rests upon you of giving practical appli-
cation to the principles of justice and fair dealing among nations
which, as expounded in your many noble utterances, have made
our country more than ever in its history the symbol of hope to
all oppressed nations. Wherefore, we, the Rector and Faculties
of the Catholic University of America, take this opportunity to
address you and to ask respectfully that in this historic gathering
you be the spokesman for the immemorial national rights of Ire-
land. Your influence will certainly go far toward a final acknowl-
edgment of the rightful claims of Ireland to that place among the
nations of the earth from which she has so long and so unjustly
been excluded. We are convinced that any settlement of the great
political issues now involved which does not satisfy the national
claims of Ireland will not be conducive to a secure and lasting
peace. You have said, ' No peace can last, or ought to last, which
does not recognize and accept the principle that governments de-
rive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.' Dis-
regard of the rights of small nations has aroused a^^irit of
righteous indignation which can never be appeased as long as
any nation holds another in subjection. Subjection and De-
mocracy are incompatible. In the new order, ' national aspira-
tions must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and gov-
erned only by their own consent. " Self-determination " is not a
mere phrase.'
" In keeping with these words of truth, we hold that the right
of Ireland to ' self-determination ' is immeasurably stronger than
that of any nation for which you have become the advocate.
Moreover, Ireland's claims are a hundredfold reenforced by her
centuries of brave, though unavailing, struggle against foreign
domination, tyranny and autocracy. The manner in which the
national rights of Ireland will be handled at the Peace Conference
is a matter of deep concern to many millions of people throughout
the world, and it is no exaggeration to say that the purpose of the
United States in entering the War, namely, to secure a world-
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572 WITH OUR READERS [Jan.,
wide and lasting peace, will surely be nullified if a large and in-
fluential body of protest remains everywhere as a potent source
of national friction and animosity.
" That such unhappy feelings may not remain to hinder and
embitter the work of the world's political, social and economic re-
construction, we ask you to use your great influence at the Peace
Conference to the end that the people of Ireland be permitted to
determine for themselves through a free and fair plebiscite the
form of government under which they wish to live.
"With most cordial sentiments of respect and esteem, I
remain,
" Very sincerely yours,
" Thomas J. Shahan,
" Rector of the Catholic University of America.**
* * * ♦
AT a meeting held in Madison Square Garden, New York, to ask
President Wilson's intervention on behalf of Ireland, Cardi-
nal O'Connell said:
"The doom of autocracy has already sounded. The silent
millions of Russia, patient for centuries, have rushed madly into
the vortex of revolution. Even in Germany, which seemed so
content with itself, a new force is pushing out the older forms.
" Obviously, therefore, we are at the end of a period, and a
new one is beginning. Is it strange that when Poland and Serbia
and the Czechs and the Slovaks and the Serbs and the Ukrainians
are olamoring for national rights and national recognition that
Ireland, for full seven centuries dominated by a foreign rule
acquireCiV>nly by force and even today exercised by force, should
now more than ever call upon the world, but most of all upon
America, as the bountiful mother of true freedom, to help her
regain the treasure stolen from her, and reinstate her in full pos-
session of her complete liberty? . . . Ireland's position as a Nation
is nothing new which the War has just succeeded in creating.
"But ever and always every method she adopted, every
leader who spoke her cause, every victory won, every defeat suf-
fered, every weapon used, every strategy designed, ever and ever
the same ultimate purpose is clearly visible, and that purpose is
the vindication of Ireland's right to government only by consent
of the governed. . . . That is the principle which ultimately won
America's freedom; and it is because America understands that
principle that Ireland today relies upon America to echo it
throughout the world for Ireland's liberty.
"Ireland is the oldest nation and the longest sufferer. If
these principles are not applied in her case, no matter what else
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may be done there will be no complete justice, no genuine sin-
cerity believable, and the war, not bringing justice, will not bring
peace."
WE have on two previous occasions called the attention of our
readers to the estimates of Gibbon, the author of The Decline
and Fall, contributed at irregular intervals by Hilaire Belloc to
the Irish monthly. Studies.
In the September issue, Belloc resumes, treating this time par-
ticularly of Gibbon's discussion of the " Donation of Constantine "
and the temporal power. Hatred on the part of an historian for
the person or the institution which he treats need not prevent
him from writing true history. But Gibbon did, as a matter of
fact, allow his hatred of the Catholic Church to spoil him as an
historian. Belloc considers the twentieth division of Gibbon's
forty-ninth chapter: divides it into eight distinct statements and
proceeds to show the falsity of every one of them.
♦ ♦ ♦ ' ♦
'< T F it be asked why each falsehood was set down,** Belloc con-
1 eludes; 'Mn other words, if we are asked to follow Gibbon's
motive in telling these falsehoods — some of which are so lament-
ably perpetuated even in Catholic scholarship to this day — ^the
answer is easy enough to give.
'' Once call the Donation a forgery, instead of what it was, a
legend, and you have an accusation against somebody. That
criminal somebody must be, of course, for Gibbon, some one of
the clergy; and specifically the Pope. It is necessary to say that
the document, as we have it, was earlier than the year 800, because
it was necessary for Gibbon to drag in Adrian the First and his
negotiation with Charlemagne in 778. Therefore, the statement
that the document was earlier than 800 is given without proof —
for of proof there is none. Gibbon had to call the Donation
the support or pillar of the temporal power (which it was
not and could not have been, seeing the way in which the
temporal power arose centuries before the Donation was ever
used) in order to cast odium upon that political institution. Hav-
ing fraudulently dragged in Adrian the First, as quoting the docu-
ment (though he never quoted it). Gibbon can easily take the next
step of inventing entirely out of his own head the idea that the
document furnished a plea of moderation in the Pope's supposedly
extravagant demands.
" As for Laurentius Valla, he is chosen for special commenda-
tion because he was specially scurrilous in his attack upon a par-
ticular Pope.
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574 WITH OUR READERS [Jan.,
" I may be told that in all this indictment of mine against
Gibbon I do not sufBciently allow for things which Gibbon did
not know . . . Gibbon may, in a word, have been ignorant of the
essentials of his subject. Perhaps he was. But that is a poor
excuse for an historian; and in certain specific points, notably the
matter of dates and the allusion to Adrian, you have obviously to
deal with something worse in an historian even than ignorance."
#
THE German plan that was to crown their drive of last spring
and summer with success, was first to capture Rheims; sec-
ondly, to cut oflf Paris from the armies of the East, thirdly, to
march on Paris by the valleys of the Marne and the Seine. Their
success depended on breaking through the lines held by General
Gouraud. We know they did not break through: we know the
assault was turned back, the Germans smashed and the road
opened for the Allies* victory. To meet the great assault General
Gouraud "camouflaged his first line." A few brave volunteers
were left there, but the great body of his troops were withdrawn
to a line further back. The hurricane of German shells fell upon
practically empty trenches. Then, as the German troops swept
forward, they were caught in front and flank by artillery and
machine guns and ciit to pieces. Gouraud broke the left wing of
the German armies.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE strong Catholic faith of this brave defender of Rheims is
well brought out by Charles Baussan in an article in the Sep-
tember Studies. Wounded in the attack at the Dardanelles,
Gouraud was carried on board the Tchad, He at once gave orders
to have an altar erected on board: assisted at Mass and com-
municated. Later he made his first attempt to walk in order to
receive Holy Communion in the hospital to which he had been
sent. " He is a Christian knight, in the fullest sense of the word.
He has the generosity, the loyalty, the sincerity, the deep faith of
a true knight. He is a fervent Catholic in public as in private life.
We have seen him carry the Imitation of Christ to the Sudan. At
the Georges Bizet hospital he used to recite the Angelus and make
the morning meditation with the nuns. He took the greatest de-
light in listening to their hymns, and has not forgotten them. In
his sick room he had an altar in honor of Jeanne d'Arc, which the
great officials of the State — the President, the Prime Minister, and
others — could not fail to notice on the occasion of their visits."
♦ * ♦ ♦
HE is the same at the front. A chaplain writes in the Bulletin
paroissial de Brigueil: " At Clermont-en-Argonne I went, at
the request of the Mother Superior of the hospital, to inform Gen-
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eral Gouraud that, on the following day, Sunday, there would be
a military Mass at 10 A.M. in the hospital and other Masses at an
earlier hour. The General was engaged with his Staff. He thanked
me, and turning to his secretary, said: ' Put it in orders that there
will be Masses tomorrow from 6 to 10 A.M. and a military Mass at
10 A.M. ' The following day he himself assisted piously at the
Mass said for our armies.
*' General Gouraud does not conceal his faith. At Paris, in
the Church of Notre Dame des Victoires, near the altar, on the Gos-
pel side, plainly visible to the kneeling faithful, is this ex-voto in
white:
" ' A Notre Dame Des Victories, En Reconnaissance Du 30
Juin, 1915. — G£n£ral Gouraud.' "
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
Vol. CVIII. FEBRUARY, 1919. No. 647.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WAR
BY SIR BERTRAM C. A WINDLE, SCD., F.R.S.
ISCUSSING the question of the phenomenon of re-
ligion in a recent work, an Italian writer^ adopts
a somewhat patronizing attitude. His view is
that whilst religion is useful, perhaps even de-
sirable, in times and on occasions of stress, it
may, during the easier reaches of life, be very well dispensed
with except perhaps by those whom he calls ** the mystical
^lite *' who will '* transmit in the ages to come from one gen-
eration to another the sacred torch of religion, as long as
human life shall endure." This attitude towards the subject
of religion can hardly fail to remind us of the ancient rhyme
of the devil sick and the devil convalescent. However, it is not
for the purpose of refuting or even discussing these views that
we refer to the book in question but with the object of point-
ing out that its author, in conmion with Buckle and other
writers, strongly insists that times of warfare have often, he
thinks commonly, been also times of great religious fervor, for
that thesis is germane to the question with which we are here
concerned. With his explanation of the connection we have
nothing to do save to say that we find it most unconvincing.
It is with the fact that we have to do; and we may commence by
asking whether it be a genuine fact, and, if so, what manifesta-
tions of it can be observed in connection with the terrific strug-
gle in which the whole world has been engaged.
Since competent historians have agreed that the connec-
^RlffQano, Essays in Scientific Synthesis, 1917.
Copyright. 1919. Thr Missionary Socibtt op St. Paul thb Apostle «.
IN TBB StATB op NbW YoUL.
▼OL. CYIU. — 37
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578 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WAR [Feb^
tion is a genuine one, we need not delay over that part of the
question but may turn to the more practical and immediate
question as to what, if any, are the manifestations which are
observable today. To do this, with any success, one must
glance briefly at the period previous to the War, let us say for
the century before, from the close of the great Napoleonic
struggles, for during this time the ground was slowly but
surely being prepared for the events of today. We may, I
think, divide this era into four stages, each with its influence
upon that which succeeded it; the fourth being that with which
we are face to face today. With the premise that the phenom-
ena dealt with belongs to England, we may plunge into the
first stage, that of Evangelicanism.
It cannot be denied that the fervor of this movement did
a great deal to awaken a land which had long lain in the torpor
of eighteenth century churchmanship — ^religion it can hardly
be called. Here let me say that perhaps the most useful docu-
ments for the study of the social phenomena of this and the
later periods with which we are concerned are the novels of
the difl'erent dates; for the novelists then and now, and not
the players, are *'the abstract and brief chronicles of the
times." No one need necessarily believe that the remarks of
their characters express the authors' real sentiments, yet it
must certainly be supposed that, at least in the case of writers
of real significance, those remarks will not be grossly out of
joint with their times. But it is more to the point to take into
consideration the things which are assumed as the norm of the
day; the atmosphere with which readers were familiar.
Consider the Georgian parson from this point of view and
what a picture rises before our eyes of the man, his position
and also of the esteem felt for the message he had to deliver.
Look at Esmond and the parsons therein described. There is
only one minister of religion of even decent consideration and
he is a Jesuit — ^rather the stage Jesuit of course, but still a
man for whom one can feel some measure of esteem, even re-
gard. But, you will say, Thackeray was not of that period and
had to project himself into it. I agree, but anyone who has
made a real study of the literature of the eighteenth century
will hardly need to be told that Thackeray had saturated him-
self with it, nor will he require to be convinced that his study of
the life of the period is a faithful picture.
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But let us go to the novelists of the day. What about re-
ligion apd ministers of religion (in spite of Parson Adams) in
Fielding's novels? Or if you wish to argue that Fielding was
not a religious man, what about the picture painted by Rich-
ardson who certainly was not irreligious. Take up Pamela
and consider the character and position of Mr. Williams, the
curate whose assistance the heroine claims in the hour of her
need. This gentleman was not without religious sentiments
and generous desires, but his position was somewhat lower
than that occupied by a steward, even a butler.
We need not labor the question; it will be admitted that
religion could hardly have been at a lower ebb in England than
it was when the Evangelical movement came to trouble its
placid, if turbid, pool. There can be no doubt that there was a
reality in this movement, although, in my opinion, it was the
parent of most of the evils which followed in later times. There
was real fervor, real devotion, an intense desire to know and
do God's will; but at the same time there was the most distorted
idea of what that meant. As though there were not sins
enough for man to conmiit, all sorts of innocent things were so
dislocated as to appear iniquities, and thus children were
brought up to look upon God as a being Who desired them to be
miserable and Who was far more likely to damn than to save
them. I have recently sketched some of the opinions of this
school in the pages of The Catholic Womj) and need not there-
fore do more than aUude to the perfectly accurate picture
drawn in Father and Son;* a picture which to many of my age
is one only too painfully true.
Further this school of thought developed directors of con-
science before whose actual doings the fabled activities of the
Jesuits and Dominicans of romance positively pale to nothing.
Let anyone who doubts this glance through Southey's Life of
Cowper' and extract the parts relating to the Rev. John
Newton.^ A scrutiny of his portrait as given in Bohn's
edition is not without interest, since it seems to reveal to
*By Edmund Gosse. New York: Charles Sciibner's Sons.
*As Cowper died In 1800 he falls a little outside the date which I have selected
as the commencement of the period with which I am dealing hut the Instance is too
pertinent to be passed over.
* It is a curious point in what we may call spiritual genealogy that Newton was
the person chieHy concerned in turning the mind of the Rev. Thomas Scptt to Evan-
•eUcanism, and Newman tells us that Scott was "the writer who made a deej^r
impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking), I almost
owe my soul.**
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580 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WAR [Feb.,
us, as, indeed, do his letters, that here was a man who
had ho sort of doubt as to his right to deal with human
souls or of his profound knowledge of how they should be dealt
with. Yet it should be borne in mind that whilst the Catholic
priest receives a prolonged training in how to deal with the
soul, ministers of this kind attempted that task — that perilous
task — ^by the light of nature and without training of any kind.
With what result? Well, look at the life of poor half — or
whole — ^mad Cowper, harried by Newton on aD occasions: be-
cause kind Mrs. Unwin, a woman much older than himself,
against whose character there is no word of reproach, lived in
the house with him, to nurse him and save him from himself:
because his labors in translating Homer were to be thought of
as a sin, since they did not bear upon religion.
Southey hated the Catholic Church, of which he knew
next to nothing, but he had some sobriety of thought and he did
not approve of the Rev. John Newton and his ways. Need one
wonder when the reverend gentleman himself admits that his
preaching had the reputation of driving people into lunacy?
In a letter asking that steps may be taken to remove one victim
to an asylum he says: **I hope the poor gu*l is not without
some concern about her soul; and, indeed, I believe a concern
of this kind was the beginning of her disorder. I believe my
name is up about the county for preaching people mad . . . what-
ever may be the inmiediate cause, I suppose we have near a
dozen, in different degrees disordered in their heads, and most
of them I believe truly gracious people." Is it any wonder that
under such influences a generation grew up which hated reli-
gion, and was glad to be allowed to think that there was no such
being as a Grod if that God were the kind pictured by the wilder
and more prominent exponents of Calvinism?
The coming Materialism had its seeds in the excesses of
Evangelicanism, and founded largely, as the latter was, on
assertion and on sentiment and not on proof, it could make
no headway against the logic of the mid-Victorian scientific
school. It required a more skilled rapier to meet that blade.
But before we touch upon that school, we must not pass by the
Oxford Movement without notice, for that is the second of our
stages. So far as our purpose goes, however, this movement
is of comparatively little importance, for in its inception, and,
indeed, until the comparatively more recent manifestations
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of what, for want of a better name, we must caU Ritualism, it
was a purely, or almost purely, clerical movement. Ritualism
— ^if the term be permitted — ^in places has got hold of the
masses in a way in which no other form of Protestantism has,
but it has done so only in so far as it agrees with, conforms to,
or copies Catholicism. But the Oxford Movement in its earlier
years — ^indeed, as long as it was the Oxford Movement— was
a clerical movement and only affected a minority of the laity
and those the clerically minded. Look at the characteristic
novel of that movement — ^if it is fair to caD it a novel — New-
man's Loss and Gain. I do not think there is a single charac-
ter in it of the male sex who is not in Holy Orders or on the way
thereto. This movement for the time being did little if any-
thing to arrest the transition from Evangelicanism to Material-
ism with which we have next to deal.
Here again I am going to appeal to the evidence of a novel,
in my opinion the characteristic novel of the period. The Way
of AH Flesh, by that very remarkable and very insufficiently
recognized genius, Samuel Butler, who sums up in himself, as
he does in this book, all the characteristics of the mid- Victorian
period as far as they relate to religion and science. In his
book he points out that ** the year 1858 was the last of a term
during which the peace of the Church of England was sin-
gularly unbroken." " Again: **The Evangelical movement . . .
had become almost a matter of ancient history. Tractarianism
had subsided into a tenth day's wonder; it was at work, but it
was not noisy." Then the calm was broken by the publication
of three books: Essays and Reviews, The Origin of Species and
Colenso's Criticisms on the Pentateuch.
Without delaying longer over the causes, it may at once
be said that the effect of these and other influences, as accurately
depicted in this book, was a state of mind which led its pos-
sessor to believe that religion — ^belief in anything which could
not be fully understood — ^was impossible for anyone who really
thought about the matter. Those who did not really look into
such questions, might go on thinking they believed in revela-
tion, but the moment that a man seriously tackled the subject,
his religion was bound to go, as did that of the hero of the book
in question after a five minutes conversation with an atheistic
tinker. Agnosticism and Materialism were in the air and re-
mained the dominant features for quite a number of years.
' IOm Aoften's numeroiu parsons majr serre as the examples of this time. Pleas-
ant or lupteasant, not one of them hetrays the slightest symptom of spirituality.
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There were those who deplored the loss of theu* faith such as
it had been. Huxley, obviously, did; and so, openly, did
Romanes, who afterwards returned to the Church of England.
But they honestly found themselves unable to believe and they
scorned to pretend to do so, which surely should be counted to
them for righteousness. This kind of attitude of cocksuredness
that there were no things in heaven and earth which were be-
yond human philosophy, was not one which could or did per-
sist, and it has been followed, as Sir Oliver Lodge told us be-
fore the War, by one — so far as science is concerned — of skep-
ticism and doubt What has followed on the religious side?
That is the question which we have now to discuss.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of
Sherlock Holmes^ tells us in a recent book from which I shall
have further to quote:* **When I had finished my medical
education in 1882, I found myself, like many young medical
men, a convinced materialist as regards our personal destiny.**
We learn from Who's Who that the writer was educated at
l^tonyhurst, so that he was under Catholic influences during the
early years of his life. They proved insufficient in his case
to resist the corrosive influence of the Materialism of the day.
I can corroborate, however, his statement as to the young medi-
cal men of the time in question. At just about that time I
completed my own medical course and entered upon practice,
like scores of my contemporaries, with an absence of religious
belief as complete as that of Sir Arthur himself.
We start then with a generation more or less impregnated
with Materialism and to an equal extent destitute of religious
belief; what was to become of them? The first thing that hap-
pened was the not very wonderful discovery that science could
not explain everything (men of science today seem rather in-
clined to the view that they cannot explain anything but the
simpler problems). This discovery began gradually to sap the
foundations of Materialism, a process which has been steadily
going on ever since and is still in progress.
For a number of years I lived in the vicinity of the Oratory
in Birmingham and enjoyed the intimate friendship of its then
Provost, the late Father Ignatius Ryder. His very remarkable
mind and abilities have never been sufficiently recognized by
the Catholic world at large, in spite of the posthumous publica-
tion of his essays undertaken by the filial piety of his brother
* Th§ New Repelation, New York: Hodder ft Stoughton. 1918.
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Oratorian, Father Bacchus. We used to meet nearly every
Sunday for tobacco and talk, and I learned many things from
turn in our prolonged conversations. I suppose it must be now
some five and twenty years ago that he remarked to me one
day that Materialism had shot its bolt. I own that the state-
ment took me by surprise. When I came to think about it, it
was clear to me that — to change the metaphor — the tide was
lower than it had been. I asked him what he thought was go-
ing to be the next phase when — also to my surprise — ^he replied
that Spiritualism was the next enemy which the Church had
to confront. I asked him what led him to think so, and by way
of reply he told me to examine the second-hand book cata-
logues — a form of literature to which we were both very much
addicted — and to note how inmiensely more numerous were
the works imder the caption *' Occult" than had been the case
in previous years. My old friend was quite right; Materialism
having failed to satisfy the world, its people were looking out
for something to believe in, and many were blundering into
the old highway of Spiritualism.
During the period before the War a number of things illus-
trated this statement. I will take a few which first come to
mind. First of all, to show the dissatisfaction which existed
with things as they were, I will quote from one of the most
delightful books of that delightful writer, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Over
Bemerton's. '* Mr. Dabney," his critic of the period, denounces
the manner of life of the day;^ he deplores the loss of the seri-
ousness of the Victorian era and declares that **we believe
only in pleasure and success; our one ideal is getting wealth."
ParentheticaUy- it may be remarked that such an ideal is
exactly that which must necessarily follow upon Materialism.
If we are really to die, in the name of Matter — one cannot say
of Heaven for, ex hypothesi, there is none — ^let us eat and drink
and do whatsoever is good and pleasing in our own eyes! I
do not know that I have ever read a more astounding or a more
absurd remark than one in the book by Rignano from which I
have already quoted, where he says: "We are certain of one
fact, that the only organ actuaUy brought into play to fight
immorality, is the organ of the collective conscience and not
the religious organ." What, one asks with astonishment, stirs
up the " collective conscience? " for Professor Hemslow's ques-
tion* still remains unanswered: " If you have no taste for vir-
^The book was flrtt pubUthed In 1908.
•In Pr^Ment Dag Rationalism Critically Examined,
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tue why be virtuous at all, so long as you do not violate the
laws of the land? ** However, to return to Mr. Lucas. That
charming writer does not betray in any works of his known to
me any special leanings towards religion, and his remedy for
the state of affairs has just been drastically applied, for, by a
somewhat remarkable prophecy, "Mr. Dabney," when asked
what his remedy was, replied: "'War, nothing more or less.
A bloody war — ^not a punitive expedition or ^ a sort of a war "
(he quoted these words with white fury). That might get us
right again.'
" * At great cost,' I said.
" ' A surgical operation,' he replied, * if the only means of
saving life, cannot be called expensive.' "
So far for general discontent with things as they were.
I turn next to an example of an attempt to find a substi-
tute for anything like religion. Mr. Masefield wrote and pub-
lished a few years before the War a very interesting book.
Multitude and Solitude, narrating the adventures of two young
Englishmen in search of the cause of sleeping sickness and
brought face to face — ^in the story of course — ^with the most
terrible emergency. It does not seem to have occurred to
Roger, the hero of the book, that he might have called upon
God in his extremity, but, after everything is over— for of
course the hero and his companion recovered and returned to
England — ^it does seem to have occurred to him that man can-
not live by bread alone, and he propounds to his friend the
remarkable view that " the world is just coming to see that
science is not a substitute for religion (which is one of the
points insisted upon in this paper) . . . but religion of a very
deep and austere kind." ** Invent et aram in quA scriptum
erat Ignoto Deo — ^I found an altar also, on which was written:
To the Unknown God." It is a curious choice of an *' unknown
God," perhaps even more curious than the worship of human-
ity, for poor miserable humanity, so pitiable an object for
worship, was at least made in the image of God.
Lastly one may remind the novel-reader that Mr. Wells,
who would not at one time have been suspected or probably
have wished to have been suspected of any leanings towards
the supernatural, yet — also in a pre-war novel. Marriage —
brings his hero face to face with the great realities and makes
him exclaim that he may " die a Christian yet," and urge upon
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his wife the need for prayer if only prayer " out into the dark-
ness.** Of course, as all the reading world knows, since the
War Mr. Wells has set up his own altar Ignoto Deo — not a
very much more satisfying one than that of Mr. Masefleld. It
will be observed that these religious emotions are represented
to have been aroused by the impulse of great emergencies. In
fact they fall in with what has been said as to this relationship
in an earlier part of this article.
It is not wonderful that the terrible War which has raged,
with Europe as the cockpit but with all the nations of the
world as participants, should turn the minds of those who are
in the fighting line towards thoughts which in times of peace
might never have found entrance there. From all sides one
hears that this is the case, yet here again it is too often an "* un-
known God" that is being sought. In a recently published
memoir of one of the many splendid young fellows — ^univer-
sity gi[*aduates full of promise for the future — ^whose loss to
the world seems not only irreparable but mysterious beyond
explanation, there is this moving passage : *' I know that many
hearts are turning towards something but cannot find satis-
faction in what the Christian sects offer. And many, failing to
find what they need, fall back sadly into vague uncertainties
and disbelief, as I often do myself." Where is the St. Paul
who will announce to these and other anxious hearts the mes-
sage: **Quod ergo ignorantes colitis, hoc ego annuntio vobis?
— ^What therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I
preach to you? "
However it is much more with those who only ** stand and
wait " than with those who were actually in the trenches that
we are concerned: what about the lamentable army of wives
and widows, mothers bereft of their sons, or rising morning
after morning in dread of the news which they might receive :
what about these from the point of view of this article?
That many such have turned to some form of genuine re-
ligion, where they had it not before the War, is fortunately
undoubtedly true, but it is unquestionably also true that thou-
sands have turned aside to the attractions of Spiritualism. A
recent article in the Educational Supplement of the London
Times commences with the statement that ** among the strange,
dismaying things cast up by the tide of war are those traces of
primitive fatalism, primitive magic, and equivocal divination
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which are within general knowledge." The writer c^ the arti-
cle thinks that, as we have taken a huge and lamentable step
backwards in civilization, we need not be surprised that we
should also have receded in the direction of those primitive
instincts to which he calls attention. However that may be,
the fact remains that the return has taken place. A thousand
pieces of evidence prove it. Look, for example, at the enor-
mous sale and wide popularity of Raymond, a book as to which
I say nothing out of personal regard for its writer and sincere
respect for his honesty and fearlessness. Sir Arthur Doyle
tells us in his book that he is " in touch with thirteen mothers
who are in correspondence with their dead sons,'* and adds
that in only one of these cases was the individual in touch with
psychic matters before the War.
Further he explains that it was the War which induced
him to take an active interest in a subject which before had
been one of no more than passing curiosity. " In the presence
of an agonized world," he writes, ^ hearing every day of the
deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their un'
fulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who
had no clear conception whither their loved one had gone to,
I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so
long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules
of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a
breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct un-
deniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance
to the human race at the time of its deepest a£Biction."
Perhaps it is not wonderful that Spiritualism should have
produced this efi'ect for it ofi'ers a good deal to those who can
believe in it. It offers definite intercourse with the departed,
positive knowledge as to the existence of a future state and
even as to its nature — the last-mentioned intelligence not
always very attractive. It requires no particular creed and no
special code of morals; for one of its teachings, I gather, is
that it does not greatly matter what a man thinks or even does,
so far as his future welfare is concerned. Sir A. Doyle's book
is the least convincing exposition of Spiritualism which I have
read — and I have read a good many — ^but it may be taken to in-
clude the latest views on the subject. Amongst the revelations
which he gives there is one purporting to come from a spirit
who ** had been a Catholic and was still a Catholic, but had
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not fared better than the Protestants; there were Buddhists and
Mohammedans in her sphere, but all fared alike." Another
stated that he had been a freethinker "' but had not suffered in
the next life for that reason.**
This is not the occasion nor am I the man to deal with the
subject of Spiritualism, but this at least may be said that the
person who argues that it is all fraud and deception does not
know what he is talking about. Look at the history of the world
— quod semper, quod ubique, if not absolutely quod ab omni-
bus! The records of the early missionaries, especially of the
Jesuits, teem with accounts of the same kind of phenomena as
we read of in connection with seances of today, occurring in
all sorts of places and amongst widely separated races of man-
kind. We have it in the Odyssey, we have it in Cicero and in
Pliny; we have it in the Bible. It is everywhere. All this is not
mere imposition.
In a rather remarkable book. Some Revelations As To
*' Raymond,"^ to which some attention may now be devoted,
the writer who is himself a firm believer in Spiritualism and
one obviously in a position to write about it, points out that
the old term '"magic" has been relegated to the performances of
conjurers, and the terminology so altered as to make Spirit-
ualism appear to be a new gospel, whereas the contrary is the
case. "The impression prevailed that civilized people were
in presence of a new order of phenomena and were acquiring
a new outlook into the regions of the Unknown; whereas the
truth was that they were merely repeating, imder new social
conditions and in a new environment, the same experiences
that had happened to their ancestors during some thousands of
years."
As far as my knowledge goes no spirit has ever had any-
thing good to say about the Catholic Church, and what the
Church thinks about Spiritualism has recently — though not for
the first time — ^been made clear. That is probably enough for
all Catholic readers, but let me repeat, the man — and there
are such — ^who brushes the whole thing aside as imposture,
does not know what he is talking about.
Before leaving the "Plain Citizen" one should mention
one theory of his, the more convincing since the writer is de-
claredly in sympathy with Spiritualism. He lays down as a
*Bg a Plain Cittxen, London: Kegui Paul.
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working hypothesis the following: Spiritualism cannot
exist without mediums and mediums for the most part have
to make their living by their operations. They will not be
averse from making those incomes as large as possible. For
the purpose of acquiring information, they have a system of
an almost Free-Masonic character by which intelligence as to
all sorts of prominent persons is distributed amongst the
members of the association. This he positively asserts. Any
far-seeing person would judge that the War must have of-
fered a splendid harvest to mediums and this without refer-
ence to the reality or non-reality of their claims. What they
wanted above all things was someone of undoubted position
who would '*boom the movement," in the slang of the day.
They got their man in the author of Raymond. According to
the ** Plain Citizen" they laid their plans to get him, and
succeeded.
I have endeavored to show the kind of effect which the
War has exercised upon the minds of men in one, and that a
very important, direction. There is one agency and one alone
which can proclaim the Unknown God for Whom these a£Eiicted
persons are looking, and that is the Catholic Church. She has
a great opportunity now: let us hope that she may be so guided
as to take the best advantage of it
She finds herself confronted at the moment by a people
who have lost all knowledge of real religion, religious peace,
religious happiness as the result of the Reformation and its
devastations; who, in later days, outraged by what was placed
before them as the only true religion, lost what little they had
and fell victims to the narrow arguments of Materialism; who
now, face to face with terrible events, have come to see that
man cannot live by bread alone and are hungering for food
for their souls. At once arise " false Christs and false proph-
ets" — "Lo, here I Lo, there!" so that many are led astray.
It is the Church only which has the food which can satisfy
these cravings, and it must be her task to press her claims upon
the hungering multitude.
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PROGRESS.
BY MARCO FIDEL SUArEZ.^
|MONG the theories devised to explain the laws of
nature, there is one which, for its simplicity and
clearness, as well as on account of the support
it derives from the continued development of
experimental science, seems to approach the
character of undoubted and well-defined truth. There is no
exaggeration in describing as sublime a theory which, reducing
to the action of one single agent all the varied aspects and
wonders of creation, sums them up in a majestic all-embracing
synthesis.
According to this hypothesis, gravitation, sound, heat,
magnetism, light — all properties of matter — are manifestations
of but one principle. Motion is the agent that imderlies all
forms and phenomena — the hue of the flower as well as the
light of the star; the circulation of the sap in the plant and of
the blood in the animal as well as the revolutions of the plan-
ets; molecular attraction and chemical affinity as well as the
ebb and flow of the tides. Motion is life. The breath of God
that was borne upon the face of the primeval waters still flows
onward, bringing forth the varied forms of good and beauty
as it flows.
This hypothesis, which, once admitted, is in itself sufficient
proof of the existence of a First and Simple Cause that puts
life into inert matter, finds activity even in those accidents
that seem most opposite to one another: light and darkness,
"^ fluidity and hardness, ice and fire are all but gradations of
motion, present everywhere though often hidden. In the
great multitude of created beings there is unceasing trans-
formation; every phenomenon is a change, and every change
is motion; and so even destruction itself is the work of that
wonderful agent.
Motion is the immediate cause not only of phenomena be-
longing to the domain of space; it is also the cause of those that
constitute time. In reality, time is but a series of changes. To
^Translated by Antonio Llano. Sefior Don Marco Fidel SoAres was Inaugurated
President of the Republic of Columbia, August 5, 1918. He is one of the most
prominent men of Latin America.
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590 PROGRESS [Feb^
imagine absolute rest, is to annihilate all sequence and there-
with all possible measure of time, and time itself; for this
mysterious quantity is coextensive with its measure, and van-
ishes when its measure vanishes.
The idea of motion, far from implying absolute perfection,
implies imperfection. That progressive activity which in the
creature is life, in the Creator would be mutability and limita-
tion; just as the flow that makes the stream would belittle the
ocean. This characteristic imperfection of motion explains
why the physical sciences, whose subject matter it forms, lack
the unchangeableness distinguishing the exact sciences, which
deal with necessary truths. While the physical sciences would
disappear if motion and the consequent phenomena should
cease, the mathematical and the ontological sciences would
subsist, for their elements, being necessary, are indestructible.
Motion presupposes a beginning as well as an aim, for the
relative requires the absolute, and it is impossible to conceive
direction with neither bearing nor goal. The ever-present in-
terdependence exhibited by all created objects, and the order
governing their mutual actions, are like a yearning for the
Absolute, just as lower things are subordinate to higher things,
and the larger attract the smaller. There must be one centre
of all those attractions; nor can that centre be other than the
ineffable Cause revealed to Newton by the geometric laws that
rule the universe.
When we pass from things sensible to our consciousness,
we find in it an activity even more marvelous than the activity
of matter. Here we meet numberless phenomena, which chal-
lenge all measure, succeeding one another with perplexing
rapidity, and the contemplation of which makes us realize the
universal principle of activity in the depths of our being.
There is far greater activity in the work of the soul, its
feelings, its volitions and ideas than in the endless agitation
of the battling ocean. Every soul is endowed with that
activity; for every soul perceives, reasons, compares, loves and
wills. That healthful torment, that divine restlessness are not
the privilege of the select few; for although only these can
rise to the discovery and contemplation of the highest truths,
all men were endowed with that quickening principle which
stirs and touches the spirit. Well did the old Teutons picture
the soul as a sea within the breast surging and subsiding with
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every throb of the heart and with eyes to mirror the heavens
and the earth.
Activity is the essential feature of the mind. Christian
philosophy, among its profound theories, contains one that
holds the adherence of many illustrious thinkers; namely, that
the human understanding is more rational than intuitive, for
it acts not by intuition, but by reasoning. In the spiritual
world, reasoning becomes less and intuition grows as the
scale rises; ideas become fewer but richer and vaster, till the
Infinite Intelligence is reached, which has no other idea than
its own Word,
This characteristic of human thought seems to be the
correlative of physical activity. Mental activity, too, implies
imperfection, and varies inversely as mental development. The
chain of ideas forming that activity makes it plain that the
soul must tend to an end different from itself: to the posses-
sion of the truth real. Ideas, like the motions of material
things, must derive from a prime mover; for, as each flows
from another, the first must have flowed from a loftier source.
Volition also is a form of activity. Affected by the mani-
fold impressions it receives from external objects, the soul
reacts upon them and constantly tends towards them. This
voluntary tendency prompts the other mental powers, all of
which follow the impulse imparted to them by the will. A
common aspect of our mysterious inner existence, is the strife
between opposite propensities. From that constant struggle
of the will, which is not confined within the bounds of the
moral world; from that constant clash of appetites and long-
ings which in an instant makes us experience the most varied
emotions, arises a new phase of our mental activity; a state
which is the higher and purer in proportion to the stimuli
creating it
Activity is then the law of all beings. So obvious is this fact
that the very word being meant in its remote origin whatever
breathes or is active; and the ancients called things by the
name causes, or beings that act Universal activity is no less
manifest in the human understanding and will than in the
attractions and motions of matter. Man longs for a destiny
and pursues an ideal which neither his falls nor his setbacks
can obscure; whether conquered or victor, he is ever under
the influence of something that draws him, and, like a pre-
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destined hero, seeks to reach new kingdoms in his storm-
beaten craft.
What is the kingdom of his conquest, the goal of his
activity and aspiration? Are, perchance, the laws of that in-
ner motion as necessary as those ruling material activity?
Such questions are equivalent to these: What is progress?
What is the law of progress?
Etymologically, the word progress means forward motion,
and is applicable to whatever fulfills that condition, more or
less modified — to all forms of growth, development and ex-
pansion; and so we say those things progress which increase,
rise or gain momentum. The word, taken in so. broad a sense,
cannot be narrowed within the boundaries of special classes
of objects or ideas; for it applies with equal propriety to op-
posite things and ideas, so that what from one point of view
is progress, from another point of view is retrogression. Thus,
the rise of good necessarily implies the decline of evil, and the
unfolding of truth is the curtailment of error. In the mental
as in the physical world, the progress of everything is an in-
verse function of the progress of the opposite thing.
Therefore in its widest sense, the term has but an indefinite
meaning, somewhat like the motions of the stars, in which,
there being no fixed points of reference, there is neither abso-
lute ascent nor absolute descent. It is an error of ordinary
language to use a word so vague in a restricted sense that in
reality does not attach to it. The word ought never to be
used without qualifying words to make it determinate. When
we say progress, we convey no idea as to what moves forward
nor even what is to be understood by forward motion,
just as the term motion by itself leaves us in the dark as to
what moves and in what direction it moves.
In its restricted acceptation, progress means that form of
human activity which aims at perfection. But even here the
sense of the term is vague; so much so, that the same word is
applied to incompatible things and theories. All men seek and
invoke progress, as the foundation of every system and aspira-
tion; and yet, the progress that one school conceives is the
reverse of the progress another school exalts. This is due to
the fact that the word spoken by all is not by all associated
with the same idea. To some, progress lies in the advance of
mankind towards that form of happiness which consists in the
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possession of all pleasures; fo others, in marching towards
unlimited social freedom and absolute equality among men;
there are those for whom the goal of all progress must be uni-
versal knowledge, which, shedding its light on all men, shall
dispel the darkness that stiU obscures our vision; while others
hold that, through a continuous ascending process, humankind
will some day reach a lofty smnmit, where, its very nature be-
ing transmuted, the mysteries that now puzzle reason and
the passions that now disturb the soul, will cease to exist. This
is all expressed by an indefinite vocabulary, often mingled
with much flattery of the people, much praise of absolute
liberty, much disparagement of authority and tradition, and
an infinite deal of blind and furious enthusiasm.
As we have said, progress cannot be defined without
defining its end or object The current definitions of progress
involve an idea conmion to all of them: the idea of activity.
But, as activity may tend toward opposite ends, it does not
sujBBce to characterize progress. Progress must be a rational,
well planned and directed movement toward a fixed goal; it
must be a fruitful and unbroken march, not a vortex of clash-
ing and divergent currents.
The absurdity that progress is not directed towards a fixed
end can be admitted only by admitting that man is ruled by
necessity; for if man is free, his very freedom is proof that he
himself and not an extraneous force must direct his steps
towards perfection. If man is gifted with freedom to choose,
the purpose of that freedom must be to incline and guide his
will towards a determinate end. Human freedom, then,
shows that progress has a definite goal. So true is this, that the
school which holds the opposite view, although at first an
advocate of exaggerated freedom, has adhered, in its sub-
sequent development, to doctrines that are in reality antagon-
istic to freedom. We should be careful not to infer, from the
monotonous iteration of the word freedom by the advocates
of that school, that they use it in its true acceptance. With
many men whose pet ambition is reform* language often de-
generates into a jargon which, like that of the gypsies, mocks
in its words the things that the words mean. The men, who
would revolutionize all, upset and confuse all — things, ideas
and speech itself.
The end of progress can be no other than the perfection of
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594 PROGRESS [Feb.,
man and mankind, for the strong and persistent tendency
manifest both in the individual and the community can have
no other goal. Therefore, before a complete definition of
progress can be given, we must ascertain what is to be under-
stood by human perfection.
At the outset let us dispel the notion, upheld by some ad-
vocates of indefinite progress, that human perfection con-
sists in a change of nature. To say that progress transmutes
the being that progresses is to introduce an infinite series of
changes, which precludes the attainment of the desired end.
Besides, history refutes the theory; for, while man is today
richer in knowledge, virtue and happiness than in former
times, he is today, as in former times, subject to error, vice and
misery. Those who assume that progress must produce essen-
tial changes in the human race, shift the golden age, recorded
by all traditions, from past to future times, just as the victim of
deceptive mirages mistakes for placid waters awaiting him in
the distance, the lakes he has left far behind. No less illusory
is that indefinite progress of which enthusiasm dreams, but rea-
son fails to discover.
If we admit indefinite progress, we must admit that it is
not mankind that progresses, but a universal being, unknown
and impersonal, which in its eternal evolution assumes all
possible forms. We thus arrive at an arrogant and melancholy
pantheism which, denying the end assigned to human progress
by man's Maker, deprives the Creator of that free activity
charactertistic of a Being Who is Master of His own destiny, and
not a slave of fate. Such a doctrine is thoroughly skeptical
and immoral; for if, as cannot be denied, good and truth form
the stages of the infinite ascending scale, their constant changes
take away from them the character of being absolute. A truth
that changes is no truth, and a mutable good is not the good.
Besides, where is the proof? It is claimed that mutability
is the necessary consequence of universal activity, and that the
unceasing changes of the physical world point to a law of
transmutation ruling all things. But such assertions, even if
clothed in the garments of science, are still far from being
demonstrated propositions. Natural history has proved the
persistence of species; anthropology has proved that man
always comes from man; and language, beneath whose forms
are preserved so many profound truths, has the cognate words
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generation, to express the production of living organisms, and
genera, to denote the persistent groups formed by those
organisms.
Since progress is not a fatalistic succession of substantial
changes, it must be a continuous betterment of the human
faculties, embracing all that in man's soul is susceptible of im-
provement. Hence it is also an error, perhaps as pernicious
as that above considered, to assume that progress may con-
sist in the exclusive development of one faculty or condition;
as in the advance of learning, in moral perfection or in bodily
comfort. This is to ignore the fact that man, just because he is
endowed with powers of great complexity, cannot truly
progress unless all those powers rise to higher levels.
Reason, freedom, feeling — such are the mental factors the
betterment of which constitutes progress that is real, not
utopic; determinate, not indefinite. The acquisition of truth
through science; the attainment of the good through moral
freedom, and the satisfaction of feeling and bodily wants
through art and industry — such must be the ends of individual
and social progress, which may be thus defined; human
activity coming at civilization.
Progress is impossible if truth is not at once its guide and
purpose, for without truth there can be neither well coordi-
nated activity nor perfection. Even in primitive times, man
had some acquaintance with the main laws of nature and a suf-
ficient knowledge of his relations to the external world to seek
in it and obtain from it, the objects wherewith to satisfy his
wants; nor could he lack certain moral principles without
which no social order, however rudimentary, is possible. Man-
kind has needed' in all ages the powerful aid of truth and
science, not only to move forward, but even to preserve itself.
Mental activity requires "a knowledge of certain truths as
the ultimate basis of all thought and the very source of its
progress. Before the mind can enter the world of reasoning,
it must possess those basic truths that form the starting point
of all reasoning. The unfortunate beings on whom, owing to
mental derangement, truth has no influence, have lost the
essential characteristic of humankind, and are deprived of the
power to advance.
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the benefit accruing
alike to the individual and the community from intellectual
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culture, whether considered as a safeguard of liberty, as a con-
comitant of morality, or as a cause of artistic and industrial
progress. Ignorance, which the noble instincts and aspirations
of the soul repudiate, not only deprives man of ineffable joys,
but makes of him a degraded creature, which is the antithesis
of progress. When reason is absent, imagination tends to take
its place; whence it results that the ignorant man, in the pres-
ence of facts that he must interpret, is not content to remain
in ignorance, and rushes into the field of error.
Mythology has been justly called a disease of language be-
cause, from a right examination of its vocabulary, it appears
that the greater part of the names of gods were originally com-
mon words expressing natural forces and devoid therefore of
that mysterious prestige bestowed on them in later ages, when
ignorance made persons of these forces. Mythology is besides
a usurpation of the functions of reason by erratic fancy, which,
incapable of seeing even the inunediate causes of things
sensible, lacks the power to ascend from general laws to a first
cause. Hence, in pagan times, geography, physics, history,
astronomy had rather a mystical than a scientific character.
Atmospheric currents were personified in .£olus, and the mo-
tions of the sea in Neptune; electricity was identified with the
lord of the gods, and the woods and rivers were peopled with
fauns and naiads. What was judicial astrology, that veritable
calamity which weighed so heavily upon mankind for cen-
turies, but disregard of the laws that rule the heavens? And
what but ignorance of history is all that phantasmagoria of
semigods with which Greek and Oriental imagination filled
primitive times? Even now the peoples who inherit the fav-
ored soil of India, squander their mental wealth on a geogra-
phy that finds in seas of milk the foundation of the earth, and
on a chronology that becomes lostin eons. All the superstitious
and otherwise harmful systems know as occult sciences, which
in the past played a part so great and so pernicious as the
instruments or the cloak of oppression and crime, arose from
ignorance of scientific principles. We see in all this how well
founded is the doctrine that good and truth cannot be divorced
one from the other.
Intellectual poverty brings with it the lowering of char-
acter; for when man believes that he lives under the inexorable
rule of invincible forces, he regards himself as a slave of na-
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hire, and this attitude fosters abject submission to oppression.
Where philosophic systems and religious doctrines are the
stays of error, despotism becomes the natural form of govern-
ment, and idolatry that of worship; customs are invaded by
license, and art by depravity.
Every step that mankind takes in the path of progress is
the acquisition of a truth. Truth is the powerful auxiliary in
the conquests of knowledge, morality, liberty and all other
forms of well-being. Redemption, the highest progress ever,
granted to man, since it is beyond his natural powers, was the
revelation of Eternal Truth, Who bequeathed it as the heritage
of salvation to all who cooperate with it.
As the field of knowledge broadens, general culture, social
order and happiness increase, and there is a consequent de-
crease of injustice and suffering. The discovery of a new con-
tinent opens a new epoch to history. The invention of a ma-
chine capable of multiplying writing in a few moments, makes
it possible for truth, after centuries of stagnation, to offer
new or easier channels to man's activity. So abstract a concep-
tion as that of the existence of thought, acted as a powerful
agent in the reconstruction of scientific methods and in the
intellectual progress of modern times. How wonderful is this
power of science, which reads in the layers of the earth's crust
a revelation of the successive stages of creation; which, ques-
tioning subtle light, puts before our eyes the composition of the
nebulse, and which finds in word roots the existence and even the
customs of peoples who left no other footprints upon the road!
Intellectual progress is a slow but certain nearing to God.
Knowledge, as it advances, tends towards unification, just as
rays of light grow closer as they approach their source. Every
scientific step forward is the invention of a law, and a law is
a synthesis of several phenomena or of several other laws. The
mathematician, the naturalist, the philosopher, in their con-
tributions to intellectual progress, reduce multiplicity to one-
ness and thus advance towards supreme truth. Hence arises
the indisputable superiority that man owes to knowledge,, and
the involuntary homage rendered to intelligence as the dis-
peller of ignorance. This led the descendants of Japheth, who
excelled in genius, to worship man, as those of Shem wor-
shipped the stars beneath the clear skies of the Orient, and
those of Ham, the gigantic productions of the African soil.
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As knowledge is one of the objects of general progress, it
must be studied from the point of view of its general features,
not of those exceptional features it exhibits in favored individ-
uals. Neither intellectual conditions, nor economic resources,
nor that social equilibrium which, despite fanciful systems,
must ever and everywhere be the necessary result of the in-
equalities established by nature, permit even the greater part
of the race to attain the highest stages of knowledge. The
conditions of individuals and communities, limit the scope of
progress in this field to a dissemination of the most necessary
and useful elements of knowledge.
Nor should it be forgotten that, the highest sciences being
by their very nature speculative, it would be fruitful of per-
nicious consequences and most unnatural, to give them the
preference in popular education, thus making popular educa-
tion more abstract than concrete, and subordinating practice
to theory. Let higher knowledge be pursued by those who can
turn it to good, but do not stultify and pervert the mind by
cramming into it abstractions that in practice bear no fruit, or
may bear a baneful fruit. Perhaps it is not too much to say
that the boldness, silliness and haughtiness produced by in-
digestible doses of crude and noxious would-be science, is a
serious menace to future generations. The bad effect of a shal-
low knowledge of religious things which Bacon saw, is much
extended today; it has spread to other fields, and saps the so-
cial structure.
It would be a sin against humanity to disparage popular
education, which is one of the glories of our time. Popular
education is a good of the highest order, and therefore one of
the main objects of progress. But to realize it, we should guard
against attempting the impossible. It is necessary to make a
sober study of the end to be attained and of the means ade-
quate to that end. General education is a great good because
it is a necessary condition of the civil and political liberty to
which society aspires, and because in the happy and effective
movement towards representative government, majorities will
be called more and more to exercise noble rights where ignor-
ance would be a hindrance. Besides, the marvelous develop-
ment of industry in civilized communities demands the spread-
ing of the knowledge which keeps and fosters it.
But, although education in its general character must be
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practical, it by no means follows, as some extremists hold, that
progress repudiates whatever cannot be stated in a formula,
or materialized in the form of a machine, or turned to economic
profit. This pernicious exaggeration degrades the sublim-
ity of science. Such was not the tendency of ancient learning.
Plato, the idealist, was the only sage who won the distinction
of being called divine, and Archimedes deemed several of his
inventions unworthy of history. If speculative science exerts
no immediate influence, it does exert indirect influence in a
very high degree, for its bearing on morality is indisputable.
Even if we are to accept the claims of positivism, is it not to
certain doctrines of the most abstract nature, such as those set
forth by Bacon and Descartes, that we must ascribe the
wonderful development of modern science?
This development has misled the new learning, pufi'ed up
by its triumphs and filled with over-confidence, into believing
itself all powerful, and the field of progress unlimited. As,
however, there are certain problems that the unaided soul can-
not solve, some minds fall into the despair of hopeless impo-
tence, a feeling that extends even to lower spheres of mental
activity and begets what is now called universal doubt. This
state of doubt, in such as really experience it, arises from the
fact that knowledge, not satisfied with the light that shines on
the world, has sought to look into the very depths of the sun
whence it flows, forgetful that truth, like that mighty sphere,
holds in her bosom the darkness of mystery. Men have not
only inquired into the causes of things, but attempted to lay
bare their ultimate essence and reason, as if a limited under-
standing could reach so far; the unavoidable failure has pro-
duced a *• rash and ravaging '' despair that threatens to over-
spread the world.
Is this state a mark of progress, or rather of decline? Aside
from the evil it works in the centric field of ethics by under-
mining duty and the whole moral law, skepticism is
not a step forward or upward, but a retrogression and
fall due to discouraged exhaustion. It extinguishes the hope
that promipts to progress, and overthrows science itself. Judged
by the results thus far attained, reason can shed no light upon
the higher truths relating to the origin of man, his ultimate
destiny and his relations with his Divine Maker. These form
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the bed wherein flows the stream of human knowledge; they
are the supportmg rock that endm*es even when the structm'e
above is torn down, and, like the foundations of the temple of
Jerusalem, they envelop in devouring flames whoever attempts
to remove them.
Without these truths, which afford shelter to the con-
science and peace to the heart, neither the learned nor the
ignorant man can work out his destiny. Man's faculties are
limited. To achieve progress, he needs the guidance not only
of the light he can analyze and understand, but of other lights
that illumine his path and whose origin he cannot fathom.
These truths are like the nebulae that light the vault of heaven
but are themselves beyond the range of the human eye.
[to be concluded.]
THE PROMISE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
To you and you it shall be given
As unto Mary her lost Heaven.
Her Son, and your son come
Alive out of the grave and gloom.
Like hers your bliss is preSrdained
To see the wounds healed and unstained.
Yea, you shall kiss with her
The side that hath no mark o' the spear.
They shall come in warm to your cold
Dropped arms that found naught to enfold,
And on your heart be laid
The young, the beloved, thorn-crowned head.
Sudden some dawning or some eve
Your dead son shall come in alive,
As once came Mary's Son;
The lost, the incredible Heaven be won.
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THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.
BY THOMAS O'HAGAN, LnT.D.
J HE most complex period in all history is that of
the Italian Renaissance. It is misinterpreted be-
cause it is complex. In dealing with its origin
and development, writers forget that the seeds of
the Italian Renaissance had been cast into the
soil long centuries before these seeds blossomed into Renais-
sance flower and fruitage.
Speaking in general terms, we may regard the Renaissance
as denoting that transition from the mediaeval to the modern
world which took place during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, but which, in different countries, began to make itself
felt at different dates and under different aspects determined
by differences either of race or geographical position or the
existing state of civilization.
One thing the student must note, and that is that "the
growth of civilization is as gradual and imperceptible as that
of an oak tree : it does not suddenly pass from night to day, nor
even from bright to twilight. Even in these latter days of the
nineteenth century, separated as we are from what is called
the Renaissance not only by three centuries but by the great
upheaval of the French Revolution, we are in some things still
in mid-Renaissance; can it even be said that we have wholly
put off mediaevalism? It is not many years ago since Matthew
Arnold spoke of Oxford as the last stronghold of mediaevalism.''
It is well to bear in mind, too, that a series of world events
of greatest import to civilization mark the period of the Italian
Renaissance. These are: The Invention of Printing, 1440; Fall
of Constantinople, 1453; Conquest of Grenada, 1492; Discovery
of America, 1492; Invasion of Italy by Charles VIII., 1494, and
the Diet of Worms, 1494.
Here let me warn the student against the generally
accepted opinion that the movement known as the Renaissance
in Italy — the literary manifestation of which is Humanism —
was entirely hostile to Rome and that the attitude of the Popes
was at all times unfriendly to the Humanists. On the contrary.
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the Italian Renaissance in its origin and scope was not directed
against the Church nor were the Popes unfriendly or hostile to
those who represented the Humanistic movement. Let us not
forget, in support of this contention, that Boccaccio was three
times ambassador from the Florentine Court to the Papal
Court and was always, well received there. All Popes from
Benedict XII. to Gregory XI. showed Petrarch great favor,
and Clement VI. delivered the great poet from pecuniary em-
barrassment
It is true that the Popes differed in their attitude towards
the Renaissance and its promoters, yet it is surely an attempt
to prove too much to charge the Popes with condoning every
form of literary immorality on the part of the Humanists, and
at the same time condemning the books of the Humanists to be
burned publicly, as contra bonos mores as George Havens Put-
nam has done in the Making of Books in the Middle Ages.
Again, there were factors at work, bringing about the
Italian Renaissance, of which little note is made by the ordi-
nary historian of this period. There are also two phases of the
Italian Renaissance which must not be confused: The Revival
of Learning and The Development of Art.
It is quite correct, it is true to credit to the Greek world of
thought and the influence of Greek art and literature the mar-
velous impulse given to Renaissance scholarship and art in .
Italy during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
But we should remember that the Fall of Constantinople in
1453, while giving a fresh impetus to the work of collecting
Greek manuscripts and bringing a fresh supply of scholars to
Italy, was by no means the primary cause of the Italian
Renaissance.
The true cause of the Italian Renaissance lay much
deeper than all this. It had been growing through the pre-
ceding centuries and gathering force. Nor can any historian
very well put his finger on any one fact, factor or event and
say: '"This was the real cause of the Italian Renaissance."
The world of thought and free inquiry had extended its boun-
daries. This came with the broadening process of the mind.
This spirit of free inquiry existed, not despite Scholasticism,
but largely because of it. Indeed, it existed before Scho-
lasticism found full concrete form in the Summa of St. Thomas
Aquinas. The Church never formally condemned free inquiry
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either in the world of philosophy or science. What the Church
did, was to condemn what she, as the deposit of divine truth,
regarded as false in the world of moral teaching. In fulfilling
her divine commission, the Church does the very same thing
today.
As a proof that free inquiry existed long before the period
set down as the f uU-ripening of the Italian Renaissance — that
is between 1450 and 1525— we have but to refer to Abelard,
Roger Bacon, Dante and Petrarch. In these four, representing
four distinct periods of scholarship and thought, we find the
spirit of free inquiry. But it may be objected, the first of these,
Abelard, incurred the condenmation of Rome. This is true.
After being confronted at the Council of Sens, by St. Bernard,
the teaching of Abelard was condenmed, though, through the
good oflSces of the Abbot of Cluny, Abelard became reconciled
to St. Bernard and died, we understand, in the bosom of the
Church.
It should not be forgotten here that the right of free in-
quiry and the right to uphold what is morally false are two
distinct things. The Church, too, permits the very fullest criti-
cism. What critic could be more scathing in his denunciation
of Papal abuses or what he regarded as abuses, than the poet
Dante? Yet his sublime trilogy, the Divine Comedy, in which
Pope and prelate, personse non gratae to this terrible mediaeval
hater and singer of the most inspired and divine song of the
world, are lashed and consigned to the Circles of Hell, was
never put on the Index.
Touching the question of free inquiry and criticism in the
Middle Ages, Dean Church, the well-known Anglican divine
and Dantean scholar, writes : " It is confusing the feelings of
the Middle Ages with our own, to convert every fierce attack
on the Popes into an anticipation of Luther. Strong language
of this sort was far too conunonplace to be so significant.
When the Middle Ages complained, they did so with a full
voiced and clamorous rhetoric which greedily seized on every
topic of vilification within its reach. It was far less singular
and far less bold to criticize ecclesiastical authorities than is
often supposed: but it by no means implied unsettled faith'
or a revolutionary design.'*
In a similar strain, James Russell Lowell, the well-known
American poet and critic, writes: ''We protest against the
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604 THE CHURCH AND THE RENAISSANCE [Feb.,
parochial criticism which would deprave Dante to a mere par-
tisan, which sees in him a Luther before his time and would
clap the bonnet rouge upon his heavenly muse."
Let us add to these the opinion of the late Dr. Moore, the
eminent Dantean scholar of Oxford. Dr. Moore says: "'It
may be declared at once that there is not the very smallest
ground for claiming Dante as a * Reformer before the Refor-
mation.' There is no trace in his writings of doubt or dissatis-
faction respecting any part of the teaching of the Church in
matters of doctrines authoritatively laid down. He would have
probably considered any such feeling as most presumptuous
and, indeed, as little short of blasphemous. A great deal has
been written about his supposed defence of the right of private
judgment, of his alleged sympathy with free thinking or with
philosophic doubt. Of this also it appears to me that no evi-
dence can be found. There seems, on the contrary, every rea-
son to believe him to have been a firm, faithful and devoted
son of the Church without any misgiving as to her teaching or
as to her indefeasible right to teach."
Yet despite these eminent witnesses to fact and truth, a Rev.
Mr. Owen, an Anglican divine, has published a book bearing
the title Skeptics of the Ualian Renaissance, in which he in-
cludes with Machiavelli, Boccaccio and others, the names of
Dante and Petrarch.
Now when we turn to the Standard Dictionary, we find
" skeptic " defined as agnostic, atheist, deist, disbeliever, free-
thinker and infidel and its antonym believer and Christian.
No further comment is needed here.
The fact is, as Ozanam has justly remarked, Protestantism
had felt the need of creating for itself some sort of genealogy
which would link it with the age of the Apostles. For this
purpose its promoters went about stirring up the drybones of
every cemetery and of every ruin; interrogating the dead and
the institutions that had fallen; making for themselves a family
of the heretics of every age; seeking out the most audacious in-
novators of the Middle Ages in order to claim their paternity.
It was enough that a few bitter words should have fallen from
the pen of a celebrated man on the abuses of his contem-
poraries, to secure him admission into the catalogue of those
so-called witnesses of the truth.
But what we are particularly concerned with here, is the
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relation of the Catholic Cliurch to the Renaissance movement
in Italy and a consideration of the conditions which made pos-
sible its advancement on the pagan and immoral side.
First, let me say with W. S. Lilly in his Renaissance Types,
that ** the victory of Christianity over paganism in Italy was
superficial. Great saints, great doctors, great Popes arose in
that country. But Christianity never so thoroughly penetrated
the masses and the conunon life as it did in regions which it
won from barbarism. It is not too much to say that Italy was
the least distinctively Christian part of Christendom. The old
deities were never quite superseded there; a popular cultus
was still paid to them.** This opinion of LiUy is supported by
so able a critic as Qzanam who in his study of Dante and
Scholastic philosophy has this to say: ** Dante has been re-
proached for his mythology of the Inferno. But Dante fol-
lowed the spirit, the taste, the preoccupations of the men of
his time. So far from being pedantic in this respect, he is pop-
ular. He obeys a people which still believes in all these things :
in the secret virtue hidden in the statue of Mars, in the geese
of the Capitol, in the ancilia. The ancient gods have merely
changed form. They have become demons, fallen angels, but
they are alwajrs there; and the poet mentions them because he
believes in them. The Middle Ages are full of the remains of
paganism.
So much for the character of the soil into which the seed
of the Italian Renaissance had been cast. And here the ques-
tion arises: Why men who had been face to face with a clas-
sical Renaissance in the ninth and twelfth centuries had not
then been paganized or made skeptics? The reply is obvious.
In the first place, political and social conditions in Italy in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced, at least among
Italians of the higher classes, a psychological and moral state
singularly appropriate to the comprehension and reception of
the lessons of antiquity. Secondly, at the beginning of the
fourteenth century all connection was broken between the two
great universal powers of the Middle Ages — the Empire and
the Papacy. The Empire fell in 1250 and the Papacy went into
exile in 1305.
Furthermore, in the Italy of the fourteenth century there
was not a single legitimate power. Take, for instance, the
types of the tyrants in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth
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centuries — the Viscontis, the Sforzas and the Medicis. Not
one of them possessed a legitunate title to sovereignty. As a
consequence of this, the Christian land fell into contempt.
After trampling the Chfirch under foot all their lives, as a
writer tells us, most of these triumphant adventurers died
laughing at her excommunications.
Then again, we know that the prestige of the Church had
been weakened by nearly two hundred years of exile and
schism, though it is far from the truth to say that thle Church
bore no spiritual fruit during her seventy years of Babylonish
Captivity. Historians who hold that the Church was but a
mere appanage of the French crown during these seventy
years, are the very ones who severely attack a Pope Hilde-
branfl, because, in his desire to purify and restore the Church
to its proper place in Germany, that great Pontiff forced the
Emperor of Germany to go to Canossa. The truth of the mat-
ter is that the great mission work of the Church was carried
on vigorously a great part of the time that the Popes were
in exile at Avignon.
More than that, one of the greatest factors in creating a
need and taste for the study of Greek was the efforts put forth
by the Popes of Avignon to unite the Eastern and Western
Churches. Because of this there was frequent exchange of
Greek manuscripts between Avignon and Constantinople.
This too was long before Chrysoloras occupied a chair of
Greek at Florence, or the fall of Constantinople directed the
minds and footsteps of Greek scholars towards the shores of
Italy.
It is true, as BaudriUart, Rector of the Catholic In-
stitute at Paris and member of the French Academy, says:
" The long exile of the Popes at Avignon had led, almost fatally,
to the Great Schism with its scandalous rivalry of Popes, to
withdrawals of obedience and the tendency of the national
Churches to rule themselves under the jealous supervision of
the heads of states, to the enfeebling and disorganizing of the
hierarchy; the Papacy being in dispute, was terribly under^
mined, and the general disorder of Christendom was further
aggravated by war and public calamities.*'
Monsignor BaudriUart discusses in what particulars the
Renaissance is opposed to Christianity, and asks : "' Is it in the
return to classical letters? No. Is it in the return to the cult
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of form and beauty? Again, No. Is it in the return to
nature? No, not even in that It was in the return to the
spirit of pagan antiquity."
The two besetting sins of the Humanists were pride and
vainglory and the monks, rather than the secular clergy, were
the special object of their attacks, for the monks represented in
their lives humility and voluntary abasement. The Humanists
glorified riches; the monks took a vow of poverty. The Human-
ists, in fine, justified sensual pleasure, while the monks morti-
fied their flesh with penance and charity. Yet it is frequently
these Humanists whose judgments are cited by our modem
historians as to the character of the mediaeval cloister.
Because of their knowledge and talent, these Humanists
of the Italian Renaissance enjoyed many privileges. Although
laymen and married, they spoke in the churches. They would
pronounce the panegyric of a saint or the funeral oration of
some distinguished person; they would even deliver a mar-
riage sermon and sometimes preach at the first Mass of some
ecclesiastical friend. It may readily be understood, then, what *
a large place the Renaissance scholar filled even in the
economy and life of the Church. He became, too, the teacher
of princes and lords, and of the most eminent citizens of the
difi'erent towns, and thus, as Monsignor BaudriUart points out,
there was formed a new and particularly powerful class of dis-
ciples of the ancient culture.
L Nor must we forget the place which Humanists filled as
V Papal Secretaries. Of these, the two Secretaries of Pope Leo
\ X., Pietro Bembo and Giacomo Sadolet, became perhaps the
most iUustrious among their fellows.
It now remains for us to consider the attitude of the
/ Church towards the Renaissance movement. It is but a truism,
known to every impartial and honest historian, that from the
very earliest centuries the Church has been the generous
patron of learning. Not only has she at all times held aloft
the torch of learning, but she has been the founder through the
centuries of the chief mediaeval seats of learning, granting
them Pontifical charters of recognition, and bestowing recog-
nition and honor upon their most illustrious scholars.
^ The Church has ever recognized that every genuine ad-
vance of knowledge is itself an advantage to religion, inasmuch
as Truth, Science and Art are alike daughters of heaven. Be-
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608 THE CHURCH AND THE RENAISSANCE [Feb^
cause of this, the attitude of the Church has been ever sym-
pathetic and cooperative with every intellectual movement
Because of this the movement in Italy known as the Renais-
sance, as long as it was not injurious to faith and morals, re-
ceived the support of the Church. Indeed, some of the Popes,
such as Nicholas V., became its ardent and powerful pro-
tectors.
Yet, as Pastor says: "To make the promotion of the
Renaissance by the Holy See a matter of indiscriminate re-
proach, betrays total ignorance of the subject. For deep and
widespread as was the intellectual movement excited by the
resuscitation of the antique, it involved no serious danger to
Christian civilization but rather was an accession of new
activity and energy, as long as the unity and purity of the
Christian faith was maintained unimpaired under the author-
ity of the Church and her head. If in later days, in conse-
quence of the undue influence obtained by the heathen
Renaissance, a very different development ensued, if the intel-
lectual wealth won by the revived study of the past was turned
to evil purpose, Nicholas V., whose motives were of the highest
and purest, cannot be held responsible. On the contrary, it
is to the glory of the Papacy that, even in regard to the great
Renaissance movement, it manifested that magnanimous and
all-embracing comprehensiveness which is a portion, of its
inheritance. As long as dogma was untouched, Nicholas V.
and his like-minded successors allowed the movement the
most ample scope; the founder of the Vatican Library had no
foreboding of the mischief which the satire of the Humanists
was preparing. The whole tenor of his pure life testifies that
his words proceeded from an upright heart when he earnestly
exhorted the Cardinals assembled around his deathbed to
follow the path he had chosen in laboring for the welfare of
the Church — the Bark of Peter which by the wonderful guic[-
ance of God has ever been delivered out of all storms.'*
It must be said that as regards the relation of the Popes
to the Italian Renaissance most confused and false ideas
obtain. There is no doubt that some of the Popes extended
too much indulgence to the men of the Renaissance movement,
but had the Church crushed out the Humanistic movement,
what a chapter would have been written by the very same pens
that now criticize the Popes for their undue leaning and
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leniency to these Humanists, charging the Church with the old
calumny of crushing and strangling every intellectual move-
ment among the people.
There is no doubt that there were worldly and political
Popes in those days of the Renaissance but, because of this,
there is no need on the part of historians to misrepresent facts
and give no credit to the successors of St Peter who, wearing
the tiara in stormy and difficult times when political and moral
confusion reigned in well-nigh every quarter of Europe, directed
the ark of Peter 'neath the darkest skies till it, at last, found a
haven of shelter on the shoreii of better and happier and more
peaceful days. Many historians of the Italian Renaissance
go so far as to claim that the paganism of the Renaissance un-
der Pope Leo X. reached the Papal Chair itself, and that this
Pope was a Christian neither in morals nor doctrine. Noth-
ing could be further from the truth. Leo X. was of unimpeach-
able morality. Nor are there any grounds for saying that he
lacked faith.
As Monsignor Baudrillart maintains, it is the historian's
first duty to distinguish periods and to avoid confusing epochs.
For instance, in the first half of the fifteenth century, from In-
nocent VIII. to Nicholas V., Humanism had as yet borne no
fruit; there was merely the revival of letters. Though certain
individuals were, from the beginning, of almost pagan morals
and intellectual leanings, there were, on the other hand, many
Christian Humanists, therefore Humanism in itself cannot be
blamed for the utter demoralization of certain of its follow-
ers. The Popes of this epoch can be reproached only with
having shown undue indulgence towards men who, outside
their literary talent, deserved no esteem. They, perhaps,
would have done better had they been more scrupulous.
Yet was it not Pope Leo X., the very incarnation of
the Renaissance, who at the Council of Lateran, in 1513, ener-
getically condenmed all the false teaching that had crept into
men's minds concerning the soul, its nature and immortality?
Unfortunately there is a conmion impression that the dan-
gerous tendencies of the Renaissance were not recognized by
the Church. This is entirely erroneous. There were ever men
in the Church who raised their voices against the deadly poison
of the false Humanism. The great Dominican preacher
Giovanni Dominici, who enjoyed the favor of Pope Innocent
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VIL and was raised to the purple by Gregory XIII., in his cele-
brated Treatise on the Order and Discipline of Family Life,
written very early in the fifteenth century, denounces, with all
the energy of his ardent nature, "the system which lets youth and
even childhood become heathen rather than Christian; which
teaches the name of Jupiter and Saturn, of Venus and Cybele
rather than those of God the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost; which poisons minds that are still tender and powerless
by sacrifice to the false gods and brings up wayward nature in
the lap of unbelief.**
What, then, is our judgment as to what was the attitude of
the Catholic Church toward the Italian Renaissance? It is
simply this : The Church, with Clement of Alexandria, looked
upon the learning of the ancients, as far as it contains good, as
not to be considered heathen but a gift of Grod, and she showed
herself to be in the Middle Ages, as she shows herself to be
today, the patroness of all intellectual progress, the protectress
of all true culture and civilization. Sometimes, it is true, the
Popes, in their enthusiasm for the New Learning and art, over-
looked or underestimated the perils which threatened the in-
terests of religion from the side of the heathen and revolu-
tionary Renaissance. Nor did all the Popes of the Renais-
sance regard this great movement in the same light or with the
same mind. Human vision has its degrees of certainty and
judgment. In temporal matters, neither the Popes of the Mid-
dle Ages nor the Popes of modern times have claimed infal-
libility. The Italian Renaissance was of the world. Only when
it threatened to destroy souls, did it, or could it, become essen-
tially an afi'air of the Church.
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THE CHAPLAIN'S STORY.
Letters from France of a Knight of Columbus Chaplain.
edited by i. t. martin.
The Western Front.
INGE may last letter to you, we have been in the
thick of the fight, are still in it, and don't know
when we will come out. I have been sleeping
anywhere I could find a place to lay my head —
in torrents of rain and in the cold. I got sepa-
rated from my baggage at the start, and have not been out of
my uniform for ten days.
The morning the big drive started I was in a little tent just
back of No Man's Land. I had walked fourteen miles, in rain
and mud, trying to locate my organization. I was '' all in,'* wet
to the skin, foot-sore and no hope of a change of clothing. I
fell into a fitful slumber, when all of a sudden a terrific noise
shook my tent. The high-powered guns seemed to have gone
mad.
The next morning it was still raining. I walked to the
next town. Never before have I seen so much traffic on one
muddy road, nor have I ever seen the efficiency of the United
States Grovernment better demonstrated than it has been dur-
ing the past ten days. I reached the town in time to see the
German prisoners come in. They came in squads, varying
from thirty to one hundred and fifty men. Their faces showed
plainly that they felt relieved — ^glad to be alive — and they ex-
pressed it in word and gesture.
As we marched, we passed through several towns, and
each told an eloquent story of German destructiveness. Not a
building stood intact, and it was pitiful to see the deserted
dwellings that once had housed happy families. God only
knows where the children are that laughed and sang around
the now demolished firesides. As we left the last town up this
way, we met a group of French civilians who had been held
prisoners for four long years. Their faces were careworn and
wrinkled, and the fire had gone out of their eyes. When they
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612 THE CHAPLAIirS STORY [Feb.,
smiled, they smOed only with their lips — ^they had been four
years in a literal hell.
To make a long story short, we completed the drive, and
we kept the enemy running towards Germany faster than they
ever ran before. Oh, it is great, and this view makes up for
long waiting, sacrifice and hardship. The French now realize
the wonderful fighting qualities of the American soldier, and
the Germans feel it
My tent is pitched beside a wood. There are thousands of
men and horses scattered here and there, and ever a roar, as
of nearby thunder, in my ears. From above come the detest-
able aerial bombs. Last night one dropped within one hun-
dred feet of my tent, and made a hole five feet deep and six feet
wide. I have seen many battles in the air. Our long range
guns roar all night long, and every shot means destruction to
the enemy lines.
The other night was a bright one for the boys here. I had
the good fortune to receive a consignment of goods from the
Knights of Columbus. It consisted of cigarettes, chewing to-
bacco, smoking tobacco, writing paper, envelopes, pencils and
last but not least, good old American chocolates. I lined the
boys up and played the r61e of Santa Glaus, and you may be
sure they expressed their gratitude for the luxuries. Within
the next few days, I am going again to the nearest K. of C. head-
quarters — I'll manage to get there, somehow — and will try to
get some more luxuries, so that the boys all over the brigade
may share in the treat
I am living the life of a soldier, eating their food, sleeping
in their quarters, and trying to be all things to all men. There
are hardships to bear, of course, but I have learned to forget
them, and to look forward to the happy denouement when the
boys will proudly march into Berlin. I want to be right there
at the finish, when the Stars and Stripes are raised in victory,
at the dawn of a victorious peace.
For the past two nights I have been dodging shells and
getting back to the old practice of sliding the bases. Early
Sunday morning I was sleeping in my tent when a shell
dropped about five yards away. There must have been many
fervent prayers said for me that night, for the shell did not
explode. It was what we call a ** dud " — a shell with a defec-
tive fuse.
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Being under shell fire is the most terrible ordeal any man
can ever go through. The shell comes whistling through the
air with the most menacing and blood-curdling music that
mortal ear can hear» and then, heaven help you if it bursts
near you. The men fall on their faces when under shell fire,
because when the shell bursts the fragments have less chance
of getting you. I think we fell flat forty times while seeking
shelter. It was three o'clock in the morning when we left the
battery camp, and six when we returned. One man was dead
and another mortally wounded. It was a terrible night, but,
notwithstanding, I offered Mass in the woods, as planned, at
ten the next morning. In the heart of the woods, where we
were shelled during the night, the carpenter built an altar be-
side a great tree, and I offered the Mass with the most atten-
tive and devout congregation of my life. The trees came to-
gether overhead, making an arch like that of a great cathe-
dral.
When Mass was over, we had burial services for our f aUen
companions, and in the little cemetery close by we laid them
to rest in the sheltered comer where the children of France lie
sleeping: Just the same sad music, the long, tearful notes in
the music of ** Taps,** the firing of the volley; the salute to their
dead comrades — and all is over!
The boys felt the leave-taking of their comrades, and in
their hearts I am sure they echoed my prayer:
** Not all who heard the clarion call at mom are with us now,
for many a fellow man-at-arms has fought this day his * last,
dim, wierd battle of the west' God rest their soldier hearts.
** O Jesus, our hearts are full, for the War is hard and short
rest comes with the quiet of the night Here, Lord, we kneel
beneath the flickering rays of the tiny altar light and cast our-
selves before You, as soldiers bivouacking for the night. Taps*
has sounded, Christ my Captain, and on bended knee Your
soldier, wearied with the warfare of the day, asks pardon for
the many times he has fallen since reveille. Lord Jesus, at
times we have lowered our banner; at times we have failed to
front the foe, but ahl thanks to You, we have never lost our
flag, never suffered it to be trampled in the dust. And now
evening is come. Tarry hard by us, dear Lord, like the valiant
General guard Your sleeping host, ' for the night cometh when
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814 THE CHAPLAIN'S STORY [Feb.,
no man can work.' Guard us until another morrow lights us
to new battle for Your sacred Name:
' When the sun ascends each day —
When it sinks» and day is o'er —
Stay with me, good Jesus, stay —
Dwell with me forevermore.' "
We have been hiking now for two whole nights, from dark
to dawn and having irregular meals, sometimes, owing to un-
avoidable circumstances, none at all. But the spirit of the
lads is high, and that never-say-die spirit will not down.
Imagine putting one foot ahead of the other in the dark, for
thirty-five kilometers, and then going to sleep on an empty
stomach. But these clouds blow away, and when mess call is
sounded, the soldier is standing in line, with his mess kit, wear-
ing a smile that won't come off — eager for another plunge at the
enemy. This division, I believe, is the hardest worked and the
greatest division in the American Expeditionary Forces. It
has never had a rest, and now that the end is in sight, the
men do not desire it. They have been in every scrap from the
beginning, and now none of us want to be relieved, with the
end in sight.
It is a great division of wonderful soldiers, and how the
French loye the "Rainbow." I have been with the men, in
their tents and in their dug-outs and sheds, and have learned
to sleep anywhere, in all kinds of places, under all sorts of
conditions. I generally locate a creek somewhere nearby,
where I can enjoy the luxury of a bath, and the rest matters
mue.
This morning it is raining and everything is soggy and
muddy. The sup is trying to work its way through the clouds
but, thus far, the effort has been in vain. I offered Mass this
morning for the 149th Field Artillery, an Illinois organization,
and was delighted with the work of the morning. The camp
is situated about three kilometers from ours, and as they have
no Catholic Chaplain, I am also attending the regiment. I
celebrated Mass in an old building that was used as a sort of a
recreation hall by the Germans, during the days when they
were masters here. I hadn't given the boys much notice, but
the way they responded was one of the most consoling of
my many consoling experiences on the western front. I heard
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confessions for two hours before Mass, and when Mass began,
the hall was crowded to the doors, every man there receiving
Holy Communion. I had to return here as soon as Mass was
over, because my own regiment was expecting Mass at ten-
thirty.
This is one of the things most noticeable on the western
front — that religion, in the face of danger, is absolutely neces-
sary, and that men who have none and are desirous of finding
something to which they can cling, invariably turn to the Cath-
olic Church for spiritual comfort
The Daring Ru)ER of the Air.
We have been constantly on the move, since I wrote to
you a few days ago, and the weather has been bitterly cold
at night and in the early morning. In my wanderings I have
traveled through some of the most desolate country that the
eye of man has ever seen, desolate not by nature, but by the
Ore of artillery and the fumes of gas. I know a forest that is
absolutely shorn, not a tree standing with its own foliage:
acres of green, stark woods — ^where skeletons raise their naked
arms to heaven as if in protest to the Author of nature and
beauty. I have seen towns dismantled and destroyed, leveled
to the very curbing of the sidewalks, and I have seen more
shell holes on this journey than anywhere else in all France.
But, saddest of all to me, are the silent, deserted villages that
dot the country side.
I am writing this in the naked woods, sitting beside a fire
and watching the dying embers with a '"loneliness akin to
pain." What queer pranks our imagination plays upon us, and
what strange dreams come to us when we are surrounded by
desolation. You know how I love the great out-of-doors, lit
up by the lights of heaven — the sun, the moon, and stars — and
how in my Oregon home I went to sleep, caressed by the
zephers of the land that God has so richly endowed. There
have been, and are now, however, nights when the out-of-doors
is terrible and when my soul shrinks from the demons that
kill the love for the open spaces. For many nights, I have
been sleeping in a grave fifty feet deep, where the sun never
shines, and where the breezes of heaven enter only upon
occasion. There are thirteen others sleeping there with me,
in that narrow little corridor in the bowels of the earth. The
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616 THE CHAPLAIN'S STORY [Feb.,
first night I felt that I was gomg to smother, but it was a case
of choosing the less of two evils. Up above there was the
hungry cry of shell fire, and death lurked very near. Down
below there was the dark, grim silence, broken only by the
far-sounding detonations of heavy artillery and the scurry-
ing of myriads of rats. Up above there was the panic of
shock; down below a sort of despairing solitude. It was a case
of out of Scylla into Charybdis, but, with all its disadvantages,
and they are legion, I like Charybdis better. There it must be
a direct hit and a very large shell.
These days there are many rumors in the air, and some
believe that our boys will eat their Christmas dinner at home.
War is a tiresome and a terrible thing, but I keep my face
ever turned to the bright side and do not allow the grim
shadows to darken the light of hope, or mar the happy antici-
pation of better things. It is the only way to face the realities
that otherwise would wither and destroy. The good soldier is
always looking forward, and it is this hope that keeps him
happy, even in the midst of the terrors of war.
Just after I had written the address on the last letter I
sent to you, I had what might be called a grandstand seat at
one of the greatest spectacles I have ever seen. My letter was
written beside the dying embers of an open fire, the sky was
blue, without a cloud, except the tiny black and white clouds
formed by the explosion of the anti-aircraft shells which our
guns were firing on the German planes. On and off, through-
out the afternoon, the German planes were endeavoring to
break through our lines, but their efforts were fruitless. We
had several planes up, and I spent part of the afternoon watch-
ing their manoeuvres. Down beneath our planes, and almost
directly over my head, were three of our observation balloons,
one of them high in the air, the others close to the ground.
Just before sunset I distinctly heard the purring of a German
plane, but I could not see it. In an instant it came whirring
over the gnarled, withered tree tops, right at the balloon
nearest to me. An observation balloon is a very large bag of
rubberized silk, about one hundred feet long, and is inflated
with a gas lighter than air. The observer sits in a basket,
about twenty feet beneath the balloon. It is used entirely for
observation purposes, and is fastened to a coil of wire which
is unrolled from an automobile below. Such a balloon can
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ascend very high, its movements controlled by the automobile.
Sometimes two observers sit in the basket, carrying powerful
glasses which scan the country for miles around.
As the German plane came into view, I noticed it was fly-
ing very low, and, for a moment, I thought it was one of our
own planes, as it carried the American colors. But I was not
long in doubt, for the flyer flew directly over the observation
balloon, sent a charge of liquid fire into it, and in a moment,
the thing was a mass of flames. A second before he fired, both
observers jumped, with then: parachutes of white silk around
their necks. It was a beautiful sight, though a terrible one.
There was the setting sun, like a ball of fire, the balloon in a
shower of flame, the two observers, like great white sea gulls,
hastening to earth, the ** flying Dutchman " hurrying back to
his lines followed by three Allied planes.^ Both observers
landed safely — one of them, a first lieutenant aeronaut — ^not
more than fifty yards from me. His parachute became en-
tangled in a withered stump of a tree, but he was himself un-
injured. Then I turned my attention to the plane of the
Boche. He was flying fast when, suddenly, a well-directed
shot from one of our planes went through his machine, and
machine, pilot and observer were instantly dashed to the
ground, shattered to pieces. The daring rider of the air had
taken his chance and lost He had paid the supreme penalty,
made the last sacrifice.
FiGURETA — ^A Soldier of Fortune.
We are in an old French cantonment, very near Some-
where. It is seven in the evening, as cold as ice, and getting
darker all the time. I think the nights are darker here than
anjrwhere else in the world. We are well camouflaged, and
have candles lighted throughout the camp. Some of the boys
are writing letters home, some are playing a game of poker
to while away the time, and others are shooting '^crap** or
dice — ^the great pastime of the soldier. A group of the boys
are singing, a few are reading, and lots of them are sleeping,
and I mean actually sleeping, although you might think sleep
an impossibility in such a place, amid such an environment
Be assured of this — a soldier can sleep any place, any time. He
can lie down in the mud and rain and, wet and weary, glide
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calmly and peacefully into the arms of Morpheus, and arise
in the morning with a song and work all day as though he had
slept the previous night in a luxurious sleeping room, sur-
rounded with all the comforts of home.
The medley of sound and laughter is incessant: "Come
Seven— Five Francs Better— I'll Raise You Ten— * There's a
Long, Lone Trail Awinding *— * Tis a Baby's Prayer !at
Twilight • "—interspersed with questions like this: **I wonder
will we eat Christmas dinner in God's country? Will the Rain-
bow Division ever get a rest?" But all this disturbs not the
tranquil calm and the dreamless sleep of the weary soldier.
There are one hundred and fifty sleeping here, in double
rows of bunks. We are pretty closely packed — but, consider-
ing the biting chill of the night, I think that is something to be
thankful for, rather than otherwise. Just now the lights were
ordered out, because of the distant humming of a hostile plane,
and nothing could be seen about the camp, save the red, lighted
tips of many cigarettes. No sound could be heard save the
peculiar purring of the Boche plane, which soon retired, thanks
to the never tiring vigilance of our anti-aircraft guns.
One of the lads here — a youthful Portuguese — ^is a ver-
itable soldier of fortune, Figureta by name. He is not yet
quite fifteen years of age, though he has been a full year and
a half in the army. Figureta is the pet of the regiment, and
generally does exactly as he pleases. For a while he was an
orderly to a good-natured Captain, but lost his job, on account
of his care-free manner. He unrolled his blankets and slept
when and where he pleased, and when the orderly was needed
somewhere he was usually nowhere!
Withal, he is a cheery lad, the life of the company.
Whether school keeps or not, concerns him but little. His one
objective seems to be the finding of a suitable place to sleep,
and discovering the hiding place of stray luxuries. One day,
after a weary march, the boys came upon Figureta, seated be-
side a company of engineers whose duty it was to repair the
aeroplanes — a sort of a salvage crew they were. In some man-
ner, the engineers came upon an abandoned plane, and un-
earthed a feast of " Boston Baked," and some real apple pies.
The treat had scarcely been spread brfore the boys, however,
before Figureta, with his usual good luck, appeared upon the
scene. You can imagine the dismay of the rest of the com-
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pany, as Figureta, cleaning up the dihris, fell once more into
the ranks.
The life of the little fellow seems almost charmed. Go
where he will, he comes out unscratched and unscathed, un-
afraid and never tired of the fearful strain of war.
The Desecrated Churches.
It is raining, and I have just had my breakfast-— black
coffee, com and stew eaten in the rain. We are still on the
front, and no immediate prospect of being relieved.
Yesterday,^ I saddled a horse and went out to get a good
view of this battle-scared land of nbrthern France. I started
out toward the mountain towards which the eyes of the world
have been directed the past four years. Every field I crossed
was filled with shell holes, each one deep enough to bury a
Ford car. Through the woods I wandered in a maze of
natural and artificial entanglements — all intended to lead our
army into the traps of the enemy. In the heart of the woods
were moss-covered cottages, often with flower boxes outside,
German names marking their location. This spot had been
the home of the German forces for four years, and mound
after mound told the story of their dead. Some were white,
marking the graves of our boys, the rest were the graves of the
Germans. After roving through the woods for an hour or so,
I came to an open space, then through a valley with a little
town at its foot. It was once a town, with happy, contented
people, but now, alas, it is but a poor riddled body, with great
gaping wounds.
I climbed the hill which the Germans had thought im-
pregnable, but which our boys took in thirty-five minutes!
Never have I seen anything to equal the fortifications, and the
elaborate preparations for a long siege. Long, deep passages
led into trenches one hundred feet deep, many of them fur-
nished more like a modern drawing-room than a trench.
French tapestries, handsome mirrors, rich carpets, and in some
instances pianos decorated the underground homes of the
German marauders. Each piece of furniture was, no doubt,
once a treasure, an heirloom of some deserted home of north-
ern France. Inniunerable observation posts dotted the moun-
tain side, and mounted batteries which swept the plains below,
informed the enemy of every move that was made in the adja-
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cent territory. Standing on the highest point, I could count
twelve towns in the circle surrounding the mountain.
Since I have been in this section of France, I have trav-
ersed one of the greatest, if not the greatest, battlefield in
Europe. Every town and hamlet I visited was desolate. The
churches were but skeletons, through which the winds of
heaven sung solenm requiems. The towns and the churches
are now ours, thank God, and children will again play in the
village streets. If there is anything in this wide world as sad as
a desecrated church, I have yet to see it There is the same hal-
lowed silence when one enters, the same majesty of expres-
sion, the hush, as though the angels feared to whisper. A look
at the altar shows that the light of heaven is no longer there,
there is gloom in the sanctuary, for the Host has departed and
the guests, bleeding and torn, have been scattered to the four
winds of heaven. The crucifix, in every instance, hangs in its
wonted place, intact, and thus far I have not seen a statue of
the Sacred Heart mutilated.
I remained in one of these desolate churches for a long
time, wandering around the sanctuary and examining the
altar. The vestments were all there, the altar stone was set in
the marble altar, the altar cards were upon the table. The
great, big, red letters of the Consecration seemed, to my blurred
vision, to reach up to the tabernacle door. Oh, how I longed
to stay, and were it possible, how I would have enjoyed the
privilege of offering the Holy Sacrifice as a reparation to the
Sacred Heart.
The Final Drive.
My last letter had scarcely started on its journey to you,
when movement orders reached us, and once more we started
north, following closely on the heels of the retreating
forces of the Kaiser, ever drawing nearer to the goal of victory.
It was a cold night and the mists hung low over the tree tops of
Argonne. There were thousands of troops on the road— in-
fantry, artillery — and the various organizations of our great
American army were packed together like the proverbial
sardines. The roads were all but impassable and the trans-
port of troops would have been utterly impossible, were it not
for the great work of the engineers, who work day and night, in
fair weather and in foul, building roads and bridges, mending
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the broken arches on the bridges that have been unable to bear
up under the weight, or filling a shell crater here and there.
The engineers are by no means exempt from the immediate dis-
comforts of war, and when the history of the great struggle is
written, I hope the historian will do full justice to the United
States Corps of Engineers.
The night we started to march was as dark as pitch. That
better than anything else describes the nights of northern
France. Only the sharp, staccato sound of the cracking of
whips, and the cries of the drivers as they urged their already
tired horses and mules to still greater exertion, broke the still-
ness of the black night. On and on, until men and horses seemed
to move as though walking in their sleep. At two o'clock, as we
neared a cross-road — ^four roads branched from the centre of
the cross — there came upon us a peculiar, intense strain. Our
drooping eyelids lifted suddenly, and we became galvanized
as though an electric current had passed directly through our
batteries! We were awake — and for a half hour or more we
heard the crash of high explosives. But the danger was not
imminent, and we gave to the roar of the guns only the atten-
tion of a tired brain in an exhausted body.
We were approaching the danger belt, however, and were
soon to march through bursting shells. The occasional
snatches of conversation died away and an ominous silence
hung over the long column. Ever and anon a screaming shell
would crash in the fields on either side of us, and it seemed as
though we were hours getting by that cross-road, so tense were
the moments, and so anxious the men — ^with a vision of home
flashing over their hearts and memories 1 We were just about
out of danger, when a shell fell in our midst, killing two of
our men, wounding a third, and leaving five dead horses to
mark the trail of the shot A young lieutenant was rendered
unconscious by the bursting shell, and it was two hours before
he regained consciousness. His comrades cared for him as
tenderly as the circumstances would permit and the next day
the gallant young fellow was about as usual, as though noth-
ing had happened in the interim.
We reached our destination that eventful night, just be-
fore dawn, pitched our tents and went to sleep to the music
of a thousand guns. The next night we were roused from our
slumbers to seek shelter in shell holes. We had learned that
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622 THE CHAPLAIN'S STORY [Feb^
it was better to lie in a shell hole when the enemy is on the job
with his artillery, than to take chances in the open. Through-
out the night there was no sleep, and the biting cold from the
Meuse seemed to enter into the very marrow of our bones.
At seven that morning I had the influenza, and at one in
the afternoon bade farewell to the boys, and was driven in an
ambulance, twenty-five kilometers, to an evacuation hospital.
There, for two days, I was surrounded by gas cases and pneu-
monia in all its stages. As I rode from the front, I saw on the
side of the road a boy whom I used to know in Oregon. His
face was white with the pallor of death and on his forehead
was the wicked mark of a machine-gun bullet. Never again
for him the joy of the welcome of father and mother, waiting
for his return in their far-away home on the peaceful Wil-
lamette. It is only when war stretches out its cruel hands and
kills those who are near and dear to us, that we fully realize its
horrors, and oh, what myriads of stalwart manhood strewed
the dismal mud patches in the woods of the Argonne!
After a few days in the hospital I managed, somehow, to
reach Paris, and there, for two weeks, I looked into an open
grave, trying to reconcile myself to the thought of filling an
unmarked grave on the soil of France. But the good God, Who
watches over all, was good to me. He brought me to a good
hospital, and gave me, as a nurse, an Irish girl from Mayo —
the most competent nurse in the hospital — ^who was fully de-
termined that I should get welL
There I think it was only my intense longing for home that
buoyed me up, and enabled me to attend to the thousand de-
tails that beset the traveler in war time. My passport finally
visaed, I waited for the signing of the armistice.
Farev^^blu
The good ship Rochambeau left Bordeaux this morning,
and I am once more on board, homeward bound. It all seems
like a dream to me — a dream of seventeen weeks duration,
variegated with the lights and shadows of suffering and vic-
torious France. A dream that began in the crowded, sorrow-
stricken wards of the hospitals of Paris, and came to an end
with the gay and festive celebrations of Bordeaux on the morn-
ing of victory. A dream that takes one through the whole
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gamut of human emotions — ^through a vale of tears into
paroxysms of laughter, from resignation and determination,
to despair. A dream that gathers within its shadowy limits,
the vineyards of Clermont-Ferrand, with the quiet and repose
of its old rambling streets, and entwines them, almost uncon-
sciously, with the war horrors of St. Mihiel and the Argonne
Forest on the battle-scared frontiers of the north. A dream,
in truth, that is red with the stem reality of human blood and
suffering, and golden with the gold of self-sacrifice and victory.
A dream, sad and terrible as were its pictures, that shall ever
be classed among my beautiful dreams, etched indelibly upon
my heart.
What a change from the war mad Argonne, with its babel
of roaring guns, belching forth death, to the gay streets of
Bordeaux, with its loud huzzas, its songs and its flowers. 1
had expected the signing of the armistice and had hastened to
catch the boat at Bordeaux before the rush for home. 1 knew,
from the prompting of my own heart, the exile's longing for
home. I reached Bordeaux on Friday night, and for four
days roamed around the streets of the quaint old city on the
banks of the Garonne. Saturday and Sunday were days of
expectation, every one scanning the newspapers in the hope
of reading therein the good news of the beginning of the end.
I visited the Cathedral of St. Andre and noted its old
Gothic architecture, built in the days when Bordeaux was noth-
ing more than a village, and the great ships from far away
moored not at its wharf. Notre Dame, sitting majestically and
looking down calmly on the AUde de Tourney, and St. Michel,
mecca of the sightseer because of the mummies of the long
ago that sit beside the walls of its annex — ^how peaceful they
seemed in the twilight!
It was mid-afternoon when I retraced my steps to the
hotel. Although nothing definite had yet been published, I
learned of the signing of the armistice on the way thither. The
streets were unchanged, the same crowds, the same buying
and selling. I mentioned the good news to some French peo-
ple, but they were slow to believe — unconvinced of their good
fortune. Four years of war is a long time, and they could not,
in a moment, shake off the borrows of the past.
I walked on, down the Rue St. Catherine to the Knights
of Columbus headquarters, and as I drew near the glad news
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624 THE CHAPLAIirS STORY [Feb^
of the signing of the armistice was shouted out by hundreds.
The papers containing the joyful tidings were in the hands of
the eager populace. They gazed anxiously at the glaring head-
lines and, for a moment, all was still. A sort of stunned silence
seemed to enthrall them. The great goal for which they had
long prayed had been reached, and finally the windows of their
memory opened. A long, loud huzza rent the air, caps were
soaring on high, men danced and hugged each other, while
women wept They were tears of joy, mayhap, but who shall
say that there were not also tears of sorrow, for even in her
hour of triumph France could see the graves of her soldier
dead.
Marie, the French maid of the Knights of Columbus
recreation room, was standing in the doorway, arms akimbo,
humming the ^ Marseillaise.**
"Marie,** I said, " tonight you will celebrate — ^you will go
zig-zag? **
*• Ah, non monsieur/' she answered, "zig-zag mon coeur, pas
zig-zag ma tite — ^my heart will have a great time, my head will
remain steady!** — ^wise maid of France!
Just then I was awakened to the realities of peace. A
great shower of confetti caught me in the face, almost blind-
ing me. The crowds were beginning to celebrate. They blocked
the streets for miles around, and there was no alternative but
to be whirled away in the happy maelstrom. Flowers were
showered from the balconies of the Rue St. Catherine as the gay
throng marched to the AUie de Tourney, the centre of Bor-
deaux, where the American band opened the festivities by ren-
dering the national anthems of France and America.
The crowd went mad with joy. Breaking up into lesser
crowds, they marched around the statue of Gambetta singing:
" On les a — on les a — we got them — ^we got them! ** Gambetta,
who had fought so hard to keep Alsace-Lorraine in the days
that are gone, looked down from his stone height on the happy
populace. He must have been gratified to know that France
was coming into her own at last: that the success which had
been denied to him in 1871, had been achieved by his children
ml91&
As the crowds marched around the statue, they threw
flowers at the feet of Gambetta until finally, hilarious with joy,
two wounded soldiers were raised on high, to place garlands of
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roses and chrysanthemums on the brow of the soldier whose
valor France had never forgotten.
Throughout the night, the merry making continued. Music,
song and speeches were the order of the night, as France drank
her cup of happiness to its dregs. Fain would I have remained
with them, but I had to go on board the boat that was ready
to carry me to my ** land o? heart's desire." Time and the tide
wait for no man, but I was compelled to stop a hundred times,
on my way to the wharf, to shake the hand of the French sol-
diers who greeted me as ** Comrade,** and sometimes empha-
sized their camaraderie by kissing me on both cheeks. One
could stand more, knowing that the hideous nightmare of the
past four years was now at an end.
It was midnight when I crossed the gangway to the
Rochcanbeau. She had carried me to France in the days that
were dark with the loud alarms of war, and now in the sun-
light of peace she will carry me safely home again. The next
morning, we pulled anchor and bade farewell to France. With
faces turned towards the Statue of Liberty, we sailed away
from the Garonne into the blue waters of the wide Atlantic —
homeward bound. As the shores of France faded away before
the friendly rays of the sun, my thoughts went out to God in
the homing instinct of my heart
And where we love is home.
Home which our feet may leave
But not our hearts.
[concluded.]
woIm cviii.*— 40
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SIR GALAHAD'S VISION OF THE VIRGIN.
BY J. CORSON MILLER.
'Tis on the holy night of Candlemas,
A merry moon spills silver on the snow.
And stately pines, like sentinels a-row.
Behold a rider pass.
Sir Galahad, a noble knight and true.
Whose gallant blade is ever raised on high
To shield weak Womanhood in chivalry,
Springs suddenly to view.
His casque of gold strikes fire, and his eyes
Burn with a mystic light — ^in all the land
Rides never knight more fit to hold command
In desperate emprise.
Yet 'tis the night of Candlemas — ^he goes
On peaceful quest, yon chapel summons him.
Where watchful tapers flame, and Seraphim
Are sculptured in repose.
He falleth on his knees — far, far the world
Recedes, and Sin, and every evil thing
That vexes men, when lo! a fluttering
Like to great sails unfurled.
He glanceth up—'' O Ladye, grasp mine arm.
Strengthen mine eyes that gladden now to tears.
Thou stately Lily of the Starry Spheres,
Bright Beacon in the Storm! "
She stands — our Blessed Lady — ^like the sun,
The while a diamond light moves slowly 'round.
Wherein a Seraph circles without sound.
Calm as oblivion.
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The Virgin speaks: "Unconquerable Knight,
Strong as the oak, for that thy heart is pure.
Keep thou steadfast, let naught of earth allure
To mar thee in my sight"
What loving look the Virgin casts on him,
It seemeth his lost childhood comes again,
Bringing a mother's care, and then — ^ah! then
The dazzling rafters swim. . . .
Viols and harps breathe music 'mid a throng
Of swaying lilies; ruddy roses stir.
While ceaselessly a mighty thurif er
Blends with an Angel's song.
Let us rejoice, Madonna of the Morn,
Let us rejoice. Thou Lily of the Night,
With happy voice.
Let us rejoice . . .
Thou Jewel of the Crown of Kings,
Thou Bloom of God's imaginings.
With tireless voice
Let us rejoice.
Rejoice. . . .
The Vision fades, the North Wind's trumpet-blast
Is borne unto his sad and startled ears,
And o'er his eyes there falls a mist like tears.
Because the dream is past.
He mounts his fiery steed, the ancient stars
Smile down as swift he skims the lonely plain.
Sir Galahad, the Pure — devoid of stain.
Is leaving for the wars.
4c ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
'Tis on the holy night of Candlemas,
A merry moon spills silver on the snow.
The stately pines, like sentinels a-row.
Behold a rider pass.
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JOHN RUSKIN— ECONOMIST.
BY ATI.ee F. X. DEVEREUX, S.J.
I HE point of view from which this article inspects
the Economics of John Ruskin is fixed purposely
to disclose certain personal and historical cir-
cumstances of the writer and his works, but no
more of the latter than its roots, its first prin-
ciples. For it must be admitted at the outset, that some poli-
cies that Ruskin elaborated from his premises are unsound —
in the case of State functions, even pernicious. These errors
are accounted for partly by his own apology, that ** my powers
of thought are all purely mathematical, seiziiig ultimate prin-
ciples only, never accidents;" partly by the excuse that he
gives elsewhere, that *' in a science dealing with so subtle ele-
ments as those of human nature, it is only possible to answer
for the final truth of principles, not for the direct success of
plans;" but chiefly by his overmastering belief in Plato,
especially the ^' Republic." This admission once made, it be-
comes plain that in some vital points of economics, more par-
ticularly in Social Economics, Ruskin did ^'infallibly reason
out the final law;" and further, that it is important for our civil
welfare that we keep in constant mind these ultimate prin-
ciples. It is also becoming to the centenary of Ruskin's birth,
that, disregarding the evil that lives after him, we disinter the
good from his bones, purely to praise it.
Fortunately, to do so in these days is a far less uncertain
undertaking than it would have been in Victorian times. It
was then the vogue to rebuke Ruskin for venturing into
Economics. Writing the epilogue to Arrows of the Chase in
1880, he could say of his efforts: '" No man, oftener than I, has
had cast in his teeth the favorite adage of the insolent and the
feeble, ' ne sutor.'" England agreed with Mr. Whistler, the
artist, about Mr. Ruskin, that ^ as Master of English Litera-
ture, he has a right to his laurels;" and with Mr. Saintsbury,
the scholar, that ** whereas from the thirties to the sixties it
was almost impossible to buy anything new that was not com-
placently hideous, from the sixties to ttie nineties it has always
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been possible to buy something new that was at least graceful
in intention. And this was more the doing of Bfr. Ruskin than
of any one man.** But she did not agree with Bfr. Ruskin about
himself, that "^the aesthetic side, or point, of me, ought to
have remained undeveloped, like the eyes which the Dar-
winians are discovering in the backs of lizards," least of all
with his contention, that Munera Pulveris contained: ** the first
accurate analysis of the laws of political economy which has
been published in England.** She preferred to learn her politi-
cal economy from Adam Smith, who interpreted Quesnay's
Law; from Mill who interpreted Ricardo's Law: both highly
irreligious and inmioral; but not from Ruskin, who inter-
preted to her God's Law, who based his system on "" the pre-
sumably attainable honesty of man;** and who considered
'' the greatest of all economists ** to be the fortifying virtues of
''Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.** So that
what he had written of Carlyle was true of Ruskin: '' Republi-
can and Free-thoughted En^^and ... set the hacks of her litera-
ture to speak evil, grateful to her ears, of the solitary Teacher
who asked her to be brave for the help of Men, and just for the
Love of God.**
Ruskin answered this taunt, ne supra crepidam with due
incisiveness, that it had '' always been forgotten by the speak-
ers, that although the proverb might on some occasions be
wisely spoken by an artist to a cobbler, it could never be
wisely spoken by a cobbler to an artist** And the assumption
was not gratuitous.
In point of mental acumen, Ruskin matched the foremost
English thinkers of his day. Mazzini thought he surpassed
them, even considering Ruskin*s ** the most analytic mind in
Europe.'* *' In which so far as I am acquainted with Europe,"
was Ruskin's droll rejoinder, ** I am myself entirely disposed
to concur." Certainly few English books surpass Ruskin's on
Economics — and none, his letters on the subject — either in
accuracy of original thought, or acuteness in examining the
thought of others. Which points, pertiaps, led Chesterton to
the conclusion that ''it is entirely nonsensical to speak of
Ruskin as a lounging aesthete, who strolled into Economics,
and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact, Ruskin was seldom
so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as when he was talking
Economics."
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630 JOHN RUSKIN— ECONOMIST [Feb.,
In point of mere information^ Ruskin, in consequence of
his travels and scientific researches, all relating him to
economic factors, especially in their elementary condition,
was qualified in this field: as he put it — ^^the multiplicity
of subject, and opposite directions of investigation, which
have so often been alleged against me, as if sources of weak-
ness, are in reality as the multiplied buttresses of the Apse of
Amiens, as secure in allied results as they are opposed in direc-
tion." Perhaps his art-studies formed his highest qualifica-
tion, if, as he claimed, **no exhaustive examination of the
subject was possible to any person unacquainted with the /
value of the products of the highest industries, conmionly
called the *Fine Arts/" These very art-studies taught Rus-.
kin the essential truths, then never even suspected by popular
economists, that things have also an ** intrinsic value," and that
'* the wealth of nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in
ciphers:" the first formula, it would seem, of the '* national
minimum."
In point of morality, Ruskin was also choicely qualified.
" What I am," he writes, "since I take on me the function of
teacher, it is well that the reader should know, as far as I can
tell him. Not an unjust person; not an unkind one; not a false 1
one; a lover of order, labor and peace." Mr. A. C. Benson, in
John Ruskin, A Study in Personality — * confessedly not intended
" to be a flattering portrait," says: " It is then as a personality
and a moralist that we have to regard him; as a man of clear
vision, relentless idealism, and kindling speech." And Mr.
Frederic Harrison, over the admission, "I have not the
shadow of a claim to speak as his disciple, to defend his utter-
ances, or to represent his thoughts," yet wrote in his paper,
Ruskin as Prophet, that "Ruskin had expanded the gospel
of the Eternal Beauties into three hundred exquisite volumes,"
and again in his generous eulogy, Ruskin's Eightieth Birthday:
" Think what we may of this enormous library of print, we
know that every word of it was put forth of set purpose with-
out any hidden aim, utterly without fear, and wholly without
guile; to make the world a little better, to guide, inspire, and
teach men, come what might, scoff as they would, turn from
him as they chose, though they left him alone, a broken old
man crying in the wilderness, with none to hear or to care.
They might think it all utterly vain; we may think much of it
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was in vain; but it was always the very heart's blood of a rare
genius and a noble soul." It should appear, then, that Ruskin
was in every way, in mental stock and moral poise, apt to teach
England Political Economy.
And how sorely she needed just some such teaching!
How sadly true it was, that the age of ** sophisters, economists,
and calculators," which had succeeded chivalry in time, had
suppressed it too in principle! As early as 1770 writing on the
theme
111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, t
Where wealth accumulates and men decay, I
Goldsmith said of her:
Even now the devastation is begun,
And half the business of destruction done.
By 1840, she had completed her ruin. "'Industrial England
lay, in 1842," says the Cambridge History, "in the lowest
trough of its misery." Her condition wrote Carlyle in 1843,
" is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one
of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of
wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in
every kind; yet England is dying of inanition." This the
papers daily verified; now by a story of a "poor bone-picker,
who died upon a dung-hill;" now, "of the paupers in the
Andover Union, gnawing scraps of putrid flesh, and sucking
the marrow from the bones of horses, which they were em-
ployed to crush;" again, "of the famine in Orissa, during
which five hundred thousand, at least, died of starvation in
our British dominion;" or of an official report on England and
Wales of one million five hundred thousand paupers. " Such
instances," as Carlyle wrote of himself, were for Ruskin also,
"like the highest mountain apex emerged into view; under
which was a whole mountain region and land not yet
emerged."
This land terrified Ruskin. In the introduction to the
Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849 he complained: "The
aspect of the years that approach us is as solemn, as it is full of
mystery; and the weight of evil against which we have to con-
tend is increasing like the letting out of water. . . . The blas-
phemies of the earth are sounding louder, and its miseries
heaped heavier every day." Even then he questioned " if, in
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632 JOHN RUSKIN ^ECONOMIST [Feb.,
the midst of the exertion which every good man is called upon
to put forth for their repression or relief, it is lawful to ask for
a thought, for a moment, for a lifting of the finger, in any
direction but that of the immediate and overwhelming need,"
feeling himself, as he said, that it was ** no time for the idleness
of metaphysics, or the entertainments of the arts.** But by 1860
the State-of-England question had so possessed him that all
doubt was absolved, and he determined ** to make it the cen-
tral work of his life to write an exhaustive treatise on Political
Economy.** Alasl it exhausted him.
His work on the subject is contained formally in Unto
This Last Munera Pulveris^ Time and Tide, by ** Weare and
Tyne,** and less formally in A Joy for Even and that curious
^ and characteristic work in eight volumes, Fors Clauigera.
Ruskin himself maintained that his Political Economy was all
involved in the single phrase *' Soldiers of the Ploughshare as
well as Soldiers of the Sword,** and was *'all summed in a
single sentence in the last volume of Modern Painters: " Gov-
ernment and Cooperation are in all things the Laws of Life;
Anarchy and Competition the laws of Death.** Seven years
later he repeated this epitome in the last paragraph to Time
and Tide — "so that,** he writes, "we shall all be soldiers of
either the ploughshare or sword.** Quite a summary! as cryp-
tic as the number of the Beast; yet as expressive as the Pillars of
Enoch; and giving, like the famous sum in the parody, when
once the due additions and subtractions have been made, an
answer, " exactly and perfectly true.**
First of all, the word " Ploughshare ** was intended to con-
vey Ruskin*s idea of the final cause of Political Economy. He
saw clearly what no writer then appears to have surmised, that
the material things of this world were set in one, and only one,
proper relation towards man — "they serve either to sustain
and comfort the body, or exercise rightly the aflfections and
form the intelligence.** From this sure foundation he con-
cluded that the science legislating for the increase and ex-
change of these goods should advance from, not against, this
relation : In other words, that the science, as the goods them-
selves, should provoke life. He writes : " The real science of
Political Economy, which has yet to be distinguished from the
bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astrology
from astronomy, is that which teaches nations to desire and
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labor for the things that lead to life; and which teaches them
to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction." Life,
then, was intended as the consummation of his science — ** life,
including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration " —
^ the happiness and power of the entire human nature, body
and soul." Not ciphers, and then substance 1 But life, first, and
necessarily so. How strange! yet how radically the principle
for all true wealth of nations!
But besides the end or purpose of Political Economy, the
word ** ploughshare " also carried his conception of its true
matter. In fact, his concept of its material cause, of the mat-
ter of the science, led him to the concept of its aim. The ortho-
dox economist, Mr. Mill, had asserted that ''the subject of
Political Economy is wealth," which, he continued, ** consists of i
all useful and agreeable objects, that possess exchangeable
value." Ruskin perceived that the limitation imposed by the
last clause of this definition on the matter of Political Economy
was absolutely wrong in theory, because only too frequently
he had seen how pernicious was its practice. France, in the
possession of some highly-colored lithographs of modem
dances, among which the cancan held a most distinguished
place, was in no true sense wealthier than Venice in the pos-
session of some canvasses of Tintoretto, because, forsooth, those
were in frenzied circulation and exchange, while these were
fixed firmly to some molding, lath and plaster. What he did
see, however, and plainly proved, was that economists,
accountable for the condition of these, two cities, besides refus-
ing to extend the matter of their science to a vast multitude of
objects, more vital even than vast, had failed to comprehend
the true quality of the things which they did admit. *'In
fine," the modern Political Economists have been, without ex-
ception, incapable of apprehending the nature of intrinsic
value at all. He vehemently denied that material goods got
their proper value from the arbitrary estimate of men; and
maintained as vehemently, that they got it from God. The
intrinsic value of a thing was its power to ** avail towards life."
Between these two terms, between life, which was the end,
and the material things, which were the matter, a third ele-
ment intervened : consumption. ** As consumption is the end
and aim of production, so life is the end and aim of consump-
tion." Hence his original and quite sensational principle that
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634 JOHN RUSKIN— ECONOMIST [Feb-,
"' the final object of Political Economy is to get good method
of consumption and great quantity of consumption.**
"Economists," he wrote, "usually speak as if there were no
good in consumption absolute " — a position forced upon them,
no doubt, by their politico-economic notion, that consumption,
lacking value in exchange, lacked potency as well to produce
wealth and was accordingly a negligible quantity; so that, be-
ing intent in reaching wealth, which depended on exchange,
they directed their efiTorts to enliven the latter, namely, to pro-
duce. But Ruskin, having shown the fallacy of their notion
about wealth, showed as well the faultiness of their efforts
toward production. For if wealth was life, its inmiediate
cause was consumption. Conunon sense then first enforced,
not the increase of production, issuing in excited exchange,
but the adjustment of consumption, issuing in vitality.
This seems the place, consequently, to notice Bfr. Ruskin's
attitude toward the then sacrosanct law of Supply and De-
mand. It is well stated in a letter of his in reply to a lecture
delivered by Professor Hodgson in the University of Edin-
burgh. "Permit me," he wrote, "to correct the professor's
expression. I have never * denounced' the principle ex-
pounded by the professor. I have simply stated that no such
principle exists; that no 'law of supply and demand,' as ex-
pounded by Professor Hodgson and modem economists, ever
did or can exist." He challenged and denied the law as ex-
pounded by the modern economists; which, he was told by
theory, regulated production, but he saw in practice only
accomplishing perdition; which though meaning, by its word,
that supply was measured and maintained naturally by de-
mand, he saw, only too frequently and with much heart-scald-
ing, meant, by its works, that demands were forced and fash-
ioned viciously to acconunodate supply. So that, whenever
he was met by the assertion " demand regulates supply," he
answered with the question: "Yes, but what regulates de-
mand?" "Three-fourths of the demands existing in the
word," he claimed, "are romantic; founded on visions,
idealisms, hopes and affections." Hence, he argued, elsewhere,
" there may be all manner of demands, all manner of supplies.
The true political economist regulates these; the fake politi-
cal economist leaves them to be regulated by (not Divine)
Providence . . . for all wise economy, political or domestic,
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1919.] JOHN RUSKIN^ECONOMIST 635
consists in the resolved maintenance of a given relation be-
tween supply and demand, other than the instinctive, or
(directly) natural one." For he did hold that supply and de-
mand were amenable alike to regulation* He had evidence of
it as a fact, sad and ghastly evidence. He contended merely j
for the right regulation. When asked how his principles dif-
fered from the ordinary economist's view of supply and de-
mand, he answered: ** Simply in that the economy I have
taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science which
not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and
supply, but determines what ought to be demanded, and what I
can be supplied."
Indeed *' ought " was the keystone in the arch of Ruskin's
economy. '' Political Economy," the first paragraph in Munera
Pulveris had stated, ** is neither an art nor a science; but a sys-
tem of conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, direct-
ing the arts, and impossible except under certain conditions
of moral culture." Whether he was justified in disallowing
that political economy is a science may be disputed — ^perhaps,
denied. But he was beyond even an approach to a dispute in
asserting that it was possible only when morality had been duly
cultivated. And it signalizes to an eminent degree both the
man and his work, that, at the moment when economists
assumed as the first and self-evident principle of their pro-
fession, that it had nothing whatever to do with moral con-
siderations, he maintained that it had so much to do with them
as to be wholly impossible without them.
Thus far, then, it appears, that Ruskin rectified the con-
cept of both the final and material cause, of the end and the
matter, of Political Economy, by regarding them from a moral J
rather than a mercantile viewpoint. We are prepared, accord-
ingly, to meet with a like treatment of, what for order's sake
may be called the efficient cause: of the men and masters, <
whom Ruskin called upon to be "" Soldiers."
It was once dictated by Dr. Johnson that '" the inseparable
imperfection annexed to all human governments consisted in
not being able to create a sufficient fund of virtue and principle
to carry the laws into due and effectual execution. Wisdom
might plan, but virtue alone could execute." Ruskin agreed
with the sentiment in part — that virtue alone could realize
right government. But he was by polar exactitude opposed to
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636 JOHN RVSKIN— ECONOMIST [Feb.,
thinking that human government was inseparable from such
an imperfection as the incapacity to create a satisfactory
fund of it. Perhaps English Government at the time did suf-
fer this imperfection. Perhaps **the heathen had returned;**
and the hour struck wherein, as Alfred told in the post-f actum
prophecy of Chesterton,
Backward shall ye wander and gaze,
Desu*ing one of Alfred's days.
When pagans still were men.
But he saw no reason why it should remain so. Like Rosmer-
sholm, but by virtue of a better agency, he meant to try to create
a true public opinion, and to lay upon the public its true task —
" to make every man in the country," as Ibsen put it, " a noble-
man : •• or, as he himself put it, to make every man a " Soldier.**
First of all, then, he disproved the orthodox conception of
the operative. His opening words of Unto This Last, are that
of all delusions the most curious and least creditable is *' the
modem soi-disant science of Political Economy, based on the!
idea that an advantageous code of social action may be deter- \
mined irrespectively of the influence of social aflfection.** Re-
specting such a theory he wrote: "I neither impugn nor
doubt the conclusions of the science, if its terms are accepted.
I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a
science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skele-
tons. Modem Political Economy stands on a precisely simi-
lar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton,
but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossiflant theory of I
progress on the negation of a soul.*' He denied that procedure
on such a basis resulted in the greatest average of work; for
** the servant was not an engine of which the motive was steam,
magnetism, gravitation, or any other calculable force." The
servant is ** an engine whose motor power is a soul;" and the
largest quantity of work will be done " only when the motive
force, that is, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought to its
greatest strength by its own proper fuel; namely, by the affec-
tions." "The universal law of the matter is," he claimed,
"that, if the master, instead of endeavoring to get as much
work as possible from the servant, seeks rather to render his
appointed and necessary work beneficial to him, and to for-
ward his interests in all just and wholesome ways, the real
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amount of work ultimately done, or of good rendered, by the
person so cared for, will, indeed, be the greatest possible.'*
Which, he added, is not ** one whit less generally true, because
indulgence will be frequently abused, and kindness met with
ingratitude. For the servant who, gently treated, is ungrateful,
treated ungently, wiU be revengeful; and the man who is dis-
honest to a liberal master, will be injurious to an unjust one/'
Wherefore Bfr. Ruskin has been styled by one of his more re-
cent critics — ** the hammer of the * Economic ' man.**
Secondly, he arraigned the masters on their attitude
towards their own employment Assuming it as an univer*
sal fact, he inquires why *^ a peaceable and rational person,
whose trade is buying and selling, should be held in less honor
than an unpeaceable and often irrational person, whose trade
is slaying** — ^than a soldier, or, than a lawyer, physician or
clergyman? The reason is not, he showed, *'in the measure-
ment of their several powers of mind." Essentially it will be
found to lie in the fact that the world considers that the soldier
(and in proper circumstances, each efiScient member of the
so-called liberal professions) holds his life at the service of the
state; and **in a fortress breach, with all the pleasures of the
world behind him, and only death and his duty in front of him,
he wiU keep his face to the front; ** but presumes that the mer-
chant acts always selfishly. ** The merchant's first, object in
all his dealings must be (the public believe) to get as much
for himself, and leave as little to his neighbor (or customer)
as possible.** Public opinion, therefore, must amend itself;
not cease to condemn selfishness, but discover a '*kind of
commerce which is not exclusively selfish." Or, rather, it must
discover that "there never was, or can be, any other kind;"
and that what it called such was not commerce, but cozening.
It must force into general acceptance and corresponding ob-
servation this truth, that in commerce it is necessary to admit
the idea of occasional voluntary loss; '" trade has its heroisms,
as well as war;** and that the function of the merchant being
to provide for the nation, it is his duty also, on due occasion, to
die for it. Such a duty consisted mainly in faithfulness to en-
gagements, and perfect and pure provisioning — '*so that,
rather than fail in any engagement, or consent to any deteriora-
tion, adulteration or unjust and exorbitant price of that which
he provides [the merchant] is bound to meet fearlessly any
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638 JOHN RUSKIN— ECONOMIST [Feb.,
form of distress, poverty, or labor which may, through mainte-
nance of these points, come upon him.** For no matter how
Utopian this seemed to the general reader, it seemed to Rus-
kin equally Utopian, on the side of evil, *' that ever men should
have come to value their money so much more than their
lives, that if you call upon them to become soldiers, and take
chance of a bullet through their heart, and of wife and chil-
dren being left desolate, for their pride's sake, they will do it ^
gaily, without thinking twice; but if you ask them, for their
country's sake, to spend a hundred pounds without security of
getting back a hundred and five, they will laugh in your face."
Ruskin thought that the rate of wages could and should be ^
fixed irrespectively of the demand for labor. " We do not," he
argues, *'sell our prime-ministership by Dutch auction; nor,
on the decease of a bishop, whatever may be the general ad-
vantages of simony, do we (yet) offer his diocese to the clergy-
man who will take the episcopacy at the lowest contract. We
do, indeed, sell commissions, but not openly generalships; sick,
we do not inquire for a physician who takes less than a guinea;
litigious, we never think of reducing six-and-eightpence to
four-and-sixpence; caught in a shower, we do not canvass the
cabmen to find out who values his driving at less than sixpence
a mile." He admitted that always there must be " an ultimate
reference to the presumed difficulty of the work or number of
candidates for the office; and in this ultimate sense, the price of
labor is, indeed, always regulated by the demand for it. He
claimed that **the national and right system respecting all,
labor is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate — ^but the good I
worker employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The
fake system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his
work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or
force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum."
The publication of this principle created a commotion almost
equatorially wide and great. Yet it seems the very point in •,
Chesterton's mind when he wrote of Ruskin that ** the point
and stab of his challenge still really stands and sticks, like the
dagger in a dead man."
Ruskin never admitted that the orthodox and adverse
Political Economy was in form political. He revealed its nature
by two cases, which he developed '' on the exactest principles
of modem Political Economy," one in Unto This Last, and
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4
the other in Munera Pulveris. In both the result was that an
individual became opulent, and a community servile. From |^
its fruits, therefore, he concluded, that its principles were not
just, nor its economy political. A state is not necessarily rich,
because certain of its citizens have amassed a fortune. And
this economy was nothing more nor less than '^the art of
getting rich '* and ** therefore and necessarily, the art of keeping
your neighbor poor " — " the art of establishing the maximum
inequality in our own favor." ** Success," he says elsewhere,
** (while society is guided by the laws of competition) signifies
always so much victory over your neighbor as to obtain the
direction of his work, and to take the profits of it No man
can become largely rich by his personal toil. The work of his
own hands, wisely directed, will, indeed, always, maintain him-
self and his family, and make fitting provision for his age. But
it is only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor
of others that he can become opulent." Hence, it is to the in-
terest of the rich that "" the poor should be as numerous as they
can employ and restrain." But such an economy, at cross pur-
poses to the interests of the polis, or State, is in no wise a politi-
cal one.
Such in brief measure is the Political Economy of John
Ruskin. It is aimed straight and accurately against In-
dividualism. It denies that man may be, since he was not
made so, autonomous. It asserts that anarchy is, and always
has been, the law of death. It inculcates submission. For it '
holds truly that the law for conduct has its source outside of
man. One such source it sees in Government, which, based on
compromise and exacting of the individual self-sacrifice, gives
back to him in return for his cooperation, out of the conunon
good achieved, a sufficiency and a security of life.
" All of which," he once wrote, " sounds very strange; the
only real strangeness in the matter being, nevertheless, that it
should be sound." To prove which he appointed a hundred
years. One-half only of that time has elapsed, and already its
soundness has been recognized. Public and publicist alike
are attorneying for Ruskin.
This set of the tide in Ruskin's favor had to be. The politi-
cal economy which he controverted — the " Mammon gospel of
supply and demand, competition, laissez faire, and devil take
the hhidmost " — ^was for other times than ours. It was a fast-
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640 JOHN RUSKIN— ECONOMIST [Feb^
rate expedient for national expansion. It served England, if
not wisely at least well, in fostering her young industries; and
America in feeding her young mtuiicipalities. For both these
national undertakings required Capital. But Capital would
not oblige them unless they obliged it. That Englaild did so is
clear from all her writers on the subject. And that America
did so is equally as clear; very notably so from Professor
Hadley*s Undercurrents in American Politics, of which the
foundation principle is that, ** The Whole American Political
and Social System is based on Industrial property right, far
more completely than has ever been the case in any European
country.** Which statement is strengthened by President Wil-
son's view expressed in The New Freedom: "Monoply means
the atrophy of enterprise. If monoply persists, monopoly will
always sit at the helm of the Government. I do not expect to
see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country
big enough to own the Government of the United States, they
are going to own it; what we have to determine now is, whether
we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we
are free enough to take possession again of the Government
which is our own. We have not had free access to it, our minds
have not touched it by way of guidance, in half a generation,
and now we are engaged on nothing less than the recovery of
what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our dele-
gated authority." Capital, then, treated by national policy to
limited liability, by its own policy succeeded to unlimited pre-
hensibiUty. Which England and America have seen is not
good for themselves. Hence, that the economy that fostered it
is not good. For it is the general opinion, that in the present era
the focus is not Economy, but Sociology; which means, it would
appear, that less attention is being paid to Production, and
quite a deal of Distribution. And Ruskin's Political Economy
is eminently the economy for right distribution. As he said
himself: ''with respect to the mode in which these gen^td
principles affect the secure possession of property, so far am I
from invahdating such security, that the whole gist of these
papers will be found ultimately to aim at an extension in its
range; and whereas it has long been known and declared that
the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also
to be known and declared that the rich have no right to th^
property of the poor.**
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Perhaps it may be shown finally that the late war has
contributed not a little in demonstrating the soundness of his
theory. " The common notion," he once said in a lecture at the
Royal Military Academy, " that peace and the virtues of civil
life flourished together, I found to be wholly untenable. Peace
and the vices of civil life only flourish together. We talk of peace
and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civili-
zation; but I found that these were not the words which the
Muse of History coupled together : that on her lips the words
were peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and
corruption, peace and death. I found, in brief, that all great
nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought
in war; that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace;
taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by war, and be-
trayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war, and
expired in peace."
Perhaps this war has taught us a truth of word and
strength of thought. Certainly we expect of it a regeneration.
To that end our millions of people to a man spent their best
efforts, under the leadership of one^ who, searching sharply
day by day for the best thing to do, found and told us nobly,
that it was the right thing. And his economy and Ruskin's
met at two points. First: that since "Anarchy and Competi-
tion" showed themselves (on the International level, in this
case) not alone as being, but as wanting also to become, " the
laws of death," it was the duty of an upright nation to assert,
with its utmost strength of arm, that " Government and Co-
operation " are and shall be " in all things the laws of life."
Secondly : that this assertion would be foiled, unless each man
recognized his duty and yielded to the obligation therefrom, to
" Work or Fight "—to become either " Soldier of the Plough-
share, or Soldier of the Sword." For this kind of economy
depends not merely "on prudence, but on jurisprudence —
and that of divine, not human, law."
VOL. cvni. — 41
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A VISIT TO SOUTH WESTLAND.
BY D. J. B.
Dear Waiho. New Zealand.
My journey here was so interestingt and most of it through
scenery so beautiful, that I want to talk it over with you. I
wish I could make you see it all. On the way from Christ-
church to Greymouth we went through the Otira Gorge by
coach. How Dickens would have loved it He always had a
weakness for coaching, and I wish he could have depicted this
drive.
We left Arthur's Pass at about two o'clock. There it was
I first saw back-block dwellings. They were made mostly of
wood and scraps of iron, with here and. there a kerosene tin
where wood and iron were scarce or failed to meet There they
stood — huddled together — the largest not more than six feet
by eight. The last had painted on it in uneven white letters
*' Bank and Mansion House;" and it left me wondering whether
the owner was facetious, or did the accumulated wealth of
Arthur's Pass truly lie behind that wooden door.
It was a fine warm day — a rare thing in this part of the
country — ^where they say it rains in torrents " seven days out
of six." A warm wind was blowing through the gorge. Our
road wound up and down the mountain slope, and the coach
swayed over yawning abysses thousands of feet deep. One's
first impression of the gorge is its immensity. The mountains
rise on either side thousands of feet, leaving, in places, merely
a strip of blue to indicate the sky; and again there are
precipices beneath, so deep that a downward glance makes one
giddy. Far below, a rushing, roaring, torrent foams on its
stormy way, widening its bed as it carves its path through the
valley. Next comes an impression of greenery, that is wonder-
ful: the multi-colored, ever-varying green of a primeval, tropi-
cal forest. The slopes of the mountains are wooded to the
summits, and so dense and thick is the undergrowth that it is
absolutely impossible to penetrate it
Through this verdant forest growth we drove, every turn
in the road bringing us face to face with some new and won-
derful aspect of the gorge. Now, between two mountains on
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the left rose a snowy peak from its green setting, its heights
shrouded in blue haze. Now, we saw our road descend with
terrifying abruptness into a sea of fern-trees. There was color,
too, on all sides. The rata^ trees were everywhere shaking out
their flaming tassel^, and here and there a patch of yellow but-
tercups or wild snapdragons covered a grassy knoll; while the
end of the gorge was bathed in that blue opalescent light that
softens contours and colors. White manuka ' lined the road,
and peering into the twilight of the forest we saw myriads of
starry white flowers, the names of which are unknown to me.
From the trees hung a curious white lichen resembling snow,
and great masses of white convolvulus interlaced the dense
foliage. After a time we came to a more open space. Here
tawny tussocks covered the ground interspersed with large
clumps of the mountain daisy. It is a beautiful flower — larger
a good deal than our daisy, with petals a purer white and a
great golden centre.
After a couple of hours we reached the end of the gorge.
A sudden turn in the road showed us Otira down in the valley;
and soon we had exchanged the coach for the train, and were
wandering along through fields of gently-swaying, dull-red
flax flowers and past fern-trees with the loveliest pale green
fronds I ever saw. Alas! everywhere the bush ■ was on fire. At
one place I saw an old forest warrior stand out against the
shining background of Lake Brunner, with trunk charred and
blackened, but with branches all in flames. It looked as if the
glowing red sky had set it on fire.
G— — was a disappointment, a place of dust and flies, liv-
ing and dead. The best hotel set me conjuring up visions of
what the worst would be like. Next morning an hour's jour-
ney took me to the town of H , a perfectly dead town it
looked. The only inhabitant visible told me that there was
nothing worth seeing but the cemetery. At four the train set
off for Ross, an abandoned mining town now going to ruin.
And now began the most beautiful drive of my life, lasting
all day and far into the night. It will always remain a red-
letter day in my calendar. Picture me perched up beside the
driver — an amiable youth of seventeen — in a wagonette with
luggage and two little Maori boys behind, their Maori papa
on a bicycle bringing up the rear.
'Rata — a natlye New Zealand tree with crimson flowers.
'Manuka — a native shrub. *llie "bush" means forest
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644 A VISIT TO SOUTH WESTLAND [Feb.,
The road led the whole way through the bush, and never
for an instant was it monotonous. We wound up hill and
descended precipitous places at breakneck speed. Sometimes
we peered into a huge ravine, with sides clothed in tree-ferns
and other native trees hundreds of feet high^ their tops level
with our road. Sometimes we jolted across the stony bed of
some wide river, plunging at some places into streams of clear
blue water, at others into floods of ice-water of a cold gray tint.
Everywhere we saw the tender green of tree-ferns intermingled
with the innumerable kinds of native trees. Looking up at
those forest giants, I seemed to lose all sense of height. Our
way led sometimes under foliage so dense that it cast a gloom
upon the road. The undergrowth is such that eternal night
must reign a few yards from the road.
At short distances were little brown pools into which bent
green ferns with pink-tipped fronds, while dragon-flies as long
as one's hand hovered over them. Everywhere, the rata flamed
against the green. In the patches of sunlight along the road,
fluttered great red and black butterflies, and the hmnming of
the locusts was at times so loud as to sound like rushing waters.
An opening among the trees revealed the still waters of Lake
lolanthe, and for quite a long distance we saw it flashing
through the rata trees. Once we came to a swamp of flax — a
pretty sight with its red-brown flowers.
Our drive was not to be without adventures. Our cyclist
had gone on ahead, and we found him at the foot of a steep
slope lying unconscious, his arm doubled up under him. We
sprinkled cold water on him which brought him to his senses,
and having put cold compresses on his swelling arm, placed
him in the back of the trap in a half-dazed condition. The
little Maoris seemed not at all perturbed by the accident to
their revered parent.
We stopped for lunch at one of the accommodation
houses along the eighty mile road, then we set oflf again and
jogged along till we met the mail coach. Here our springs
broke, and I had to get out and sit in the river-bed while the
two drivers tied things together with strings. My peace of
mind was much disturbed by the coach driver who told me that
the **old lady way back at Wataroa** was expecting me to
spend the night at her place, and had made all arrangements.
Now I had particularly set my heart on going right through to
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Waiho that night, and thus reduce two journeys to one. The
driver scratched his head sorrowfully when I explained this,
and intimated that I should be a brave girl if I dared the dis-
pleasure of Mrs. X . To dare it I was determined, so I be-
gan to compose about a dozen humble and apologetic sentences.
We arrived at last, and, with my heart in my mouth, I
watched the old lady come down the path to meet me. In my
most engaging (!) manner, I explained and apologized, but
my excuses were received in stony silence. Then, as a sop to
Cerberus, I asked for tea. This was given without any melting
of the icy reserve. I was about to give up my reconciliation
tactics, when suddenly I caught sight of a boy in khaki in a
photograph frame on the mantelpiece, and I inquired if it was
her son. Then, I do not know exactly how it happened, we
were the best of friends in a few minutes, and I had learned all
about Charlie who was lying dead over there in Armentiires;
about Frank who had been all through the Gallipoli campaign
and who was still in France; and Joe who had gone to
Trentham (Training Camp). The hard exterior hid a heart
of gold. Such a sad mother it was, but with an heroic spirit.
Frank's photographs were brought out, and I translated their
French titles, and told her a little about some of the places I
knew. We parted the best of friends. I was not aUowed to
pay for my tea, but was to be welcome as a guest whenever I
chose to come. I really felt sad as I waved to the poor old
mother at the gate. It seemed so unjust that this awful war
should have had such far-reaching effects as to break an old
woman's heart so many miles away, out here in this un-
inhabited wilderness of forest and silence.
Evening was now coming apace, and the scents of the
bush were growing stronger. The silence, too, became more
intense. Soon the moon rose, and lit up the still waters of
Lake Mapareka, and cast long shadows of trees upon the white
road. By degrees, the sky became cloudy, so that the road
was at times pitch dark, at others, light as day. Then the
glowworms began to appear like myriads of diamonds glowing
in the underwood.
Unfortunately, the strength of our second relay of horses
began to give way while we had yet seven miles to go. We
had not reckoned on the additional weight of the Maori. There
was nothing for it but to get out and walk for a couple of miles
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646 A VISIT TO SOUTH WESTLAND [Feb^
to give the horses a rest. Not caring for the Maori's company,
I set out alone on foot along the the road through the bush. Up
to that point, I had felt only the charm of the forest. Now,
quite alone in the very heart of it, I began to experience a sen-
sation of horror. I had left the wagonette so far behind that I
could not hear a human sound. It was quite dark; but as there
was only one road, there was no fear of losing the way. In aU
my life I never experienced an3rthing like it. The silence was
awful — ^horrible. Not the rustle of a leaf — not the breaking
of a twig to relieve the stillness. I often stopped to listen for
the sound of the wheels; and when I could not hear them a
sort of blind fear seized me. I knew it was foolish (there was
nothing to fear). The glowworms comforted me somehow as
being alive.
At last I sat down and waited for the others. Never did I
hear so welcome a sound as the rattle of the springs accom-
panied by the crooning of the Maoris. I got in and rain began
to f aU. I have never seen any rain like that West Coast rain.
It comes down in bucketfuls. We could not see the horse's
heads so blinding was it and in three minutes my clothes —
mackintosh and aU — ^were wet through. The poor horses
dragged on wearily until nearly midnight, when we drew up
at the door of the accommodation house. The kindest of
hostesses changed my wet clothing for dry, and brought me
into the kitchen where I partook of tea and cake.
Here I am now at Waiho, sitting in a field which faces a
glacier, and trying to write a letter in spite of mosquitoes which
are the evil genii of the place.. Tomorrow, we — ^my two friends
whom I met here and I — are hiring horses to take a two days'
ride down the coast. This is the life to blow away school cob-
webs! Alas! that it must end so soon! My companions are
very pleasant, and expert climbers as well. They know this
part of the world very well, so we can undertake excursions
which, were I alone, would be impossible.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The accommodation house lies at the mouth of two gorges,
the Calary and the Waiho Gorges. Into the Waiho, at the other
end, glides the Franz Josef Glacier. The densest and loveliest
bush covers the three miles that lie between the hotel and the
glacier. It is the loveliest walk in the world through the gorge,
for every instant one comes upon an opening in the trees, and
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sees the snowy peaks and the glacier framed in the blazing
rata. I have never in my life seen anything like the tree-ferns.
They grow in the most luxm*iant profusion, and the dense un-
dergrowth of lawyer and supplejack reminded me of pictures
I have seen of the banks of the Amazon.
One day we hired a guide, who took us up to the first hut
on the glacier. It was a totally new and altogether delightful
experience for me. As soon as we got out of the bush, we found
ourselves opposite the terminal face of the glacier, up which
we immediately climbed. The air on the ice is the most won-
derful I have ever felt. It buoys you up to such an extent that
it is absolutely impossible to feel fatigue. Another wonderful
thing is the guide's pack. It is so heavy that an ordinary
woman cannot lift it from the ground. This he carries on his
back by means of straps, which leave his hands and feet free to
hew the steps out of the ice.
I honestly confess that for the first ten minutes I was terri-
fied. The ice was very jagged, and the chasms below were
often so profound that, as I stood with the tip of one toe in a
roughly hewn niche and the other foot dangling in space, wait-
ing for the next step to be cut, I imagined that every instant
would be my last: that the ice would give way, and that I
should be hurled into eternity. I kept my eyes glued to the
guide's feet, and followed up step by step. Fear soon wore
away, however, and I began to gain confidence in my enormous
nailed boots, which prevented me from slipping. Then the
real enjoyment began. It was an exquisite day, with the
bluest of blue skies above. Up and down we went, walking
for a few minutes along a kind of promontory of ice, which
some huge crevasse would separate from the next. Then we
would climb down step by step into an abyss of ice, with the
sound of rushing water in our ears all the time; then up a per-
pendicular ice face. The little tablelands are often broken by
pools of a blue impossible to describe. Then again there
are ice-caves, generaUy arches of dripping blue.
After about three hours of this climbing, we came to the
first ice floe. Here the way became more difficult. Frequently
we had to cross ridges, the crests of which narrowed to about
the width of two hands laid palm to palm. We joined hands
and crossed one foot over the other. And aU the time yawning
blue chasms waited for us. It took us all day to get to the first
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648 A VISIT TO SOUTH WESTLAND [Feb..
hut, built on the side of Mt. Moltke. Every piece of timber
has had to be carried up the glacier, one piece at a time, by
the two guides. It was a work of love, though, I think; for
the guides are a race apart, steeped in nature, and regarding
the gorge and the glacier as a kind of sanctuary of which they
hold the key. There is something reverent in their attitude
towards the beauty of the place, which no one could help feel-
ing. I experienced the same impression when I was at Mt. Cook.
We had an appetizing supper in the hut, which contains
all kinds of tinned specialties. Then the guide built a huge
fire; and on our ridge of rock overhanging the glacier we
waited for the moon to rise. I shall not try to describe what
passed within me as we watched: nor the effect of the moon-
light on the peaks and the snow, on the great river of ice, on
the shadowy trees of the gorge far beneath us, and on the
waters of Lake Mapourika. It must have been a place like this
which the Creator saw " was good."
We retired to our bunks at midnight, with the door of
the hut wide open, and the whole view before us: for the
moonlight made it all as bright as day. About two a.m. my
slumbers were disturbed by hearing my boots being pulled
over the floor; and, looking down, I saw a bird resembling a
parrot tugging them along by the laces. It was a kea,^ and
another one was gravely hopping about on the doorstep with
his head on one side, watching the operation. In another
minute my boots would have been gone forever; so I seized
an alpenstock and harpooned the wretch. The consequences
were dire. The two keas retired, to return in a few minutes
with a wild horde of sisters and cousins and aunts. Then the
noise waxed fast and furious. Grandfather mounted on the
roof, with a piece of wood, which he rolled down to grand-
mother^ Grandmother caught it, clambered up the iron roof
and rolled it down to grandfather. An aunt sat on the edge
of the chimney, and shrieked insults at us, the uncle mean-
while dropping down all the stones and twigs he could find:
and so it went on, amid screams and flapping of wings, the
whole night long.
At dawn we rose, and climbed Mt. Moltke. For two and
a half hours we scrambled up the bush-clad slopes of the moun-
* Kea (pronounced Kee-ah) or Mt. Cook parrot, a very inquisitive bird. It lives
above the snow-line usually.
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tain. It was very steep, and I thought I should die before I
reached the top. At length we emerged from the trees and
ferns, and found ourselves in an open wilderness of flowers.
In that Alpine garden there were sheaves of mountain lilies
with cups and leaves full of dew; mountain daisies with thick
snowy petals, as large as small sunflowers; clumps of white
gentian, sweet scented Alpine broom; some pure white, some
with a mauve centre; a dozen different kinds of white veronica;
and through them all the glacier and mountains. We stayed
among them the whole day, returned to the hut that night, and
descended the glacier the following day.
Our next excursion was almost equally delightful. We
hired horses and a guide, and rode forty miles to Okarito and
back, taking two days to perform the journey. Our way the
whole of the first day led through the loveliest bush — every-
where huge tree-ferns, rata, little brown pools, impenetrable
undergrowth, white convolvulus, and pink-tipped ferns.
You must know that having had little practice, I am not an
expert rider. Indeed, I did not dare to mention the fact before
we set out, for fear I might be left behind. I was given a most
unmanageable steed, and I really think we were the most comi-
cal pair that have ever been seen on the road. When we
stopped for lunch at the only house in the region, I was so fear-
fully stiff that they had to lead me to a couple of beer barrels,
on to which I descended and then collapsed. I simply cannot
describe to you the agony of cantering after that. My horse
was an animal full of character, and I really felt tremendous
respect for him. He did exactly what he pleased. If the
other horses kept to the road, he would dart off up some little
side bank, then leap down again. He would stop dead in the
middle of a gaUop to pluck some wayside flower. He always
got into holes in the river-bed, and the others, helpless with
laughter, would have to drag us out with ropes. He was, also,
of such an inquiring disposition. When we arrived at Okarito,
he stopped to investigate the one letterbox, put his head right
into the box, and neighed loudly. Once we passed the empty
huts of some diggers. Bucephalus, who desired information,
walked in. I narrowly escaped beheading. He cantered round
the table and went out at the back door.
The climax was reached, however, on the homeward jour-
ney, when after swimming gayly through the river, he went
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650 A VISIT TO SOUTH WESTLAND [Feb.,
down on his two knees. As I never could get off him from a
height, I thought this was very considerate on his part, and
stepped lightly off, as from the back of a camel. To my horror,
he rolled his eyes heavenwards, turned over on his back, and
kicked with all his might, aU four legs in the air. At first I
thought my weight had been too much for him, but the thrash-
ing he received from the guide soon undeceived me. At four
we arrived at Okarito, another little town of " has beens;" once
a flourishing gold digging centre, with thousands of huts and
many hotels. Now six houses comprise the whole. It faces the
sea: the main street and pavement are of grass. Bucephalus
preferred the pavement to the road. We drew up before the
door of the one inn. Five people, the only adult inhabitants
in the town that day, came out to see us dismount. I descended
from my charger by means of a step ladder.
They were all the nicest people imaginable, and in five
minutes we knew each other by name, and our family histories
were common property. One man was simply charming. He
had a nice gray suit on, and I took him to be a lawyer or a doc-
tor. He offered us his boat in which to go out on the lagoon
and all the men in Okarito, mustering three, came with us. I
was so delighted with the manners and conversation of the
" gray suit '' after we had been out the whole afternoon in his
boat, that I inquired who he was, and learned that he was the
policeman of Okarito ! Evidently he left the criminals to look
after themselves that afternoon.
For three hours we rowed up the lagoon. It was a quite
unforgettable afternoon and evening: for from the still waters
we had all the time a panorama of the various snow-clad peaks:
Mt. Cook, Pioneer's Pass, the Graham Saddle, and others.
Dozens of other names were recited to me, but I cannot remem-
ber them. I know only that I have never seen, even in Switzer-
land, anything more beautiful than that snow-clad range, with
its jagged white peaks distinctly and sharply outlined against
the blue sky. We rounded bush-covered islands, only to find
at every opening those sentinels of snow and ice.
We left the lagoon, and glided into a lovely creek. Here
the bush was dense on each side, but every leaf and twig was
clearly mirrored in the water. Never have I seen such reflec-
tions. My friend the policeman insisted on our remaining on
the lagoon while the sun set. And we watched the light on the
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peaks change from pink to mauve, from mauve to blue, then to
gray and last of all to white.
The next morning we made an early start, and galloped
for miles along the beach — great stretches of sand, with the
bush growing almost to the water's edge. After some hours
we reached the mouth of the Waiho, and retiuned home by
the dry river-bed.
This ended the most delightful holiday I have ever known.
KOSSOVO: ''THE FIELD OF BLACKBIRDS/'
BY M. B. BUHLER.
Over the Plain of Kossovo
Five hundred years ago.
There swept the flower of Serbian power
Against the Turkish foe.
That down from the dark mountains
Came as wild torrents flow.
Dark rolled the Balkan rivers,
Sitnitsa and Ibar,
For their tides bore red the blood of the dead
Out to the seas afar;
And prone in the sombre shadows
Slipt the hosts of the Tsar Lazar.
Dark, dark lay the mangled bodies
That covered Kossovo Plain;
But darker still by wood and rill
Where nge-long gloom hath lain.
The viewless birds went flocking
That were the souls of the slain.
The new and the old embattled
Still fight the great world's War,
And unseen birds are hovering
Wherever the battles are —
The shades of the dead whose souls are sped
By sword or scimitar.
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A GREAT SPANISH ORGANIST— SALINAS OF SALAMANCA.
BY THOMAS WALSH.
WRITER in the London Times has complamed
that no ode was ever written to an organist,
although poems of every sort have been made
about music and musicians and even organ-
grinders. Let us assure him that he is mistaken.
One existed even before the publication of The Dead Musician.
In Memory of Brother Basil, Organist for Half a Century at
Notre Dame, with its superb climax :
With might unmortal was he strong
That he begot
Of what was not»
Within the barren womb of silence, song.
Yea, many sons he had
To make his sole heart glad —
Romping the boundless meadows of the air,
Skipping the cloudy hills, and climbing bold
The heavens nightly stairs of starry gold.
Nay winning heaven's door
To mingle evermore
With deathless troops of angel harmony,
He filled the house of God
With servants at his nod,
A music-host of moving pageantry.
This brilliant achievement of the young poet. Father
Charles O'Donnell, C.S.C, had its great antecedent in Spanish
in the Ode to Francisco Salinas by the prince of lyric poets.
Fray Luis de Le6n, in the middle of the sixteenth century. In
these days when the Spanish and South American note is so
prominent in the artistic world, when even the French fashion-
designers are modeling their gowns after the pictures of
Velazquez and Goya, when we have witnessed the success of
the " Goyescas " of Granados, the first Spanish grand opera
to be sung in this country, when Spanish authors and com-
posers are in the full flower of esteem, it seems timely to tell
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something of a great musical figure of sixteenth century Spain,
a figure but little known to English readers — "Salinas the
Blind/' the great organist of the University of Salamanca.
The Ode to Francisco Salinas is one of the supreme
poems not only of Spain, but of the world — ^its message antic-
ipates by several centuries the Intimations of Immortality
of our English Wordsworth, and so esteemed is its doctrine in
Spain that the distinguished scholar, Mila y Fontanals, com-
pelled his students to memorize it as a perfect code of
aesthetics. It was translated into EngUsh for the first time by
the present writer and appeared in America for July 23, 1910.
Its author was the Fray Luis de Leon (1528-1591), the laureate
of Salamanca, whose daring studies in Scripture after the
Council of Trent, brought upon him five years of imprison-
ment and trial before he was vindicated by the Holy Office of
The Inquisition. His relations with Salinas were intimate both
before and after his incarceration. From the pages of his
Process, and from the notes of several authors, we may build
up a picture of the life of the old organist.
Francisco Salinas was born in 1512, the son of Juan
Salinas, who was Treasurer of the Emperor Carlos V. at
Biu-gos. In his tenth year he was stricken with total blind-
ness and, after the fashion of the day, was permitted to devote
most of his time to singing and playing on the organ, until a
young lady preparing to enter the Convent of Burgos, gave him
some instruction in Latin in exchange for his lessons in music.
Observing his leanings toward learning, his parents yielded to
his desire to study at Salamanca. On arriving there, he ar-
dently appUed himself to the courses in Greek philosophy, the
arts and higher mathematics for some years, until poverty
came upon him and drove him from the schools. Thereupon
he entered the service of his friend and kinsman, Pedro Sarmi-
ento, of the Counts of Ribado y Salinas, who had become Arch-
bishop of the rich See of Santiago de Compostelo, and who later
on took up his residence as Cardinal in Curia in Rome. In
the entourage of this patron, Salinas gave full rein to his
musical gifts, and gladly devoted twenty-three years of his life
to the study of the secrets of ancient Greek and Latin
musical instruments, embodying his many discoveries in a
precious work, De Musica, Libri Septem, 1578. Musicians of
today are indebted to this work for its calculations of ratios
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654 A GREAT SPANISH ORGANIST [Feb.,
of sound according to different methods : for its studies of the
ancient rhythms and melodies of the Greeks and Latins, with
imique matter relating to the archaic music of Spain. Ac-
cording to Dr. Plepusch, Salinas is to be honored for being
the first to reestablish the true enharmonic, which was sup-
posed for many centuries to be irretrievably lost
Such learning and attainments could scarcely have been
responsible for the lyrical enthusiasm of Fray Luis' de Le6n,
had not Salinas also possessed immense powers of expression
and the creative faculty to introduce new beauties and emo-
tions into music, and of this the poet speaks in his lines:
When from thy fingers pure and wise
The music raptured and controlled,
Salinas, flooding unto heaven is rolled.
Salinas became the special protigi of Cardinal Granvelle,
then Viceroy of Spain at Naples; and at the instance of the
Duke of Alba, Pope Pius IV. created him Titular Abbot of
San Pancrazio di Rocca-Scalegna in the Viceroyalty of Naples.
It was not until death had decimated the ranks of his friends
that the '* blind Abbot," as beloved for his gentle personal
qualities as esteemed for his music, turned his steps back
to his old home in Spain, realizing with the flight of years
that from the great ones of Italy *' he had received more affec-
tion than riches." Spain, however, showed her appreciation
of his achievements in a material way, appointing him pro-
fessor of music at the University of Salamanca, her greatest
educational centre.
The music schools attached to the cathedrals and cloisters
of Spain seem to have escaped the general debasement that
overtook the ecclesiastical chant during the troubled exiles of
the Popes at Avignon, so that liturgical song, as seen in the primi-
tive music of Avila, had kept its archaic dignity without con-
tamination with folksong and popular balladry such as was
prevalent in the choirs of Italy and France. Therefore it was
not extraordinary that the University of Bologna should peti-
tion Salamanca for a professor of music like Ramos de Pareja
to reconstruct the art in Italy. In 1263 the Laws of the Siete
Partidas arranged for a professor of music at Salamanca, in
1313 his salary was fixed; and after 1550 music was always a
secondary course in the Arts. So when Salinas took up his
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1919.] A GREAT SPANISH ORGANIST 655
residence as catedratico of music, Master in Theology and Art,
the dignity of the post was ah'eady ancient and honorable.
The Faculty, moreover, arranged to pay him an extraordinary
salary.
In a community of six or seven thousand students, where
one without a guitar was compared to a comet without a tail,
the glory of Salinas as a composer and performer on the organ
and on all the musical instruments known to his time, became
one of the prime boasts of the University. He was especially
remarkable at the organ for his power to awaken emotions of
sublime terror and pity. His reverence for the ancient did not
preclude an open mind; while not desiring to restore the classic
modes, he labored hard to relieve the diatonic scale of some of
its harsher intervals. He was thus of a type of mind singularly
sympathetic with Fray Luis de Le6n, and his testimony to such
reciprocity of studies, as can be possible only between like
characters, is to be found in his words of January, 1573:* " He
is about fifty-five years of age, and is a friend of the said Fray
Luis who frequently came to his house and heard him talk on
especulativa (the first part in music according to the nomen-
clature of the time) and he exchanged with the testator lessons
in poetry and other topics of art.'* Moreover, one Juan Gal-
van, a student who made his home with Salinas, declared *' that
he loved Fray Luis de Le6n as his professor, and that for two
years he had consulted with him on matters of theology.'
Salinas added to this testimony that he had heard it said that
the Master was so good a scholar as to be able to carry off any
chair (or professorship in the elections) especially that of
Scripture, from anybody soever with whom he might contest."
What rare old concerts and poetical discussions these
friends must have enjoyed together! Fray Luis de Le6n is
known to have been an expert on several musical instruments,
and, no doubt, the house of Salinas may have been open at
times to that genial rascal Vicente Espinel (1550-1624), pro-
fessor of music at Salamanca, who would join in the per-
formances and demonstrate the uses of the fifth string he had
added to the old Spanish guitar in spite of the utter dis-
approval of Lope de Vega." In the pages of that prototype of
the modern novel, Relaciones de la Vida del Escudero Marcos
* DoeumentOB iniditOB, zl., p. S02. * Doeumentos tnidltos, xl., p. 303.
^DoTOten, act 1, scene 8.
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656 A GREAT SPANISH ORGANIST [Feb.,
de Obregon, out of which Le Sage constructed his more famous
Gil Bias, Espinel pays glowing tribute to "the Blind Abbot
Salinas, most learned scholar the Time has known, not only
in diatonics and chromatics but also in harmony to which so
little attention is given today." Soldier as well as musician
and novelist, Espinel ended his days as Canon of Santa Maria
la Mayor, formerly the brown old mosque of his native Ronda,
where he had fallen into disgrace, and where, recently, his
monument has been transported from the village square to the
courtyard of the local jail.
One can also picture solemn afternoons under the squat
Romanesque arches of the Old Cathedral, with its painted
sculptures of birds and beasts and monsters out of the grim
imagings of archaic art; or again, perhaps, in the clear lofty
nave of the New Cathedral, still under its scaffolding, but after
1560 in use for public worship — afternoons, tranquil or gloomy,
when, at the hour of Office, Fray Luis would take his place in
the Coro among the canons, as his professorship in the Univer-
sity gave warrant, and watch Galvan lead the blind Salinas to
his organ. Perhaps the last rays of the " hours of fire " came
half-tempered from the windows of the clerestory, or the
canons, prelates and professors shivered under their fur capes
and hoods at some mid-winter Tenebrse, and the tousled
choirboys played their tricks in the shadow of the great bronze
and leather-bound antiphonaries piled around the lecterns;
at some supreme hour of worship the soul of Fray Luis de
Le6n winged forth upon the music of his disillusioned old
friend:
Unto whose consonance divine
The soul endungeoned in oblivion yearns
Toward powers as once it did enshrine;
On memory's paths confused it turns,
Whereon its primal lights it now discerns.
One can hardly read the lines of this great poem. To
Salinas, without feeling a thrill of transport at the lines, too
often omitted from the ode:
See, how beneath that mighty lyre
He bends, the Master of our school renowned —
The while his gifted hands inspire
The flood of melody profound
To which these temple vaults eternal sound !
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It is such a thrill and vision as recurs again in The Haunted
Temple of another blind poet, the American Edward Doyle,
where —
The organ was of so profound a tone
It ran aground along Eternity,
Thrilling one, as the grating of the Ark
On Ararat!
Fray Luis rapt to mystical heights immortalizes the thrill
of the sublime occasion —
Afar on that resounding sea
Of sweetness floats the soul; within that tide
Submerging self, it comes to be
Annulled to every wish beside.
Nor hears nor sees what may its heart divide.
The grim portraitist of King Philip II., Juan Panto j a de la Cruz,
saw also such a scene and painted it in 1567, and his picture of
the blind master at his organ is to be found in the Espanoles
Ilustres, engraved by Esteve.
As will be seen by a comparison of the dates of their
births, Salinas (1512-1590) was in a way the predecessor of
Palestrina (1524-1594) and Victoria "of Avila" (1540-1608).
During his years in Rome he was no doubt in friendly relations
with the great Italian composer whom the Council of Trent
took for a model in 1565, through the suave beauty of his
" Mass of Pope Marcellus.'* The Flemish composers, in striv-
ing to show their skill in counterpoint, were accustomed to se-
lect as the cantus firmus of their Masses popular songs and
melodies associated with the coarsest words, so that it was not
an uncommon occurrence to hear the tenors sing out Kyrie
Eleison or Credo in Unum from one part of the church to be
answered by a rollicking drinking song from the other end.
Palestrina's great Mass proved that counterpoint was entirely
compatible with religious expression, that when the Flemish
abuses were removed, it contained a mine of riches for the
use of the Church. Pope Julius had appointed him Master of
the Papel Choir in spite of the fact that he was a married man,
the rule being that none but celibates were eligible to such an
office. Pope Paul IV., in his reforms of the Papal Choir, re-
moved him from this office, but later on the success of his
" Mass of Pope Marcellus " restored hiim to his post.
VOL. Gvm.— 4S
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658 A GREAT SPANISH ORGANIST [Feb^
Thomas Louis de Victoria, who always signed himself
Abulensis — a " Native of Avila ** — ^was a musician of quite an-
other type, resembling Salinas in his devotion to Spanish ideals
in music, as well as in his piety and devotion to the learning
of his craft. He was the pupil of Escobedo and of Cabezon, the
organist of Carlos V. and Philip II.; in Rome he was associated
with Palestrina, and was in touch with St. Francis Borgia and
St. Philip Neri of the Oratory, and with Fray Luis de Le6n
and the Carmelites of Madrid on his return to Spain.
Wrapped in his Spanish cloak amid the scholars of Rome,
Victoria was, indeed, an exponent of the music generate da
sangue moro, and his hymns ab antiquo more hispano showed
a fierce independence and originality. Pupil of Escobedo and
Antonio de Cabezon, he taught the half-scornful Italians the
sharp, acrid beauties of the Spanish psalmody. The austere
Morales, the learned Salinas, the mighty Comes, aU cultivated
spirits as well as great artists, he handed on to his unappreci-
ating countrymen, as exemplars of the pure traditions of their
own musical art.
As for Salinas, he was not caUed upon to remove abuses
such as the Church in Italy had known during the removal of
the Popes to Avignon; for Spain had kept intact her archaic
tradition, and his work consisted mainly in enlarging the
scope and extending the range of church music, by introduc-
ing a great sublimity and more intense and varied emotions,
where, before him, there had been only the expression of the
peace and calm of the cloister. To organ-playing he brought
newer and richer effects of harmony and color, showing above
all originality and progress in his accompaniments. As to
his technique, we know that he must have had great mastery,
since compositions for the organ in Spain of the sixteenth
century made severe demands upon the player; the Spanish
organists of the sixteenth century were held to be far in ad-
vance of those of Germany.
Hilarion Eslava, the noted organist of the Cathedral of
Seville in the early part of the nineteenth century and author
of the famous Miserere, says in his book Museo Organico
Espanol, that in sixteenth century Spain there were several
styles of organ-playing in use — the sublime, in which imita-
tions occurred between the parts; one, in which harmonies
were played above the melody in the treble or the base; one
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in which florid passages called glosas were introduced; an-
other, a style peculiar to the Spanish school which continues
in favor to the present day, consisting of compositions or
arrangements of organos partidos and glosas, the organ-stops
being so divided in the former as to act only on half the key-
board — those on the right affecting only the treble, those on
the left, the bass. This style of composition caused the organ-
ists of that time to develop their technique enormously.
Salinas, ^The Blind Abbot of Salamanca," the greatest
musical figure of the early part of sixteenth century Spain,
a country and century of rare prowess in the history of music
as a glorious appanage of the Church — Salinas and his fame
are handed down to all time in the magic strophes of his friend
Fray Luis de Le6n: his work
Encompassing heaven's utmost sphere.
At last it touches on the threshold high
Where other music meets its ear —
The caroling that cannot die.
The fount and primal source of harmony.
« ♦ ♦
To thee — one cadence of my chant —
Thou glory of Apollo's choiring spheres!
Friend whom I love and proudly vaunt
Above all treasures — ** Naught appears
On earth for mortal sight except through tears! ''
Oh, let thy floods of song outpour —
Salinas, without end! that I may keep
Attent on God forevermore —
In Him my wakeful soul to steep—
Unto all else left careless and asleep!
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THE BETTER PART.
BY ANNA T. SADUER.
^
CHILLE DE GRANDPRE was pacing up and down
the full length of the luxurious drawing-rooms
where his mother, ever since she had been left
a wealthy widow, had so often gathered together
an exclusive circle — ^people of various nationali-
lies, but especially her own. For the de Grandpr^s were
French and French they desired to remain, notwithstanding the
fact that each member of the family spoke English, with a
scarcely perceptible accent.
These were the stirring days of 1914, and the ancient city
of Montreal was already touched with war fever. Restlessness,
perturbation, excitement prevailed, everyone eagerly sought
the daily papers, constantly supplemented with the thrilling
call of "Extras." The streets were full of uniformed men,
regiments were drilling in the open spaces at the foot of the
Royal Mountain, whence nearly four centuries before, Cartier
had looked down upon the river and the wooded shore. At
the doors of armories, barracks, and public buildings sentries
were stationed: in the churches, patriotic announcements were
made and men were reminded of the duties of the hour. Yes,
decidedly war was in the air.
Achille de Grandpre was thinking deeply. He gave no
heed to the luxury about him; the rare objects of art, picked
up in many a pleasant sojourn abroad, the handsome, solid
furniture, the rich curtains and portieres. The atmosphere of
elegance which had surrounded the young man from child-
hood up, no doubt made the sacrifice he was contemplating
more difficult. But that thought was far from his mind. Noth-
ing he had wished for, had ever been denied him, and he
knew that his share of his late father's estate was consider-
ably in excess of a million. Still thinking, and in his habitually
careful fashion, for he had inherited much of his father's
shrewdness and practicality, he left that luxurious atmosphere
and went out to the workshop. This was precisely what its
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name implied. It was bare and empty, save for an array of
implements of all sorts and of small engines. AchiUe was an
amatem* mechanician and engineer, and could offer no mean
comparison with many a professional. He had taken shares
in some great iron works, for the mere pleasmre of visiting
them, and being amongst those works of man, in which his
soul delighted.
His face lit up at sight of the objects he had coUected with
so much care, as it had not done, in presence of the costly
objects of art and bric-a-brac. Here was the most engrossing in-
terest of his life. Still, deeply pondering, he took up abstract-
edly a small object upon which he had been busy and which he
was anxious to finish. And so thinking, and so working, he
made up his mind.
That evening, at the dinner table, where everything was of
studied daintiness and elegance, and over which his still
beautiful mother presided with such dignity, he waited till the
servants had left the room, to announce that decision which
his mother had been dreading to hear:
" Ma mire, I have decided. I am going to the front.**
The mother's face blanched, as though she had been struck
a blow. Her hazel eyes contracted in that instant of mortal
agony. She had two more sons, much older, both of whom had
been long away from home. One had settled in Germany,
before the War, had married there and, at the beginning of the
conflict, had been interned as a British subject. The other had
been, for some years, ranching in the Canadian Northwest and
had volunteered from there for service at the front. So that
these latter had practically gone out of her life. Her two
daughters had married and lived in Quebec. Hence, although
devoted to all her children, this Benjamin who had remained
at home and promised to be ever near her, had become the
chief centre of her maternal hopes and affections. His de-
parture would leave her desolate, indeed. There was a pause
which seemed long. She knew her son well and was perfectly
aware that when he had thus announced his decision, it was
irrevocable. Moreover, she was a Christian, besides being a
woman of great strength of character and of fortitude. The
thought flashed through her mind that even if her influence
could prevail with this son, who was so like his father in in-
flexibility of will, she would have no right to exert it, when the
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662 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
sons of poor women, whose need was greater, were being dailj
torn from them.
"Have you reflected well," she inquired calmly, "and
have you remembered that weakness of your chest? **
" I have reflected," Achille answered, " and as to the rest
they'U pass me all right Other feUows have gone with ail-
ments like that, and are all the better for it. You know it is
only bronchitis."
That physical weakness was the mother's sole ray of hope.
The hope died in that instant, as a lingering ray of light might
be shut off.
" You will get a commission. It will be easy, especially as
you have had some military training at the college."
" If they offer me one, I shall take it, of course. If not, I
shall go in the ranks. No man who is free can possibly stay
here."
The mother was not one to argue against so evident a
truth. She had offered the only objection that occurred to her.
There was no more to be said. Mother and son sat facing each
other in that room, whose rich appointments seemed to mock
them. Madame de Grandprd, a notable housekeeper, had
always seen to it that the perfection of cookery should be
placed before her husband and sons. On the table the dessert
of fruit and ices with sweetmeats of various kinds seemed, to
the mother's fancy, symbols of the life that was closing: trifles
soon to be replaced by stem realities.
As the son, with scrupulous politeness asking his mother's
leave, put a match to a cigarette, the mind of the woman went
back to the days, when her husband, who had been many years
older than herself, and her sons and daughters, had met round
that board, supplemented very often by their friend, or by
relatives. It had been her husband's policy to make the home
as attractive as possible for his children and also a centre and
pleasant meeting place for a large family connection. Her
mind went back still farther to the time when the young man
before her was a little child, the youngest and the last! a little
child and now he was going whither, and for how long? The
tears began to gather in her hazel eyes, but her wilt was strong
and she did not wish them to f alL
The son's thoughts, meanwhile, had run forward to the
training camp at Valcartier, to the troopship, France. He
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had not decided impulsively as had some of his chums. At
jBrst he had felt convinced that the conflict would soon be over,
and that Canadians were scarcely needed. But now, the idealis-
tic side of his nature was fully aroused and he was possessed
by a certain sober, repressed enthusiasm, which made him im-
patient to be gone. His mother had never thought of advanc-
ing as a plea, that she would be left alone. But the idea had
occurred to Achille, and he said now:
" Of course, you will have Tant' Luce to live with you."
At that suggestion, Madame de Grandpre, with a sup-
pressed sob in her throat, got up and left the room. Achille
smoked on thoughtf uUy, with a more sombre color to his re-
flections. It was hard on his mother. He only wished he could
make it easier. But he knew and she knew that mothers every-
where had to accept that harder part. When they met again
in the drawing-room, where coflfee was served in exquisite lit-
tle cups that suggested a sojourn they had made together in
Dresden, Madame de Grandpr6*s manner was perfectly com-
posed. She asked him in her usual even tones, when he would
be going, and Achille answered:
" At once. I want to get over, if possible, with the Twenty-
second. The corps is down at Valcartier now.*'
"Yes, most of your friends are in that regiment," the
mother assented. She was thinking, as she had always done,
of his comfort.
AchiUe had no difficulty in procuring a commission. The
military authorities were only too glad to give one to a young
man of his character, ability and social influence. Also, he put
his motor-car absolutely at the disposition of the government.
He was sent to Valcartier for training; but his desire to go to
France at once was frustrated. It was decided that, just then,
he could be more useful in recruiting through the country dis-
tricts. His mother, naturally, was rejoiced and offered cordial
hospitality to his fellow recruiting oflBcers. The house became,
in fact, their headquarters whence they went forth into differ-
ent sections of the country.
One day in late summer Achille arrived at the first village
in his itinerary. A motor was still something of a novelty
there, and as the young officer came driving at a discreet pace
up the principal street, he was the cynosure of all eyes. He
passed the village church, of gray stone and time stained.
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664 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
Despite the late hour of the afternoon, apparently some cele-
bration was in progress. As he passed the sacred edifice,
Achille, faithful to his custom from boyhood, reverently
saluted.
He drove straight to the one hotel, where, by the local
option which prevailed in so many cities of Lower Canada,
no liquor was sold. It was late afternoon, yet he noted that
there were but few on the gallery. The dusty road lay white
between it and the river, with rapids rippling white and foamy
in the distance. All around were farms, where the ripened
grain stood in sheaves, and the rich fruity odor from orchards
of apples and plums filled the air. On the gallery, smoking a
long pipe and evidently infirm, sat an old man whom Achille
recognized as a habitant or Canadian farmer of the best type,
with all the traditions of his race about him.
Divining him to be a person of influence in the neighbor-
hood, the young oflBcer at once addressed him. He was re-
ceived with a courtesy which an emperor might have envied.
Achille, seating himself, resolved at once to feel the pulse of
that vicinity. He introduced himself as Lieutenant de Grand-
pr£ from Montreal, but the old farmer made no allusion what-
ever to his military title or his uniform. Observing this, it was
with an instinctive sense of repugnance that the Lieutenant led
up to his mission in the village. The old man heaved a deep
sigh.
"i4A, Monsieur," he said, "it is what I feared, what I
divined, when I beheld your martial costume. I said to myself :
He comes to take our young men from the farms, from the
boats, from the forests."
"But," interposed Achille, quickly, "we must fight, is it
not so, for our country? "
" Our country," cried the habitant, with the fire of another
day in his eyes, " it is here. We have lived here for nearly
four hundred years. We are rooted to the soil. These scenes
of peace are oiu^. Our fathers have fought with the brave
Montcalm and Levis, and later with the armies of Great
Britain, Soit But they have left us a heritage, to guard our
shores, to remain here, faithful."
At that instant, the doors of the church nearby swung
open and a crowd began to issue thence. Lieutenant de Grand-
pr6 looked inquiringly.
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" It is the pilgrims," the old man explained. " They go to
the good St. Anne's by the night boat from Montreal."
He stood up with considerable effort. It was plain that his
lower limbs were paralyzed. The young officer followed his
example. A throng, the majority of which were old men,
women and children, poured through the church doors, sing-
ing as they went:
En touchant la plage,
Nos pires jadis,
Lui firent Vhomage
De ce beau pays.
The familiar air, with its rhythm, powerfully effected the
soldier, and he was thrilled with an emotion of which he had
not thought himself capable. He watched the procession pass-
ing on its way to the boat, which was to convey the pilgrimage
to Montreal in silence, while the old man observed :
** It is the women and children and the old people who go
now. The young men cannot be spared from the harvest.
They will go later. Me, I am too old and sick. My day is past.
I went every year while I could."
His wistful eyes were on the pilgrims. Catching the distant
echo of the hymn, while the bell in the church steeple pealed,
and the boat steamed away from the shore in the glory of a
descending sun, the habitant hummed softly to himself:
En touchant la plage,
Nos peres jadis,
Lui firent Vhomage
De ce beau pays.
" It is that, Monsieur" he said, " our fathers offered to
heaven the homage of this beautiful country, they had won
from the wilderness and from the savage hordes."
" But it is that country we must defend," put in Achille,
though he was quite aware of the futility of argument. " Other
men are gone. We cannot leave the task to them."
The old man only shook his head, mournfully : ** It is not
the same. Those men, les Anglais, they speak of going home
when they cross the sea to England. Even the Frenchman who
comes here, his heart is with la belle France. For us Cana-
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666 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
dians there is no other country. This is home and our race
must grow and develop here or perish and die."
"Yet what will it matter, if the Germans come," cried
Achille. " All we have gained will be lost."
Again, he shook his head : " They will not come," he de-
clared. " The good God will not permit it."
To him that black, menacing cloud from beyond the
Rhine had no terrors. His dread was the depopulation, and
extinction of the race, and its disappearance from that fair
land which would become the heritage of strangers. "But
if in punishment of our sins, they should be permitted to
come, these Germans," the habitant cried, " then we will fight
them on our own soil. The child, the man of eighty, will take
a gun. The women will know how to defend themselves."
Achille saw that it was useless to combat the sentiment
which in a man of that age was deep-rooted as the sturdy pines
in the Canadian soil. He trusted that the solid reasons he was
able to advance, rather than his own eloquence, would have
weight with the yoimg men, in whom all his trust lay, and so it
proved and to an unhoped-for extent. The young villagers
whom he harangued in the town hall or on the green where
they had gathered at evening to tell stories or play quoits, re-
sponded, at once, to his stirring call. They were mostly a fine,
muscular set of fellows whom their simple, regular life had
kept in good training. Many were ready to follow him at
once. Others, more cautious, covenanted that they be allowed
to remain till the harvest had been gathered in. They could not
leave the grain and the late crops. The fruit in the orchards
had to be picked, and in some cases there were the honey and
the hives to be tended.
Before leaving the village, Achille had a moment's talk
again with the old habitant, who could not be made to re-
gard as other than a misfortune Achille's successful recruiting.
At only one point was he in agreement with the city man and
that was in loyalty to the King.
" Ah, Oui Oui," he cried. " It is a good king. Dieu Sauve
le roi. On his birthday, the Ciu*^ has made the choir sing,
Domine Fac Salvum Regent. It was grand. Monsieur, and the
people, they have joined in that singing."
In the inexperience of his youth, Achille was puzzled.
" Then you are loyal? " he exclaimed.
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" Mais, OuU we are loyal. We wUl have no evil men com-
ing to our villages to talk revolution. The King will always
have us French-Canadians, no matter what happens."
It was a curious psychological study, which Achille left to
older heads. As he drove away in his motor, he had a last
glimpse of the old man sitting in the setting sun on the gallery,
looking out with dim and wistful eyes on the beloved land-
scape.
After that the time was short. Achille had done his work
weU and with his accustomed thoroughness. His efforts had
been extraordinarily successful. He came home from Valcar-
tier, on a short leave, to that luxurious dwelling whence he
was so soon to go forth. It was a heartbreak to leave his
mother. He only realized now what she had been to him.
Yet he was impatient to be gone, whither had preceded him
nearly all those who had been his comrades or his friends.
His eyes were fixed on France. All the idealism of his nature
was in rebellion against the delay. On the other hand, his
father's practical turn which he had inherited, induced him to
put all his affairs in order, as though he were never to return.
He visited the notary, who had arranged the family affairs
from time immemorial, and bidding him keep the matter sec-
ret, save in the event of his death, willed all his considerable
earthly goods to his mother and sisters, not forgetting a quite
considerable share in charity. There was another bequest,
which he would like to have made. But he finally decided
against it. The notary watched him from his desk in the old-
fashioned ofSce where but little had been changed in the last
half century. He saw the slender, upright figure departing
down the street, full of repressed enthusiasm, of which but few
outward tokens were given.
" Ah, le uoilAI" he muttered, ** it is a type. In his business
capacity like his father, the late Monsieur de Grandpre, but in
other ways different." Also he shook his head. " It*s a pity,"
he sighed, ** that such fine types must be sacrificed."
Then he devoted himself to the deed of sale he was prepar-
mg, as though no such brave soldier had come into his ken. He
had prepared deeds of sale, mortgages and what not for those
who were long in dust. For a few years longer he would con-
tinue to prepare them, while generous-hearted young men
were sacrificing their lives On Flanders Fields. He had
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668 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
never heard those lines of the gifted poet, who fell there him-
self, nor read of those poppies growing under alien skies, that
were nourished with Canadian dust.
Achille also put everything in his workshop into shape, in
preparation for the time when he should be working there
again and as if that return were a certainty. He instructed his
mother, how occasionally it would be necessary to bring a
practical man to overlook the appliances, that they might be
kept in the best order.
" I shall be working harder than ever when I get back,** he
told her, " to make up for lost time. Also," he added, after a
pause, '' according to Tanf Luce, I shall be getting married,
then, and shall want to show off my workship at its best.*'
His mother laughed and he added : " And then some poor
girl will find out how you have spoiled me."
Aunt Luce had always told the mother that Achille had
some particular girl in his eye, which was the truth. But in his
practical way he argued : " If anything should happen, over
there, I would only leave her a widow, which is scarcely just
and fair. If nothing happens, why she may prefer to marry
some other chap, if Fm too long away."
All of which went to show that Achille was unusually
altruistic, or as some might have argued, that he was not very
deeply in love. In any case, it was highly characteristic.
Meanwhile Madame de Grandpre, with an agony which
was daily showing itself in every line of that finely chiseled
and still beautiful face, attended with the most meticulous
care to every detail of her household. Never had the exquisite
finish of its appointments been more evident: nor its comfort
and ease more alluring. The appetizing dishes which had
been wont to tempt his boyhood, were placed before the young
soldier and any of his comrades whom he chose to invite, in
the daintiest of settings. Surely Achille must have been aware
that no one so well as his mother understood the elegancies
no less than the comforts of life; and that, notwithstanding
the fact that her own health had long been delicate and that
her diet was of the simplest. It all came so naturally to the
young man that he scarcely gave a thought to the excellence of
what was set before him, or the manner in which it was served.
Nevertheless it pleased him that his fellow officers should re-
gard with such manifest admiration his beautiful mother.
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presiding with dignity at the table and entering sympatheti-
cally into all their conversation.
She heard them frequently discussing, by way of jest, or
possibly to encourage her, the chances of the War and the cal-
culation that had been made, that there was one in every
twenty chances that a soldier would come through the War
safe, and one in every forty that he would recover from his
wounds. In her heart the mother said always : " What if that
one chance in twenty or one in forty, should not, my son, be
yours." Aloud she said nothing.
Aunt Luce had not yet arrived. It had been arranged be-
tween the sisters that she should not take up her abode in the
big house until after Achille had gone. He went over to her
modest quarters to bid her good-bye, and to sun himself, as it
were, in her cheerfulness and gayety. On the surface she was an
optimist, though inwardly she was oppressed by the sadness of
life. She pictured the young man's future in roseate colors,
and she did not neglect to throw out a hint which he promptly
took. He paid a last visit to the young girl who, as Aunt Luce
shrewdly suspected, had captivated his fancy, if she had not as
yet completely won his heart. He was only to discover when
distance had added its melancholy charm how much he really
loved that charming girl, with her delicate, fragile beauty,
porcelain like complexion and dark, wistful eyes. She ap-
pealed to him more than ever in that final interview. But he
was his father's son and, holding himself well in hand, spoke
no word of love and gave no hint of his future intentions. He
held that it was fairer to leave her absolutely free. It had cost
him more than he had believed possible to bid her farewell
without a word. But he was, like his father, inflexible of will.
On the night before his departure, mother and son were
left alone. Achille's thoughts which had been chiefly in France
or on the muddy plains of Flanders, with his comrades, came
back to centre themselves on his mother and the parting that
was so near. He had never been demonstrative, but all the
love and tenderness that, boy fashion, had lain hidden arose to
the surface. Much passed between the two that evening, which
was to serve as a memory and a solace to the mother, after
her Benjamin, in the phrase that had grown to be a common-
place, " had embarked for overseas service."
AchiUe did many of those lighter things he had been
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670 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
accustomed to do. He put on the gramaphone, choosing the
records of ragtime airs that had been reserved for him and his
young companions, or patriotic selections that warmed his
blood and stirred his pulses. He played with his dog and put
him through all his tricks, as had been his habit after dinner in
the evenings, and when his mother had gone to give instruct
tions in the kitchen for his early breakfast.
" Poor, old fellow,'* he said. " You will be looking around
for your master, at this time tomorrow, and he will not be here.
That wiU be strange enough, old doggie.**
As he said those words, he raised his head and gave a long
look around the rooms, that long suite of drawing-rooms, so
long familiar and so soon to be strange. He put away the dog,
who jumped on him and licked his hand, and began to pace
thoughtfully up and down the room.
^ I am glad Aunt Luce is coming tomorrow,** he said, ** to-
morrow 'when I shall not be here.**
It was characteristic of mother and son, that then and in
aU the conversations they had held together, there had been
no word of rancor against the foe, nor yet of hatred. Con-
sciously or unconsciously, they despised such modes of speech,
or, in their inexorable commonsense, they recognized their
uselessness. To them both there was a great duty to be done,
a sacred cause to be upheld, and that was all. Achille felt
no strong and virile man could shirk that duty, just as the
mother was convinced that no right-thinking mother could
hinder its performance. It made the mother*s sacrifice the
harder that she was resolved to restrain all outward emotion.
She would not even accompany her son to the station, lest
she might break down there. Also, she fancied it would be
harder to return to the empty house. On that long dreaded
morning she said to the departing soldier:
**You will return, my son, when God pleases and when
your work over there is done.**
"" Until our work is done, that is as long as we are needed
anywhere, mother dearest,** replied Achille, with a laugh that
sounded forced.
Then he folded her in his arms and for a long moment
they so remained, the mother and the son. After that Achille
went bravely down the steps, which as man and boy his feet
had so often traversed. His dog who had been shut up.
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whined and yelped. It was the only sound. The mother stood
at the door with a smile upon her face. She saw her Achille
turn and cast a long, wistful glance backwards over the house.
Then he stepped into the motor, waved his hand in farewell
and was gone out of her sight. The mother sat a few moments
in the drawing-room before she passed upstairs to her own
apartment and there remained. Was it on her richly carved
prie dieu, or giving away to the long repressed agony of tears?
Who could tell?
In the afternoon she came down, calm and composed, to
meet Aunt Luce.
The letters that soon began to come, at tolerably regular
intervals, were bright and full of news. Achille in the trenches,
in the dugout, forty feet below ground, in the ruined towns be-
hind the line. Achille on leave and seeing more or less of the
world, but always, as he said, looking forward to the t|me when
he would stand on Canadian soil again. Never had that native
land gripped his heart strings as now, when he had put thou-
sands of miles between him and it. Sometimes he jested about
himself or his comrades, relating how alarmed he had been at
sight of the gray-coated adversaries advancing in serried
columns, the shells bursting near, the bombs coming from over-
head, or the whizzing bullets of the snipers, speeding close on
their death-dealing mission. Again, he described with a burst
of patriotic fervor some advantage that had been gained, some
dearly bought triumph won, or he extoUed with an enthusiasm,
real if repressed, the heroism of those who were courting death
at every hour.
Madame de Grandpr^ shared all these letters with Aunt
Luce, even when the bright-faced widow had not herself re-
ceived one. She was naturally of a gay and cheerful disposi-
tion and keenly interested in the sayings and doings of all
around her. She was at pains to discover whether Achille had
gone to say good-bye to Marguerite, that charmingly pretty and
winsome girl, who in her extreme youth and inexperience was,
as yet, but a silhouette in the young man's life, an exquisite
sketch of what, more matured, she would become. As far as it
was possible for Aunt Luce to discover, Achille had not spoken.
The girl was shy and reserved, but the elder woman could
detect a slight accent of bitterness in her tone.
" Lieutenant de Grandprd," she observed, " was very keen
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672 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
about the War. Nothing else seemed to interest him very
much."
"Strange!" commented the aunt meaningly, "I used to
fancy he was interested in — many things."
The girl catching the significance of the tone, flushed
slightly. " He could speak of nothing else," she declared.
" Vraie? Well, he hopes that this War will not be long."
The girl sighed ever so faintly. ** I fear it will be very
long," she said.
" Nothing is long to youth," exclaimed Aunt Luce. After
which she went away and told her sister that it was very dis-
appointing that that rascal of an Achille had not spoken, and
that he might miss the chance of getting so perfect a wife.
The mother laughed a little, as though she were not ill
pleased.
" Perhaps after all," she remarked, " he has not discovered
all her perfections."
" There spoke the green-eyed monster," jested the cheer-
ful little widow. But she did not insist any farther. It would
be time enough when the neglectful boy came home, if Mar-
guerite were not snapped up in the meantime. She argued,
however, with the philosophy of experience that, apart from all
sentimental considerations and the sterling qualities of Achille,
neither the girl nor her parents would be in a hurry to let a
million or more slip through their fingers. Meanwhile it was
her chief business to smooth away, as far as possible, any
thorns from her sister's path, and to keep her mind from too
much brooding. For she was well aware that under that out-
ward calm and repose, were the deep waters of pain and bit-
terness. Sometimes when she missed her, Madame de Grand-
pr^ would be found in the workshop, softly fingering over the
various mechanical applicances, whose names she did not
know, or polishing their shining surfaces with a chamois. On
such occasions. Aunt Luce stole away without a word, or softly
miumured to herself:
" Ah, the poor mother! "
Achille de Grandpr6 stood under the stars of France. It
was a cool dark night. The familiar constellations, Orion and
the Herdsman, Cassiopia and Charles' Wain, burned deeply
in the azure, and sent the young soldier's thoughts back, with
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a fierce throb of pain, to that country of his heart's love. Sud-
denly, it seemed to him he heard singing. Was it the voices
of the pilgrims in that peaceful village singing the hymn to
good St. Anne. It sent a weird, uncanny thrill through his
veins and he saw, as in a picture, the figure of the old habitant,
with white hair, a symbol of happier times, sitting in the peace
of the gallery in a far-off village, looking out over the river,
and fearing only the depopulation of his beloved Canada. To
the young man, whose whole frame vibrated with eagerness,
responding to the call of the hour, it was difficult to under-
stand such an attitude. He shook himself to get rid of that
weird impression of those pilgrims singing thousands of miles
off. Then he laughed, and realized that what he had heard
was a few Canadians near at hand, singing in subdued voices:
" O Canada, mon pays, mon amour! "
That was different. It sent a thrill through him and seemed
to warm his blood. Achille bethought himself that he had to
see the chaplain, before it was too late. For it was known that
they were going into action on the morrow. As he threaded
his way through the line of trenches, he could see, dimly in the
bright starlight, the town of Courcellette over yonder, with the
spire of its church rising into the air like an emblem of hope.
He stood and looked at it with a strange feeling. There are
certain objects that at times seem like landmarks on life's
journey. The chaplain was busy. Numbers of men were
crowding about his quarters. But Achille waited. Never since
leaving college had he omitted his monthly Communion, far less
would he do so now in this vital, throbbing moment, when life
seemed to touch on the confines of death. After confession
he laughed and jested with the chaplain, who had known him
and his people in that far-off Canada which seemed so dream-
like. This, this was the reality, grim and terrible. That coun-
try with its fragrant pine forests, its glory of autumn coloring,
its winter snows, the frost-bound rivers, and its summer's
splendid warmth, was something remote and distant. It
seemed as something he had imagined and almost spectral
appeared the familiar faces — the cheerful, kindly countenance
of Aunt Luce, the pretty and winsome visage of Marguerite
with her own appealing lithe charm, and his mother, his
mother.
After his interview with the chaplain, he felt strangely
▼OL. cvui. — 43
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674 THE BETTER PART [Feb^
lighthearted and glowing with enthusiasm for the work that
had to be done on the morrow. He had been under fire be-
fore, and he could have told, if he wished, all sorts of blood-
curdling tales of narrow escapes in the trenches. But tomor-
row would be something new and vital, something, he hoped,
which would immortalize the men of Canada. He went about
and visited the other officers. Many of those attached to that
unit had been fellow students with him at St. Mary's in Mon-
treal, or had been his personal friends. They belonged to
prominent Canadian families. They were mostly merry and
good-humored with a certain reckless dash and bravery.
There was much gay talk and laughter among them, as though
they were going to a festival, though occasionaUy a graver note
was struck, when half in jest, whoUy in earnest, they gave
each other messages to carry home, ^' in case they did not come
out."
At dawn, the chaplain gave them Holy Communion and
addressed to them a few heart-stirring words. He bade them
divest their hearts of aU hatred against the foe and to super-
naturalize their actions for the stern duty they had to per-
form. No man, he said, who had been strengthened by the
Sacrament of life, could fail in presence of the enemy, and he
exhorted them, one and all, to make the sacrifice of their lives.
That so that they might be able to exchange this mortal for
immortality, this corruptible for incorruptibility.
That battle of Courcellette has been described in many a
glowing newspaper account, in many a home-written letter. It
will be described in war chronicles, long after this generation
that reads has passed from the earth. Courcellette will be a
name to stir the blood of Canadians and to be reechoed by the
children and children's children of survivors, in generations
to come. The Canadians swept all before them. Scarce re-
strained by orders, the gallant Twenty-second rushed like a
torrent over the ground, crossing the bridge that spanned the
stream, and into the heart of that little viUage which they
carried by assault. Achille de Grandpr6 seeing before him as
his objective the church spire which shone brightly in the
morning sun, speeding onwards at the head of his men, seemed
like one beside himself in a very frenzy of martial ardor. He
could not be kept back, as in a rapid, incisive voice he gave his
orders to advance, always to advance. In one swift rush he
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carried his men over the stream. His courage was aU but
superhuman. His slight jBgure appeared to have gained ad-
ditional stature. He heard his own voice, shouting himself as
it were hoarse, and he waved his sword which caught on its
point the gleam of the rising sun.
Madame de Grandpr6 sat with Aunt Luce at breakfast, in
that luxurious dining-room where but a few months before
Achille had been with them. They were talking of him as
they so often did, and of the good news in his last letter; how
well and in what excellent spirits he had been. All at once the
mother's eyes dimmed and her face clouded.
" You will laugh at me. Luce," she said, " but I feel sad
and depressed this morning."
Luce looked inquiringly: ** Just after having got such good
news? " she suggested.
" It is all because of a dream."
"A dream? I wonder at you, ma chire. You are not
growing superstitious is your old days? "
^'No, no, I have always mocked at omens, dreams and
such like fooleries. Biit this was extraordinarily vivid."
"About Achille?"
" Yes, about Achille. I thought I saw him in France. He
was at the head of his men, and they were crossing a stream,
over a bridge. I could see the water and the bridge very dis-
tinctly, my dear Luce. Then — ^" she paused and passed her
hand over her forehead. ** In the centre it broke down. I saw
him struggling. Then darkness."
Luce could not help being impressed by the look and tone
of her sister, who was so sensible, so strong-minded, but she
stoutly contended: " It is an indigestion, my sister, something
you have eaten, and since your thoughts are always on Achille,
why, naturally your nightmare would take that form."
Madame de Grandpr6 forced a smile : " It is ridiculous, of
course," she agreed, "to be troubled about the vagaries of
the mind in sleep."
" You will have Achille back here before you know," Luce
argued, " to be a — ^yes a grandfather."
" That wiU take time," jested the mother, " and I may not
be allowed to wait for that."
" If only he has not let slip," continued the aunt, " that Mar-
guerite, so mignonne, so chic and so good and pious besides."
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676 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
"She is a very sweet young girV agreed the mother,
thoughtfully. " Decidedly you are right, Achille could not do
better. Yesterday I saw her praying in church.'*
" Praying for Achille, sans doute"
** I hope so. Prayers are their only safeguard, those dear
soldiers of Canada."
It was hard to say why the conversation took that turn,
but before they knew the two women were counting those of
their acquaintances who had lost some dear one at the front
Aunt Luce, in her incurable optimism, pictured that loss in
itself as a great happiness.
" Is it not better," she said, " for those who have fallen to
have met with so glorious a death, rather than to live on and
grow old, to see their strength fall from them day by day, to
suffer perhaps from some terrible disease, until death gathers
them like withered leaves. They have gone, young, brave, with
clean souls and brave hearts. Spared all the miseries of life,
their country will remember them always, living and young,
and God wiU receive them speedily into His Kingdom. Surely
for them it is the better part."
The speaker's face was lighted up with enthusiasm, her
voice trembled with emotion. Madame de Grandpri looked
at her with something like fear, something like awe. She shiv-
ered slightly as she cried: "Oh God! Luce, where do the
mothers get the strength to bear itl "
Aunt Luce started off, after a while, to market. The serv-
ants were all busy at their various tasks. The day was bright
and clear, very much like that one upon which AchiUe had
waved good-bye to his mother from the motor. The house
seemed big and empty: its mistress wandered restlessly about
the big, drawing-rooms, putting little touches here and there.
She decided that if once that dreadful War were over, and
Achille were coming home, she would make some changes,
some improvements. With a smile and a sigh, she recalled
Aimt Luce's predictions, which she had always tried to wave
aside, that there might be question of a marriage. She re-
solved that she would try and reconcile herself to that, as a
Christian mother should, especially when her son was likely
to make so excellent a choice. She tried hard to banish the
memory of that sinister dream, which had left her with so
strong a feeling of depression. She strove to picture to hcr-
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self instead that day when her boy should come home, bound-
ing lightly up the steps as had been his habit. How delightful
it would be to hear him tell of his experiences over there, and
she determined to ask him if he had ever seen such a river and
such a bridge.
The electric bell sounded through the spacious hall and up
the broad stairs. Contrary to all precedent in that orderly
household, the servants seemed to be all busy, so that Madame
de Grandpr6 went to the door and opened it herself. She was
handed a yellow slip of paper, with its brief, official message:
We regret to inform you that your son, Lieutenant de
Grandpr^, was killed in action, leading his men to the attack
over a bridge at Courcellette.
That strong, brave woman, with one cry of "My God, I
offer it for his soul's repose,'* fell fainting to the floor just as a
servant came hurrying to answer the bell. When Aunt Luce
returned, full of consternation and dismay at having been ab-
sent, she found her sister in bed. Bending over her, with fast
falling tears, she could only hear the faintly whispered words:
" Achille has won the better part."
Some days later came letters from the Battalion Comman-
der, from the Colonel of the regiment and from the chaplain.
All extolled the heroic conduct of the young officer, giving such
details of his death as were known. One only at the moment
gave the mother any comfort. It was the letter of the
priest who told how Achille had been to confession and
in the dawn of that fateful morning had received Conununion
from his hands. He gave further details that had reached him
through a comrade and friend of the dead officer. This latter,
mortally wounded himself, had managed to creep back to the
lines bringing Achille's watch, beads and scapular with two
letters found upon his person and giving details. That com-
rade lived just long enough to describe the manner of his
friend's faU and to receive absolution. The letters were to
Marguerite and the mother. The first read as follows:
My dear Marguerite:
Tonight it has seemed to me that I was wrong in not
having spoken to you definitely. Probably with your fine
intuition, you have guessed much of what I could tell you.
But, my dearest girl, if I had asked, and you had listened
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678 THE BETTER PART [Feb.,
favorably to my suit, there was always the chance that I
should leave you a widow or bound by a long engagement,
which did not seem to me just or right. Except I be
disabled, I shall not return, until this War is over. If I do,
perhaps you will consent to marry me. It would rejoice
me to believe so. If I never go back, I hope some luckier
fellow will make you happy. But do not entirely forget
Achille, who now sends you this message across the wide
ocean that separates us, that through all the years you may
know that he truly loved you. I also beg of you, who pray
so much, to put me always in your prayers living or dead.
Good-night, my love. Something tells me it is good-bye.
In life or in death.
Ever faithfully yours,
Achille.
The letter to his mother ran as foUows:
Dearest Mother:
If I come out of tomorrow's fight, this letter will never
be sent. It might then seem absurd and sentimental. But
if I am never to see Canada again, I want to thank you for
all your love and care, and to ask you to forgive me for my
thoughtlessness and selfishness. I realize now how much
more I might have done for you. Give my love to my sis-
ters, whom I am glad to think I saw in Quebec before sail-
ing. Tell them to pray for me. Also, my best love to Aunt
Luce. In the absence of your children, her true heart will
be your comfort. I have made my peace with God, and so I
am ready for whatever happens.
It was so pleasant to meet our old friend Father
who could speak of you all. In any event, I do not regret
what I have done. I am willing to lay down my life, with
our splendid, gallant follows, for the cause. If I am not to
go back, do not grieve. As the chaplain says, "Time is
short " and we shall meet again soon, after all. I seem to
see you all before me in the old places, with even my poor
old dog, an humble faithful friend.
Good-night, dearest mother, and if it must be so, good-
bye. That God may ever bless you is the prayer, on this
night that may be his last, of
Your ever grateful and devoted son,
Achille.
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Bew Books.
THE PROCESS OF HISTORY. By Frederick J. Teggart, Ph.D.
New Haven: Yale University Press. $1.25 net.
A moment more opportune than the present could not have
been chosen by Dr. Teggart for the publication of his book, which
analyzes the processes of history. His interesting inquiry aims
at discovering a method more scientific than the rude ones now
employed to ascertain how man everywhere has come to be what
he is. No subject more important could have engaged the scholar-
ship of an investigator. Professor Teggart attempts to do for
human history what biologists are doing for all forms of life. In
such an undertaking, however, it should constantly be kept in
mind that the field of the historian, the unnumbered activities of
the mind of man, is a realm more ample than even the consider-
able kingdom of animated nature.
The author's object is practical, for he inquires whether his-
torians are doing all that .lies in their power to contribute to the
well-being of their fellow-men. The stages of his discussion in-
clude an account of the nature and scope of this investigation,
the geographical as well as the human factor in history, and an
examination of former methods of research.
One result of the present conflict, the author remarks, has
been a lessening of the exclusiveness and self-confidence of the
western European; and, he adds, we have come to regard the differ-
ences and contrasts among men, not as a basis for disparagement,
but as something to be explained. This is the problem selected
by Dr. Teggart. The familiar fact is noticed that men of every
hue assume toward one another an attitude of superiority. How
do historians propose to eliminate from their conclusions all
traces of the subjective? In historical narratives personal bias
will show itself by the appearance of elements, personal, ethical,
religious. This sufficiently suggests the winds that sweep across
the field of history.
The popular theory is examined which attributes the diversi-
ties among peoples to physical differences in race. This implies
that not only in all places but in all times a race preserves its
distinguishing characteristics. Certain writers base the differ-
ences of race groups on mental characteristics. But neither the
race theory nor that of habitat offers an adequate basis for an'ex-
planation of how man has come to be what he is.
The sociologist, says the author, still sets before himself the
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aim of discovering the law of progress, while the historian
assumes progress. In the annals of the races of men there appear
to have been stagnation, retrogression, and oblivion nearly as
often as progress.
Professor Teggart justly observes that the " analytical study
of history must be founded upon a comparison of the particular
histories of all human groups, and must be actuated by the con-
scious effort to take cognizance of all the available facts." If we
are ever to know how men have come to be what they are, it is
clear that it is not to be discovered by even the most exhaustive
investigation of a few distinct human groups.
The author's second section examines "the bases for an
acceptance of the homogeneity of history." It is pointed out that
though Freeman expected pleasure in perusing the annals of
Asiatic peoples, he did not look for light from the East Of ex-
treme importance is the subject of the migration of the races, a
phenomenon, says the author, which is not caused by the pressure
of population. Investigations leave no doubt that the inhabitants
of the explored sites have " been repeatedly driven forth by de-
structive changes of climate." After treating the influence of
climatic changes, this study considers in detail the human factor.
The last section, method and results, along with other mat-
ters assembles the principles examined in the earlier part of the
work. This makes it plain that the study of man involves an
inquiry "as to how modifications and changes in idea-systems
have been, and still are, brought about." In every human group.
Professor Teggart remarks, there may be observed certain pro-
cesses by which idea-systems are being slowly but continuously
modified. These processes, differing both in potency and type, it
would be interesting to describe, but there is not in this place the
space even to enumerate them. If, however, this review will but
lead the reader to the pages of the author, it will have attained
to its principal object. His remarkable essay is not to be tasted,
but, to use the words of Bacon, it is " to be chewed and digested."
If one will apply its principles to one's own group, it will solve
many of one's problems.
THE WORLD'S DEBATE. By Rev. William Barry. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $1.50.
How a duchy, with an area smaller than Scotland, with no
silver streak and but little natural resources, became a kingdom,
how the kingdom became the most powerful empire of modern
times, and how in its passion for universal domination that State,
hammered and welded into an army, brought war upon the world.
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is told with many a dramatic touch in The World's Debate.
Through all the wonderful chapters runs the story of a dynasty
steadily forging its way towards the realization of its vast am-
bition, the hegemony of Europe, scheming and working with a
continuity of purpose and method that linked the last of the
HohenzoUerns with the Great Elector of Brandenburg. For the
unfolding of this gigantic plot Dr. Barry, " a spectator of all time
and all existence," was eminently fitted. The book is full of his-
torical portraits: as one towering figure after another emerges,
it is instantly etched. It is also replete with allusions and
anecdotes and analogies. The mention of Cardinal Mercier's name
sends the thoughts of the writer back to the year 451, when Attila
was ravaging Gaul, and when (quoting Gibbon's words) "the
pastoral diligence of Anianus, a bishoj> of primitive sanctity and
consummate prudence, exhausted every art of religious policy to
support their courage till the arrival of the expected succor."
There are innumerable side-lights. "Kultur is the idea of
mechanism made perfect." "Heine. bade his audience observe
that German princes sat on nearly all the thrones of Europe and
that they fought or conspired everywhere against liberty." " The
definition of Papal Infallibility, as Cardinal Gibbons said, did more
to rescue the Church from the dominion of the State than any-
thing in modern history. And it did so by declaring that the
Church is a sovereign society, complete in itself, having juris-
diction in its own province everywhere over its members." The
United States did not enter the War sooner because " President
Wilson was waiting until the nation of America had made up
its conscience." In the hands of the scholarly English priest the
story throughout has all the charm of Macaulay's pages. There
is the same grasp of history, the same wide reading among the
literatures of Europe, the same vividness of narration — the vivid-
ness of memories rather than of history pure and simple. Need-
less to add that history, as Dr. Barry tells it, is philosophy teach-
ing by examples.
OLD TRUTHS AND NEW PACTS. By Charles E. Jefferson, D.D.
New York: Fleming H. Revell Co. $1.25 net.
If this book can be taken as indicative of present-day Prot-
estantism it is a hopeful sign of a return at least on some points
to sound Christian doctrine. Indeed, the Reverend author is occa-
sionally more Catholic than he is conscious of. His aim is to tell us
a few of the things " at which it is reasonable to expect a modifica-
tion of Christian opinion to be brought about by the Great War."
And while his position does not permit him to say plainly that
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certain truths which have always been accepted dogmas in the
Catholic Church will now occupy a similar place in the minds
of those who still retaiit some form of Christianity, he does ven-
ture to predict that various doctrines " will receive a prominence
which has hitherto been denied them."
It is only too well known that many sects have in the past
despised or at least disputed the dual nature of the God-man. Dr.
Jefferson rightly rejects such blasphemy as well as the vulgarism
of those traveling evangelists who " slap Jesus as it were on the
shoulder, and speak to Him as though He were a street Arab." But
it is painful to see him in the heart of an edifying chapter, leave
cold present-day facts and drift into mythology. He calmly pro-
ceeds to inform his readers that '' during what we call the Middle
Ages, the Virgin Mary held the supreme place in the popular mind.
Most of the prayers were offered to her. Jesus was hidden behind
His Mother." One would expect more from a scholarly divine.
It is disappointing that in the churches for which he speaks the
dogma of the Incarnation will after all be merely '* a shifting of
the emphasis from the humanity to the Divinity." We looked
for something more definite. But let us be thankful even for this.
The remarks on vicarious suffering are a big improvement
on those usually upheld by his co-religionists. In his treatment
of prayer he is not so happy. Its necessity is not questioned. But
the attempt at a theological explanation of its conditional efficacy
is lame. We may not hope to save a burning city on bended knees.
But this does not mean that God may not sometimes as a result
of intercession grant what, humanly speaking, we could never hope
for. We are sorry Dr. Jefferson has no room in his theology for
prayers for the dead. Anglican-Protestantism wisely modified its
attitude in this at the demand of many of its members. It would be
a healthy sign if in this country we heard of something similar.
The Reverend author is not disturbed by the cry of those who
consider Christianity a failure because it failed to prevent war. The
very fact that men looked to it to accomplish this, and not to
art, education, science, or even international law, shows that re-
ligion has a deeper hold on men's hearts than they themselves are
conscious of. There is something in this. The assistance ren-
dered the state by the various churches will, he thinks, be pro-
ductive of much good. We trust it will. The naive advertisement
however of the Y. M. C. A. as the Church's agent par excellence,
and *• the most popular institution on the face of the earth," is
we venture to think slightly overdrawn. The omission of any
particular organization where so many have done excellent work
would show better taste.
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The Bible has been abused. This must change. " The war
is demonstrating the futility of Bibliotry. We cannot live on a
book: No book can tell us all we want to know, or do for us all
we must have done." If it took a war to make those outside the
Catholic Church realize that the *' Bible and nothing but the
Bible " means spiritual starvation then it has not been in vain.
DYNAMIC PSYCHOLOGY. By Robert S. Woodworth. Ph,D.
New York: Columbia University Press. $1.50.
The purpose of this interesting volume is to study human
behavior from the point of view of cause and efifect. In a pre-
liminary chapter the author briefly sketches the history of the
development of modern scientific psychology in its separation
from traditional philosophical associations. The definition, how-
ever, of psychology as a science, either of consciousness, or of
behavior, is too superficial to satisfy the scientific inquirer.
Dynamic Psychology would utilize the results of the study of con-
sciousness and of behavior, with the addition of brain physiology,
in the endeavor to solve the two problems of "how" we do a
thing and " why " we do it, the problem of mechanism and drive,
or motives of action in human life. The thesis the author defends
is thus summed up in his own words : " Any mechanism, once
it is aroused, is capable of furnishing its own drive and also lend-
ing drive to other converted mechanisms."
Human instincts, varied though they be, do not furnish suf-
ficient motive to human conduct in all the multiplicity and variety
of man's activity. Over and above the instinctive tendencies there
are native equipments, acquired or learned equipments, selection,
control, originality, social behavior; these cannot be explained
adequately on the mere assumption of instincts as the motor-
power or drive. The motor force in each one of these varied func-
tions of human life is found in the performance itself; interest
in the work is the force which furnishes the drive. Selection, con-
trol, inhibition, find complete explanation in the interest which
accompanies man's activity. Even in mentally abnormal cases
the same law of action obtains.
The work is written in a refreshingly clear style, so unusual
in a great deal of our contemporary psychological literature. The
criticism of many current psychological errors is clear and con-
vincing. The author manifests throughout the work a keen
analytical mind and a thorough acquaintance with contemporary
psychology. The union of mechanism and drive undoubtedly
exists in many human actions; if the principle could be applied,
say, to education, to industry, gratifying results would surely
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follow. But man is bound to do many things in which spontane-
ous interest is not the motor force; the stimulus to action must
come from external sources, both to initiate the function and to
keep the mechanism at work. Moral law, duty, self-denial, are
facts that need an interpretation not found in the psychological
analysis of this work. Entirely insufficient is his account of "so-
cial behavior." The freedom of the will, " in the sense of being
unconditioned and uncaused," is " an uncongenial concept " not
only in dynamic, but also in rational psychology.
The work is worthy of careful study, even if the reader will
not be able to agree with all the views advocated by the author.
Dynamic psychology marks a step in advance towards a more
thorough psychological interpretation of human conduct, the aim
which rational psychology always has in view.
OUR HUMBLE HELPERS. Jean Henri Fabre. New York: The
Century Co. $2.00.
It is perhaps unfortunate that Our Humble Helpers is put
forward as a book for children, because that is precisely what it
is not, except for children of an older growth. The mere casting
of it in dialogue with children does not mitigate the fact that much
of what Fabre says is expressed in a fashion too difficult for the
average child to comprehend. Overlook this obvious drawback,
and the book is just one delight after another, an accumulating
series of informative sketches on the everyday birds and beasts
about us.
The style of the book and its purpose closely resembles
Fabre's Story Book of Science, and is more interesting for general
readers in that the domestic animals are more familiar. The style,
however, has the same captivating intimacy with dumb things
which made Fabre so beloved and so serviceable to mankind. He
opens the eyes. He puts us at ease in the presence of nature's in-
tricacies. He shows us the fellowship and warfare and stern
rigors of another life and another world. He has robbed science —
natural science, at least — of its forbidding dryness and unhuman
characteristics.
PEBBLES ON THE SHORE. By " Alpha of the Plough." New
York: E. P. Dutton & Co. $2.00.
This is a book of essays of singular charm, which were con-
tributed to the Lordon Star in war-time, and are now published
under the above title, as being " pebbles gathered on the shore of
a wild sea." It would be a mistake to suppose that they have
chiefly a war-interest, except inasmuch as they served as leni-
tives of the prevalent unrest. As types of the familiar essay, of
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the informal causerie on. men and things, they represent English
journalism at its best — at once intimate, elevated, self-contained.
Each paper embodies the admirable working-out of an idea which
leaves the reader fascinated by its rich implications.
'* Alpha of the Plough ** has nimbler senses and more vivid
pulses of pleasure than the average man, else he would not write
so charmingly. ** It is the privilege of the artist,'' he says some-
where, '' to enrich the general life with the consciousness of the
world which he alone has experienced." It is this gift of vision
which tinges the diction and content of the essays with the imagi-
nation and phrasing of the poet. He has, withal, a saving sense
of humor which divests him of English class-prejudice, and a
healthy inertia which makes him proof against pessimists — even
in war-time. In point of technique, the most striking features are
the simple means with which he creates his effects, and the limpid
ease and flow of the writing. However much the current of his
thought may ripple and return on itself, it never fails eventually
to cast up its pebble of truth well on the shore.
It may be added that the little volume belongs to the Way-
farer's Library and is illustrated with the attractive crayon
sketches of M. C. E. Brock, who has done a similar service for
many English classics.
THE VIRGIN ISLANDS, OUR NEW POSSESSIONS AND THE
BRITISH ISLANDS. By Theodoor De Booy and John T.
Paris. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. $3.00.
Since it has become the privilege of the United States, as
President Wilson said, to chart the course of peace and to form a
league of peace-enforcing nations, the purchase of the Virgin
Islands would seem to be a form of cosmic joke. Bought osten-
sibly to add to our coaling stations or to command certain of the
West Indian trade routes, these Islands proved a costly venture.
We paid on the average of $300 per acre! The price was
$25,000,000; whereas, in 1867, the Danish Government was willing
and glad to part vsrith them for $5,000,000. But now we have them,
it is our opportunity to make them repay the investment. This
volume, by two authorities on the Virgin Islands, is a sort of
survey of the possibilities.
Behind this little group of islands lies some rare and roman-
tic history, and as the authors consider each one — St. Thomas,
St. John and St. Croix — they give a general sketch of the past.
It is a past filled with buccaneers, slave insurrections, national
greed, petty wars and hurricanes. Having told of the past, they
proceed to describe the geographic and economic conditions, the
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nature of the inhabitants, and then project these conditions into
the future when they shall have felt the improving attention of the
United States. Not that Denmark neglected this little group of
colonies; in fact her record there is an almost spotless page in the
history of colonial government. Finally, the authors give hints to
tourists — for tourist traffic will surely start with the States — and
a risumi of the business opportunities.
The volume is well illustrated with photographic views, and
its text is eminently readable. The growing interest in our new
possessions, which peace has made possible, should justify a pop-
ular demand for this excellent volume of travels.
THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY. By William Lyon Phelps. New York: Dodd,
Mead & Co. $1.50.
The title Professor Phelps has chosen for his latest book is
unfortunate inasmuch as the term *' advance" leaves room for
cavil; English Poetry in the Twentieth Century would more
accurately indicate the scope of the work. His real purpose is to
give a survey of the best contemporary poetry produced in Eng-
land, Ireland and America, and to show that, today more than
ever before, poetry exercises a vital influence on humanity. In
a readable and gossipy style he analyzes the work of the major
contemporary poets — ^Watson, Masefield, Kipling, Thompson,
Henley, Hardy, Phillips, Noyes, Yeats, Synge, Lindsay, Masters —
and of a hundred lesser figures. He proves himself in this task an
admirable popularizer of current literature, at once wholesome,
brilliant and entertaining. The estimates are written with un-
flagging verve and gusto, and his talent as a literary causeur is
illustrated by the incisive allusions and obiter dicta with which
he seasons his discourse. His method is Chestertonian in its
point and antithesis, its colloquial idiom and pungent humor. At
times, indeed, in his striving for effect he is betrayed into ill-con-
sidered judgments. Yet, all in all, he gives a tolerable conspectus
of the recent development of English poetry.
His appreciation of Masefield, whom he styles a modern
Chaucer, is the piice de resistance of the book. It gives the leading
notes of the twentieth century trend in poetry — dynamic quality,
freedom of technique, truth to the conditions of the actual world,
and lack of restraint or reticence. Incidentally it reveals the
fact that "vitality" is the chief element in the modern poets
which recommends them to Mr. Phelps. This ground of prefer-
ence may explain his omission of Mrs. MeynelFs exquisite Muse,
his imperfect sympathy with George Woodberry and Lascelles
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Abercrombie, and his glorification of Kipling at the expense of
Robert Bridges. Yet it is only fair to say that he values the deli-
cate art of Yeats and Walter de la Mare. He is, however, surely
misguided in over-rating Kipling, the Jingo bard whom William
Watson decries, and whom Matthew Arnold would dub a
Philistine.
Some of Professor Phelps' comparisons are plausible rather
than real. For instance, Francis Thompson — ^whose spiritual pas-
sion he does not plumb — might more effectively be contrasted with
George Meredith, the poet of Evolution, rather than with Henley.
Then, too, the parallel traced between Wordsworth's poetic creed
and Masefield's practice seems prompted by love of paradox. On
the other hand, his characterization of Hardy, Hodgson, Alan
Seeger and Rupert Brooke is undoubtedly felicitous. Vachell
Lindsay is effectively described as an authentic twentieth century
minstrel, and Yeats and ** A. E." Russell are piquantly named the
Ariel and Prospero in the modern Tempest of Ireland. By the
way it seems that the modern Irish poets do not give Professor
Phelps the "unmistakable spinal chill" which is his unfailing
test of poetic excellence. The lack of the appreciative spasm is
due simply to the fact that things Irish do not interest him. Hence
his treatment of the Irish Revival movement is hopelessly beside
the mark.
It is regrettable that so few Catholic writers receive notice in
this account of modern poetry.
CITIES AND SEACOASTS AND ISLANDS. By Arthur Symons.
New York: Brentano's. $3.00.
Arthur Symons has gone into every corner of Europe to spy
out the land, and he has never once returned without the
pomegranates and the figs and the cluster of grapes which are the
reward of those who wander afar in receptiveness of spirit and in
hope. Some of these meditative visions have already been pub-
lished in his golden book. Cities, and now in Cities and Seacoasts
and Islands he enshrines in perfect and pensive prose certain
other adventures of his voyaging spirit among the moods of a few
Spanish cities, in London, and in several coast towns and dis-
tricts of France, England and Ireland.
Perhaps by no other English writer has the fascination that
is in all things Spanish been more delicately, wistfully recap-
tured ; above all the fascination of the Spanish city, especially the
Spanish city on a feast-day. His pages on London are full of deli-
cate color effects that recall Whistler's brush-work at its most
magical.
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His visit to the Aran Islands, whither he journeyed — one no-
tices from the date — two-and-twenty years ago, was made before
the Aran Island had become literature in the prose and dramas
of J. N. Synge. These descriptions remind one a little of Synge's
writing in The Aran Islands; but only a little, for there is a
hard glittering firmness about Synge's prose which definitely
demarcates it from the more fluid art of Symons. Cities and Sea-
coasts and Islands is a book to be read over and over. It is a
permanent addition to English literature. And with all due re-
spect to the reviewers, permanent additions to English literature
do not occur once a week.
ALBERT DE MUN. By Victor Giraud. Paris: Bloud & Gay.
If a friend had told the materialistic philosopher, Claude
Adrien Helvetius, that a great grandson of his would be an ardent
defender of the Catholic faith, he would have laughed the prophecy
to scorn. But time frequently has its revenge, and God knows
how to make the children adore what their fathers burned. One
of Helvetius' daughters married in 1772 the Count de Mun, a Field
Marshal of France under Louis XVI., the grandfather of the sub-
ject of this biography.
Albert Count de Mun was essentially the soldier and the
aristocrat his life long. He graduated from St. Cyr in 1862, and
learned his first lessons in French colonial policy during five cam-
paigns in Algeria. He fought also in the Franco-Prussian war,
and gained the Cross of the Legion of Honor on the field of Grave-
lotte. While a prisoner in Germany with his friend. La Tour de
Pin, he became initiated into the popular social movement in
Germany associated with the name of Bishop von Ketteler. The
Commune of Paris, with its bitter hatred of religion and govern-
ment, made him ask whether France had not failed to educate the
popular conscience, and whether she was not reaping the fruits
of the Revolution.
In November, 1871, the Count de Mun met a Brother of St.
Vincent de Paul, Maurice Maignen, who interested him in a work-
ingman's club, which he had established in Paris. His first public
speech was made at one of these meetings in the boulevard
Montparnasse, and from that time he devoted his best energies
towards developing these cercles catholiques d'ouvriers. Within
four years one hundred and fifty clubs had been formed, with
18,000 members, 15,000 of whom were workingmen.
For thirty-eight years he fought in the French Parliament
the cause of the worker. He studied the social question in its
every phase, and became an expert economist, sociologist, and
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statistician. He ever maintained that the modern demands of
the worker for more leisure, better wages, the safeguarding of
children and women, the right of arbitration in labor disputes,
were based on justice, and were in reality " an unconscious long-
ing for a forgotten Christianity."
The social and political work of the Count de Mun was much
hampered by his royalist leanings. His enemies claimed that he
wanted the monarchy back with all its abuses, but this was un-
true, for he frequently spoke of the corruption of the old rigime,
and declared that the royalist of today must appeal to the people
''not as men of the decadent past, but as men of the future."
When Pope Leo XIII. asked the Catholics of France to rally to the
Republic in 1892, Count de Mun at once responded, although his
enemies were not impressed by his change of front.
Still the Count de Mun was respected by all for his ardent
patriotism, which loved France to the core, although it deplored
• the anti-Catholic government of the Third Republic. When ill-
ness prevented his speaking in the early days of the War, he wrote
day after day to rally all parties to the defence of their country.
All France attended his funeral in Bordeaux. They knew they
were burying one of the greatest Frenchmen of the century — a
valiant soldier, an ardent patriot, a Catholic Crusader and a great
lover of the poor.
APPLIED EUGENICS. By Paul Popenoe and RosweU Hill John-
son. New York: The Macmillan Co. $2.10 net.
It is interesting to have a book on the subject of Eugenics
which begins with a quotation from Jacob Riis who, at the first
Race Betterment Conference years ago, declared with regard to
heredity: "The word has rung in my ears until I am sick of it.
Heredity! Heredity! There is just one heredity in all the world
that is ours — ^we are children of God, and there is nothing in the
whole big world that we cannot do in His service with it.*'
There is much in this book that is thoroughly conservative.
Some of it even startling for those who have thought that eugenics
pointed exactly the other way. For instance, as regards the argu-
ment that large families are an evil in themselves, the children in
them being handicapped by the excessive child-bearing of the
mother, the authors have to say, '* It can easily be shown by a
study of more favored families, that the best children come from
the large fraternities.*' As regards the effect on the mother her-
self, her subsequent health and above all her longevity, recent
observations are equally contradictory of the conclusions that
selfish luxury would suggest. Infant mortality is shown to be
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lowest among the children of young mothers, say from twenty to
twenty-five years of age. A delay in child-bearing after that, pen-
alizes the children.
The last chapter in the book emphasizes the place of
euthenics, that \s of well-placedness or environment as quite as
important as eugenics itself. There is some opposition between
those who would improve environment without taking proper
account of hereditary elements, that deserves to be remembered.
Social workers need to remember this particularly and of course
luxury and ease of life, so far from belonging to euthenics or good
environment, always have exactly the opposite effect The authors
emphasize that euthenics and eugenics bear the same relation to
human progress as a man's two legs do to his locomotion.
FOCH THE MAN. By Clara E. Laughlin. New York: Fleming H.
RevellCo. $1.00.
Miss Laughlin writes an interesting brief narrative of the*
life and battles of the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces.
She tells us of his early life near Tarbes in Southern France, and
his soldiering in the Franco-Prussian war which ended so dis-
astrously for his beloved France. Foch was determined to dis-
cover the military reasons for Germany's victory and France's de-
feat. ''His analysis of those reasons," says Miss Laughlin,
'* and his application of what that analysis taught him, is what
has put him where he is today — and us where we are." In 1896
Foch was made chief professor of military subjects at the Superior
School of War in Paris and advanced to lieutenant-colonel's rank.
(Lieutenant-Colonel Joffre was at that time building fortifications
in northern Madagascar.) Clearly and well Miss Laughlin de-
scribes the profound impression made by Foch upon those who
came in contact with him in his new sphere. Aptly she quotes
Charles Dawbarn's penetrating remark about the Foch of this
period : " Such was his fine confidence in life, that he communi-
cated to others not his grievances but his secret satisfactions."
Her account of Foch's war-time trials and triumphs is most vivid
and inspiriting. Her book should find many readers.
THE SAD YEARS. By Dora Sigerson. With a tribute by
Katharine Tynan. New York: George H. Doran Co. $1.25 net.
The beauty-loving heart must be held high, indeed, if it is not
to be broken by the spectacle of war. . • . And when it is broken,
it must be held higher still, if life and the mysterious Ideals which
are dearer than life are to endure for men and women.
For Dora Sigerson, as for so many perplexed souls, it would
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seem these ideal motives were obscured during those last years
of her life : sorrowful years truly enough, for her and for Ireland
and for all the torn but spacious world. She sang of them with
magic in her pathos. Her title poem is a masterpiece of the horror
or war — ^her Palace Gate to choose but one other, is as perfect as
the illumination in some finely-wrought missal. But they are
songs of Death-in-Life, which the world, in very self-defence, will
wish to forget. To many lovers of this lovely woman and truly
Celtic poet it will be a lasting grief to remember that the end came
before she could hand down as heritage one note of that high,
eternal music which for others — ^as for herself — had meant Life-
in-Death.
The volume is graced with an interesting portrait of Dora
Sigerson, and with a sympathetic little memoir by her friend
Katharine Tynan Hinkson.
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS OF SWITZERLAND. By Robert
C. Brooks. Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York: World Book Co.
This description of the organization and functioning of the
government and political parties of Switzerland, is preceded by a
summary account of the history of the country which helps to ex-
plain why its constitutional problems are such as they are. The
volume is intended as a text-book. The chapters are followed by
selected bibliographies, and at the end of the book are thirty pages
of " critical bibliography.'* There is a good index.
A bias against " the reactionary Catholics '' is kept at a mini-
mum, or, at any rate, it is difficult to' prove that it is not so kept.
Wherever there is a Catholic side, however, one has the feeling
that the author is on the other side. He would probably in each
case explain his position on other grounds than religious
prejudice.
THE WONDERS OF INSTINCT. By Jean-Henri Fabre. New
York: The Century Co. $3.00.
Fiction is not more interesting than the facts recorded in
this study of insect life, nor could truth be presented more allur-
ingly had its eminent author been a writer of romance. It is not
necessary that the reader should have a penchant for natural his-
tory in order to feel the spell exercised in these pages wherein we
are told in the simplest of language, with much grace and humor,
the results of prolonged and infinitely patient experimental ob-
servation of insect customs and habits. If the attention wanders,
it is only to marvel at the absorption and perseverance of the
great scientist who has revealed these wonders of the civilization
that lies under the feet of man.
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LOVE OFF TO THE WAR AND OTHER POEBIS. By Thomas
Curtis Qark. New York: James T. White ft Co. $1.25.
In this interesting book of verse Mr. Clark writes of many
things, but chiefly of war and peace, and of the life of the spirit.
His most effective work is to be found in the division of the book
entitled ''Studies in Souls.'' Such poems as, e. g., Sons of
Promise, The Remorse of David and Influence exhibit the
writer at his best, and are not likely to be overlooked by the com-
pilers of anthologies for popular consumption. They have con-
siderably more poetical quality than Mr. Clark's verses on the
War which are, for the most part, rhetorical and uninspired.
THE EYES OF ASIA. By Rudyard Kipling. Garden City, New
York: Doubleday, Page ft Co. $1.00.
Followers of Kipling fall into two schools: those who feel
that his work began to fail when he passed his imperialistic stage
and forsook India; and those who think a newer and more facile
Kipling was born when he took up England and wrote An Habita-
tion Enforced. For those who look on him as the Anglo-Indian
siipreme, here is a slight soupgon to please their palates.
The book is comprised of four tales, scenes, sketches if you
will. They are character sketches rather than stories, for the
plots are nil but who the characters are and what they say, give
the subtle flavor to the book. All four are Indians serving in
the British army, and they tell of the War and Britain as seen
through an Indian's eyes.
The atmosphere is established in a truly Kiplingesque man-
ner by the explanation of the first sketch — "A Retired Gentle-
man." It is a letter " from Bishen Singh Saktawut, Subedar
Major, 215th Indurgurh (Todd's) Rajputs, now at Lyndhurst,
Hampshire, England. This letter is sent to Madhu, Singh, Sawant,
Risaldar Major (retired), 146th (Dublana) Horse, on his fief which
he holds under the Thakore Sahib of Pech at Bukani by the River,
near Chiturkaira, Kotah, Rajputana, written in the fifth month
of the year 1916, English count." In the second sketch, a letter
written from a Brighton hospital, a wounded Indian writes to his
brother, who is a fool. The War has broadened this native trooper,
and whilst he dictates his letter, he breaks in with quaint observa-
tions — to the emanuensis — of his own shortcomings and the un-
enlightened view of his brother.
*• The Private Account " comes closer to the old Kipling than
any others of the four sketches. It is a scene in an Afghan house-
hold when there arrives from France a letter written by the eldest
son to his aged father. The family gathers to hear the news, and
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comments on it. The old man is worried lest his son be spoiled
by the kindness of the French women where he is billeted
and the mother retorts, as mothers will, in defence of the old
bonne who looks after his welfare.
The fourth letter, " A Trooper of Horse," writes to his mother
and explains the ways of France and speaks of religion and his
heart's desires. It is a very beautiful piece of writing and savors
of a certain mellowness not typical of the Kipling of earlier years.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE. By Theodore Roosevelt. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.00 net.
The Great Adventure, the essay from which this book gets its
title, is a beautiful thing — a wonderful tribute to the torch-bearers
— those who made their sacrifice in the " Great Adventure." This
article alone makes the book worth while. Because of its sublim-
ity and inspiring nobility, we forgive the distinguished author,
now embarked on "The Great Adventure" of death, his in-
temperance at times, both of thought and expression.
JAPAN AT FmST HAND. By Joseph I. C. Clarke. New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co. $2.50.
In this interesting volume we have an enthusiastic account —
too favorable perhaps — of Japan and the Japanese people. The
author has gathered his facts at first hand from all classes of in-
formants — college professors, newspaper men, merchants, diplo-
mats, and working people. He describes in great detail Japan's
home life, her language, religions, ' temples, educational system,
art, drama, industries, newspapers, fighting machine and the like.
He assures us that the Japanese do not hate the United States,
though since their advent to power they naturally resent being
considered in any way an inferior race by their Western brethren.
The volume is well written and beautifully illustrated.
CAMP TRAILS IN CHINA* By Roy C. Andrews and Yvette B.
Andrews. New York: D. Applet on & Co. ' $3.00 net.
Mr. Andrews was sent, by The American Museum of Natural
History, to explore the wild, unknown sections of Northern China,
along the border of Thibet, and to collect specimens of that coun-
try's rare fauna. We are given the results of the expedition.
Accompanied by his wife, who was the ofScial photographer of
the party, he traveled through thousands of miles of China, Meet-
ing thirty little known tribes, and collecting thirteen hundred
mammals and several hundred birds. Outside his specific work,
he finds time to comment in an interesting way upon Chinese cus-
toms, religious practices, morals, the status of women, and such
like topics.
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JOSSELTN'S WIFE. By Kathleen Norris. .Garden Qty, New
York: DoabIeday» Page ft Co. 91.40 net
Ellen Latimer, the sweet country-girl heroine of Mrs. Norris'
latest novel, marries a wealthy New Yorker, and soon becomes
initiated into all the luxuries and nastiness of modem social life.
Her one great mistake was to dream of living happily in the same
house with her husband's father and his immoral stepmother. The
story develops into a cross between the triangle plot of a modem
French play and the cheap melodrama of a second-rate American
detective story.
The husband is punished for his unfaithfulness by suffering
imprisonment under a false charge of parricide. The strain of
the murder trial brings husband and wife together again, and she
finally manages to free him through the extraordinary testimony
of their young son. The story closes with the husband dying of
consumption in a town of Southern California, and suggesting
to his wife's brother the possibility of a second and a better hus-
band.
We prefer the Mrs. Norris of Mother, The Treasure or of Un-
dertow. Her latest novels seem written to order — ^mere pot-
boilers, utterly lacking in distinction of style.
CHAMBER MUSIC. By James Joyce. Boston: The Cornhill Co.
91.00.
An enchanting grace and wistfulness are found in the thirty-
six brief lyrics which compose this tiny book. In technique and
temper there is surely no modem English verse so nearly Eliza-
bethan, for Mr. Joyce has but recaptured again and again some
portion of the l3rric rapture of those spacious singing-days. To
Arthur Symons, who reviewed them, when, eleven years ago, they
were first published by Elkin Mathews in London, these songs
were 'Mike a whispering clavichord that someone plays in the
evening when it is getting dark." For him, to write such delicate
and lovely poetry as the lyrics in Chamber Mtuic, was "to
evoke, not only roses in mid-winter but the very dew in the roses."
About every verse there is an extraordinary firmness and restraint.
THE GHETTO AND OTHER POEMS. By Lola Ridge. New York:
p. W. Huebsch. $1.25.
It is in The Ghetto, the title poem of this volume, that Miss
Ridge has her vivid and arresting art most powerfully at com-
mand.
Indeed there is much that is memorable and distinguished
in Miss Ridge's book. She has savored the pathetic glory and
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the tragic beauty of life in a vast city. Manhattan and Broadway,
Brooklyn Bridge and the Bowery have 3rielded up to her something
of their brooding sinister essence, and she has been able to set
it down in words that are full of life and color and movement.
For acrid dynamic description she has a remarkable gift.
But very rarely is there sounded in these poems that note of
serenity which is characteristic of the highest art; and Miss Ridge
-must learn to do violence to her tendency to assault eye and ear
with distressing images and figures: images and figures which dis-
tract the reader's attention and render difficult the task of fol-
lowing the poet's thought and entering completely into her mood.
LEAGUE OF NATIONS. A Chapter in the History of the Move-
ment. By Theodore Marburg. New York: The Macmillan
Co. 50 cents.
The dramatically sudden termination of the War and the
diplomatic activities consequent upon it, thrust this book into the
immediate foreground, written as it was when few ventured even
to hope for an early dawn of peace. This " chapter " — since fol-
lowed by a second — sets forth briefly, though with all essential
detail, the objects of the movement and the method by which these
are to be attained. The various points are presented without
reservation or ambiguity, the section captioned " Race and Alien
Government" being especially plain-spoken. Whatever may be
the outcome of the international conferences now pending, Mr.
Marburg's history of the movement will retain its interest as a
document for reference.
Ex-President Taft contributes a foreword to the book.
THE PRIESTLY VOCATION. By Right Rev. Bernard Ward.
New York: Longmans, Green ft Co. $1.75 net.
We recommend to the clergy this excellent retreat manual,
just published by Bishop Ward of Brentwood, England. While
addressed directly to the English clergy, it presents the ideals of
the priesthood common to all times and countries. The Bishop
writes very sensibly and piously of the priest's pastoral work, his
recreations, his religious exercises, his annual retreat, and his
practice of the evangelical counsels. Most of our spiritual books
are written and most of our retreats are given by Regulars, who
at times do not understand the special needs of the secular clergy.
Bishop Ward knows them thoroughly, both as bishop and in the
many years spent in training seminarians. Like Cardinal Man-
ning, he upholds strongly the great dignity of the priestly voca-
tion, and urges secular priests to counteract by their lives and
works the old traditional prejudice in favor of the Regulars.
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EIGHT-MINUTE SERMONS. By Rev. WUliam Demouy, D.D.
New York: Benziger Brothers. Two volumes. $3.50.
These sermons come to us highly recommended by the Apos-
tolic Delegate at Washington, and by Bishop Allen of Mobile.
They are eminently practical talks on moral and doctrinal themes,
their only fault being their excessive brevity. This lack, however,
may prove a virtue. Their suggestiveness will be a real help to
the busy priest in preparing his sermons, instead of serving as a
mere memory exercise.
THE BOYff MILITARY MANUAL. By VirgU D. Collins. Illus-
trated by the author. New York : Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.00.
This Manual is written in the interest of boys undertaking
military training, the value of which few fail to appreciate in the
education of present-day youth under present-day conditions.
The Manual indicates how, when, and where these advan-
tages may be obtained. It treats of the makeup of the army; The
School of the Soldier, of the Squad, of the Company; The Manual
of Arms; Signalling; Marksmanship; Military Map-Making and
Reading. The last four chapters give advice and counsel to the
youthful aspirant for ofScer's honors, and teach him how to con-
duct himself as such. The little book will be found a useful com-
panion to a boy seeking a guide in this new life.
SKINNER'S BIG IDEA. By Henry Irving Dodge. New York:
Harper Brothers. Qoth, 50 cents; paper, 25 cents.
If increasing one's facilities for trade or business, is a big
idea, the title of this book is justified. Indirectly the " big idea "
results in retaining the services x){ older men, and shows up their
advantages. This booklet is to be recommended, for even the
charity which begins at home, cannot fail to diffuse some warmth
in a cold world.
THAT WHICH HATH WINGS. By Richard Dehan. New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.60 net.
Richard Dehan's product is not precisely a sequel to One
Braver Thing, 'yet the "Dope Doctor "figures largely in it, with
several others whose acquaintance we made in the earlier book.
As it dealt with the Boer War, so the present work treats of the
War whose end was not in sight even so short a time ago as the
publication of the novel. The stage is crowded with characters,
and there is much incident and action. The author's obvious pur-
pose is to portray the regenerating effect of the War, " the leaven
of the Great Awakening," in the ignoble life of England's fash-
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ionable circles : and to show forth the Church's power to guide the
emotional reactions of a sinner — ^in this instance, a young woman
— ^to real penitence and steadfast faith. These intentions are
achieved, though effectiveness is lessened by discursiveness and
lack of unification of the interest. While far from wishing to
disparage the -actuating motives, we yet question the discretion of
the author in depicting with so much elaboration the scenes of
temptation that led to the downfall of Patrine.
JOAN AND PETER. By H. G. WeUs. New York: The Macmillan
Ck). $1.75.
Mr. Wells* work resolves itself into a war novel, along a line
of thought different from that which inspired Mr. Britling. It is
perhaps a more brilliant effort than the former book; it is cer-
tainly less human and appealing. It registers the author's dis-
approbation of English education. Of course, the one way to
make the indictment telling is to have presented Joan and Peter
as concrete examples of failure to meet the great test. This is not
done. They acquit themselves excellently, like the majority of
their kind, and^the case against classical education remains un-
proved.
Much grotmd is covered and many subjects handled in this
work of nearly six hundred pages. There is a story, loosely con-
structed, and a number of well-drawn characters, most of them
with views which they express at length. It is all illustrative of
Mr. Wells, his versatility of mind, his insight, his blindness and
his sacrilegiousness. He offends in all he says regarding religion;
while in his customary attack upon the Catholic Church he sur-
passes his previous extravagances. By the coarse abuse he puts
into the mouth of the young man, Peter, he aligns himself with her
most ignorant calumniators.
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Ck>lumns upon columns have appeared in
France. the newspapers about the conferences
which have been held in preparation for the
meeting of the Council which is to settle the terms of peace, the
status of the many new states, the League of Nations, and the
freedom of the seas. As a matter of fact, however, nothing is
really known, as all the participants in the decisions have felt it
incumbent upon them to keep their proceedings a strict secret.
It is scarcely worth while therefore to say more than that the
first full meeting of the Peace Council was scheduled for the
eighteenth of January.
The reception given President Wilson is perhaps the most
noteworthy of recent events in France. It seems to have had
more influence on the people than upon the Government. So at
least it would seem from the fact that M. Cldmenceau has in-
dicated rather plainly a lack of sympathy with the President's
League of Nations as a means of preserving peace in the future.
He has announced his adherence to " an old system which appears
condemned today,'' and he adds, *' to it I do not fear to say I remain
faithful at this moment. Countries have organized the defence of
their frontiers with the necessary elements and the balance of
power. This system appears to be condemned by some very high
authorities. Yet if such a balance had preceded the War, if Eng-
land, the United States, Italy and France had agreed that whoever
attacked on^ of them attacked the whole, the World War would
not have occurred. There is in this system of alliances, which
I do not renounce, I say it most distinctly my guidiifg thought at
the Conference, if your body permits me to go there." As the
Chamber thereupon proceeded to pass a vote of confidence in M.
Cldmenceau, it does not look as if the League of Nations will meet
with very hearty support from the French Government. How-
ever, one of the chief statesmen of France, M. Bourgeois, is col-
laborating with Lord Robert Cecil in harmonizing the forty vari-
ous schemes that have been prepared for the wished-for League
of Nations.
Although the Bolsheviki have supporters in France, numer-
ous enough to make their voices heard, there is little reason to be-
lieve that they will influence the course of events there. Elections
are not to take place in the immediate future, for the French Con-
stitution disfranchises all soldiers. As so many of the citizens of
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France are at present in the army, in justice to them no new elec-
tion will take place until after demobilization.
Much of the news from Russia is so uncer-
Russia. tain as scarcely to be worth recording.
Some things, however, appear certain.
Among these is the fact that the Bolshevik Government main-
tains its power, and in fact seems to have attained a secure posi-
tion. Whether under the control of Lenine and Trotzky or of
the latter alone cannot be said. For a report was circulated a
few weeks ago that Lenine had been imprisoned by his former
coadjutor because of his willingness to take counsel with more
moderate parties. Lenine did this, so report said, on account of the
failure of food supplies consequent upon the nationalization of
industries adopted by his government
However this may be, according to latest report the Omsk
Government, the hoped-for centre of an All-Russian Government,
capable of uniting the whole country against the Bolsheviki, is on
the point of being isolated by the Bolshevik forces. And the Allies
operating in one sector of the Northern Government of Russia,
have been forced by the Bolshevik troops to retire to positions bet-
ter capable of defence, fifteen miles behind those formerly held
by them.
The Bolshevik Government is able also to direct a consider-
able body of troops to take the places of the Germans who have
evacuated Lithuania. Report has it, these troops are marching
upon Warsaw after having taken possession of Riga, Revel and
Vilna. Of course this has been accomplished by cooperation with
the local adherents of Bolshevik principles. This constitutes the
great danger of the movement, for these principles have spread
to a great extent in other districts and countries: to Berlin and
to other German cities.
The Berlin uprising is said to have been largely due to an
emissary of the Moscow Government, named Radek, who had at
his command not only eloquence and literature but also, strange
to say, money furnished by the Moscow Government, by means of
which he hoped to promote the success of the movement. To
further the Bolshevik uprising of the Proletariat against Capital,
Trotzky is said to be providing an army of three million men, to
accomplish by force what pure reasoning cannot bring about.
This is probably an enormous exaggeration of the capabilities of
the Bolsheviki, but there are those who believe it within their
power to send over a million men to enforce the purposes they
have in view. At present there are something like a hundred and
fifty thousand men serving under Trotzky's orders.
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The seriousness of the movement is universally recognized.
President Wilson has appealed for an appropriation of a hundred
million dollars to buy food for the hundreds of thousands threat-
ened with famine in the evacuation provinces of Russia, in Poland,
in the Balkans and in the Central Powers. The President con-
siders a supply of food the best weapon against the extension of
Bolshevism throughout these districts. Others, however, and
seemingly with good reason, think the only way to combat the
western movement of the Bolshevist troops is by armed forces.
It is, indeed, a time when it were well to recall the words of
Pope Leo XIII. in his letter on The Duties of Christicuis as
Citizens: ''Nations and even vast empires themselves cannot
long remain unharmed, since, upon the lapsing of Christian insti-
tutions and morality, the main foundation of human society must
necessarily be uprooted. Force alone will remain to preserve
public tranquillity and order; force, however, is very feeble when
the bulwark of religion has been removed; and, being more apt to
beget slavery than obedience, it bears within itself the germs of
ever-increasing troubles. The present century has encountered
notable disasters : nor is it clear that some equally terrible are not
impending. The very times in which we live are warning us to
seek remedies there where alone they are to be found — namely,
by reestablishing in the family circle and throughout the whole
range of society, the doctrines and practices of the Christian
religion. In this lies the sole means of freeing us from the ills
now weighing us down."
Great surprise has been felt at the recent disclosure of a sug-
gestion made by the British Government to the Government of
France, that the Allies should call upon all the Russian parties now
at war among themselves, as well as upon the Bolshevik Govern-
ment, to enter into a truce for the period of the Peace Conference,
and that representatives of all these warring factions, including the
Bolshevik Government, should go to Paris to receive a hearing
from the other Peace delegates. This fact came to light by the
surreptitious publication of the French Foreign Minister's re-
sponse to the suggestion made by Mr. Lloyd George's Government.
To this proposal the French Foreign Minister offered most stren-
uous opposition, refusing very bluntly to listen to a proposal to
recognize in any way whatsoever the Moscow Government. " The
criminal rigime of the Bolsheviki," he insisted, " does not entitle
them to recognition as a regular government, and France is re-
solved to continue treating the Soviet organization as ii\ enemy."
French opposition put an end to the plan suggested by Great
Britain.
The question still remains to be solved whether or no Rus-
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sia is to be represented at the Peace Conference in Paris. That it
should be without any representation there, would seem to de-
prive that Conference of the ability to do anything for the good
of what was once the vast empire of Russia. To admit represen-
tatives, however, involves the question which of the many states
in Russia are to be represented. One solution looked for, is the
formation of a committee at Paris to receive delegations from all
that may chose to come, and to lay before the Peace Conference
the information it obtains and the conclusions it arrives at.
The conflicts going on in Russia are not confined to the con-
test with the Bolshevik Government which is common to all. In
each and every state which has adopted the principle of self-
determination, there have existed, or now exist, internecine
conflicts. All have their parties and their mutual jealousies which
have rendered. the task of the Allies to bring them aid an exceed-
ingly difficult one. The Omsk Government, for example, had a so-
cial revolutionist movement which brought on a crisis, ending in
a dictatorship. This dictatorship led to the outcry that a return to
a monarchical form of government was contemplated, thereby
exciting the distrust of the Czecho-Slovak troops and hindering
their cooperation. In the Northern Government of Russia the
Allies found it necessary to suppress a revolution for the sake
of good order. The Ukraine presents Ihe most striking example
of disorganization. It is impossible to describe the state of this
country, except as one of utter chaos. The peasants have risen
up and are destroying all property, and one set of troops is warring
against another. The confusion is so great that no hope of a
settlement is in sight, except by means of the French troops which
have taken possession of Odessa. According to a report received
some time ago, they were marching upon the capital of the
Ukraine, Kiev. Notwithstanding this confusion at home, perhaps
because of it, the Ukrainians have entered into hostility with the
Poles and have made an attack upon Lemberg, in Eastern Galicia.
Their attack was at first successful, but resulted in their rejection
from the city by the Poles. The Ukrainians, however, have re-
turned to the attack. In the present contest hostilities are not con-
fined to Lemberg, the activities of the Ukrainians having extended
to the fortress of Przemysl, the place which attracted so much
attention in the early days of the Great War.
The armistice has brought to an end Germany's attempt to
dominate the world. It has not brought an end, however, to the
attempt of the Bolsheviki to effect a similar or, perhaps, more
sinister domination. The avowed purpose of Lenine and his
associates is to dominate in every country, not merely of the old
world but of the new, the class that lives, from day to day, on
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702 RECENT EVENTS [Feb^
wages earned by the toil of their hands. Eversrthing over and
above this, they look upon as stolen. Their watchword is exceed-
ingly simple and extraordinarily attractive in its simplicity; it
appeals to everybody and is intelligible to everybody: ''Steal
what has been stolen." As no one will voluntarily surrender what
is his, the result is the further cry: " Kill those who resist" This
has been followed in Russia practically and extensively, and will
be adopted in other countries as a fixed principle of action, when
and wherever scope is given to the Bolshevik movement
This is the war which is beginning, and is to many more to
be feared than was the late Great War, inasmuch as every nation
has within its borders those who suffer hardships and are inclined
to take any measures open to them to relieve those hardships. A
lesson to be learned from what Russia has suffered is so to order
things that, as far as is possible, there shall be no class which can
reasonably complain of injustice. Thus, rather than by force, this
new attempt of world domination by a single class may be averted.
It is satisfactory to note that in our own country the minds of
many of our best men are being directed to this matter, and that
every effort will be made in this way to avoid the conflict. The
example of Russia and its sufferings should certainly induce all
who have it in their power to influence the course of events, to
remove all existing grievances in every possible way.
For over a year Bolshevism has been triumphant in Russia,
and the results are seen in the present state to which that part
of Russia under Bolshevik control has been reduced. Civil liberty
has been destroyed to such an extent that anyone who expresses
discontent with the existing rigime is sent to instant execution.
Famine, cold and cruel death are hovering over every man. From
a commercial standpoint Russia is hopeless, and will remain so
until it is able to set up an established government At present
all industry is nationalized, which is the same thing as saying that
it has been confiscated. Industrial proprietors who have not been
placed in jail or sepM*ated from their property altogether, are
working on them as superintendents. Probably some of them —
men of exceptional brains and tact — ^will save something out of
the wreck. The rest are simply deprived of everything they owned.
All industrial plants are closed down as a consequence of Bolshe-
vik interference. The people who worked in them are without
employment. One class, however, and that the largest of all, is
content. The peasants, who form eighty per cent of the popula-
tion, having possession of the land they wanted, are satisfied. This
enables the Bolshevik Government to remain in power. On the
other hand, people are dying from starvation by the hundreds in
Petrograd, and prefer to suffer death by being shot rather than to
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live on under present conditions. Such is the testimony of re-
liable authorities as to the present condition of Russia and of the
Bolshevik rigimi.
This distressing state of things calls for outside assistance.
But the desperate situation has led the Allies to relax their effort
to maintain the degree of help they had led Russia to expect.
The Japanese have withdrawn a large part of their forces through
their inability to cooperate with those their co-Allies had sent into
the country. Deaf ears are being turned to the appeals made by
Prince Lvoff and other Russian authorities. In this country a
strong effort is being made to recall from Russia the force which
has already been sent there. It is reported that the British
are on the point of withdrawing from the country, although this
report has been denied. The only Power which seems ready to
help is France. French troops have been landed in the Ukraine,
as already stated. The British, to be sure, have given some slight
help by bombarding the Bolsheviki on the coast of the Baltic
States.
In connection with this matter of intervention, precise infor-
mation concerning the first step taken for intervention in the
North of Russia is of interest. This took place at the request of
the Soviet Government of" the Murman Provincial Council which
was recognized as legitimate by the Moscow Government. The
Finns allied with the Germans, were making an attempt to take
possession of the Murman coast by force and to annex it, along
with the province of Karelia, to Finland. To this the Murman
Provincial Council objected and requested the British naval force
to land a body of marines to protect them from the German-Fin-
nish attack. The British naval force was reenforced by French
and American troops. This intervention was legalized by a
definite arrangement between the senior representatives of the
Allied Powers, including the United States, and the Murman
Provincial Council. When the Moscow Government heard what
had been done, instigated it is believed by the German Govern-
ment, it disapproved of this intervention. Thereupon the Mur-
man Provincial Council, exercising that right of self-determina-
tion, which is a cardinal principle of Bolshevism, declared its
independence. It is certain, however, that the Allies in inter-
vening acted at the request of the constituted authorities.
As soon as Germany collapsed it gave to
Poland. Poland in reality the independence it had
hitherto possessed only in name. The
Austro-German troops evacuated the country and left it in com-
plete freedom to form a Government of its own. The Council
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of Regency, which had been formed during the Austro-German
control, at once renounced ^1 power and transferred it to Gen-
eral Pilsudski, who had won distinction by service in the army
on the wrong side during the late War. He is a Socialist of a
moderate type, who subordinates the general interest of Socialism
to patriotic love of his country. To him was entrusted the making
of a government. This government, when formed, was controlled
by Socialists of the same moderate type. But General Pil-
sudski's government has not yet been recognized by the Allies.
The Polish National Ck)mmittee at Paris claims to be the rightful
authority for Poland. It consists of representatives of the Poles
scattered throughout the world, whose most active promoter in
this country was M. Paderewski. This Ck)mmittee has raised a
force of some forty or fifty thousand men who have served in
France as soldiers, fighting against the Germans. This National
Committee claims to be the real government of Poland. The
Allies, especially France, lean to its support because of the help
it rendered the Allied cause, while most of the Poles in Poland
were fighting, in rather a lukewarm way, to be- sure, on the Ger-
man side. As a consequence Poland has practically two govern-
ments, one with General Pilsudski as its head, the other, the Polish
National Ck>mmittee in Paris. M. Paderewski recently went to
Poland to effect a reconciliation between these conflicting claims.
A late report states that he has been successful in his mission;
that a Ck)alition Cabinet has been formed of which he is both
Premier and Foreign Minister. The New Ministry includes three
members of the former Cabinet, the rest being non-political
experts. The new Cabinet has met with warm approval from all
but a small minority of radical Socialists. A promise of national
unity now seems assured. The Cabinet will continue in oflBce
until elections are held within the next fortnight. The elections
will decide the definite constitution of the new republic. M.
Paderewski Inay yet prove for Poland what M. Venizelos has been
for Greece, and Dr. Masaryk for the Czecho-Slovak Republic.
The confusion hitherto existing at the top had spread through-
out the whole of the nation. Rather premature efforts had been
made in two directions to extend by military force the bounds of
Russian Poland constituting the new Independent Poland. Into
Galicia, formerly a part of Austria, Polish troops had been operat-
ing. They drove out of Lemberg the Ruthenians who had taken
possession of that city. The Ruthenians, however, renewed their
attempt to take the city and as a consequence hostilities arc still
continuing in that region. In another direction, too, the Polish
Government seems to have been hurried into premature military
action. One can hardly blame the efforts of the Poles to take
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possession of the city and provinces of Posen; in fact all would
rejoice to have restored to Poland, at once, a province of which
she was so ruthlessly despoiled. Still it would have been more
satisfactory had the Polish Government awaited in calmness the
award the Peace Conference would certainly have made to her of
all the territory of ancient Poland. The troops being used
against the Germans, might have been used with more effect
against the Russian Bolshevik army which is threatening the
eastern frontier. Moreover, as a result of Poland's action against
Germany in Posen, a volunteer German army has been called into
being of which von Hindenburg was to have command. Indeed,
*at one time the situation was so curious that Poles, Germans and
British seemed likely to have to fight side by side in order to defeat
the attempted Bolshevik invasion of Esthonia. The question of the
future political status of the Jews in Poland has added to the
difficulties of the situation. The Jews form sixteen per cent of
the population, and there are those among them who claim
autonomy, meaning thereby the right to govern themselves.
This claim, however, has not been recognized by any Polish states-
man nor has it been made by all the Jews. The situation in
Poland is further complicated by the danger of starvation, due to
the ruthless way in which the Germans ravaged the country while
it was in their possession. Manufacturing plants were destroyed
in the towns, rendering it impossible for work to be resumed. The
mischief done is said to be even greater than that wrought in Bel-
gium. Hence the necessity for that appeal for food which the
President has made, and for which Mr. Hoover has already
arranged. Some think the Bolshevik attempt to overrun Poland
is another step to propagate their principles throughout Central
Europe, and that this can only be counteracted by sending troops
to assist the Poles in the armed conflict thought to be impending.
This mode of help is not likely to be adopted, although some favor
is being shown to the proposal in France. A demand may be
made on Germany to allow the troops of the Allies to pass from
the Rhine provinces by railway to Posen.
Three attempts have been made in Berlin
Germany. to overturn the government of Herr Ebert,
a government which now consists ex-
clusively of members of the Majority Socialists. The last and
most determined attempt has just been terminated by what looks
like the decisive defeat of the Spartacides. This group of In-
dependent Socialists stands in Germany for the principles of the
Russian Bolsheviki, and would propagate those principles by the
same methods of tyranny and bloodshed as have been adopted by
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Lenine and Trotzky. This they would do by establishing a dic-
tatorship of their own, and by relegating to the distant future the
calling of a Constituent Assembly. In order to suppress the up-
rising of these self-named Spartacides, Herr EberVs government
was obliged to call out large numbers of soldiers. The latter made
use of artillery, flame-throwers and every military means to re-
duce the rebels to terms.
The Government's victory means that, on the nineteenth of
January, elections will be held for the National Assembly, which
is to determine definitely Germany's future form of government
and to make a constitution to replace that of the empire. Prepara-
tory to these elections Germany has been divided into electoral dis-
tricts. In Bavaria, the elections which have recently taken place
for its own National Assembly, have resulted in giving to what is
called the Clerical Party more than one million votes; and to the
Majority Socialists nine hundred thousand. The party to which
Herr Kurt Eisner belongs, received only seventy-five thousand.
The Independent Socialists polled an insignificant number. In
Baden and Wurttemberg, recent local elections give large majori-
ties to the more Conservative Parties.
In various other towns efforts in favor of Bolshevik methods
and aims have been frustrated. Bremen is the only important
place under their influence. There is every prospect, therefore,
that the National Assembly will meet and give a stable Constitu-
tion to the new republic. The Conservative Parties and the old
Liberal Parties are giving a more or less constrained support to
the new order of things, but it is probable that the Majority So-
cialists will control the National Assembly. However, the Major-
ity Socialists may possibly be defeated by a new movement set on
foot by the Catholic Centre. The Centrist Party has changed its
name to Christian People's Party, and its ranks are now open to
everyone who calls himself a Christian and who is in favor of main-
taining religious worship and education and social order in the
German republic of the future. Its appeal to the Lutherans and
Evangelicals has met with a warm response from leading mem-
bers of the Evangelical United Church, so that its efforts may
effect a union of all the non-Socialist parties, and so wrest the
control of the Assembly from the Majority Socialists.
No notable change has taken place in the composition of the
Government, except that the Independent Socialists have resigned,
so that it is composed exclusively of Majority Socialists. Mem-
bers of the Government call themselves Commissaries of the Peo-
ple as they do in Russia. There is one notable exception. The For-
eign Secretary who succeeded Dr. Sdlf, seems to belong
to the old rigime. Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the new
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Minister, until recently represented Germany at Copenhagen,
and during the late War was looked upon as a possible Chancellor.
He has signalized his assumption of the Secretaryship of Foreign
Affairs by making a somewhat defiant declaration as to the terms
of peace Germany will accept. He declares that Germany most
not yield to every peace condition her opponents may wish to
dictate. It is to be hoped that this expression does not indicate
the spirit which will actuate Germany during the Peace
Conference.
Although the Dual Monarchy no longer ex-
Austria-Hungary. ists it is convenient to retain the old desig-
nation in order to give a brief survey of the
now existing divisions of the area hitherto embraced in it.
Czecho-Slovak Republic: Of the new nationalities which
have sprung into being within this area the Czecho-Slovak Repub-
lic has been the most successful, so far, in completing its organiza-
tion. A National Assembly "has been formed which has made a con-
stitution; a definite ministry has been formed and a president
elected. The new government with a reckless disregard of the
principle upon which it based its right to existence, has given
notice to all concerned that it will not allow the Germans who are
the dominating factor in two-fifths of the territory of the Re-
public to decide for themselves whether or no they shall join
the New Germany. On the other hand, they have resolved that
the Slovaks, who have been up to the present time incorporated
into Hungary, should be separated from that country and included
within the limits of Czecho-Slovakia. This they have already
begun to effect by force of arms. In their President, Dr. Masaryk,
the nation now restored to liberty has found a man distinguished
by high qualities of statesmanship. So far from being a dema-
gogue, he has been distinguished throughout his career by ability
to see the real state of things and willingness to make it public
without fear or favor. He never hesitated to tell the people the
actual conditions — even when the truth was painful. He com-
bated false patriotism. When he found that certain documents,
attesting to ancient Czech culture, were forgeries he published
the fact. The secret of his great moral influence is that the
Czech people consider him a tireless champion of truth. So also,
in practical matters, he did not approve of the old methods of
agitation against the German overlords, which consisted in merely
superficial opposition to German influences and in unreasoning
praise of everything Czech. Any success to be hoped for, in his
estimation, would he attained only by assiduous work in all de-
partments of social life; by developing culture to the highest in-
tellectual, moral and material level. To assist in this and to re-
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move the prevalent ignorance which he found to be common
among his countrymen, he promoted the circulation of the political
literature of the Western European State. When the time had
come for practical realization of the aspirations of the Czechs he
was willing, and in fact tried, to satisfy them by moderate meas-
ures and to conciliate the Austrian authorities. It was only after
he found this to be an impossible task, that he became an advo-
cate of the complete separation which has now been accomplished.
To his efforts, too, was due that organization of the Czecho-Slovaks
in Russia which has had so great an influence upon the situation
there. The future career of Dr. Masaryk and of the Republic
over which he presides should be watched with keen interest.
Hungarian Republic: Of all the states into which Austria-
Hungary has been divided the new Republic of Hungary finds it-
self in the most unfortunate situation. It has lost, or is on the
point of losing, on the north the regions dwelt in by the Slovaks
in which is found the coal supply of the country. To the east,
Transylvania where the iron supply is found, as well as the Banat,
has been annexed by the votes of its inhabitants to Rumania, and
on the south Croatia has joined the new kingdom oi the Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes. If this status becomes permanent, the new
Republic will be left with only the plains of Hungary. But great
as these losses of territory may be, the political disorganization
which has taken place will be far more disastrous. If a recent
dispatch to the New York World can be believed, nothing short
of anarchy reigns in interior affairs. Indeed, Hungary, it is said,
is fast becoming a second Russia. The Bolsheviki are rapidly gain-
ing adherents. Russian propaganda began as early as the advent to
power in Russia of Lenine and Trotzky, but it is only since last
July that the success of that propaganda has been revealed. Since
the armistice was signed, it has made appalling progress. Bribed
by Bolshevist money, pouring in from Russia, large numbers of
peasants have followed the example of the Russian moujiks, and
have refused to till or sow the land. Thousands of them have
seized the estates of the nobles, but they vrill not cultivate them.
The Government itself, so far from contributing to the mainte-
nance of order, has promised to the returning soldiers half of the
property of the rich in order that for the rest of their days they
may live in wealth and idleness. The peasants refuse to labor
and as a consequence there will be no harvest this year. The
existing Provisional Government is so inexperienced that it gives
the unemployed eight to ten dollars a day, contributing twenty-
five per cent itself and forcing the manufacturers to contribute the
balance. The Government, in fact, seems to be under the control
of the most ignorant elements of the population. Count' Karolyi
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is the nominal head, but he is deprived of all control. No account
has reached this country of the elections which were to have taken
place before this for the purpose of forming a definite organization
of the country. It is to be hoped that, when they have taken place,
something like order may be established.
Jugo-Slovenia: The kingdom formed by the union of Serbia
with Croatia and the districts of Austria-Hungary which consti-
tute Jugo-Slovenia, is known as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes. In its territory is embraced, by the vote of its par-
liament, the Kingdom of Montenegro, its king having been de-
throned by the same parliament. The king is offering decided
opposition to his dethronement, but not to the incorporation ef
Montenegro into the new Stat^ on a federated basis. The new
kingdom has come into decided conflict with Italy on account of
her claims to the whole of the east coast of the Adriatic, compris-
ing districts where the vast majority of the population are Slavs.
These claims of Italy form one of the most embarrassing questions
to be settled by the Peace Conference. They have, in fact, caused
a Cabinet crisis in the Italian Government. Several ministers of
the Cabinet, including Signore Nitti, having resigned. It is thought
they were unable to support the imperialistic policy of the For-
eign Minister, Baron Sonnino. The Peace Conference will have
to settle the questions at issue between the Kingdom of Italy and
the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Austro-German Repubuc : This is not an oflBcial name, but
it indicates that part of the Dual Monarchy which is properly
German. Of this there is little to say, for no changes have so far
taken place and no definite constitution made. Whether or no
it will join the New Germany has not yet been settled. The Ger-
man electoral scheme makes provision for arrangements by which
the Austro-German Republic may, if it so decides, take part in the
election for the new German National Assembly. The crying
need of Austria is for food. A few weeks ago the British Govern-
ment sent three train loads of provisions by way of showing appre-
ciation for the fair way in which British prisoners had been treated
during the War.
Nothing has been said of Galicia because there is absolutely
no organization in that Province of the late Dual Monarchy. From
the north the Poles have made incursions and from the east the
Ukrainians. The two have come into collision and now are fight-
ing with each other for its possession.
January 18, 1919.
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IF a man does not believe that the Church is founded, is kept in
existence, speaks and commands with the authority of God,
then for him there will be no church. The Catholic believes that
Jesus Christ established the Catholic Church: that through His
power it is kept in life: that by His living authority it speaks and
commands. The Catholic does not deal in terms that may mis-
lead or have a twofold meaning. He does not speak of the exis-
tence of the Church and then define the Church as such a nebulous
thing as almost not to he. He does not speak of life and then so
interpret it as to make it almost synonymous with degth and the
dead past. He does not speak of authority and then profess that
he does not exactly know where the authority is, nor does he pro-
fess to give obedience and then empty the word of serious con-
tent by accepting what he pleases or believing what is agreeable.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE Church is visible — ^a city placed upon a hill: the Church
speaks definitely and distinctly. It speaks in human accents;
its voice is the voice of Christ, true God and true Man. When it
speaks in matters of faith, every one of its members, whether he
be Pope or simple layman, accepts fully such pronouncement be-
cause it is God Who speaks. And its teachings of faith are the
soil whence spring the flowers of Christian life. Dogma is as
necessary to the full supernatural life of man as an intellect is
necessary to make a man rational.
Rob the Church of this concept and you rob it of life. Make
dim the Divinity of Jesus Christ and you cast the Church and the
truth of the Church's existence into the darkening shadows. The
dogmatic dispute of the Arians did matter vitally, in spite of what
Harry Emerson Fosdick says in the January Atlantic, for if
Athanasius had not stood unflinchingly for the Divinity of Christ
we would have neither Church nor civilization today. If any
church claim to be a church and yet fail to assert that it possesses
these prerogatives it only writes its own death sentence. In other
words any so-called church that does not teach that it is founded
by God; that it speaks vnih the authority of God; that all its mem-
bers must listen and accept its word as the word of God, vdll
not continue to command man's respect. Any church that is not
visible to man: able to be known by man, so that he can see it.
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hear it, speak to it, serve it does not meet the spiritual needs of
humanity.
INASMUCH as any organization retains ttirough its members the
traditions of definite Cliristian faith and conduct: and believes
that the church they acknowledge has the authority of God, without
looking too deeply at the question of how it possesses that author-
ity, or where it is vested so that all humanity may know it, inas-
much as these are retained, such a body will do good, and number
as its own many conscientious upright Christians.
But more and more will the critical human mind apply the
full and ultimate test and ask: Did God Himself establish this
church? Does it speak, does it claim to speak, with and by the
authority of God? Is it above all human powers? Does it claim
independent, divine prerogatives? Has it always been visible and
its voice always audible? No church has any authority unless it
be of God, and the human mind will demand that a church justify
its divine origin and its divine power.
♦ * « «
THE pitiless logic of time is working itself out and, all uncon-
sciously, the opponents of the Church that alone possesses these
prerogatives and has had the courage to insist upon its claim all
through the- centuries — ^are making their confession that if there
be a Church of God, the Catholic Church alone can justify its
claim.
* « • «
THE so-called church that vrill leave eternal truth subject to
church conferences that neither possess nor claim to possess
any divine authority is but making a mockery, through its defini-
tions, of dogma. No wonder dogma is scorned by non-Catholics
today, when their concept of it rises little higher than their esti-
mate of an enactment of a State legislature. Not many years ago, a
" sectarian " church revised its " dogmatic " teaching on the fate of
unbaptized infants and decided that they were not damned, as had
been formerly taught by the same " church." The wit who moved
to make the resolution retroactive synopsized humanitjr's judg-
ment on the whole situation. Such action is a parody on Chris-
tianity.
The " churches ** that accept their teachings on marriage —
the estimate and esteem of which is the folindation of all morals —
from the State legislature write the indictment of failure against
themselves, for by such action they announce that they have not
the authority of God.
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THE logic of time has l>een hastened in its operation by the fact
that millions of men have lately stood face to face with death
in the greatest of the world's wars. At home they were content
to go on undisturbed: satisfied with things as they were — never
caring or never aroused to look deeply. But now they were
brought face to face with the ultimate meaning of life and the true
message of death; the veil fell from their eyes» and their souls
yearned for God. They would know what message the Creator
had spoken to His creatures. Did the Redeemer live and did He
speak of the life redeemed? And they looked back to the churches
that they had known in their youth, and they found there neither
the authority of God nor the claim to it
* « « *
ALL the articles appearing in the current periodicals on the
subject of religion in the trenches, the religious beliefs of the
soldier, religion and the war — though they differ in manifold
ways — are one in this: their complaint against the "churches"
because they have found the ''churches*' insufBcient The
** churches " must go with their sectarianism; with their dogmas;
with their unjustified authority; with their shortsightedness and
their selfishness. One may admit readily that such '' churches '*
as they describe must and will go; but we will also see that there is
no true concept of what the church is in the mind of any of these
writers. What they do testify to is this : that if there be a church
its authority must be from God, that it must speak as of God, be
visible to and audible of men — else it is no church at all.
They may give rein to their imaginative hopes and construct
out of humanity what they call a church: but that after all is un-
guided, faltering humanity doing its best, admitting its insuf-
ficiency by the question of how it may do better — ^it is humanity
looking for God and for God's Church.
♦ ♦ * *
F)R an example of the articles we have referred to, let the
reader take that by Harry Emerson Fosdick in the January
Atlantic, entitled. The Trenches and the Church at Home. The
concept of the church which it presents is barren of the idea that
the church has the authority of God. '' The churches face a new
day of unpredictable changes." '' We need now to face another
question: what are these returning soldiers going to do to the
churches in America?" ''Back in America's town and villages
our churches stand — ^Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Old Two-
Seed-in-the-Spirit, Predestinarian and what not." " Christianity
faces today not from religion but from the churches a crisis of the
first magnitude."
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Mr. Fosdick seeks to summarize the deficiencies of the
churches at home that will meet with the condemnation of the
returning soldier. He enumerates *' the selfishness of their appeal,
the pettiness of sectarian emphases, the negativeness of their ethic,
the undemocratic quality of their fellowship." He refers of course
to the Protestant churches in which he was instructed and with
which he is familiar. It is a striking forceful commentary upon
the failure of the Protestant churches : it may lead to a searching
for and a finding of the Church that is Christianity.
* * ♦ ♦
IN similar but more radical vein writes Mr. Joseph Ernest
McAfee in the New Republic of January 18th. Mr. McAfee, it may
be well to note, studied at the Union Theological Seminary; Auburn
Theological Seminary, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He
is also a member of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions.
As a result of his Protestant theological studies, he concludes that
there cannot be a church at all: that Christianity and a church
are intrinsically incompatible. To quote, ** a Christian church is
an anomaly, a contradiction in terms, an impossibility.'* Mr.
McAfee's constant study of the history of innumerable sects evi-
dently led him to believe this conclusion warranted. In fact he views
the Christian centuries through Protestant spectacles. '* Christian
history is one continuous breaking away from the institutions
which have assumed to confine Christian truth and the Christian
spirit." His course in history began with the sixteenth century.
" Christianity is a spirit and therefore cannot be confined " —
such is his thesis; and therefore no organization can represent it.
His philosophy is more discerning than that of the Founder of
Christianity Who stated that He did found His Church; that it
was visible to all men; that it would endure till the end of the
world; that He sought to bring all men into it; that error would
never be allowed to prevail against it.
♦ 4t 4t *
PATRIOTISM is a spirit— yet like everything else spiritual it
needs an embodiment. Patriotism is devotion to one's own
country. A man may preach patriotism in the abstract, patriotism
to all humanity, patriotism to all peoples, and he will at once be
suspected of being a traitor to his country. And much of this
high-sounding talk and well-expressed speech about the loftiness
of Christianity is calculated to make it so lofty that it will
disappear into the clouds. It is easy to agree on general spirit-
ualities and abstract notions. Translate them into concrete terms
that demand action and you will at once arouse opposition. Give
justice meaning and the way of the just man is difficult. Utter
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the word that gives practical content to obedience and denial and
sacrifice, and you have at once aroused enmity. And the more
definite and comprehensive that word is the greater will be the
opposition and the enmity. That is why the Divine Word In-
carnate was crucified by men.
♦ 4t « «
R. McAFEE is so entirely opposed to a church that he will
have religion and religious institutions under community con-
trol. He is the champion of ecclesiastical bolshevism. When the
spirit is thus confined it will, to his mind, have its best expression.
But it must be remembered that there are thousands who so
lack an elementary concept of what the Church of Christ should
be and is, that they will be impressed and even comforted by the
easy sentences and the easier thought of such writers as
Mr. McAfee. By discussion and denial and revolt from the true
Church the world has been made spiritually desolate. Those
who are without homes and vdthout food have had little or no part
in the dissension and the revolt. Their souls are seeking and
searching. Their souls will grasp at half truths or the semblances
of truth — if that is all they can see. Is not our duty — ever press-
ing but even more pressing now — ^to carry to them in speech, in
VTritten word, in kindly sympathy the truth vdth which the Church
has blessed and enlightened us?
A
WOMAN who evidently *' speaks whereof she knows," offers
in The Catholic Charities Review for December and January
a careful ** analysis " of the growth, requirements and outlook of
*' Catholic Settlement Work." As she well says, the Catholic set-
tlement ** with social as well as religious opportunities, came into
existence as a necessary part of a plan of redemption; a point of
contact, a meeting place between rescuer and rescued, the head-
quarters from which to reconnoiter in the campaign." Like all
new things, Catholic settlement work has had its struggle for ex-
istence: it has had to breast the winds of indifferentism and posi-
tive opposition. Even today it is not as widely recognized as it
should be as " a necessary part of a plan of redemption " in our
complex, congested modern life. Besides the diflBculty of winning
its way in ecclesiastical and popular esteem, it has had to solve
"the problem of meeting expenses and that of getting faithful
and competent service."
♦ 4t « 4t
FOR the most part the work has been a lay work, and necessarily
so, since only a very modern religious institute would be
adapted to so very modern a work. That there are such institutes
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and that they have done great service in Catholic settlement work,
does not discount the fact, as stated by Margaret Tucker, that
Catholic settlement work is a work of the Catholic laity, and
from the ranks of the laity the workers must be recruited.
Of the character of that service she has this to say: ''It
must be truthfully admitted also, that the service in the
work has fallen far short of the need in both quantity and quality.
In the main it has been performed by volunteers. Now volunteer
service is at once a source of inspiration and despair, according
as it is earnest, intelligent and reliable or, as it may be, thor-
oughly irresponsible and undependable. Those who could and
would give the best of help were, of course, often prevented from
doing so by other calls upon their time and energy. Many also
who would have made excellent, enthusiastic workers were hin-
dered in the doing through mismanagement on the part of execu-
tives who could thoroughly dissipate the result of intelligent work.
There have been in the work a splendid group of volunteers will-
ing and able to sacrifice themselves to the work, who persevered in
spite of discouragement and adverse conditions. There have
been casual workers, however, who could not take the work seri-
ously, or appreciate the necessity for regular service. Experience
was usually the same at the different centres, that for any fun or
excitement in connection with the activities there was a bevy of
interested workers which quickly dwindled away to a handful in
the face of those thankless tasks demanding personal service with
undisciplined children, or excursions into the dingy homes of the
poor."
♦ 4t « «
SUCH conditions make evident the necessity for and advantage
of the salaried social worker. This advantage is fully recog-
nized and carefully stated by our writer: the pros are many, but
they are nil unless associated with that high spirit of consecra-
tion essential to any work which deals in spiritual values, which
is fraught with eternal consequences to immortal souls. " It
should not be necessary to state that executives and workers in
a Catholic work, which must always endeavor to set a moral as
well as a social standard, should be women of personal dignity,
unimpeachable reputation, and inspiring Catholic practice; that
besides the training in scientific method and organization, there
should also be training of spirit and motive. In the arduous life
of the social worker any but the essentials in Catholic practice
are nearly impossible, yet who needs close contact with her Church
to a greater extent than she for inspiration in her task of guiding
and shaping the destinies of her innumerable ''cases?" It is
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pertinent and interesting to observe how few of the busy workers
in attendance at conference or convention, devotedly attending
committee meetings, can add to their daily task the extra effort
of getting out to early Mass/'
'' There are many influences in the life of the average self-
supporting woman which pull against highest achievement in a
work which must minister positively, if not primarily, to spiritual
needs; which is at the same time arduous; which must, not even
though it happen to afford it, be considered merely as a means to
self-support/*
The inference is plain: Until Catholic women enter the field
of social service as a '' vocation " demanding of them the spirit of
the counsels, if not their outward observance, we will not meet
the opportunities of social service, satisfy its obligations or accom-
plish its potential results for the Kingdom of God on earth.
♦ * * *
THE hour of destiny has struck for Catholic work in this and
every country. The War has thrown open vast tracts of op-
portunity, devastated or untilled: "The fields are white for the
harvest." Where are the workers? Forces of evil: Socialism,
anarchy, spiritual unrest and discontent, masquerading as good
are sowing their seeds and reaping their harvest in countless ** So-
cial Centres,*' where, unconscious of the harm they are doing, the
material good is so stressed as to submerge the spiritual : souls are
scuttled like ships in a sea of Materialism. And many of these
souls were '* born again of water and the Holy Ghost '* as chil-
dren of God and heirs of heaven in the true fold of the Catholic
Church.
♦ * * *
THE Catholic Church alone permits no divorce: not only in the
marriage state but in every department of life. Man is a
creature composed of body and soul; as such he must be reckoned
with from birth to death. We cannot feed the body and starve
the soul and make a man; neither can we feed the soul and starve
the body and live. The Church is in all things synthetic: she is
the great life-builder.
♦ 4t * *
THE cry of the hour is for life: life complete and rounded out;
life spiritual as well as material. From the bosom of the great
Mother well the fountains of life for which the world of men
thirst; yet they die of thirst rather than slake it at her breasts,
because they know her not as their Mother.
In all the ages she has had children who have dared every
hardship and danger to bring to her fountains of life the hungry
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and the thirsty. She needs such today. Valiant woman who are
unafraid: who will venture on uncharted seas with her truth as
their compass, who will dare the desert led on by her light.
Women for whom her message is so clear, so infinitely above and
beyond all other teaching that they burn to make it known for the
saving of the nations; for whom her cause is so precious that it
overwhelms all pettiness of personalities, all count of personal cost
in labor, in sacrifice.
♦ ♦ ♦ *
THIS is the trained worker we need to makfe the Church's voice
effective in our age: one full of faith and ever subject to
authority. Without such positive ideal, such complete surrender
to service, we wHl not excel; and no social worker is truly Catho-
lic if she be not excellent
Too many enter the field with no higher ideal than to extend
to Catholics, or to place under Catholic patronage, the benefits of
non-Catholic social work. Or they view their work as a preven-
tive or antidote to Protestant propaganda. This purely negative
viewpoint will never produce anything but a counterfeit, a base
imitation, not a positively Catholic work, redundant with Catholic
vitality and force. Again we say: The call is for workers steeped
in Catholic thought, virile with Catholic enthusiasm, nourished
with Catholic life. The response must not be niggardly in num-
bers or in spirit. Those who give themselves thus, the Church
must munition with the riches of her teaching, and the people
must support with the means to live and carry ever forward the
ideal of Christ: " Greater love than this no man hath: to lay down
his life for his friends.'*
THE text of the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Republic was
published in full in The Nation of January 4th. It calls for
the entire abolition of all classes among the people, the establish-
ment of a Socialist Society, and the victory of Socialism in all lands.
Not only are all social classes abolished: but all right to private
property in lands is done away with. The land is to be appor-
tioned among ''husbandmen" and no compensation is to be
granted to the former owners. All implements, " animate or in-
animate," are national property; also factories, mills, mines, rail-
ways and other means of production and transportation.
The Constitution constantly refers to the former owners as
"exploiters" — and to those who will now use and manage the
property as "workers." It repudiates the Russian national debt;
all banks are transferred to the ownership of the Workers' and
Peasants' Government; an obligation to work is universally im-
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posed; the workers are to be armed and to compose a Socialist Red
Army; the propertied class are to be disarmed; nor may the " ex-
ploiters ** hold any place in the Russian Government
♦ * ♦ *
THE Soviets of the different Russian republics may be
autonomous in their own territory but the supreme power be-
longs to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets: and in periods be-
tween the convocations of such a congress to the AU-Russian Cen-
tral Executive Committee.
It will be seen that this Committee is the real governing
power: in fact the Constitution does not hesitate to speak of the
necessity of the establishment of a dictatorship : and this dictator-
ship is the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. It is " the
supreme legislative, executive and controlling organ " of the Rus-
sian Republic. And it is this Central Committee that forms the
Council of People's Commissars which is entrusted with the gen-
eral management of the affairs of the Russian Socialist Federated
Soviet Republic. Only two items are outside its jurisdiction, rati-
fication and amendment of the fundamental principles of the
Soviet Constitution and ratification of peace treaties. It is both
shrewdly worded and wisely framed to keep political power in the
hands of the Executive Committee. The All-Russian Congress
can be but a general convention without the opportunity of delib-
erative power; dominated by the Executive Committee in whose
hands is all the machinery of government. And the numerical
strength of the Committee only weakens its corporate strength
and places the ruling power in a few strong, active men. The
necessary checks in truly representative government are abso-
lutely lacking, nor is there personal responsibility of particular
members of the government to a real legislative body*
♦ « « «
THE Constitution forbids the right to vote to all persons who
employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase of
profits — ^which provision is ludicrous; also to all who have an in-
come without working; to private merchants, trade and commer-
cial brokers; to monks and clergy of all denominations, and all
persons deprived by a Soviet of their citizenship.
The Constitution demands that the Church shall be separated
from the State; and the school from the Church; to the working
people it turns over all technical and material means of publica-
tion of newspapers, pamphlets and books; halls will be furnished
free to the peasantry; the government sets for itself the task of
furnishing full and general free education; it demands universal
military training; and having limited the title citizen to those
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who '' work;" having deliberately excluded a large portion of the
population, this same Ck>nstitution states that it recognizes equal
rights for all citizens and protests against the oppression of
national minorities.
»
AMERICA has lost her foremost American. His life, even his
private life, was public. There are those who admired him
intensely, and some few who disliked him. No American since
Lincoln endeared himself more to the hearts of the American peo-
ple. No public man ever had his life and conduct subjected to
such scrutiny: his character appeared brighter because of the
ordeal.
The welfare of his country and his countrymen weighed upon
him from his youth. He cared. And because he cared so much
he felt so keenly: and passion often fired his speech. .
A brave man: an upright character, a loyal friend.
4( 4( 4( 4(
AT one of the most critical moments of his political life, his friend.
Father Alexander P. Doyle, former editor of The Catholic
World, died. At much personal sacrifice, Theodore Roosevelt
sent a tribute to this ofBce, which in part reads as follows: '* It
was with Father Doyle that I first discussed the question of my
taking some public stand on the matter of race suicide, it having
been developed in one of our talks that we felt equally strong on
the matter. I have never known any man work more unwearily
for the social betterment of the man, woman or child whose
chance of happiness is least in our modern life. Their welfare
was very dear to him. Again and again in speeches which I made
I drew largely on the great fund of his accumulated experience. I
mourn his death, not only because he was my friend, but because
he was so fearless and resolute a worker for the betterment of
mankind.'*
4( ♦ ♦ ♦
HE lived the virtues that he preached, and they were the homely
fundamental virtues that alone make a nation content. The
world cannot take to itself too soon the habit of rehearsing and
imitating them.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
Vol. CVIII. MARCH, 1919. No. 648.
THE WORLD WAR AND THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OI
EDUCATION
BY WALTER GEORGE SMITH.
^E are too close to the events which have changed
the face of the world since August, 1914, to form
any adequate idea of their consequences. It
would seem that after more than two hundred
years, the principles that brought about the Eng-
lish revolution of 1688 are to have their full fruition. The fall
of the empires of Austria and Germany and their rapid dis-
integration into their original elements have shown that the
democratic theory of political government is in the ascendant.
The age-long belief in the divine right of any one man or class
of men to wield the destinies of peoples has yielded, but with
such a mighty struggle as to shake civilization to its base.
Autocracy has well-nigh pulled down in its ruin the barriers
that keep human passions in subjection. The work of cen-
turies must be done anew. We shall be fortunate, indeed, if,
out of the welter of destruction, the blood of the dead and
dying millions of the flower of young manhood, the devastated
villages, the desecrated and destroyed temples of religion, there
shall emerge a realization of the fundamental truth of Chris-
tian polity — equality of opportunity under a system of law
embodying justice as the ultimate test of international and
private rights.
We in America have been but lightly touched by the great
catastrophe. We mourn, indeed, for the thousands of our gal-
lant dead and for the scores of thousands of the wounded, but
Copyright. 1919. Tbr Missionabt Society op St. Paul thb Apostlb
nr THB Statb op New Tobk.
vol. CTm.— 46
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722 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF EDUCATION [Itfar-,
our vast resources of untouched wealth and magnificent maxi-
power make us a giant in strength in comparison with tlie
Allied powers and the German enemy, whose best and bravest
have fallen by millions.
Even if we wished it, it were vain to hope that new con-
ditions will not afifect our outlook on life. By the test of utility,
not alone in material things, let us hope, but in things spiritual
le wo^Nd can be so used — ^will all systems be rigidly
judged. No revertjcce for the past, no human authority, how-
ever venerable, will detej* mankind from so molding its insti-
tutions as to make them, dih>ctly or indirectly, avail for the
best interests of the masses of meo^ There was a time when,
in the realm of education, certain po^hilates required no
demonstration. It is not so now. The flooNii|^es are down;
and there is no theory so revolutionary that it o^iLnot find its
advocates, who seek openly, or covertly, to prevail.^
It needs no demonstration to trace the great W^to the
vicious system of education that has at last been unveile^ip all
of its hideous consequences in the late German Empire. Jtias
been purely scientific, based upon a philosophy absolutely cr
severed from recognition of the supernatural. ** Philosophy,
says Dr. Pace, "detached from theology formulated nev
theories of life and its values that moved at first slowly, thGn
more rapidly, away from the positive teachings of Clxris-
tianity. Science in turn cast off its allegiance to philosojpliy
and finally proclaimed itself the only knowledge worth seeking
The most serious practical result was the separation of mojra
and religious from purely intellectual education — a result du.
in part to religious differences and political changes, but alsc
in large part to erroneous views concerning the nature and
need of moral training." ^
A glance at the doctrines enunciated by the leading Ger-
man thinkers, whose writings are both the cause and the
product of this separation of science and religion, is all that is
needed to account for the cynical levity which brought on thr
war and the abominable cruelty with which it was conductoi,
A recent review of Nietzsche's philosophy — and Nietzscte ap-
pears to be the outstanding exponent of modern German ideas
— summarizes his reasoning as follows: " There is i^o God; the
world with which natural science deals is the only /real world.
^The Catholic Encyclopedia, " Education.** f
4
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If this is true, as it is accepted by men of science, then all ideas
and tendencies which connect the life of man with a spiritual
world are wrong and must therefore be destroyed; religion
and especially Christianity must fall; to speak of a destiny
of mankind becomes pure nonsense." The reviewer comments :
"Other thinkers who have denied the metaphysical foun-
dation of Christianity were eager to observe its moral values.
Kant whose Critique of Pure Reason has made the proof of the
existence of God impossible, appealed to the practical reason
or the categorical imperative in order to maintain the moral
values. John Stuart Mill in his interesting Essays on Religion
was wrestling with the problem, and finally came to the con-
clusion that the Christian values were to be preserved. These
philosophers were prompted by good intentions, by utilitarian
motives, but to do it they renounced logic in regard to their
premises. Nietzsche is logical in his reasoning. He denies the
moral values, as being based on imaginary presupposition.
His thesis may be formulated thus : There is no absolute self-
existent supreme standard of valuation distinct from individ-
ual volition." *
From such a basic philosophy it is not hard to trace the
awful crimes of the Lusitania, of Louvain, of Rheims, the mur-
der of Edith Cavell and of Captain Fryatt, and the whole
catalogue black with a depravity which shocks the world.
It may seem at first a far cry from the materialistic
philosophy and its outcome to the subject of liberal education,
but in reality the connection is close. On the one hand is a
system which advances and maintains the overmastering value
of a philosophy which trains the mind while it forms the char-
acter of the student upon the noblest models, on the other a
system which shows a material reward as the end of every
effort and every course of study. Let us glance briefly upon the
history of classical education. The study of Homer goes back
to the golden age of Greece : from Xenophon to Alexander the
Great, the Iliad and the Odyssey were familiar to all who
aspired to a liberal education. The Greek tragedians taught
the lessons of duty and religion, of justice and providence;
and when rhetoric became a separate art, Thucydides became
a separate study. Gradually the elements of a liberal educa-
tion were found in the study of Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic and
'Francis Szubinski, Truth, November, 1918.
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724 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF EDUCATION [Mar.,
Mathematics, and Mathematics included Geometry, Arithmetic,
Astronomy and Music, making the seven liberal arts. ** And
thus,'' says Cardinal Newman, ** a definite school of intellect
was formed founded on ideas and methods of a distinctive
character and (as we say) of the highest and truest character
as far as they went, and which gradually associated in one and
assimilated and took possession of that multitude of nations
which I have considered to represent mankind and to possess
the orbis terrarum." •
When Rome took the torch from Greece, she produced lit-
tle or nothing not borrowed from the older civilizations. To
quote again from the great Cardinal: "It is true Terence,
copied from Menander, Virgil from Homer, Hesiod and
Theocritus; and Cicero professed merely to reproduce the
philosophy of Greece. But granting its truth ever so far I do but
take it as a proof of the sort of instinct which has guided the
course of civilization. The world was to have certain intel-
lectual teachers and no others; Homer, and Aristotle, with the
poets and philosophers who circled around them, were to be
the schoolmasters of all generations. Therefore the Latins,
falling into the law in which the world's education was to be
carried on, so added to the classical library as not to reverse
or interfere with what had already been determined. And
there was the more meaning in this arrangement when it is
considered that Greek was to be forgotten during the many
centuries, the tradition of intellectual training to be conveyed
through Latin, for thus the world was secured against the con-
sequences of a loss which would have changed the character
of civilization. I think it very remarkable how soon the Latin
writers became text-books to the boys' schools. Even to this
day Shakespeare and Milton are not studied in our course of
education, but the poems of Virgil and Horace, as those of
Homer and the Greek authors in an earlier age, were in school-
boys' satchels not much more than a hundred years after they
were written."*
In mediaeval times the old tradition remained notwith-
standing the rise of science and so it has continued in most
civilized nations down to our own day. The reproach leveled
against Scholastic Philosophy that it was barren of practical
results was equally directed against that of the great Greek
• ChrUtianttg and Uttert, p. 259. « ChrUtianitg and Letters, p. 260.
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masters. In his essay on Bacon, Macaulay says : ^ The ancient
philosophy was a treadmill not a path. It was made up of
revolving questions, of controversies which were always be-
ginning again. It was a contrivance for having much exercise
and no progress."
The critic spared neither Plato nor Socrates. "Assur-
edly," he tells us, ** if the tree which Socrates planted and Plato
watered is to be judged of by its flowers and leaves, it is the
noblest of trees . . . but when we look for something more, for
something which adds to the comforts or alleviates the calami-
ties of the human race, we are forced to own ourselves dis-
appointed. We are forced to say with Bacon, that this cele-
brated philosophy ended in nothing but disputation. That it
was neither a vineyard nor an olive ground, but an intricate
wood of briars and thistles from which those who lost them-
selves in it brought back many scratches and no food."
That there was a large element of truth in these scathing
denunciations of the subtleties and refinements which mark
dialectical exercise both in classical and mediaeval times can-
not be denied; but as in so many philosophical systems which
had been wrested by men to their own destruction, so the
theory of Bacon has been misinterpreted and misapplied. Car-
dinal Newman says : *The truth of the Baconian method for the
purposes for which it was created, and its inestimable service
and inexhaustible applications in the interests of our material
well-being have dazzled the imaginations of men, somewhat in
the same way as certain new sciences carried them away in the
age of Abelard; and since that method does such wonders in
its own province, it is not unfrequently supposed that it can
do as much in any other province also. Now Bacon himself
never would have so argued; he would not have needed to be
reminded that to advance the useful arts is one thing and to
cultivate the mind another. The simple question to be con-
sidered is how best to strengthen, refine and enrich the intel-
lectual powers; the perusal of the poets, historians, philoso-
phers of Greece and Rome will accomplish this purpose as long
experience has shown. But that the study of the experimental
sciences will do the like is proved to us as yet by no experience
whatever." ■
May we not go farther and maintain without unfairness that
* ChrUtiantty and Letters, p. 263.
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726 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF EDUCATION [Mar.,
the scientific thought which has worked such wonders for the
material good of mankind, being misapplied to the realm of
religion and ethics, has brought about the catastrophe of man-
kind which now staggers our comprehension?
It is an unfailing experience that men are prone to frame
a system of ethics which permits the conscience to rest undis-
turbed by a course of action that conforms to self-interest.
Rarely does it happen that either individuals or nations frankly
admit their actions to be immoral. In its lowest manifesta-
tions some sanction of right is found in respect for public
opinion. When in the middle of the nineteenth century the
evolutionary theory was formulated by Darwin, it was seized
by lesser minds and forced to uses to which he never would
have applied it. Attempts were made to argue away the
primary elements of justice which are written upon the hearts
of all human creatures. These were but evolutions, it was
claimed, from accidental environments and had no real ex-
istence save in the imaginations of men. For the first time in
human history a great people ranking among the first in knowl-
edge of applied science, became converts to a theory of life
which made them not supermen, but superbeasts.
It is full time to contemplate the fruits of the utilitarian
theories of education, and as we have found them bitter, to cor-
rect and restrain their use to their proper sphere. The world
is very old, and as far back as history records, human thought
and effort have been made to solve, by reason and study of
phenomena, the mystery of our being. The profound, scien-
tific, mind of today is as powerless before it as were those of
ancient Greece.
Speaking of natural religion Macaulay says: "It is not
easy to say that a philosopher of the present day is more favor-
ably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him
just the same evidence of design in the structure of the uni-
verse which the early Greek had. We say just the same; for
the discoveries of the modem astronomers and anatomists have
really added nothing to the force of that argument which a
reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf,
flower and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates in
Xenophon's hearing confuted the little atheist Aristodemus is
exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology. Socrates
makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and
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the pictures of Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to
the other great question, the question what becomes of man
after death, we do not see that a highly educated European left
to his unassisted reasdn, is more likely to be in the right than a
Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences in
which we surpass Blackfoot Indians, throws the smallest light
on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. In truth,
all the philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted
without the help of revelation to prove the inmiortality of man,
from Plato down to Franklin, appear to have failed deplor-
ably." • Not only have they failed in such proof as man needs to
govern his lower nature, but wor^e, their modern successors
have taught a counsel of despair; turning from such aids as
natural reason can give, rejecting revelation, they have based
the conduct of life upon sordid materialism.
The close connection between theories of education and
the attitude towards the problems of life need not be labored.
If men are but higher animals without an eternity, depending
upon the right or wrong use of the opportunities of their short
stay on earth, it is not easy to find a sanction for the sense of
justice outraged by the enemy in the war just ended. The
philosophy of Nietzsche, Bernhardi, and the whole German
nation, supported in practice by all of its representative men,
whether ecclesiastical, military or civil, may have been a tem-
porary disaster, but it will not cease to attach the support of
those who see in the " will to power '* nothing contrary to the
eternal law of justice.
The opposing schools of classical and utilitarian education
have had their advocates since the rise of scientific thought.
Probably the contest will last, with alternate success and
failure, for generations yet to come. That at first sight the old
system seems vulnerable must be admitted. It is not easy to
demonstrate to the practical mind that the study of languages
which have long ceased to be used in the everyday affairs of
life, is not, at best, an occupation for the philologist or the
dilettante student. It is true that the great masses of men in
times past and probably under all conditions of the future
must forego, even were they mentally equipped for it, the
study of the liberal arts, at least beyond their elements. It is
not with them we are dealing, but with those whose intellectual
* Essay on Church and State*
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728 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF EDUCATION [Mar^
endowments and powers of concentration are to be trained for
the service of their fellows, whether in the pursuit of science,
abstract or applied, or in those professions called liberal. Ob-
viously, we cannot afford to reject the lessons of experience, to
cast away the rich heritage of the past. If we are " in the fore-
most files of times," we are there not alone by reason of our
own discoveries but also because of the work done by genera-
tions long gone. Henry Osborne Taylor appositely observes:
"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we were like dwarfs
seated on the shoulders of giants. If we see more and farther
than they, it is not due to our own clear eyes or tall bodies; but
because we are raised on high and upborne by their gigantic
bigness." ^
The master key to a true education is the training of the
mind by such a system as will prepare it to bring all of its
powers to the just apprehension of any problem requiring solu-
tion. That one and only one method exists, even the most dog-
matic admirer of his special system cannot truthfully main-
tain; but for the classical school the experience of two thou-
sand years forms a weighty argument That the purely
utilitarian theory has been tried and has broken down, must be
obvious to anyone who studies the phenomena of Oerman
philosophy during the past century. It will be well for those
who have in charge the curricula of American colleges to take
heed of what has happened. We have seen them gradually giv-
ing up the old ideals and molding the courses more and more
upon German models. No one will deny the value of voca-
tional training and instruction in applied science. The very
existence of our constitutional system of government requires
the education of our youth in the elementary principles upon
which it is based. We may cordially agree with the venerable
President Eliot, so long the titular head of the American col-
legiate system, that public instruction should be given '^in
regard to diet, nutrition, housing, community cleanliness and
the medical means of controlling epidemics." We may even
agree with him that " many highly educated American profes-
sional men have never received any scientific training, they
never used any instrument of precision, possess no manual skill
whatever and cannot draw, sing, or play upon a musical instru-
ment. Their entire education dwelt in the region of language,
V Th$ Medimual Mind, p. 133.
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literature, philosophy and history; their habits of thought per-
mit vagueness, obscurity and inaccuracy, and their spoken or
written statements have these same defects." *
But the inference is not that the old system is wrong, but
the thoroughness with which it is taught leaves much to be
desired. It needs no demonstration to prove that the study
of language, philosophy and mathematics makes for accuracy
of thought greater than can come from any mechanical art.
Experience has shown that far from producing vagueness, ob-
scurity and inaccuracy, the old classical course has had the
contrary effect, and no small part of the dissatisfaction with
the results of modem and contemporary college education, has
come from the relaxation of the old standard, by the substitu-
tion of elective studies for the old requirements. In fact, the
difficulty arises from a confusion of thought. Liberal educa-
tion is intended for the development of the powers of the in-
tellect abstracted from any particular object for their exercise.
Not only is it intended to fit the student for the conduct of the
affairs of daily life by remote preparation, by teaching habits
of thought, by ever-recurring reflection on his spiritual as well
as material development; but by training his intellect that he
be better fitted to receive the technical education for whatever
calling may be before him. Whether tested by his success in
that calling or by the better test of the form in which his char-
acter is molded, it would be impossible to disprove the value
of the classical course.
English university men in Parliament laid the foundations
of their country's glory and they have consistently maintained
it. The founders of our Republic were for the most part bred
in the classical school of thought. In our admiration for the
accomplishments of scientific men in our own day, we cannot
be blind to the fact that in constructive statesmanship, in the
nice sense of proportion which comes from habits of study of
the great models of antiquity and the learned atmosphere of a
university, which is more than a polytechnic school, no educa-
tion has been comparable with that which is called liberal.
Few men can rise above the environment of self-interest,
of passion, or prejudice; but if there be any secular education
which teaches true himfiility and subdues natural egotism, it
is that which leads the student through ** the corridors of time*"
• New York Timet, November 24» 1918.
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730 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF EDUCATION [Mar.,
and shows him what he can draw from the accumulated wis-
dom of the ages to enrich and strengthen his own talents.
" Some people," says Peter of Blois, " without the elements of
education would discuss point and line and superficies, fate,
change, free will, physics and matter and the void, the causes
of things and the secrets of nature, and the sources of the Nile.
. . . Why condemn the writings of the ancients? It is written
that in antiquis est scientia. You rise from the darkness of
ignorance to the light of science only by diligent study." •
It is by over emphasis on one phase of truth that almost all
great mistakes are made. It needs no argument to show that
the community owes to the rising generation abundant instruc-
tion in the practical arts of life, so far as they can be given in
vocational technical schools. The complexities of modem so-
cial life make it no easy matter to provide for the daily physi-
cal needs of food and shelter by honest toil. The individual
worker must conform himself to conditions constantly chang-
ing. It is well that we should adopt systems of practical educa-
tion adjusted to meet the changing demands of community life;
but for those who by the good fortune of comparative in-
dependence, whose native ability and ambition are strong
enough to bear the arduous test of winning for themselves op-
portunities for higher education, it would be folly to turn from
the ancient and well-trodden paths made broad and firm by the
endless succession of scholars who have gone before us.
We need in public and in private life, not more money-
makers, not more captains of industry, nor more engineers and
leaders in all the avenues of applied science, valuable as they
all are; but more leaders of thought, whose conclusions are
the result of unselfish and careful study, whose eyes are fixed
on a goal transcending all merely material reward, whose
teaching will bring home our Saviour's warning : ** What doth
it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of
his own soul? "*<>
•Quoted by Henry Osborne Taylor. The Medimval Mind, p. 133. >«Matt. xvi. 26.
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SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES.
BY BROTHER LEO.
Strangers have come ifrom the ends of the earth,
through the gates of the summer sea»
From the land of palm and the land of pine and the
Ice King's sovereignty,
From the dreaming South and the star-crowned
North, all bent on the self-same quest.
To bend the knee in fealty to the Queen of the
Golden West I
Light of the stars is in her eyes, red gold is in her
hair.
Her face is flushed with the salt sea winds and her
lips the rose ensnare;
She dabbles her feet in a silken sea, her couch is the
mountain's breast,
A Guinevere by the Golden Gate— the Queen of the
Golden Westl^
UNICIPAL modesty is a universally recognized
Far Western virtue. The cities that dabble their
feet in a silken sea are coy as mermaids; they
are notoriously reticent in exploiting their ad-
vantages, in advertising their prestige, in disclos-
ing their charms. Chambers of commerce on the Pacific Coast
are pathetically pacific; their uniform practice is to turn to
the smiter the smitten cheek. Los Angeles, Tacoma, Oakland,
SeatUe, Fresno, San Diego— they are blushing violets all, rarely
if ever conscious of their beauty, mainly intent upon the mossy
stone behind which shady bulwark they may hide from the
inquiring gaze of tourists and homeseekers. They flee from
publicity as from the face of a serpent
Not without trepidation, therefore, do I venture to call
attention to the fact that San Francisco — the city whose innate
and unassailable modesty once so deeply affected young Mr.
Kipling — possesses one of the richest literary traditions to be
found among American municipalities. In the olden golden
days many eminent writers found in San Francisco an inspira-
^Jtthn Northern HUliard.
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732 SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES [Mar.,
tion and a home. Mark Twain knew it, and Bret Harte and
Joaquin Miller and Robert Louis Stevenson; and Bartholomew
Dowling and Charles Warren Stoddard and Edward Rowland
Sill and Frank H. Gassaway — the great and only Gassaway
who wrote The Dandy Fifth. And the passing years have
brought to the city — scarcely more than half a century old —
scores of lords and ladies of the pen. The City of St. Francis,
appropriately enough, has been and is a favorite pasture of
Pagasus.
No California writer has surpassed Bret Harte in assid-
uous wooing of the Pacific muse. In moods both grave and
gay the author of The Heathen Chinee and The Luck of Roar-
ing Camp recorded his impressions of the city where he
worked and wandered — ^worked in the United States Mint in
Fifth Street and in the old Clay Street newspaper row, wan-
dered everywhere from the sand dunes beyond the cemeteries
to the monkey-house at North Beach. The poetical possibilities
of Meigg^s Wharf he exploited in Spenserian form though not
in all respects Spenserian spirit :
Lo! where the castle of bold Pfeiffer throws
Its sullen shadow on the rolling tide;
Harte likewise wove into serio-comic verse the story — not
without its basis in fact — of the bespangled tightrope-walker
who used to glide on a wire from the veranda of the old Cliff
House across the swirling waters to the summit of Seal Rocks;
how the little blind god caused the poor acrobat to lose his
balance; and how in consequence even to this day in wintry
weather a skeleton in tights revisits the glimpses of the moon.
Harte's longer poem, Concepcion de Arguello, is a beauti-
ful presentation of the true romance of the daughter of Don
Jos6 Dario Arguello, Spanish Commandante at the Presidio,
San Francisco. Through the Golden Gate one April day in
1806 sailed the good ship Juno, bearing the Russian nobleman,
Rezanov, on a secret embassy from the Tsar. Concepcion, then
in the first glow of her young womanhood, was by the hand-
some stranger wooed and won. Rezanov set off for Russia to
secure the permission of his sovereign to marry the beautiful
senorita, promising to return at the earliest possible date and
claim his bride beside the western sea. But Rezanov fell from
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his horse and died on the overland journey from Okhotsk to
Petrograd. The sad tidings failed to reach San Francisco,
and so through many long and dreary years the gentle Con-
chita gazed pensively seaward and scanned the deck of every
incoming ship. At length she dedicated herself to Grod in the
Dominican sisterhood; and long afterward she learned acci-
dentally of the burial of her betrothed in the snows of central
Siberia. Today the remains of Sister Dominica, Concepcion's
name in rehgion, repose in the little Dominican cemetery at
Benicia. The story has been told by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton in
Rezanov, one of her most acceptable novels, and in verse by
Bret Harte in the poem beginning.
Looking seaward o'er the sand-hills» stands the fortress
old and quaint.
By the San Francisco friars lifted to their patron saint.
Best known of Bret Harte's San Francisco poems is The
Angelas; in many respects worthy to stand beside it is San
Francisco: From the Sea. He paid his respects to the Mission
Dolores in exquisite prose; dnd to Lone Mountain, with its
cross-crowned summit looming above the cities of the dead,
he indited two tributes; one beginning.
This is that hill of awe
That Persian Sinbad saw;
the other. The Two Ships, voicing in its concluding stanza the
note of Christian hope and resignation:
Then I think of those luminous Footprints that bore
The comfort o'er dark Galilee,
And I wait for the signal to go to the shore.
To the ship that is waiting for me.
Robert Louis Stevenson knew old San Francisco well. He
lived for a time in Bush Street, took his none too frequent
meals at a restaurant in Third Street a Uttle below Market, and
occasionally chmbed Rincon Hill to visit Charles Warren Stod-
dard in the den he so picturesquely described in his novel. The
Wreckers. Then as ever, Stoddard was a good deal of a
Bedouin, and often Stevenson knocked in vain. On one such
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734 SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES [Mar.,
occasion he scribbled the following Tennysonian lines and
thrust them beneath the door :
I scatter curses by the row,
I leave off swearing never,
For men may come and men may go,
But Stoddard's out for ever.
In the standard collections of Stevenson^s poems we find
no verses associated with San Francisco; but the edition of
his hitherto unpublished poems brought out some two years
ago by the Bibliophile Society of the United States contains a
valued contribution to our San Francisco anthology. Since
the poem is not generally accessible, we present it in its
entirety:
BEsmE THE Gates of Gold.
It's forth across the roaring foam, and on toward the West,
It's many a lonely league from home, o'er many a mountain crest.
From where the dogs of Scotland call the sheep around the fold.
To where the flags are flying beside the Gates of Gold.
Where all the deep-sea galleons ride that come to bring the corn,
Where falls the fog at eventide and blows the breeze at morn;
It's there that I was sick and sad, alone and poor and cold.
In yon distressful city, beside the Gates of Gold.
I slept as one that nothing knows; but far along my way
Before the Morning God arose and planned the coming day;
Afar before me forth he went, as through the sands of old.
And chose the friends to help me beside the Gates of Gold.
I have been near, I have been far, my back's been at the wall.
Yet aye and ever shone the star to guide me through it all.
The love of God, the help of man, they both shall make me bold
Against the gates of darkness as beside the Gates of Gold.
Beside the Gates of Gold R. L. S. is fondly remembered.
His admirers have erected a monument to his memory in
Portsmouth Square opposite the Hall of Justice, and around
it they gather for a conmiemorative service every year. The
tablet is crowned with a bronze galleon with bellying sails, and
almost all the local poets and near-poets have sought to im-
mortalize it in verse. One of the most successful attempts is
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from the pen of a newspaper man, Mr. W. 0. McGeehan, who
indulges the fancy that the crew of the Hispanola, fresh from
the pages of Treasure Island, nightly man the little bronze
ship and scurry the sea of dreams. And in the morning.
Oh, the little bronze ship has returned to its place,
To the stone by the poplar trees.
And the little bronze sails, though they gleam in the sun.
Will not answer the morning breeze.
Now the ghost song has died on the pale phantom lips.
And gone are the master and men.
And the little bronze ship is back safe from the trip
Till it goes on a cruise again.
There it lies through the day till the noise dies away
And the moonshine is soft on the square.
Then its queer phantom crew take it out on the blue
And their chantey rings weird on the air :
" Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum;
Drink and the devil had done for the rest,
Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum."
Joaquin Miller who for several years before his death
lived in a picturesque cabin in the hills across the bay from
San Francisco — his estate he perversely insisted on spelling
"The Hights" — was intimately acquainted with the old city
and the new, and he sang the mystery of the dawn at the
Golden Gate and the flashing splendor of San Francisco Bay,
and recorded the prophecies he read with a poet's eye " beside
the mobile sea." His Seal Rocks narrates the baroque love
story of two of the brown barking denizens of the ocean " from
out the surge of Sutro's steep." Delicious in its bombastic
humor is his description of the sentiments that agitated the
heart of the heroine when her dripping gaze encountered the
heroic form of the bull-seal, " a lorn Napoleon on his throne:"
What eloquence, what hot love pain !
What land but this, what love but his?
What isle of bliss but this and this —
To roar and love and roar again?
When earthquake and Are laid waste the city in 1906,
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736 SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES [Mar.,
Miller sang a quickening song of the dread sight as he saw it
from the Oakland hills, and conjured a new city rising from
the old :
This ardent. Occidental dawn
Dashed San Francisco's streets with gold
Just gold and gold to walk upon,
As he of Patmos sang of old.
And still, so still, her streets, her steeps.
As when some great soul silent weeps;
And, oh, that gold, that gold that lay
Beyond, above, the tarn, brown bay!
Three days, three nights, three fearful days,
Of death, of flame, of dynamite.
Of God's house blown a thousand ways;
Blown east by day, blown west by night —
By night? There was no night. Nay, nay,
The ghoulish flame lit nights that lay
Crouched down between this first, last day.
I say those nights were burned away!
The catastrophe of 1906 inevitably moved other singers to
song. First among them was the gentle Poet Laureate of Cali-
fornia, the best loved of San Francisco's singers, Miss Ina Cool-
brith, who had come to the Far West in the pioneer days a lit-
tle girl with her doll, who read proof on the Overland Monthly
when Bret Harte was editor, and who now, from her hillcrest
home in the city of her love, has seen the scars of the great dis-
aster gloriously healed. Others who offered the stricken city
the consolations of poesy were Edwin Markham, the Oakland
schoolmaster who some twenty years ago attained nation-wide
fanie with The Man With the Hoe; Herman Scheflfeur, whose
ability was first recognized in San Francisco by the acrid
Ambrose Bierce; George Sterling, whose poetic fires have been
often fed by San Francisco themes; and Nora May French,
a marvelously talented girl who some ten years ago emulated
the unhappy ending of Thomas Chatterton, her noblest songs
unsung. The tragedy of her own young life seems uncannnily
blended with the tragedy of the city she enshrined in her New
Year's verses for 1907:
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Said the Old Year to the New: "They will never welcome you
As they sang me in and rang me in upon my birthday night —
All above the surging crowd, bells and voices calling loud —
A throng attuned to laughter and a city all alight.
** Kind had been the years of old, drowsy-lidded, zoned with gold;
They swept their purples down the bay and sped the home-
ward keel;
The years of fruits and peace, smiling days and rich increase —
Too indolent with wine and sun to grasp the slaying steel.
♦ ♦ ♦ «
" They were stately walls and high — as I felled then so they lie —
Lie like bodies torn and broken, lie like faces seamed with
scars;
Here where Beauty dwelt and Pride, ere my torches flamed and
died.
The empty arches break the night to frame the tranquil stars.
" Though of all my brothers scorned, I betrayer, go unmourned.
It is I who tower shoulder-high above the level years;
You who come to build anew, joy will live again with you.
But mightiest I who walked with Death and taught the sting
of tears."
Distinctive by reason of their mellow pensiveness and
their discerning absorption of local color are the poems of the
lamented Daniel O'Connell, a poet among poets and a man
among men. His Songs from Bohemia contains a generous
sprinkling of San Francisco verses. One of the best is Only a
Woman's Face, the record of an impression caught in San
Francisco's Latin Quarter. Another is The Drayman, casting
into perfect form an aspect of city life which most vn-iters
would pass over unnoticed. And in the little poem from which
the following stanzas are culled, O'Connell reproduced with
reverent fidelity the atmosphere of the Mission Dolores :
Away from the din of the city.
From the mart and the bustling street.
Stands the old church of the Mission,
With the graveyard at its feet.
Here alone in the silence and shadow
The crumbling belfries cast.
Lies the dust of the Spanish founders
Who reared the pile in the past.
♦ ♦ ♦
VOL, omx.— 47
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738 SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES [Mar.,
And sometimes a Spanish woman,
Veiled and dark-eyed and brown.
When the Angelus peals from the belfry,
By the graves of her people kneels down.
And tells her beads with devotion
For the sleeper's eternal rest;
Then noiselessly passes outward
With a flower from the grave in her breast.
Mr. Wallace Irwin, the premier writer of light verse in the
United States today, first struck his stride in San Francisco.
Banished from Stanford University as the result of a differ-
ence of opinion with a faculty committee, young Irwin traveled
on foot up the peninsula from Palo Alto and secured a position
on a San Francisco newspaper. His peculiar office was to
write metrical introductions to local articles — a squabble at the
City Hall, an intercollegiate football game, the arrival of a
government official. And the work was so well done that a
good many readers got into the habit of devouring the verse
and ignoring the prose. Of course that happy state of affairs
could not last indefinitely, for the clever jingles soon attracted
more than local attention, and early in the present century Mr.
Irwin hearkened to the call of the East. But he left his heart
behind him. His delightful Chinatown Ballads are redolent
of San Francisco, notably Yo Sabe Me, a dramatic recital of
an earthquake episode which conveys with telling accuracy
the friendly state of mind nowadays entertained by San Fran-
ciscans toward the industrious, unobtrusive and heroically
faithful John Chinaman. Then there is his San Francisco Fog
which merits to rank with Mandalay among the classics of
homesickness. Fog is one of San Francisco's most esteemed
assets — any real estate agent, despite his modesty, will tell you
that; but it remained for Wallace Irwin to make of the fog
at once a local glory and a national possession :
Morning, fellow San Franciscan! Here's my greeting to you!
Shake!
Fm an exiled sort of relic from the Days Before the Quake,
When old Chinatown was greasy, when old Market Street was
wood,
When half the town was restaurants, and all of 'em were good.
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Come, you envoy from my Youthland, turn my memory back a
cog—
Can't you blow me up a hatful of that San Francisco fog?
Oh, that fog, fog!
How it used to fill my brain
With a frantic and romantic
Sort of Orient refrain.
O'er the hilly
Streets and chilly.
Energizing as a nog.
Blew the soul of San Francisco
In her fog, in her fog.
Over Hyde Street's lofty summit, on the northern slope of town,
We would hie us for a moment when the sun was going down.
Just to watch the mist-snake creeping, soft and merciless as Fate,
Through the fort-protected entrance of the distant Western Gate;
Down the bay it coiled and twisted, spreading whiteness many a
mile.
Till it sprang upon the City over Yerba Buena's Isle —
'Twas the fog, the fog.
By a sea-enchantment kist —
Not a fizzle of a drizzle
Like the dismal English mist.
But a fluffy
Powder-puffy
Veil that hid the Decalogue.
One could love or laugh or murder
In that fog, in that fog.
Foreign wines are better, maybe — though I love your native stock
From the Santa Clara claret to the Napa Valley hock.
But there's nothing alcoholic you can send me, if you please.
Not from Luna's-by-the-Peppers or from Coppa's-by-the-Frieze,
That will be to me more welcome as a soul-inspiring grog
Than a long, rare, ice-cold bottle labeled " San Francisco Fog."
In the fog, in the fog,
I can revel to the last.
Nor a headache nor a heartache
Will remain when it is past.
Here's the salt on wild Pacific
Where Adventure lurks incog —
Come, you ghost of Robert Louis,
In the fog, in the fog!
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740 SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES [Mar..
We are mindful, too, of Mr. Gelett Burgess, the creator of
The Purple Cow and the expounder and popularizer of the
sulphitic theory in his clever brochure. Are You a Bromide?
In his early volume of verses, A Gage of Youth, occurs A Ballad
of the Hyde Street Grip: A San Francisco Rhapsody, a half-
dozen sprightly stanzas which, though admittedly not ex-
alted poetry, possess so many feUcitous mentions of spots
familiar to those who know the California metropolis that they
have brought tears to the eyes of exiled San Franciscans. The
Hyde and OTarrell Street cable line still lumbers sedately over
the hills, and doubtless the present day gripman soliloquizes
in much the same fashion as his predecessor who found so sym-
pathetic a spokesman in Mr. Burgess :
♦ « « ♦
North Beach to Tenderloin, over Russian Hill,
The grades are something giddy, and the curves are fit to kill!
All the way to Market Street, climbing up the slope,
Down upon the other side, hanging to the rope;
But the sight of San Francisco, as you take the lurching dip !
There is plenty of excitement on the Hyde Street Grip !
Oh, the lights are in the Mission, and the ships are in the Bay;
And Tamalpais is looming from the Gate, across the way;
The Presidio trees are waving, and the hills are growing brown,
And the driving fog is harried from the ocean to the town!
How the pulleys slap and rattle! How the cables hum and whip!
Oh, they sing a gallant chorus, on the Hyde Street Grip !
When the Orpheum is closing, and the crowd is on its way.
The conductor's punch is ringing, and the dummy's light and gay;
But the wait upon the table by the Beach is dark and still —
Just the swashing of the surges on the shore below the mill;
And the flash of Angel Island breaks across the channel rip.
As the hush of midnight falls upon the Hyde Street Grip !
When the United States entered the World War in 1917 and
thousands of young San Franciscans were called to the colors,
the local muse waved a magic wand; and from training camp
and recruiting ofiQce, from the Presidio military reservation
and the naval training station on Yerba Buena Island, came
metrical tributes from the heart of war-inspired youth. Some
of them were awe-compelling; most of them were awful. But
one Uttle poem of this group deserves recognition here by rea-
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son of its intrinsic excellence. It conies from the pen of Private
Jack Burroughs, now in the engineering corps across the sea,
formerly a reporter on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin:
GooD-BYE San Francisco.
The fog looms gray in the offing;
The plaint of the bafQed sea
Is borne from the shrouded shoreline
To the ears and the heart of me.
From her peopled hills, my Qty
Smiles through the leaden drift
Where she sheathes her ships in her harbored slips
And the gulls' slow pinions lift.
Her beauty fades in the distance
To merge with the sunset glow.
I drift from her flowered gladness
Whither — the gods shall know.
Good-by! And the wafted echo —
The shade of that last farewell —
Like the wrack that rides on the changing tides.
Swings back on the sobbing swell.
Do the wings of the dusk enfold her?
Surely my heart mistakes !
Surely the dawn's light fingers
Lie there as the morning breaks !
For the mist that seems to tremble
Where her masts and her hilltops rise,
Is the rainbow mist that sorrow kissed
And left in my heavy eyes.
It is possible to compile a fairly lengthy list of poems writ-
ten in honor of San Francisco by men and women who were
strangers within her gates, men and women who, perhaps
precisely because they were poets, thrilled at the vision of her
good gray hills and expanded in spirit under the robust caress-
ings of her sun-warmed ocean breeze. Mr. Witter Bynner, Mr.
Clinton Scollard, even Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, are among
the many visitors to San Francisco who have written and writ-
ten well of the city that met them and, in the most favorable
sense, took them in. Mr. Bliss Carmen has added his metrical
laurel wreath to the heap of poetic tributes piled upon the
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742 SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES [Mar.,
Stevenson monument in Portsmouth Square, and that gifted
Irish poet, the Countess Markiewicz, in her Jaynill Father John,
a poem dedicated to the late Father John Nugent of San Fran-
cisco, suggests with appealing delicacy and infectious humor
the atmosphere of " south of Market " and " the chapel of St.
Rose."
The young English poet, Mr. Alfred Noyes, many moons
before he visited San Francisco, with the vision of a seer,
caught in spirit a glimpse of her fascination, and his pathetic
little poem. Old Gray Squirrel, looks into the heart of a Uttle
English boy who burned with the unfulfilled desire to visit the
distant shores of the Pacific :
A great while ago there was a schoolboy,
He lived in a cottage by the sea.
And the very first thing he could remember
Was the rigging of the schooners by the quay.
He could watch them, when he awoke, from his window.
With the tall cranes hoisting out the freight
And he used to think of shipping as a sea-cook.
And sailing to the Golden Gate.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
And, before he went to sleep in the evening,
The very last thing that he could see
Was the sailor-men a-dancing in the moonlight
By the capstan that stood upon the quay.
He is perched upon a high stool in London.
The Golden Gate is very far away.
They caught him, and they caged him, like a squirrel.
He is totting up accounts, and going gray.
He will never, never, never sail to 'Frisco.
But the very last thing that he will see
Will be sailor-men a-dancng in the sunrise
By the capstan that stands upon the quay.
By no means does this complete the list of the poets and
poetry of San Francisco. Charles Warren Stoddard, who
spent his boyhood and much of his maturity in California and
who was baptized in the old cathedral in California Street, now
known as St. Mary's Paulist Church, brought out in San
Francisco the first volume of his poems; and in more recent
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years his friend and disciple, Mr. Charles Phillips, found there
inspiration and congenial friendship. Louis Alexander Robert-
son wrote Resurgam; Charles Keeler, At the Ferry and To the
Builders of the New City; Edward Rowland Sill in his Her-
mitage reproduced numerous scenes familiar to San Fran-
ciscans. And then there are Edward Pollock, Clarence Urmy,
Harriet M. Skidmore, John Vance Cheney, Mary Lambert,
Ella Higginson, Lionel Josephare, Robert Duncan Milne,
Samuel J. Alexander and a score of others who in all manner
of moods sing the praises of the city of St. Francis. Dr. Edward
R. Taylor wrote verses while occupying the office of Mayor
of San Francisco; and Mr. Lorenzo Sosso did likewise while
attending to the gastronomic needs of patrons of the Good-
fellows' Grotto. Verily, the winds of inspiration blow whither-
soever they list.
But how does this mel^e of metre, this riot of song, this
poetical efflorescence and eflfervescence reconcile itself with
the blushing violet penchant of California and Calif ornians?
Might it not appear to the unsympathetic and therefore un-
discriminating outsider, that San Franciscans have an abnor-
mally good conceit of themselves? Might it not seem that the
sweet singers of California have made unto themselves a pan-
theon of little tin gods — as the New England literati did in the
days of Emerson and Transcendentalism — and enthusiastically
bum before one another's shrines the intoxicating incense of
mutual admiration?
I suppose the answer would be that when Far Western
poets are moved to song they really cannot help it; the song
is in their hearts, and, like the feathered warblers in the groves
of Sutro Forest, they know no rest until they give it forth. Na-
ture has been in their regard wantonly bounteous; she has
blessed them with skies of sapphire and air like wine, a sum-
mer tempered with western winds, a winter without snow and
sleet, a panorama of flashing ocean and poppy-spangled hills.
And then, too, they have been richly dowered of the past. They
are the heirs of the rich, fragrant traditions of the days before
the gringo came, the days of Spanish occupation and Catholic
glory, the days of fiesta and fandango, of brown-robed friar
and Castillian caballero — the days when the lowing of the Mis-
sion cattle mingled with **the click of the clashing castanets
and the throb of the hushed guitar." And I am sure that were a
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744 SOME SAN FRANCISCO VERSES [Mar^
vote taken to discover what the living poets regard as San
Francisco's greatest poem, the unanimous verdict would be in
favor of those sweetly sombre lines wherein Francis Bret Harte
draped in the mantilla of exquisitely woven words the glowing
vision of the splendid, idle forties :
Before me rise the dome-shaped Mission towers,
The white Presidio;
The swart commander in his leathern jerkin.
The priest in stole of snow.
Once more I see Portala's cross uplifting
Above the setting sun;
And past the headland, northward, slowly drifting
The freighted galleon.
O solemn bells ! whose consecrated masses
Recall the faith of old —
O tinkling bells! that lulled with twilight music
The spiritual fold!
Your voices break and falter in the darkness —
Break, falter, and are still;
And veiled and mystic, like the Host descending,
The sun sinks from the hill!
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THE CHRIST OF THE COSPELS.
BY CUTHBERT LATTEY, S.J.
|ERHAPS the first thought that will strike even the
Catholic reader when he sees the title of this
article will be that it attempts too much, in treat-
ing of the Fourth Gospel along with the others.
Well, in what follows there is no explicit discus-
sion of the whole question of its relation to the Synoptic Gros-
pels, yet a satisfactory solution, if in the main assumed, at
least finds considerable support. For it is St. John who most
clearly indicates the general trend of events, and in that sense
is our best guide to the previous records. He himself lays
tremendous emphasis on fact; it is fact that he has to tell us,
and that is to make us believe,^ even as it was fact that moved,
or ought to have moved, the various characters in his gospel.
It was hard fact that made Christ's disciples believe in Him,*
that convinced Nicodemus that He was from Grod,* that so ex-
cited the multitude that they would have made Him King.^
And at the end we see Thomas actually putting his fingers to
the wounds of his risen Lord.*^ '" Blessed are they that have not
seen and have believed! *' Christ was not so very enthusiastic
about the belief that was only yielded at the compulsion, as it
were, of the external sign;* but not to yield it even then was to
be without excuse.^
To suppose, therefore, with Loisy and some others, that
the evangelist is supremely indififerent to facts, is to do des-
perate violence to the internal evidence itself, which Loisy is so
anxious to exalt at the expense of the external.* As a matter of
fact, it is St. John that shows the solution at least twice to a
difficulty in which the Synoptics, taken alone, would leave us.
Why does Christ leave Galilee soon after the feeding of the five
thousand? The full explanation is only to be had from John
vi.; the great miracle was worked with a purpose, and to a
large extent failed in its purpose. Christ proposed very ex-
plicitly the Sacrament of which it was a figure, and ''after
Wohn xll. 18, 19. >Johii 11. 11. •John lU. 2. «Jolm ri. 15.
•John zx. 27. 'John Iy. 48. * John xv. 24.
• L« Quatriime Evangilt, Introduction, pp. 1, 52, 53.
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746 THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS [Mar..
that many of His disciples no longer walked with Him/' ' It
was a crisis, and a crisis of failure. Yet St. John explains to
us also the crisis of success; for surely the wild enthusiasm of
Christ's entry into Jerusalem would puzzle us, if we knew noth-
ing of the raising of Lazarus.^® And so it is with regard to
Christ's teaching also. The evangelist proclaims His Godhead
openly enough in his preface and records St. Thomas' supreme
cry, after the supreme sign at the end;" but he puts no such
language as this into the mouth of Christ Himself. Nowhere,
for instance, does Christ Himself say, "I am your Lord and
your God ! " And this is so much more astonishing in his case
than in that of the other evangelists, if only by reason of the
two passages already quoted, that here too we may justly feel
that we have a clue of great significance. After all, if Christ
tells us comparatively so little of His own Person in the Synop-
tics, there is also a marked reticence on the subject in the
Fourth Gospel itself. And why? It is in the records because it
is fact. But, we ask again, in reverent study, why did Christ
choose that it should be fact?
The rationalist — at all events, the superficial rationalist —
will have a false explanation ready, which it may be worth
while to stop a while to brush aside. He will take refuge in a
theory of sources, and reject what he can as being only in one
gospel, or only two, with an implicit or open suggestion that,
if only we would confine ourselves to the best and most reliable
evidence, we should find that miracle and prophecy and the
like had melted away, and might be treated as accretions due
to the heated imagination of a later time. In answer to such a
contention it may be enough, in the first place, to cite a couple
of sentences from Dr. Sanday, whom no one familiar with his
writings will suspect of exaggerating the evidence for miracles.
He writes in regard of this evidence as follows : " In the gos-
pels we have a convergence of evidence from every one of
the larger documents or hterary strata that criticism indicates.
And the evidence, which is so considerable in quantity, is ex-
cellent also in quality." " And secondly, we may confirm this
by an example, the feeding of the five thousand, already re-
ferred to above, an unquestionable miracle, found actually in
all the four gospels. For an example of prophecy we may
•John Yl. 66. MJolm zll. 18-19. >> John zz. 28.
^ Sanday, The Life of ChrUt in Recent Research, p. 218.
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1919.] THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 747
turn to that of the resurrection. "Nothing is so deeply im-
bedded in the gospel text as the prophecy of the resurrection;
it is thrice repeated and, except that St. Luke does not give it
the second time, it is narrated each time in all three Synoptics.
St. John gives the prophecy as it was made at a different time
(John ii. 19-22).""
No, even in the case of the first three gospels we cannot
explain any reticence as to Christ's Person by any general
absence of the supernatural. How then? For there is a
reticence, and the very proof of Christ's Divinity from the
Synoptics, powerful as it is, only serves to bring it out the more.
Almost unconsciously the prayer comes to our lips, " Tell us
plainly! " ** Why did not Christ state at once in plain and un-
mistakable terms that He was God? That is a question that
must be met, if we are to discuss the part which He plays in the
gospels; and it is not to be met by blinking obvious facts. In-
deed, the gospels themselves in more than one place emphasize
this reticence. In the very passage just quoted, what the Jews
cry is, ** If Thou be the Christ, tell us plainly." Thus, even in
the Fourth Gospel we have evidence that Christ near the end
of His mortal life still refrained from publicly claiming even
to be the Messiah. Truly. "He did not trust Himself to
them." *" Early in the ministry the devils had been prevented
from proclaiming Him such," and so had the apostles after
the confession of St. Peter." Nay, even at the trial, as we
gather from St. Luke, who appears to reproduce the critical
part of the dialogue more fully, the first question put to Christ,
apparently because even that could not be proved adequately
by the witnesses, was simply this, " Art Thou the Christ? " And
it was His answer to this, and the reference to Daniel, that
brought the cry from all, "Art Thou then the Son of God?"
Christ would not refuse to speak before the official judges of
His nation, and His second answer they accounted blasphemy,
never stopping to consider whether it might not be justified by
its very truth.
We may infer from the incident of St. Peter's confession
itself that it was by no means obvious even to those who be-
lieved in Him that Christ claimed to be the Messiah; it is not
said that any thought Him such, there where we should most
" Note on Mark x. 34 in the Westminster Version. >« John x. 24.
»John U. 24. »Lak€ Iv. 41; ef. Mark i. 34. >f Matt. xvi. 20 and parallels.
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748 THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS [Mar^
expect to have the fact mentioned. It was a tremendous con-
fession to make, even to call.Him that — to say that in Him were
definitely and finally fulfilled all those pent-up hopes, all those
vast promises present to the mind and dear to the heart of
Israel. To the apostolic age, indeed, more easily than to us
modems, that confession may seem to have embraced im-
plicitly all that Christ could ever claim to be, and so in the first
tale of Christ it may be that no more was said. But, as a
modern exegete little favorable to Petrine claim confesses, it is
characteristic of the First Gospel that in a matter of this kind
it adds authentic details of its own. " The passage [Matt. xvi.
17-19] would seem to belong to that cycle of narratives peculiar
to Matthew and specially connected with the name of Peter,
cf. xiv. 28 ff., xvii. 24 ff., current among the Jewish Christians
of Palestine of the writer's day." ** St. Peter had done some-
thing more than repeat his first lesson."
But Christ forbade even the lesser title; how much more
the greater! The rationalist craves for evolution, in the teach-
ing of Christ as in all else, forgetting that in things human
there can be loss no less than gain, failiu*e no less than suc-
cess. So it was with Christ's ministry, which finds its climax in
the gibbet of Calvary. In John iii. 18, where there is mention of
" the only-begotten Son of God,*' we appear to have the evan-
gelist's own reflections. But if in John v. 25, in the early
Judean ministry we find Christ speaking of Himself as the Son
of God, it ends in His leaving Judea by reason of the peril to
His life.*® We have nothing of this kind of Galilee; in the Ser-
mon on the Mount, it is true, we have a striking assumption of
an authority superior even to that of the Old Testament, but
soon this language, too, is laid aside, probably a little before
the crisis of failure in John vi. already spoken of, and the sin-
cere must learn through parables, and the malevolent be baf-
fled by them. The multiplication of the loaves is the last great
chance for Galilee, though it is repeated before the final
departiu'e. After that there remains but outlying Jewry, in
the north and across Jordan, and then Christ sets His face
finally towards Jerusalem, to put forth His claim once more at
the centre of doctrine and worship, and to be done to death for
it, because it behoved not that a prophet should die out of
Jerusalem.'^
>* Tht Gospel According to St, Matthew, edited by P. A. Mleklem, M^., p. 167.
»Jolm 1. 41. Mjohn v. 18; vU. 1. «Luke zUl. 33.
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1919.] THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 749
No doubt there was a sparing of the weak. For one in
mortal shape to come to the Jew and claim adoration from him
as the Lord, the God of his fathers, would have been under
any circumstances a terrible shock to the Jew, although, in the
light of our growing acquaintance with apocalyptic literature,
we must perhaps conclude that it would not be quite so great
a shock as had been thought previously. But the gospels do
not let us stop there; they show us violent enemies dogging
Our Lord's footsteps, and working to discredit and destroy Him.
The promises had been fulfilled beyond the wildest hopes of
the chosen people, their God had come among them and lav-
ished His mercy upon them, but they hardened their hearts.
The Eternal Father could acknowledge His Son at His baptism,
the opening of the public ministry, and at the transfiguration,
designed to strengthen the most chosen of the apostolic body :
the devils could proclaim Him, when they were not
stopped:" but the God-man Himself must be largely silent,
because open speech would mean a prematiu*e end, the curtail-
ing of His appointed time.
Perhaps — and this is only a tentative suggestion — this may
be the true explanation of a difficult incident, John x. 34-36.
Even the title " Son of God " was not as plain as " God *' sim-
ply, the expression had been used several times in the Old
Testament of mere creatures,^* and Christ Himself had applied
it to peacemakers.^^ No doubt He chose it because it expressed
truly His own divine Nature; but, in accordance with what has
already been said. He may also have chosen it because it did
not express it with absolute necessity, as the only possible
meaning. May we not suppose, then, that He was reminding
His opponents that He had not committed Himself to a clear
and demonstrable claim to Divinity, that they had not suf-
ficient warrant for accusing Him of the supposed blasphemy,
that whatever the goal to which He was endeavoring to lead
them. He had not as a matter of fact chosen to ."' tell them
plainly? " How much meaning He would put into it they still
had to see, and if they drew too hasty a conclusion He would
check them. On this interpretation we could keep the double
antithesis which the text itself seems to suggest; Christ had
received a higher commission from the Father, but was content
» Mark iU. 11 ; v. 7, the latter with parallels.
»£. a.. Gen. vl. 2: Job 1. 6. ••Matt v. 9.
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750 THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS [Mar.,
with a lesser title. In the end, it may be noticed — going back
to the trial as in St. Luke — the Sanhedrin appear to have taken
the term in its fullest significance,^* perhaps because of the
preceding reference to Daniel vii. 13, which we know from the
Book of Enoch ^® to have been much emphasized in current
apocaljrptic.
Our Blessed Lord, then, did not set forth His own Person
and mission to His hearers in terms adequate and easy to com-
prehend; in any case it would have been a shock to them, and
under the existing circumstances it would have compromised
His own safety — always supposing, of course, that it was not
His mind to use miracle for His own protection. On the other
hand, what he sought for was absolute faith in Himself, uncon-
ditional surrender. In this we notice that He is at one with His
great apostle, St. Paul, whose characteristic standpoint and
aim has already been explained.*^ The Apostle yields himself
without reserve to Christ, and exhorts all others to do so; and
Christ Himself is trying to win all to Him, to the same self-
abandonment and utter confidence. Only there is a difference;
the Apostle, as we have seen, was steeped in dogma, and his
desire for union with Christ, his actual union with Christ, was
that dogma in action. "I know Whom I have believed," he
cried ;2^ there was no lack of definiteness in the faith he held
and taught. But in the natiu*e of the case, such as He suffered
it to be, Christ could not unfold all that His Apostle was to
write and tell of Him; He asked for faith, and still more faith,
and worked miracle upon miracle to prove His right to it, but
the full and true content of that faith He did not clearly ex-
pound. An analogy crosses one's mind of Lord Kdtchener in
the early days of the War, when there was the first urgent call
for recruits. There was a fine response, but ever and again a
paper or a speaker would endeavor to draw from Kitchener
what in very truth the full quota was to be that would finally
satisfy him. And Kitchener would smile, and ask for more
men, and still more, and would set no limit, so that we may
well say and believe that he saw the need, not of any fixed
number, but of all that could come. And Christ asked for faith,
and encouraged faith, and was against all that could limit it;
and Who could thus draw all men to Himself, save He to
Whom alone all men belonged?
» Luke xxU. 70, 71. » Chaps, xlvl., IxU.
" Thb Catholic Wobld, The Christ of Paul, August, 1918. " 2 Tim. 1. 12.
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1919.] THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 751
Such is the purpose of Christ that we find in the gospels,
and it is on this purpose that we can base our first contention,
that the claim to Divinity is truly there, implicitly no doubt,
but plain enough for us to understand, and plain enough, at
any rate, to lead on those who heard and saw Him, if they
would follow in good faith. Indeed, it is an interesting fact,
not very convenient for the rationalist criticism of our time,
that, judged upon the mere reading, the Christ of the Synoptics
may be said to be more self-centred than the Christ of St. John.
In the Foiu'th Gospel Christ is constantly referring all to the
Father, partly in the intimacy of His disciples, partly in
greater boldness of speech at Jerusalem. And to St. John
such references were precious; the whole subject of Christ's
Divinity was one of those which he wished to bring into fuller
light so that he selected what suited his purpose. The other
gospels contain a large amount of traditional matter; St. John's
is entirely his own, deliberately undertaken to supplement the
work of his predecessors, and Christ's Divinity is the main
theme throughout. At a later time, when all eyes were upon
him, and the veneration of the Christians even went so far as
to deem him immortal in the flesh, he appears to have felt the
need of another chapter to his gospel, to confute that legend —
for Christ was already, as we may suppose, returned in judg-
ment upon Jerusalem, the rehearsal of a vaster tragedy — and to
point them to the see of Peter, to the abiding shepherd of the
flock. But a better key to the gospel as a whole is found in what
may well have been the original conclusion, the end of the
twentieth chapter, where St. Thomas yields supreme homage,
and the evangelist avows that " this is written that ye may be-
lieve that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." " The Son of
God " at the end, " The Word " at the beginning. This Sonship
has after all a deep meaning of its own, and we can see that St.
John was interested, not merely in Christ's Divinity as such, but
also, if we may so put it reverently, in the manner of it.
But in the Synoptics, in the more popular tradition, little
of this is recorded, and instead a certain self-assertion — ^for
such it truly was — which would be little edifying except as the
indirect indication of claims that could know no limit. The
leper beseeches Him on his knees : " If Thou wilt. Thou canst
make me clean."*® What a confession! Is language of this
"Matt ylii. 2 and paraUels.
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752 THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS [Mar^
kind to be encouraged? Will not Christ say that He is but the
humble instrument of the Almighty's power and mercy?
Swiftly comes the answer, " I will; be thou made clean." And
swiftly the deed too; the implicit claim is there, and the divine
ratification. There is nothing like this in the lives of the saints;
or if perchance some analogous incident might be found to
the single cure, there is no case of a systematic attitude such
as this. In the very next incident (following St. Mark's order)
we have something stronger still. The paralytic is let down
before Christ, Who bids him be of good cheer : " Thy sins are
forgiven thee! " And at once the Scribes and Pharisees deem
this blasphemy: "Who can forgive sins save God alone?"
Surely here, if Christ knew Himself a mere creature. He would
be bound to answer, as would every priest of God that hears
confessions, that it was not in virtue of any power of His own
that He had declared the sins forgiven, but as the represen-
tative of God. And He would have told the objectors that they
were right enough in saying that God alone could forgive.
What happens? " That ye may know that the Son of Man hath
power to forgive sins ! " Not a word of explanation or refu-
tation. They say only God can forgive sins? Very well, Christ
will assert emphatically none the less that the power is His,
and once more work a striking miracle to prove it. Soon after-
wards He claims to be "Lord of the Sabbath."'^ It is not
necessary to pursue the story further. These episodes were
not of a nature to furnish direct evidence of a claim to God-
head, but their cumulative effect upon the well-disposed Jew
must have been the same as upon us. We notice this especially
in the case of the gospel which at first sight seems the farthest
from putting forward any such "metaphysical" views; the
rationalist forgets that real dogma may be presented in a pop-
ular way no less than in a scholastic treatise. Dr. Dean, in
his admirable introduction to St. Mark's gospel in the West-
minster Version, has not hesitated to say, " The distinct pur-
pose of the Second Gospel is to portray Jesus as * Lord of all,'
taking St. Peter's words in Acts x. 36-43 as the sununary of the
Petrine gospel. "The simple, unstudied narrative is left to
speak for itself and to convince the reader that * truly this man
was Son of God.' His Divinity reveals itself as it were imcon-
sciously and without effort."
MMatt xU. 8 and pandlelt.
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1919.] THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS 753
Nevertheless, as we have akeady seen, Christ was not left
without witness of a more direct kind, and witness that in the
circumstances could hardly be called ambiguous. His Heav-
enly Father acknowledges Him at His baptism and transfigura-
tion; the devils acknowledge Him, and are silenced, not because
they lie, but because they know;*^ His future vicar acknowl-
edges Him, and, indeed, wins the office through that confes-
sion. The testimony of His Father and of the devils was little
likely to be cited in court, and that of St. Peter was given in
sufficient privacy to be followed by an injunction to silence;
it remained only that Christ should bear solemn testimony
Himself when the supreme hoiu* came, and at the challenge
from the high-priest He was silent no more. Need other pas-
sages be cited? "No one knoweth the Son save the Father,'^
a claim more significant than that of His own knowledge of the
Father; the Father alone could plumb the depths of His Son's
being. And in the Sjmoptics, no less than in the Foiu'th Gospel,
Christ is more insistent in His claims as the end draws near,
when all Jewry had been evangelized, and His work consum-
mated, and there was left nought save to give Jerusalem the
final call. The parable of the heir ^^ says so little, and withal
says so much ! And it is pressed home by that pertinent ques-
tion, " How then doth David call him Lord? " "
The resm*rection set the seal upon all. And during the
forty days that elapsed before His ascension Christ spoke to
His apostles of the Kingdom of God — that royal supper, refused
by those at first invited, but filled with the Gentiles, good and
bad, wherein it was guilt to lack the festal garment of charity ."'^
In a sense the Church may be said to have been begun when
Christ first sent out His apostles, with authority only from
Himself, to preach and heal : later He made them priests, at the
Last Supper, bidding them do what He had done; but now He
gives them power to forgive sins, and a universal mission for
the world, only bidding them await the Paraclete and His final
gifts. Much He has to tell them, but this was not the least les-
son, that all power was given Him in heaven and on earth,**
that He was to sit at the right hand of God,®^ that it was He Who
should send forth the Promise of His Father upon them,**
that it was well to call Him their Lord and their God.*^
»Mark iii. 12, et seq. »Matt. xi. 27:.c/. Luke x. 22.
MMatt xxL and parallels. ••Matt xxU, 43. *«Matt xxii.
••Matt xxvllt 18. •'Mark xvl. 19. ••Luke xxlv. 49. ••John xx. 28.
VOL. CVIII.— 48
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754 THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS [Mar.,
"Verily thou art a hidden God!"*« Be that our last
thought, the cry of the prophet of old, true of Christ in His
mortal life, and true of Him today. We may perhaps hope to
persuade the rationalist that Christ could not announce openly
and definitely His full claims, because it would have meant
premature death. But, looking at the matter with the eye of
faith, we see far more than this. The least act of Christ had
an infinite dignity, could ofiTer an infinite reparation of honor
to His Heavenly Father, for outweighing any outrage from sin-
ful man. But He suffered so much, not merely to impress upon
us vividly the appalling horror of sin, but also to teach us that
to live worthily is to suffer, that love craves for suffering, nay,
that the Cross is God's most gracious gift. And who in this
War has not strained for the sight of the Crucified, and of the
Mother with the heart transfixed? If, then, we behold so great
a mystery. Divinity itself manifest in word and work, yet so
long hidden to human ken, and then cowering, as it were, from
Its enemies, afraid, we almost say (and does not the gospel
speak of that fear in Gethsemane?) to appear or to speak —
where is the answer save in Love, Love proving itself, and pro-
"claiming wherein it must ever be proved? So also it is in the
Spouse of Christ, the Church, so hidden and suffering so much,
and yet so manifestly divine in word and work; it is Christ
suffering once more in His Mystical Body, and inviting His
members to suffer with Him, to make up what still lacks. **
"For the Jews demand signs and the Greeks seek after
* wisdom;' but we — we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a
stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles folly, but to those who are
called, whether Jews or Greek, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God." *«
«• Isalas xlT. 15. « Col. !. 24. « 1 Cor. 1. 22-24.
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A BOOKMAN'S YEAR IN A LABOR COMPANY.
BY FREDERICK PAGE.
JHALL we never shed blood?" sighed R. L. S. to
W. E. Henley, and, indeed, I never wished to;
for me, poor man, the British Museum Reading-
room was dukedom large enough; but having
had my adventures I am glad to have had them.
It may seem a far cry from the British Museum to the
danger-zone in Belgium, but it will here be argued that it is
precisely the boolunan who found himself most at home in the
army; and not alone from the contrast with his former seden-
tary life, but as giving him the opportunity to experience the
adventures of which, hitherto, he had done no more than read.
To make an instance of myself, I have thought that the differ-
ence between my own content and the "always bally well
grousing " of my comrades (men from the Dorset coast-towns
mostly) was that they have not read that hardship is the sauce,
and danger the spice of life, that all food is sacramental, and
other such fine sayings.
*' Grousing, gi ousing, grousing, always bally well grous*
ing," to the tune of ** Holy, Holy, Holy:** we sung this in noisy
derision of the noisily contentious, tented in discontent, their
bone of contention oftenest the disposition of oiu* feet around
the tent-pole; our nightly struggle, our matutinal debate.
Another constant occasion of grousing was our food. We
grudge if we be not satisfied. Before I came into the army I
was told that they made good stews there: one is tempted to
retort that the cooks make nothing else; but that would be un-
fair. We often have had pudding made of biscuits and raisins,
and at one time, in lieu of potatoes, we had boiled chestnuts,
and there have been other variations, not forgetting that from
good stew to poor stew, and back again. *' Not without swift
mutation would the heavens be aught.** In the beginning (our
beginning) the grievance was a shortage of bread; we got but
one loaf to a tent of fifteen men, but one learned to make the
most of it by eating our bacon without bread, and the poor
ha*porth of bread with a very tolerable deal of marmalade. •
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756 A BOOKMAN IN A LABOR COMPANY [Mar.,
To recur to my theme. If reading is a necessary equip-
ment for the happy warrior, it is reading not wide but deep:
intensive culture. I have heard of a savant in the Post OflSce
Rifles who swore by the Odyssey as the best companion-book
for a campaign and a B. A. Londoner, in my own company,
brought only one book with him into the army, the Chanson de
Roland, and I believe from the analogy of my own experience
that any one of the great popular books would do : The Bible,
Shakespeare, Bunyan, what you will. Tested, as it were by
exile, even by exile from the actual printed books, they reveal
their perennial freshness and inexhaustibleness. One has them
so by heart that "remembered in tranquillity*' — the tran-
quillity of manual labor — they speak for themselves, " recurr-
ing, and suggesting still:" memory takes of their words, and
declares them unto us, with a depth of truth they had not be-
fore. "Endure hardness as a good soldier:" one's soldiering
reenforces one's reading, and one sees that for the Roman as
for the modern soldier, the stress was rather on hardship than
peril. Yet peril has its place, and once as dawn broke, and
we marched and crouched and ran between the bursting shells,
what my tricksy memory seemed to recall as a prayer of one of
Shakespeare's soldier-kings, re-worded itself as a whisper of
encouragement :
Let not base fear infest
My soldier's mind.
One then can have interior peace in the army : but there
is also amusement, if one will follow in the matters of the
intellect that "little way" which Soeur Th^rese reconmiends
in the things of the spirit, that " little way " of nonsense and
jokes and puns, followed by Lamb, and Lear, and Lewis Car-
roll and a living practitioner whose modesty I will not hurt. As
for instance: there is a notice frequently to be met with in
billeting areas, a notice I felt I could cheerfully obey: "Refuse
to be dumped here in sacks before eleven A.M." This order I
have carried out in its own sense often enough, but I was never
called upon actively to make the great refusal. And elsewhere
the army sign-writer is as unconsciously funny as his civilian
brother in his punctuation and accents. "Growing crops keep
off," made one wonder if vegetation were more docile than
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Canute's tide. But I do not know that I have ever been more
amused than with an astounding ethnological theory of one of
my comrades, who doubtless had endured a Board School edu-
cation. We saw a good deal of a negro regiment from Jamaica,
and these spoke English with a precision of articulation and a
sweetness of tone which my own Cockney upbringing obliges
me to envy. My friend asked me what language these men
spoke among themselves, and I said that they had no other lan-
guage than ours. ** Oh," said he, " then they have always been
English, and it is only the climate that has turned them black? "
The notion of a black population inhabiting the West Indies and
speaking English, long before the coming of Columbus' crew,
was so delicious that I could not undeceive him. And if I may
offer yet another joke, I thought that if anyone should laugh at
my inexpert handling of pick or shovel, I would reply that I
was a literary man with a style of my own. A further joyeuseti
occurs to me. Om* pay-days seemed sometimes long in coming,
wherefore we have a saying: "We haven't much money but
we do see life:" and hearing this one day it flashed across me
that the Little Sisters of the Poor and other nuns might like to
adopt as their motto this corollary of the Gospel counsel of
holy poverty. I commend it and ourselves to them.
It was with ironic fun that one remembered Mrs. Mey-
nell's essay "The Tow Path," when, with others pulling and
pushing, ankle-deep in thick mud, one towed a handcart laden
with burnt tins through the deep ruts of muddy lanes on Palm
Sunday morning; but with sympathetic fun one recalled the
same essay, sharing Mrs. Meynell's active delights of one who
is not athletic, pulling a ration cart through landscape as of the
Weald of Kent one fine afternoon late in April : " an unhar-
nessed walk must begin to seem to you a sorry incident of in-
significant liberty."
For the bookman the essence of these " active delights " is
that they leave the mind free for its own delights, active or pas-
sive. Except in the long summer evenings one had little time
or light for reading, but " thought is free," " the mind is its own
place," and one is Ferdinand carrying logs for Miranda's
father, " for her sweet sake, not for her father's wrath." Work
may be not only play but worship. One sets one's self the
Psychean task of extricating the stones imbedded in a heap of
earth, and this not only or chiefly as a " let's pretend " to be
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758 A BOOKMAN IN A LABOR COMPANY [Mar^
Psyche, but as a rite in her honor, a "" Do this in remembrance
of her — the
latest born and last
Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy.
But Sceur Th^rfese shall lead me back to deeper things for
awhile. I have heard Mass with five other labor men and nearly
a hundred fighting men in a bam usually dedicated to cinema
shows. The altar was a draped piano, and for the Stations of
the Cross and other sacred pictures there were advertisements
of comedies, and sensational melodramas. ''What hiunble
things Thou hast borne for us, my God." The priest sat by the
side of the piano, and we knelt at his side. We were reckoned,
even we labor men, to be within the danger-zone, and by a
gracious surprise the obligation as to fasting was remitted, and
more than half of us received Holy Communion.
We left one front for another in mid-August and ex-
changed work under entirely safe conditions for similar work
under conditions — ^for a mercifully short six or eight weeks,
and at rare intervals afterwards — not entirely safe. ** The mov-
ing accident is not my trade *' and I prefer to speak, in these
narrow limits, of life and work not under shell-fire. My year
then was thus allotted. During the harsh winds of the last fort-
night in February, 1917, we were at Salisbury, drilling and liv-
ing in billets to which we looked back as to paradise. The
greater part of March we were in tents "Somewhere in
France" working in eight-hour shifts on a munition dump.
This arrangement meant that we rose at two in the morning,
and after tea, sometimes with rum in it, we paraded (as also in
the danger zone in August and September) to confront that
other more splendid parade of stars, and then marched to the
dump to load and unload ammunition, often lying for two or
three hours uncomfortably dozing with cold feet in cold rail-
way trucks waiting for the lorries which would take the stuff
up to the firing line. And as we had watched the stars so we
could watch the dawn; then at ten o'clock "home" to our
bacon and bread and marmalade. From April to mid-August
our platoon — a hundred or so of us — ^was away on detachment,
road-mending and shifting about from one place to another.
It was then I learned to shovel mud, out of the ditch onto
a high bank, and off the road; to unload stones from railway
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trucks, and later on to use the pick. It is with a pleasant sense
of mastery that the penman finds he can conmiand these un-
wonted implements and materials. And much else that Mr.
Lucas' cloud of witnesses speak of in The Open Road is his
also. But I must bear my own witness against Guido Guinicelli.
In the sunny mornings of March and again in October, ** The
sun shone full upon the mud all day." "The mud remains
vile," says Guinicelli. This warm-brown, mud vile? Never!
A roadside sea of mud, with the sad glints on it of an October
afternoon sun, has almost the beauty of a snow-drift. " It is
not Death, but plenitude of peace;" it seems almost a desecra-
tion to disturb its calm levels with a scraper or shovel. Even
the least observant and most forgetful of bookmen, may add to
his joy for ever such things of beauty as these; that the sting-
ing nettle has, for a brief while, a creamy flower; that, in wet
and muddy weather, the hair on a mule's legs falls into ridges
as beautiful as those of the bark of the sweet chestnut
From the end of May to mid-July I reached an inner cir-
cle, the sanitary squad, and worked on easier conditions stiU,
digging latrine pits and other such work, in small scattered
groups of four or five, visited only at intervals by the corporal
in charge, and at D I watched the daily progress of the
gooseberries, only to leave them before their ripening for a
pleasant place of orchards. There for three weeks or so I was
the happy solitary angel of a purgatory all my own, where I
cleansed tins of their animal and vegetable stains in a fire of
refuse. I worked as I liked, finding much time for reading
and writing. And yet I was happier stiU when I returned to
the life of the open road at our next remove to a country of
cornfields where we laughed and sang, the valleys standing so
full of corn. But does one thought spoil it all? In the essay
before mentioned is quoted, "the erroneous sentiment of a
verse of Moore's: The joys of thinking hearts are few."
Erroneous; ah, but in war-time? Have I been too unthinking
of the lives so plentifully laid down in No Man's Land, of the
hardships of the trenches, of the privations at home, of the
awful contempt of all womanhood shown in the habitual con-
versation of my comrades? But the bookman cannot speak
without balance: he sees that our pocket vocabulary of vile
words (some three or four) only too faithfully correspond to
those three or four so tiresomely reiterated by Shakespeare's
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760 ANNUNCIATION [Mar^
men. And though half of our jokes blaspheme the sanctity of
sex, yet even so, perhaps they are no less than an inverted
tribute to woman. She is "our life, our sweetness, and our
hope," but one wishes that our recognition or confession of this
could be made with reticence or chivalry : Sancta Maria, mater
Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc.
We know, at least we readers of Henley know, that what
has been was good, was good to show (as I have endeavored to
show), better to hide (and I have hidden much), and best of all
to bear (and there has been some of that). We are the mas-
ters of the days that were. We have lived, we have loved, we
have suflfered. Even so.
ANNUNCIATION.
BY THEODORE MAYNARD.
Now doth the chilly earth receive again
Release from her long servitude to pain;
For all the snows upon the frozen hills
Melt, and descend exultant to the plain.
Now o'er the world a dress of green is cast
Where'er the feet of Gabriel have passed;
The woods and hedges quicken with their bloom
Which winter had imprisoned and made fast.
Through every trunk to every budding shoot
The sap is rising into flower and fruit.
And prophesied by Sybil and by seer,
A rod is growing out of Jesse's root !
The annunciant angel bends upon his knee
Before the virginal maternity
That shall redeem the world ! In equal joy
The new leaves burst from shrub and bush and tree!
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For loveliness and laughter, these are hers —
The early blossoms and the wind that stirs
Among them and along the meadow grass!
The sun and moon are her bright ministers !
The lark for happiness that sings aloud.
The open sky, the white, soft-breasted cloud
Unite to praise her name with all the stars
That stand upon the heavens in a crowd.
Obedient to benignant Law's behest.
The mating birds build cunningly their nest
Wherein to welcome soon their unborn young —
And Mary walks with God beneath her breast!
Now nature joins with her in wondering
How could be brought to be this marvelous thing :
A child conceived of her sweet maidenhead —
Prime miracle of this miraculous spring!
Now from a thousand woodland notes there throng
The echoed notes of her celestial song.
Rehearsal of their own Magnificat;
" For He hath from their seats deposed the strong;
" Broken the bands of winter on the earth;
The humble hath exalted; filled the dearth
Of hunger ! " Shall not all the world be glad
With Mary, hearing of the promised birth?
The whole creation rises up to bless
Its God in her amazing sinlessness
Crying, " My soul doth magnify the Lord,
Who looked upon His handmaid's lowliness ! "
And if the waking spring shall symbolize
Her spirit's exultation and surprise —
If our eyes should be open, we may see
The Holy Ghost Who shines within her Eyes !
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THE HARDY OPTIMIST.
BY CHARLES PHILLIPS.
RANKLY to make the pun and be done with it, we
are hardy optimists — ^we whom not even the
writings of Thomas Hardy, arch pessimist of
English literature, can wholly becloud or de-
press. We can read Hardy and still be hopeful
— of even him ! In his later days, returning to the first love of his
literary life, has he not actually sung? There are, as an English
critic recently put it well, " gleams as well as glooms " in his
pages: "moments of vision" (as he has called his latest
volume of verse) — and we optimists unblushingly seek the
gleams, and are glad of them on discovery. Browning's man
in Instans Tyrannus,
sprang to his feet,
Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed!
And Hardy's, though he has not yet prayed, has undeniably
"caught at God's skirts;" and he has sung! In Something that
Saved Him
The clock rang;
The hour brought a hand to deliver;
I upsprang,
And looked back at den, ditch and river.
And sang!
Thomas Hardy, the Wessex novelist, singing, or. merely
writing, lacks just one qualification to make him the greatest
of all the imaginative authors of the age. He has not the
Christian concept of life to make him a true — and therefore
optimistic — interpreter of human existence. He seems to pos-
sess every other power and attribute — ^insight into human mo-
tive, a palpitating sympathy with the human heart, its dreams
and its sufferings, and a style of expression so perfectly mas-
tered, so clear and simple and direct, that a mistaking of his
thought is hardly possible. But without the Christian philoso-
pher's touchstone of pure truth with which to test and prove his
interpretations and deductions, Hardy's conclusions concern-
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ing life and its meai^ings invariably end, as they must in-
evitably end, in a question mark.
Of course, all human life is a question mark if men, with
their finite minds, insist on probing the answer to the puzzle of
existence to the last solution; and for each and every one of us
it remains a question mark until we solve it through the mute
and incommunicable equation of death. But this side the
grave there is an answer too. Once man recognizes the finite
limitations of his mind and acknowledges the Infinity above
him, then the question mark vanishes: then man knows that
the answer is the simple assurance that there is an answer.
What that answer is, in its fullest, he must be content to leave
to the Infinite — ^which is God.
This is what Hardy does not do, or cannot do; or is it still,
will not? Is it intellectual pride that makes him set himself
' tip as a disputant with the Infinite? True, he challenges It to
appear, blind still to Its instant manifestations in himself; and
yet, time and again he appears rather the pleader, the humble
though baffled seeker, than the challenger. And yet, being
blind, he is forever blaming God for the mishaps tiiat befall
humanity, because he. Hardy, is incapable of comprehending
why those mishaps are permitted. This of course makes for a
sad state of soul for Thomas Hardy — and for a sad state of con-
fusion among those of his devotees who are ms blind as he.
But it keeps him, and them, let us hope, seeking, at least; and
to seek God is, after all, a rather healthy form of faith in Him.
It is this seeking after God, this puzzling over the problem
of life, that tones and colors all of Hardy's writings, and keeps
his sympathies alive and active. Indeed, it is in this that his
motive and his inspiration lie. He is so tremendously inter-
ested in humanity that he cannot leave it alone. He must go
on studying it, puzzling over it, addling his poor finite mind
with its intricacies, breaking his heart because of its tragedy.
This is the keynote to his literary gift and the secret of his
strength — his consuming interest in life.
His powers of observation are inmiense and exquisitely
delicate and refined. Yet, though he sees with the photographic
eye, he does not report or reproduce his observations
photographically. Here it is that his art plays its part, putting
the glow of intimate, moving life into his pictures, making them
pulsate with warm blood, making them vivid and real. He is
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764 THE HARDY OPTIMIST [Mar^
a great realist; but he is not a stark realist In the last analysis,
the absolute realist in art — ^in writing, painting, sculpture, what
you will — does not exist, outside of the photographer's gallery;
and even the photographer retouches his prints.
An absolute realist is an impossibility in art, so long as it
is a human creature that is producing the work of art in ques-
tion, whatever it may happen to be : so long as the artist has a
beating heart in his breast and blood in his veins. Hardy has
the heart and the blood. He could not rebel as he does, against
what he calls Fate, were this not true. And rebelling, he ceases
to be a fatalist, for your true fatalist submits. Hardy does not
submit. He remains absorbed in the puzzle of life; and the
more it eludes him and baffles him, the more would he probe it
and turn it over, and reconstruct it his own way, if only he
might! No matter — ^he cannot work over it with frozen fingers
or sightless eyes. He touches life with the life that is in him.
The spirit of himself — the spirit of constant questioning, con-
stant pleading — this he is bound inevitably to put into his in-
terpretation of the everlasting problem. And thus rebelling,
questioning, pleading, challenging, he may sound bitter and de-
fiant at times, crying out in his impotency. Yet his challenging,
his questioning, of God and life, nevertheless, still remains only
a quest. Will he be a finder, a happy finder, yet? There have
been others who sought and found; and if none ever com-
plained quite so bitterly or for so long, neither did any ever
seek more earnestly. Even Shakespeare had his period of
gloom and despair; but in good time he emerged into the bright
clear air of The Tempest
Hardy's long experience as an architect explains his match-
less literary workmanship. The true architect makes his
creation, be it church or chapel, cottage or palace, a living unit.
So does Hardy with his novels. One does not find mere imita-
tion-life in his pages. There are many of his tales which read
so unlike fiction that it is easier to believe that he has simply
delved into old parish records and family histories for his
material and written them down as they might be retold
around a fireside in the evening, rather than that he has in-
vented and imagined them. This is particularly true of his
shorter stories — the tales we find, for instance, in Life*s Little
Ironies and A Book of Noble Dames. No one but Hardy him-
self (and perhaps not even he) could tell where actuality ends.
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and where imaginatioii begins its fine readjustments of fact
and incident, working toward dramatic denouement, in some
of these stories. The art that conceals art was never better ex-
emplified than in them.
Yes, they are pessimistic. So are the novels, all of them.
Some have called The Mayor of Casterbridge the most pes-
simistical tract ever issued in the propaganda of hopelessness;
because in that, even when the author seems to discover a pur-
pose and an end for the lives of his created figiu*es, " life's lit-
tle ironies " at the last are once more revealed, playing their
aimless game. But is it aimless? Is not The Mayor of Caster-
bridge really like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and most of
Hardy's other novels, a tract after all? And if a tract, is it not
writing done with a purpose? What then may Hardy's pur-
pose be, in challenging life and revealing its miseries, if not
the hope of bettering it? And is not that a reaching back to
God? Keats said that *'we hate poetry that has a palpable
design upon us;" and so it is that we resent and '* hate " at
times the tracty vein in Thomas Hardy. It is the only flaw in his
art; but at the same time, it is the one element that contradicts
his despair, refutes his own complaining and redeems him as a
social being. He spoiled the ending of Tess, artistically speak-
ing, when he made plain outspoken propaganda of it; but he
recovered our faith in him as a man. He could not make such
a plea did he not have hope of it being heard : did he himself
not possess faith in man and man's better self. No one could
read the story of Tess without being moved by Hardy's
eloquence or touched by the heartbreak of his heroine's
tragedy. Hardy himself must have wept over it; and if he did,
the Good God Whom he may seem to deny, even formally and
verbally, has surely registered those tears to his credit in the
Book of Judgment. If the supreme function of art be to uplift
and ennoble, by exciting pity for the unfortunate and stirring
the heart to tenderness for the weak and ignorant and to indig-
nation against their needless suffering; if it be art's purpose to
arouse the better feelings of man's soul and awake him to high
resolves (all of which may readily be made biji^another way
to God), then Hardy has achieved art in Tess. ..And so also in
The Return of the Native — apotheosis of external nature though
that tale may be, with its unforgettable creation of Egdon
Heath — ^we can find our way to God through its pages also (at
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766 THE HARDY OPTIMIST [Mar^
least we hardy optimists!). In all literature, in any tongue we
know, there is no more memorable excerpt from life tiian that
in which Hardy tells, in this novel, of the tragic sundering of
mother and son through an unfortunate marriage. No man
could read the passages which recount that scene without
learning more of life than he knew before; without learning
to be more considerate, more kind,. more tender and filial to
those to whom he owes love and reverence.
These are some of the things that the Hardy Optimist finds
in the pages of this great living master of literature, things
that he finds without effort or search; things that the soul of
Hardy unmistakably has put there, wittingly or not. Of one
thing we are sure : that as long as Hardy rebels, protests, yes,
even defies and challenges in his, at times, white-hot zeal, just
so long do we love him, though he be blind (though not for his
blindness!) ; for just so long does he postulate and presuppose
a better and a higher Power capable of regulating the affairs
of suffering humanity, say what he will of ironical and
malevolent forces toying with the pawns of life. He may do his
best to show us that this world is the worst of all possible
worlds, but it is not, so long as Hardy remains to stir us to the
desire of a better; or so long as the Hardy Optimist, punster
though he be, still lives to challenge the Arch Pessimist to his
worst!
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PROGRESS.'
BY MARCO FIDEL SUArEZ.
UST as truth is the goal of the intellect, and good
that of the will, so the beautiful is the goal of sen-
timent. In all God's creatures we perceive some-
thing like an irradiation of that perfection which
is in their ultimate nature; something by which
the soul is attracted and captivated and touched in an in-
describable and mysterious manner. When things in the be-
ginning sprang forth from the divine hand, they came clad in
beauty and had the beauty of harmony, and the Creator, as He
beheld His work, approved it, for it was good. That goodness
of things by which Holy Writ expresses with simpHcity the
divine approval, is the source, of the beauty that shines in all
creatures.
Art is man's power to give material form to the beauty he
conceives. It is one of the high stages of progress, and there-
fore one of the aims of civilization.
The school that regards progress as a fatalistic process
and denies absoluteness to science, consistently ascribes the
same instability to art. According to it, beauty is but that prop-
erty of objects whereby they affect the senses pleasurably; a
coarse notion, scorned from old by the more spiritual school,
which has never conceived beauty apart from truth and good;
and a superficial theory which, subordinating the progress of
art to the fickleness of taste and even to the frivolities of fash-
ion, denies to it a fixed ideal, the very conception of a fixed
ideal being denounced as a form of either fancy or affecta-
tion.
It is true that the concept of beauty is as obscure to science,
as beauty itself is clear to simple perception, and that, there-
fore, a satisfactory definition of beauty may never be given.
Yet, it is possible to discern some of the relations existing be-
tween beauty and universal order and good. It may be stated
that wherever harmony is found, beauty is found therewith,
and so the works of nature are generally beautiful. Regular
^ Contiiiued from the February issue.
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768 PROGRESS [Mar.,
geometric figures, harmonious sounds, rhythmic motions seem
to bear out that statement. Even complementary colors, which
are those that harmonize best, exhibit a law of proportion in
the numbers of their vibrations. Sight and hearing, the only
senses that perceive oneness in variety, are also the only senses
that perceive beauty, and this seems to point to an intimate
connection between beauty and order. As to moral beauty, it
is so inseparable from good, that language, as if prompted by
an innate conviction of the soul, has a tendency to use indis-
criminately the names of the beautiful and of the good.
There must exist some type, ineffable and but imperfectly
revealed, to which all beauty must conform. The necessity for
such a type served the incomparable St. Thomas Aquinas as a
proof of the existence of the Supreme Being, Who must be
regarded as the Model wherewith the passing goods and beau-
ties of this life should be compared. The existence of that
ideal cannot be denied, unless, following in the footsteps of
sensualism, we allow as much perfection to Mexican idols as
to Greek statues, to the wretched hovel of the savage as the
Parthenon of Athens, to the wearisome tune of a tribe as to
the highest musical creations.
It is an error to assume that art can progress without fol-
lowing rules or precepts, and to proclaim an irrational in-
dependence as the foundation of so important a form of
activity. If natural beauty is nowhere found independent of
truth, good and order, to such an extent that it may be rightly
said that one and the same thing is good to the will, truth to
the understanding, and beauty to the emotions, why should
man-created beauty revolt against all order and set aside all
law? Why should literary and other artistic forms of beauty,
simply because they are man's productions, be free from fixed
rules? If, interpreting liberty in a spirit of exaggeration, we
proscribe rule and precept and lead astray that faculty which,
being an image of the power to create, makes man most like
God, far from uplifting human dignity and the excellence of
art, we shall belittle the one by severing it from reason, and
lower the other by turning it into a mere instrument of emo-
tion.
This does not mean that art should be stationary, nor that
its sole criterion should be the infallible taste of certain schools
and masters. Such a doctrine would be as harmful as the op-
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posite extreme of making an unbridled imagination the sole
judge of letters and the arts. Sentiment, in common with the
rest of the mental functions, is highly educable; but it cannot be
perfected by that unbounded independence which, disowning
the past, has no point of support, and knowing no moderation,
is incapable of leading to progress of any sort. If the great
masterpieces are regarded with respect, it is because the ap-
proval they have always received makes it manifest that in
them genius gave form to a natural law, and because they are
regarded as works which, being good, are susceptible of being
made better. In art, as in other provinces of progress, truth
lies between extremes; and although perhaps no one will ever
attain the just mean, which may be likened to a geometrical
point, it is at least possible to avoid the abysses that mark the
extremes.
Art is akin to creation. Matter, when touched by the hand
of man, changes into the symbol of an idea and may be said to
become spiritualized. Sometimes it is air which, flowing
through a frail reed, opens heavenly vistas to the soul; some-
times it is speech which, cast in the mold of rhythm and measure,
awakens ineffable emotions in the heart; now it is the coarse
sheet which, touched by the pen, receives and keeps all the rec-
ords and all the science of mankind; again it is the rough
stone which cut by a master's hand, shares the breath of life,
or the pliant cloth that bears upon its face images of divine
visions.
Hence the great power of art, all the greater because it
appeals not to the understanding but to the imagination. So
active and effective a power, which molds customs and trans-
forms opinions and beliefs, makes art's mission, like the mis-
sion of all that cooperates to the triumph of truth and the re-
alization of good, eminently social.
This has led a great modem historian to classify literature
and all its sister arts as branches of ethics. Art degenerates, as
experience teaches, when it lends its pure forms to error or be-
comes an instrument of evil. It then becomes the slave of
levity and selfishness, which make it fruitful of trifling works
and barren of masterpieces. As the pernicious sway of those
passions grows, the grandeur and nobleness of art decline.
Aside from beauty, their poetical eispect, the arts have
another aspect, no less important and more practical; their use-
VOL. cviu.— 49
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770 PROGRESS [Mar.,
fulness as means of subsistence and comfort. This province of
art constitutes industry, and human activity applied to indus-
try is work.
The constant exercise of all their faculties is the cause of
the progress of certain peoples. The spirit of independence
by which they are distinguished and the freedom and well-
being they enjoy are the outcome of the ever-victorious strug-
gle they maintain. Science thrives in the atmosphere of indus-
try, whence it derives both nourishment and encouragement.
Thought, as it conquers, gathers new strength. Ownership be-
ing guaranteed, liberty, which is but ownership by another
name, jBnds firmer supports, and thus all the fields of prc^ess
become richer and broader. As work is an indispensable con-
dition of progress, it is absent among savages. They, like the
brute, reap without having sown, and for that very reason are,
like the brute, slaves : for it is a law that truth, good and liberty
cannot be attained without continued effort. Work is effort; it
is a climbing towards civilization; it is the law of activity
operating in man; it is progress itself. Idleness, on the con-
trary, is the denial of that law and the cause of all decline; it
is a stream which, cut from its source, becomes stagnant in un-
healthful sloughs.
Industry aided by science constitutes material progress.
In our day it has attained gigantic proportions. Industry
draws upon the face of the earth the flaming chariot that imagi-
nation dreamed of for the gods alone; that, realizing ancient
myths, levels the mountain and compels ocean to flow into
ocean; that sends thought a-journeying upon the wings of
lightning; that imprisons the sun's rays to bring forth the
faithful image; that treads all the circles of the earth, and, not
content with the soil of the planet, seeks to extend its power to
the heavens. Industry changes even the physical aspect of the
earth, making bounteous fields of what was barren dust.
And what shall be said of the social eflfects of industrial
growth, of its influence on peace, of the facilities it aflTords to
the spreading of knowledge and of the aid it renders intel-
lectual progress? Traffic, exchanging the products of remote
peoples, makes possible the interchange of knowledge, of opin-
ions and beliefs -and thus promotes the triumph of truth.
Mutual assistance among men must naturally create bonds of
friendship rather than enmity, as some philosophers claim;
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and with increase of wealth comes the increase of the means
with which charity relieves the necessary evils of society.
Industrial progress and consequent intercourse are indis-
pensable to every nation that would advance. Today civiliza-
tion either does not reach, or reaches with exceeding tardiness,
countries outside of that intercourse. Progress must be
solidary. Conquest and isolation, first condemned by Christian
ethics, are now admitted to be contrary to the general, as well
as the individual, interests of mankind.
It would be a most grievous error to oppose industrial
progress, but it would be an error equally grave to assign to
it the first place in civilization, and an even graver error to
make it the sum of true progress. The life of society cannot be
reduced, any more than the life of man, to material things.
These must be subordinated to the spirit, wherein lies the prin-
ciple of all activity. Nor is it true that men attain happiness
when, heedless of the other factors of progress, they acquire
great wealth and shine in the splendor of art. Industry is to
science and morals what the flower is to the root and sap of
itself. It has never prevented the fall of nations; it becomes
even a harmful element when not sobered by the influence of
good and truth.
If progress is a necessary forward movement having no
end or fixed purpose, we must conclude that good is but an
empty abstraction without a corresponding reality. Besides
the culture derived from science, the comfort created by in-
dustry and the social well-being due to political improvement,
what other end, real and not a mystical abstraction nor a reli-
gious fiction, can be assigned to our aspirations? The advo-
cates of indefinite development answer this question by a
bold assertion, contradicted by universal experience and the
most deeply-rooted feelings of the heart, that good has no
independent existence but is relative to the other ends of
progress. They assert tUat good is but an aggregate of what-
ever means are conducive to knowledge, happiness and peace
among men. This doctrine is the common foundation of all the
anti-Christian ethical systems of our times. Such systems dif-
fer only in the extent to which they carry that doctrine. From
the most refined idealism to the coarsest epicurism, all ration-
alistic ethical schools deny the reality of good.
To discuss those systems from the point of view of the
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fallacies underlying them would be beyond the scope of this
article. A study of the bearing that their teachings have on
progress is sufficient to show that, far from fostering civiliza-
tion, they are eminently reactionary.
Progress, although a law of human nature, is opposed by
great obstacles, existing both within and outside of man. In-
stead of a peaceful and continuous journey, it is a painful pil-
grimage, a hard climb; its road is not one of flowers, but a
craggy path, often wet with blood and tears. Hence arises
the necessity of training the will and strengthening its motives,
that it may overcome the hindrances it encounters. Here, as in
all other cases where resistance is to be overcome, a greater
force is required than is demanded by appearances. Where
man's will is prompted by no other motives than well-being,
however lofty the form of well-being may be, it is already on
the threshold of selfishness; nor can it fail to cross the entrance.
The secret of the great civilization fostered by Christianity, and
of its great influence on morals, lies in the sublime motives
Christianity ofTers to the will and in the heroic qualities it
creates in the soul. To enable the will to develop even the
common virtues; to maintain in the world sufficient honesty to
preserve social order, mere utility whether individual or coUec^
tive will not suffice.
From Cicero to Castelar, utilitarianism has been scorned
by nearly all great intellects. The Roman orator calls it
plebeian; the Spanish democrat, despite his demagogical ex-
aggerations, regards it as a corrupting influence, comparing
it to the worm that attacks the healthy fruit Noble sentiments
naturally repudiate a doctrine which denies to the will its
characteristic function and special perfection, and thus de-
grades it to the condition of a slave of the lower faculties. Life
has always been considered as a struggle, and good as the ob-
ject of the struggle. That is why the greatest and most active
people that has ever existed, gave the. same name to life as to
victory.
The great achievements of mankind are nearly always
the work of the few, a work often slighted if not opposed.
Only too frequently the people cry for the flesh pots of Egypt,
abuse Moses and despise his word, ere they have tasted the
water from the rock. Men chosen for the high purpose of
guiding others, have always realized the type of the just man
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described by a great poet: the man whom the very overthrow
of the universe could not swerve from his purpose, and whose
motto is, " Let the world perish, but let justice be done.'* That
pure and disinterested magnanimity Plato dreamed of, has
inspired the prowess of heroes, the triumphs of martyrs and
the work of sages; it made the character of St. Paul, of Hilde-
brand and of Savonarola; of Godfrey, of Sobieski and of
Bolivar; of Christopher Columbus and of Galileo. When it
is heaven's wish to do wonders, it seems to drop a spark of its
infinite power upon men who sacrifice life for an idea,
who even in defeat are sure of victory, and who conquer alike
the fury of the ocean and the incredulity of centuries.
The principle that has inspired the leaders of progress has
been, not utility, but the worship of good; that faith and that
obedience to duty which make religion. It is not interested cal-
culation that inspires the man of genius; for interested cal-
culation would set before him, as the end of his effort, perhaps
enslaving chains, the stake, or something worse; perhaps the
ingratitude and scorn of his fellow-beings.
Man becomes the evil genius of the race when utility is
his prompting motive. Louis XI., by saying that glory lies in
gain, made his memory execrable; Machiavelli, by formulating
the doctrine of political selfishness, became the type of per-
versity; Saint-Just, by shouting that the interests of the peo-
ple are above justice, covered his country with blood; and
Napoleon, impelled by his ambition to glorify himself and his
country, became a torment to the world.
To prove that progress cannot be the result of utilitarian
ethics, it would suffice to point out that that system obtains
ascendency only during periods of social debasement. One
searches in vain for its spontaneous growth in nations not yet
decadent. It springs up nowhere but in societies threatened
with dissolution. For this reason one of our writers has com-
pared it to the parasites that thrive only on decaying trees,
whose death they hasten by sucking the scanty sap. It is even
more repulsive when the draining plant is fastened by
extraneous hands, and not by nature, upon the trunk of a frail
shrub; when men without patriotism, instead of striving after
the true and real good, make their country a field for testing
foreign Utopias.
A doctrine claiming to be an ethical criterion and pro-
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moter of progress must be applicable in all cases, in all circum-
stances and by all persons; a condition that utilitarian ethics
can never fulfill. For utilitarian ethics wrongly assume that-
all men can foresee the consequences, often so uncertain, of
their acts; it ignores the probable defeat of utility by passion;
and, by making the individual both judge and interested party,
dooms him to judge wrongly. This defect of the system ex-
plains why it leads the majority of men into selfishness and vice,
for few are sufficiently prudent to keep within the bounds of a
purely calculated morality. This pernicious effect is a deadly
menace to progress, since it relaxes the moral fibre and kills
aspiration in the heart withered by self-indulgence. This ex-
plains why there are so many barren souls and so many in-
tellects blasted in the bud by Paphus' breath; why great models
and great virtues are becoming rarer and rarer, as if the earth
no longer produced the food that made the blood of heroes
and of martyrs.
Fallacy directed against the ethics that all men admire and
against the faith that upholds that ethics, is always and every-
where harmful, especially in young communities. When
national customs and character tend naturally towards order,
liberty and justice, utilitarianism may coexist for some time
with a well-established civilization. But when such a system
gains ascendency in nations made unruly both by nature and
by habit, not yet accustomed to order nor to the exercise of true
liberty, and with no great preestablished interests, it is a
superadded agent of destruction. Factions and mean interests
shield themselves behind it, with resultant disorder.
History is the surest criterion to determine the influence
of the doctrine that regards good solely as a means and not as
the end of progress. History teaches that such doctrine has
not only proved always inadequate to prevent the decay of
civilization, but is its efficient cause. Asiatic civilization, once
the only civilization and source of all others, has disappeared
under the influence of fatalism and sensualism. Of that cul-
ture nothing remains but fossilized relics, and today the epithet
barbarous may be applied to all the land extending from Thibet
to Sahara, and from the wastes of Siberia to the frontiers of
Persia. A similar fate befell Greek civilization, so rich in
poetry and strength; a civilization which produced inunortal
poems, profound systems, sublime eloquence, heroic bravery
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and radiant grandeur, and which even now shines through the
centuries. When Epicurus became its moral master, it too de-
clined and fell. And that empire which ruled the world and
was sustained by the courage and discipline of its legions, the
eloquence of its orators and the wisdom of its laws; whose life
was at first struggle and glory, and then pleasure and crime,
saw its independence, its liberty and its greatness end in an
ignominious fall.
Rob the tree of its sap, and its leaves will wither and its
starving fruit will fall unseasoned. Let the sap remain, and
the tree, surviving storm and frost, will some time put forth
new verdure and new fruit. So with human communities : they
can rise from their falls and resume their forward journey
when character and virtue are their strength; but intellectual
and artistic culture cannot save them if selfishness, whether pub-
lic or private, has become their prompter and the end of their
aspirations. Virtue is to men and nations a vase wherein are
preserved hope and the germs of the future.
The doctrine of indefinite progress is no less harmful when
applied to politics than wtien applied tq morals. According
to this doctrine the facts of history form a series of states that
must necessarily change, however final they may seem, and
human nature must keep in a state of constant transformation
due to blind forces. As a logical result society, government,
religion and law are contingent conditions arising out of transi-
tory needs and destined to disappear.
Such principles are at the bottom of the social unhap-
piness produced sometimes by despotism and sometimes by
anarchy: by despotism, when authority, no longer guided by
duty and justice, consults only changeable interests, which can
never be the interests of all; by anarchy, when the social state
not being considered natural and indefectible, attacks against
it are justified if they can be covered by that excuse known as
the general good, which usually means the reward of unprin-
cipled audacity. With social order thus undermined, nations
live in constant danger of serious catastrophes : anarchy, work-
ing slowly and secretly, prepares revolution to overthrow insti-
tutions that have endured for centuries; and where revolution
has become an almost normal state, anarchy is its faithful com-
panion, and the gate of progress is closed.
" Law is an evil,*' said a Colombian leader whom one of
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our parties, apparently prompted by faith rather than by con-
viction, has followed with blind submission for more than half
a century. So flagrant an error not only betrays unbounded
audacity, but is an affront to reason. To declare law an evil
is to assert that order, harmony, work, progress are evils, for
these are inconceivable where law is absent. Nature without
laws would become chaos; thought, to attain truth, must re-
spect certain principles. God Himself is the law of Infinite
holiness. There exists so necessary a relation between order
(which is intrinsic good), and law, that language has made the
two words synonymous.
A thunderbolt sometimes occasions, in vast and lonely
forests, a fire that spreads in awful conflagration, turning
hoary trees to ashes, devouring all living creatiu'es, and cover-
ing the expanse of heaven with a lurid veil. So, too, today from
the high realm of ideas, from prevailing false notions regarding
the nature of freedom, falls the bolt that threatens to destroy
all things — tradition, principles, order and even society itself.
" Man is free '1 — so runs the argument — " therefore he
ought to be independent, and therefore all law is irrational.
Man is free; therefore progress must do away with those things
that have been called government, religion, ownership, family."
It is true that many who accept the premises, have not the
hardihood to admit the consequences; but it is equally true
that these consequences derive logically from the premises. It
is vain to attempt to arrest the torrent after the dam has been
torn down, and every philosophy is responsible for the fruit
borne by the seeds it sows.
Nothing is more important to progress than the inter-
pretation of freedom, which is its guide. Cicero left us a defini-
tion of freedom which is full of wisdom : the power to act and
to live as the will wishes, not as appetite desires. In this the
great orator shows a profound knowledge of our nature.
Neither the understanding nor the will nor the other powers
of man are independent. We are so constituted that when
these powers do not follow the promptings of good and truth,
we fall into evil and error. Absolute independence is as im-
possible in man as the absence of gravitation in matter, and
even were it possible, it would be a denial of activity and
therefore of progress. And what in this respect is true of man's
soul, is true of society : both man and the community must serve
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either reason, whose dictates constitute the will, or passion,
which is blind appetite. In the one case they are slaves; in the
other, they are free.
Freewill and liberty should be throughly understood and
earnestly defended from the attacks of modern ethics. Free-
will is the power to either seek or shun perfection; the exercise
of it constitutes that struggle wherein lies merit. Liberty is the
state of living under the laws required by civilization, removed
from all that may hinder our tendency towards perfection.
In proportion as the law of truth and good becomes clear and
definite, liberty and progress grow.
What is the law of progress?
According to a certain theory, at present very much in
vogue, man progresses by k necessary law, ascending from
stage to stage in an indefinite scale. Others regard progress
as a fatalistic repetition of historical events, so that the human
race, moving in a circle from which it cannot escape, passes
' today through the state through which it passed yesterday and
through which it shall pass tomorrow. And, according to
others, progress is a tortuous joiu'ney wherein man, as if con-
fined by two infinite parallels, moves from side to side and
simultaneously forward, constantly gaining in virtue, knowl-
edge and happiness.
Such hypotheses are the creations of favored intellects;
but even the genius of a Leibnitz or a Vico is shattered when it
clashes with truth. To show that these hypotheses are ill
founded, it suflSces to point out that they destroy the freedom
of the wiD. Besides, they are a priori conceptions contradicted
by experience. Experience shows that civilization grows, de-
clines, vanishes and springs up again without obeying any
necessary law. History is far from exhibiting that assumed
regularity which would convert it into a sort of geometry of
human acts.
The peoples occupying the easternmost part of the old
world have been in the same state of culture for thousands of
years, victims of moral paralysis, and motionless as lakes
hemmed in by mountains. The Bedouin of the desert still
pitches his tent upon the ruins of Babylon, Balbek and
Palmyra; and the American savage lives on in careless ignor-
ance of the import of the monuments raised by the Aztecs and
the Incas. In contrast, the works of European civilization, the
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temples of the true God, the schools of science and charity's
hospitals rise today not far from the druidic stones whereon
human beings were laid in sacrifice; and the same seas that
not long since were infested by pirates or traversed by slave-
laden vessels, now bear the fleets that carry light to barbarous
lands and transport the men who go out to shed their blood
for the civilization of their less fortunate f eUow-beings.
The natural freedom that man has to rise, f aU or remain
stationary is greatly modified by external causes capable of
influencing progress in different ways. Man's moral freedom
may contribute very effectively to maintain, lower or raise civil-
ization, but it is impotent to create. This is borne out by the
history of all nations and by present experience, which no-
where shows savages emerging out of barbarism by their own
unaided effort. Civilization is like light: once kindled, it may
grow or dwindle, but it cannot begin without another source of
light. Progress is also like a mysterious stream flowing
through the human race and whose source is placed by all tra-
ditions within paradisiac barriers. It is a remarkable fact that,
just as cosmology cannot explain physical activity without a
first Cause, just as philology refuses to admit the invention of
language; just as philosophy is impotent to account for the
first idea without a certain mysterious light coming from with-
out, so too history rejects that primitive savage state dreamed
of by the advocates of indefinite progress.
Progress is affected by various influences, such as religion,
systems of teaching, legislation, custom, and even physical en-
vironment. The aggregate of these influences constitutes
education, a word having a profound import, for it means to
bring out latent powers into activity.
Although man's progress has not always been a constant
forward motion, during certain periods and among the peo-
ples occupying certain territories, mankind has progressed in
a persistent manner, as if some force outside of nature gave it
impulse and lifted it up after seemingly hopeless falls.
The blow which struck European civilization diu-ing the
northern inroads was such as to have perhaps warranted the
belief that barbarism was destined to rule the world. Yet, con-
trary to all appearances, the effect was quite different; brute
force, trained by the spirit of religion, changed into an element
of moral strength; and the old culture flowed out of enervated
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societies into the veins of young and lusty peoples^ who, in
the course of time, have become the leaders of modern civili-
zation.
Later, there broke out the war between spiritual power
and the power of kings. All signs seem to indicate that the
priesthood which had restrained conquering might was on the
point of losing, by becoming secular, the prestige it had justly
won and which had been fruitful of so much good. Yet, from
that clash sprang, to light the darkness of those ages, a spark of
civil liberty: justice conquered vain pride, and the spirit
asserted itself in opposition to force.
Afterwards came the struggle between Islam and Christen-
dom. It seemed certain that the Caliphs, who were possessed
of the greatest power, learning and industry of those times,
would prevail against peoples who were ignorflnt and clumsy
and lived in the disunited state of feudalism. Yet, Islam was
conquered; from the scattered tribes of the victors arose great
nations, and serfdom yielded to liberty.
It was later believed, when the wave of corruption had
scaled the very mount where Moses prayed, that Christianity,
torn by a profound schism, would perish, and that doubt would
end a civilization founded on faith and tradition. Yet, that
schism purified society, and religious doubt turned to scientific
doubt, opening up new fields to inteUectual activity.
And when philosophism undertook to drown in a sea of
blood the things of the past — ^beliefs, laws and social order —
it seemed to the world as if the end of progress were at hand.
But enraged liberty is calming its anger,* and although it
still threatens new catastrophes, there is reason to hope that,
guided by justice and embodied in representative government,
it will in future be a remedy against both despotism and an-
archy.
What hand checks nations on the brink of the abyss?
What ferment prevents the decay that seems inevitable?
What cause can thus bring caution out of rashness, harmony
out of strife, liberty out of sedition, and order out of revolu-
tion?
Freidrich Schlegel, after investigating in the light of philos-
ophy the causes of modern progress, concludes that the most
potent is the influence of the Christian religion, both because
it lays before man the loftiest ideal of perfection and because
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it affords him the most powerful motives to imitate that ideal.
This doctrine of the German thinker is borne out by the verdict
of experience and impartial judgment.
Christian humanity marches onwards, even if at times
its march is temporarily arrested or even reversed. Here the
mighty stream flows in swift rapids, there it stretches into the
semblance of a quiescent lake; its winding course sometimes
bears east, sometimes west; but it ever goes forward, carrying
at last to the ocean the tribute of its waters.
[concluded.]
I AM THE WAY.
«Y JOHN H. COLLINS, S.J.
I CLIMBED the old, old hill today,
With its winding track and its red-brown sand;
And the March wind blew
As I nearer drew
To the summit topped with the fields I knew
And the old home tumbled and grey.
I watched the long blue shadows hide,
In their spirit-sweepings, the wood's green edge;
And a lone star white
Hailed the creeping night,
And I laughed at sorrow; my heart was light.
For a dear friend walked at my side.
I feel the black storm lashing strong.
With its rods of rain and its thunder deep;
And the leaping gleam
Of the lightning's stream
Shows the Cross-crowned hill of my young life's dream.
And the uproad weary and long.
I hear the wild wind's desolate wail.
And I feel the thorns all the rocky way;
Still I know not fear.
For a Friend is near.
And I follow the path that He opens here.
And a Love that never will fail.
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BOHEMIA FREE.
BY OLDRIGH ZLAMAL.
jFTER many centuries Bohemia is free once more,
and in the royal castle of Prague, instead of the
imperial caretakers, there now resides the first
President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic,
Thomas Garrigue Masaryk. In the building for-
merly used as the meeting place of the Bohemian Diet, sits the
National Assembly of the Czecho-Slovak people, making laws
and working great changes in a country which was compelled
for generations to accept its laws from foreigners, and in Paris
among the seventy statesmen who are engaged in rebuilding the
world there are two representatives of this newly emancipated
people taking their share in the government of the entire
world.
The whole thing is one of the most surprising overturns in
history. Five years ago no citizen of Prague would have dared
to dream of any such miracle as the winning of liberty and
complete, unfettered independence. No more imperial and
royal officials and gendarmes to send to jail national en-
thusiasts who dare to say a word against the rule of the Ger-
man and the Hapsburg. The joy with which the news of libera-
tion was received is best exemplified in the foDowing account
of a celebration in a Slovak village. The local priest began the
celebration by saying: "This is the day which the Lord has
made." And all the people responded : " We will rejoice and
be glad in it. " Then the people shouted : " Glory be to our
liberator Wilson," and with bared heads all sang the national
hymn, Hej Sloudci.
It goes without saying that the tremendous change involved
in the gaining of independence after centuries of oppression
will involve many transformations. Not only was monarchy
abolished and a democratic Republic established in its place,
but all titles of nobility were done away with by one of the first
acts of the National Assembly. Among the social reforms
which have already been carried out should be noted the en-
actment of an eight hour working day, and other changes for
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the benefit of the laboring classes are contemplated, although
in Bohemia, with its fiery patriotism and an unusually large
fund of common sense, there seems no danger of a violent
economic overtiun or even the experimenting with socialist
Utopias. The new order of things in the Czecho-Slovak Re-
public will naturally affect to a great extent the position of the
Catholic Church.
Under the Austrian rule the Catholic Church enjoyed
many favors from the State, and in return for them was used
by the State and the emperor for their own purposes. The
Church was recognized by the State; the parish priest was the
oJBQcial keeper of birth, marriage and death records, and for
this work he received a small subsidy from State funds. It
must, however, be stated that a number of Protestant sects,
even Jews and Mohammedans, received from the State the
same recognition as the Catholic Church. And in return for
these doubtful favors the Austrian government claimed and
exercised important rights of the Church which, from the Amer-
ican point of view, seem indefensible. Thus the emperor prac-
ticaUy appointed all the bishops; the Holy Father could do lit-
tle but confirm the nomination made by the emperor and
forced through the chapter. In practice only noblemen could
become bishops, and as the nobility in Austria was almost en-
tirely German, the archbishoprics and the richly endowed sees
in Czech dioceses were usually occupied by Grerman coimts.
It can easily be imagined what evil effect this had on the loy-
alty of the flock to the Church, when their chief pastor was an
alien, in fact one upon whom they looked as belonging to the
enemy camp. There was also much discontent among the
Czech parish priests who took it very ill that, however faith-
fully they might labor, they could never receive the reward to
which they might be entitled, because the high places were
all reserved for the ruling race. Even the canons* stalls in the
archiepiscopal chapter of Olmutz (Olomouc) were reserved
for younger sons of the Austrian nobility, that is to say Ger-
mans, although the diocese is overwhelming Czech. It may be
mentioned here that the Archbishop of Olmutz was one of the
richest land holders in all Austria, and that the noblemen who
occupied this place seldom used their inunense income for the
benefit of the Chiu-ch or of charity. Thus, in Bohemia before
the War, the peculiar condition existed of the Church out-
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wardly enjoying great respect and power, yet in reality
alienated from the faithful.
AU this will be changed, and some of the changes may at
first appear to work a hardship upon our Church. Before
President Masaryk left America, he was interviewed by a dele-
gation of the National Alliance of Bohemian Catholics as to his
attitude toward the relations of the State and Church in the
new Republic. He was unconditionally for the separation of
the State from the Church, but he assured the Bohemian priests
that his ideal was the relations existing between the secular
authorities and the Church in the United States. He disclaimed
all unfriendliness to the truest interests of the Catholic Church.
A free Church in a free State was his goal. And Masaryk may
be trusted to keep his promise, especially as his influence, in
the old country, was always thrown on the side of religion
against infidelity. It may be, and in fact most ^f the priests
in Czecho-Slovakia will urge it, that the great estates of some of
the episcopal dioceses and a few abbeys will be expropriated;
but there is no danger that the Church will lose any of its
property, for the money obtained by the sale of rich endow-
ments would be employed for the maintenance of the poorly
endowed country parishes. As the pernicious meddling of
the Austrian State in the internal administration of the Church
ceases and the hostility which formerly existed to some extent
has nothmg fresh to feed on, I confidently expect a wonderful
growth in the influence exerted by the Church upon the people
who, before the War, especially in the cities, had become much
estranged from their spiritual Mother.
Every Bohemian and Slovak priest in the United States
watches with great interest and great hopefulness the orderly
development of the Czecho-Slovak Republic.
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SAN JOSE DE ACOMA.
BY MARGARET B. DOWNING.
F the ten thousands of churches in the Christian
world that have been placed under the patronage
of our Divine Saviour's Foster-father, there is one,
San Josd de Acoma, which can claim supreme dis-
tinction. Acoma, City of the Sky, stronghold of
the Quferes, a tribe of Pueblo Indians, is about thirty-five miles
from the small town of Santa Ana in New Mexico, and is one
of the most marvelous human habitations in the world. Miles
from a railroad in a wilderness almost as unbroken as when
Alvarado came upon it during his march from the Rio Grande
northward in 1540, the Rock of Acoma, like an island in a sea
of sand, rises nearly foiu- hundred feet from a mesa which is
itself no inconsiderable mountain, having an altitude of seven
thousand feet. The summit of the rock covers little less than
one hundred acres. Its surface is polished in wide area by the
passing of moccasined feet during the centuries, but every-
where else it is wild and rough in contour like the coast of
Norway. Precipitous cliffs, overhanging on three sides, rise
straight from the plain and thus form for the Quires an im-
pregnable natiu-al fortress against hordes of the cruelest war-
riors in history — their foes on the mesa. Yet almost three cen-
turies ago, a soldier of the Cross, alone and on foot, stormed
the Rock and received its submission in the name of the Cruci-
fied, and his only weapon was the Sign of the Redemption
which he held aloft during his perilous ascent.
A worthy disciple of the little man of Assisi, was this Fray
Juan Ramirez, with an unquenchable desire to emulate his
master's methods in dealing with souls. His story shows that
he accomplished this laudable ambition with almost stupefying
success. It is a most edifying application of the wondrous tale
of the wolf of Gubbio to the spiritual condition which the
Franciscan discerned when he set out to conquer the Rock of
Acoma for Christ. Fray Juan came to the City of the Sky in
1629, and for forty years he swayed its destinies. He trans-
formed the warriors into docile children of the 'Church and
made them industrious, useful and respectable citizens.
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Incontestable proof of what this early adventurer bearing
the Gospel brought the savages of Acoma, may be examined
today in the church and convent of San Josi, standing on the
rock with a dignity and grandeur unsiupassed in this coilntry
and rarely equaled in any. How did this zealous missioner
build this mighty house of God? The soil of the heights is poor
and thin, barely sustaining superficial vegetation and entirely
lacking clay for the adobe, or sun-baked brick, and the timber
needed for a church which is one hundred and fifty feet long,
about one-third as wide and forty feet high. Every pound of
clay, every foot of timber was carried on the backs of men
from the plain below up a steep, circuitous hidden path where
the slightest misstep meant a horrible death on the crags. The
timbers used for the rafters are nearly fifty feet in length and
were cut from the great forests beyond the San Mateo moun-
tains — and dragged through the valley by the Indians, who in
that remote day were without the services of the faithful burro
or the sturdy horse. How they brought them up the four hun-
dred feet to the summit of the rock, no one today can explain.
The modern pilgrim to San Jos6 de Acoma finds it arduous to
steady his own weight unenciunbered by luggage. The ages
have been asking how the stones of the Pyramids were lifted
into place. The labor which built San Josi de Acoma was
equally stupendous, equally patient and fraught with more
appalling danger.
A wise Roman Pontiff invoked the guarding care of the
Foster-father in a special manner over the temporal needs of the
Church. The devout Catholic deems him the saint par excel-
lence to adjust all material difficulties. Thus St. Joseph con-
tinues from heaven the work which he performed so cour-
ageously, yet hiunbly, on earth. But where in all Christen-
dom do we find a nation whose proud profession was rapine
and slaughter, singling out the peaceful and home-loving
spouse of Mary as its tutelary, and rallying its martial forces in
his name? Have not the warlike nations always chosen saints
of more dashing exploits whether real, like those of St. Sebas-
tian, St. George, St. Theodore or imaginary like the attributes
given to St. James and to St. Mark? So great, however, was the
magic which clothed the tongue of Fray Juan that these blood-
stained warriors of the Rock saw in San Josd a true pro-
tector. Gently their spiritual father led their thoughts from
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excursions on the plains to rob and kill, to the building of bet-
ter homes and the laying up of larger stores for the winter;
and then, gradually and tenderly as St. Francis could have
done, to that miracle of love and labor, the chm*ch and con-
vent on the Rock.
When the great church was almost completed. Fray Juan
dedicated it to the glory of God under the protection of St.
Joseph, and then he set out for the City of Mexico to get relics
of the saints and such works of art as the custodian of the Fran-
ciscans would bestow. He went, as he had come, alone, save
for a guide across the valleys to the capital of Sante Fe, and
then with the guide down the established trail due south to
the river. From thence his way was comparatively without dan-
ger. Months later he returned, bringing on a small white horse a
painting on canvas representing St. Joseph carrying the Divine
Child, both in full figure. It was, as every worthy historian
who has studied the subject confirms, the gift of Charles 11., in
token of the appreciation which that monarch felt for Fray
Juan Ramirez and the work he had accomplished among the
savages for God and for Spain. On that return journey. Fray
Juan stopped at the Pueblo of the Lagunas, then without a
spiritual head, for he could no more neglect an opportunity
to preach God to the Indians than would St. Francis in his
stead. The visit was destined to play a large part in the future
of both Pueblos.
In good season, the shepherd retiu*ned to his flock on the
dizzy heights and the painting of the saint was hung behind
the high altar with grand ceremonial. It was considered the
greatest of tribal treasures. When the Fray, worn with years
of service and privation, felt his end approaching, he called his
children and with his parting breath exhorted them to remain
faithful to God and to put their trust in San Jose. They laid
him to rest in their cemetery, the most wonderful one under
the sun today, just as San Jose is the most wonderful church,
considered from many viewpoints. For the soil, as before
stated, was not of sufficient depth to bury the dead, and as the
Fray had taught them dust to dust was the divine conunand,
they built a wall of stone, forty-five feet high inclosing a square
of two hundred feet, of easy approach to the church. Bagful
by bagful they brought up earth from below and filled in that
storm-swept terrace, to be consecrated ground for their people
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during all time. Here Fray Juan Ramirez found sepulchre and
surely, appraised in the spiritual sense, this world contains
none more costly.
Fray Juan came to the Rock in 1629, eight years after the
Pilgrims landed at their rock and five years before the Ark and
the Dove anchored at St. Mary's. He is thus chronologically
entitled to high rank among the permanent shepherds of souls
who brought the truth to the aborigines. But to understand the
stupendous nature of his triumph among the Quferes, we must
read backward among the adventures of the Spanish con-
quistadores and must study anew the beautiful parable of the
wolf of Gubbio.
Fray Marcos Niza, the first adventurer of the Cross to en-
ter the confines of what is now the United States, came in 1539
and heard from his guides of the mighty City of the Sky,
Acoma, called by the natives, Ahucas. But he made no attempt
to reach it, and to Alvarado belongs the honor of having first
set foot on its heights. He was honorably received and remained
for two days the guest of the warriors. They gave him food
and guides to point out the best trails northward. Forty years
later came Espejo with a band of followers, and he, too, was
hospitably welcomed, fed and provided with scouts to see the
explorers safely across the treacherous desert. But these men
were only birds of passage, as the Indians well knew, seeking
richer treasure afar.
But in 1598, Onate crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso del
Norte, with hosts of warriors, with women and priests and
raised the flag of Spain over all the country and claimed it as
his own. This was quite another matter. The Quferes in coun-
cil agreed they had foes enough already in the nomad tribes,
and they plotted, in secret, the destruction of the new enemy,
the Spaniards. Onate passed through pueblo after pueblo, re-
ceiving no opposition of moment, and finally he and a choice
selection of soldiers came to the foot of the Rock. Invited to
scale the heights and confer with the chiefs, he did so, but
clothed in armor and armed to the teeth. He was an expert In-
dian fighter. He and his followers were to be led into one of the
rock houses, on the plea of finding an easier path to descend,
and here they were to be butchered at leisure. But Onate re-
mained above, sternly on guard, the sun streaming on his armor,
and his good Damascus blades so awed the chiefs that he was
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permitted to descend in peace. Fray Juan de Rosas whom the
custodian had assigned to the province of the Queres, was not
permitted by the Captain-General to throw his life away among
those menacing savages. Scarcely a week after Onate's depar-
tiu-e, young Juan de Zaldivar arrived. He had hoped to join
forces with the main expedition. He and his fifty soldiers were
invited to the Rock. Suspecting nothing, they were assaulted
and all but four killed. These preferred leaping over the cliff
to the fearful knives of the savages.
When news of the outrage reached the Captain-General,
he was not only furiously angry but he faced a serious
dilenuna. If he permitted the treachery to go unpunished, his
prestige in his new possessions was gone. Yet he had seen
with his own eyes, that the Rock of Acoma was in the military
sense well-nigh unassailable. In his tiny capital, St. Gabriel
de los Espagnols, the second city founded in the United States —
St. Augustine, in Florida, being the first — the commander faced
many difficulties among the Pueblos whose chiefs had pro-
fessed friendship. So he willingly ceded to Vincente de
Zaldivar, brother of the murdered Juan, the task of punishing
the assassins. Perhaps in some distant age the war of the Rock
will find a Homer. It is an epic grand and sombre : the march
of the commander of Oiiate's little army, a few soldiers
with ridiculous flintlocks, others with swords and lances,
some in battered mail and some protected with jackets of
quilted cotton. The artiUery comprised a single gun roped
on the back of a horse. It was a twelve days* tramp from San
Gabriel to this Gibraltar of the mesa.
In the middle of a brilliant afternoon the soldiers halted near
the Rock. The Quires knew from their runners that the Span-
iards were coming and they awaited them, reenforced by the
Navajos. The notary who makes so brave a figure in all the
records of the conquistadores, stepped from the ranks, blew a
mighty blast from his trumpet, and in a tremendous voice read
the formal summons to siurender in the name of the King of
Spain. The reply was a voDey of stones and a storm of arrows,
and then began the bloodiest and most memorable battle ever
waged on the soil of New Mexico. There were almost three
thousand Indians in the stronghold of Acoma when the battle
began. Three days later when the old men came from the
huts to plead for mercy, all their best warriors gone, there
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remained a bare six hundred, many of them women and chil-
dren. A terrible punishment inflicted by Vincente de Zaldivar
for the treachery which killed his brother. The details are so
gory that they make painful reading. The commander con-
quered the rock in the military sense, but he left behind sullen,
bitter enemies, hating all the world and by all the world hated.
Fray Juan's victory was altogether different.
Now, Fray Juan having read the story of the wolf as he
had read most avidly everything which pertained to his be-
loved founder, St. Francis, began to see the Queres of Acoma
from the standpoint of the hunted beast of Gubbio. Here, he
argued with his superior in Santa Fe, for San Gabriel had been
abandoned, were poor savages to whom not a word of the Gos-
pel had ever beto preached. Fray Juan de Rosas, had not ap-
proached nearer to the perch of the Queres, than he was that
day when Oiiate ascended the heights. Those who were ap-
pointed to the mission later, remembering the terrible deed of
Vincente de Zaldivar, were not courageous enough to face the
revengeful tribe. The Quires, according to Fray Juan, believed
they were defending their rights when they killed Juan de
Zaldivar, for to them, poor souls, the true difference between
right and wrong had never been expounded. It may be sur-
mised that the superior blessed the insistent Juan with a sad
heart when he went forth alone with his crucifix to ascend the
Rock, and that mentally his name was added to the list of
Franciscan martyrs rolling up in the new world.
Spring was breaking on the world when Fray Juan after
his lonely tramp with an Indian guide, first beheld the Rock.
Tradition places the date within two days of the equinox, on
the very day on which the Universal Church rejoices that its
watchful guardian is enthroned in glory, March 19th. Runners
from the mesa had scaled Acoma, and an angry group stood on
the edge armed with stones and arrows as they had been when
Vincente had led his hosts. The Fray might well have drawn
back under the shelter of the overhanging ledge and stealthily
crept away in the night, had not one of those wonders hap-
pened in his behalf, which are so frequently recorded in the
lives of saintly pioneers. A young girl standing near the cliff,
startled by the shouts of her people, lost her balance and
plunged down the awful heights. She fell, hot upon the crags
but, by a blessed dispensation of Providence, upon a mound
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of soft white sand such as the winds of the desert pile up cease-
lessly against the Rock, and rolled unharmed almost to the
feet of the crouching missioner. Very tenderly he soothed
her fright and then led her out in full view of the howling
populace. A mighty shout rent the air but it was not of execra-
tion. The damsel was the daughter of a chief, and the stranger,
surely not of the race of Onate and the Zaldivars, was a good
wizard, who had arrived just in time to raise her from the dead.
A runner was sent down to bid the missioner ascend to the
chiefs. He went up holding his crucifix and chanting the Mag-
nificat, as he duly recorded in the message sent back by the
guide to the anxious governor and his brother Franciscans in
Santa F6.
Reading again the fruitful story of Gubbioin juxtaposition
with the spiritual tactics of Fray Juan on the Rock of Aconia,
it becomes plain that it was an excellent thing for the reputa-
tion of the wolf that he died before St. Francis. The intrepid
pastor of the Queres passed away in the forty-first year of his
mission and was laid to rest in that most wonderful of all
God's acres. Then Fray Luca Maldonaldo came to serve in
his stead. But the advent of Fray Luca had nothing super-
natural about it, and the church and convent being already
finished, he had but little to hold the interest and zeal of his
restless flock. The Queres began to wander again on the mesa
and, being idle and somewhat discontented, the old story re-
peated itself and they fell into mischief. A crafty conspirator
from San Juan aroused their old vengeful feelings against the
Spaniards and against the Fray, whom, he declared, was not a
good wizard as was Fray Juan who had brought them San Jose,
but a spy who would deliver them over to the pale face. So
Fray Luca received the martyr's crown which should by all
tokens have been bestowed on his predecessor. The great
church was burned and destroyed as much as possible in the
time left before the Indians took the warpath.
But St. Joseph with the Blessed Child in his arms hung un-
harmed behind the altar and Fray Juan rested in the church-
yard, two matters which had powerful influence in bringing
about the speedy repentance of the tribe.
They drank deep of blood, it is true, and cast o£f in a
night the pious customs of nearly fifty years. But all was well
with them in the end, as their beloved father had predicted.
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if they held, as they did, their fealty to good San Jos6. The
elders of the tribe counseled peace with the Spaniards, and an
immediate return to their rock and restoration of the church.
When in response to their prayers and promises, another mis-
sioner was sent, they received him as truly repentant children.
It was their only revolt, though they were sorely tempted by
Navajo and Apache and apostates from neighboring prov-
inces. In the second great Pueblo rebellion of 1728, the first
being in 1680, the chiefs of Acoma threatened to throw from
the precipice the runners who brought news of it, if they did
not depart at once with their sedition.
So the Quires clung to their rock as they had, except for
brief intervals for many hundreds of years. Archaeologists in
a broad way suggest that the stone huts which Alvarado de-
scribes in 1540 had probably existed three hundred years
previous and had been inhabited by the same sturdy race. Con-
sidering how little it has changed since the first Spaniard set
foot on those precipices, it may have been six hundred years or
even a thousand, previous to the coming of the Spaniards, that
the Queres took possession of these domiciles formed by
erosion in the dry clear atmosphere of the desert.
In the eighteenth century the Queres, now thoroughly do-
mestic and converted to the holy Faith, grew to be the most
conservative and opulent of the Pueblo tribes. They had been
given a great state paper by Cruzate, Governor of New Mexico,
when the rebellion began in 1680, confirming their ancient
title to the rock and the fertile valley for ten miles beyond.
Their flocks spread on the mesa and their corn and other
grain grew well by the ditches and their tribe increased in
power and nimibers, just as Fray Juan had foretold, if they
remained true to God and remembered San Jose. Their rever-
ence for the picture grew with the years. Did they desire rain,
they fasted and prayed before it and their prayer was heard.
Did the Navajos or Apaches threaten, a fast and season of
prayer brought the menace to nought. The sick were cured
and all tribal disputes adjusted after a serious consultation
with San Jose behind the altar.
The fame of the miracle-picture of Acoma grew in the
pueblos and many were the pilgrimages to the rock. Especially
from the Lagunas whom, as we have seen. Fray Juan had vis-
ited and to whom he had exhibited, for their reverence, the
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treasure which made Acoma so prosperous. Once when ill for-
tune came, the Lagunas requested that the picture be loaned to
them. When at the end of three months, the delegates were
sent by Fray Mariana from Acoma to bring back San Jos^ the
Lagunas insolently turned them away and told them, that if the
Queres wanted the holy picture, they would have to come with
their warriors and take it
Then began a series of sorties — of stratagems on the part
of the Queres, always frustrated by the Lagunas. After a
time the latter began to tliink the treasure was theirs by right,
and it was counted among their tribal riches.
Seventy-five years rolled by, the Lagunas watching; the
Queres waiting. Then Phil Kearney came over the mountains
and a new political order began. An enterprising land agent
endeavored to eject the tribe from its rock and the acres of fer-
tile valley. The chiefs, by the advice of their priest, ap-
pealed to the new government, representing that they had come
under the dominion of the United States as a free people; that
they had existed for many hundred years with their public
officials and permanent form of government and, moreover,
they produced the state paper of Cruzate confirming their
rights to the patrimony. It is good to record that the case
being heard in both upper and lower courts of the territory of
New Mexico the Judge, Kirby Benedict, confirmed their title
to the grant of the Spanish King, and extended to them the
citizenship which they claimed.
This success to which their priest had contributed in so
large a measure, no doubt guided the Quferes to the momentous
decision of appealing to the same kind white father. Judge
Benedict, to obtain the return of the miracle-working picture of
San Jos6. This case which also went through both territorial
courts, and is unique in the legal annals of the United States,
is known as the Pueblo of Acoma vs. the Pueblo of Laguna,
and was filed in the second Judicial District of New Mexico in
1857. Judge Benedict, after hearing the testimony which
was overwhelmingly in favor of Acoma, despite the frantic
efforts of the defendant, gave a verdict for the Rock. The
Lagunas who were exceedingly civilized, indeed, by this time
appealed to the higher court. Meantime a tremendous mass of
evidence was collected by both tribes, depositions from Madrid
and from old Mexico figuring in the array of documents. But
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again Judge Benedict decided for the Rock, and his verdict is
so fair, so broad in every sense, it is worthy of reproduction.
Having closed our view of the merits of this case, we may
be indulged in reflecting, that of the highly interesting
causes we have had to conduct and determine 'during the
present session, this is the second in which this Pueblo has
been the party complainant. One keenly touched the reli-
gious affection of these children of the Rock of Acoma.
They had been deprived by their neighboring Pueblo of
Laguna of the likeness in full painting of their patron and
guardian, San Jos£. However much the philosopher or more
enlightened Christian may smile at the simple faith of these
people in their supposed immediate and entire guardianship
of their pueblo by the saint, to them it was a Pillar of Fire
by night and a Pillar of Cloud by day, the withdrawal of
whose light and shade crushed the hopes of these sons of
Montezuma and left them victims to doubt, to gloom and
to fear. The cherished object of the veneration of their
long lines of ancestors, the court permanently restores, and
by this decree confirms to them and throws around them
the shield of the law's protection of their religious love, piety
and confidence. In the other case, the title that Spain had
given these people, confirming to them the possession and
ownership of their land and the rock on which they have
so long lived, was repudiated by those who claim to come
of a superior race, and means were taken to use extortion
and other unjust measures against this inoffensive peo-
ple. It is gratifying to be the judicial agents through which
an object of their faith and devotion, as well as the vener-
able manuscript through which is established their right to
their soil, are restored to them in safety, and they are con-
firmed in the possession of their territory and picture for
all time.
Both pueblos became bankrupt in paying the lawyers* fees,
but surely St. Joseph has never received a like tribute.
The ancient picture, so faded that one must follow carefully
the many descriptions which were presented at court, to dis-
cern the outlines of the figures, still hangs behind the high
altar, the most revered of all miracle-pictures of which
the Indians have knowledge. The mighty church stands
on the Rock as grandly as when the high towers were added
as a finishing touch, the most marvelous of all the mission
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794 SAN JOSE DE ACOMA [Mar^
churches of the desert. It is one of the few which have with-
stood the storms of time. It served as the model for the New
Mexican Buildings of the Panama expositions at San Francisco
and at San Diego, and more recently it has furnished a splendid
inspiration to the artists and archaeologists who have erected
the New Museum and Auditoriimi of St. Francis at Santa Fe.
Acoma holds its great feast not in March, as it should occur,
but in September when Fray Juan returned bringing the holy
picture. St. Stephen's day it was, the second, and no more
picturesque religious ceremony can be viewed in the new
world. From early morning processions come across the mesa,
some are Acomans who dwell afar and return for the feast,
many are strangers from other pueblos. A chief of the
Rock heads the line on a small white horse. The pilgrims are
welcomed at the base and led to the Rock, the man on the
horse receiving special homage. All enter the church, even the
horse, and he is guided right to the railing of the altar. This
because Fray Juan who went away on foot returned on a small
white horse bearing the miraculous picture. Then a solemn
High Mass is sung, the horse according to eyewitnesses bearing
himself with as much piety and composure as any of the
Quires. Truly the Foster-father cannot see on earth a more
marvelous church or more devoted children than at San Jose
de Acoma.
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ACADIA.
(EECONSTEUCTION OF A LOST CHAPTER OF AMERICAN
HISTORY,^)
BY MARGARET P. HAYNE, M.A.
JONGFELLOWS Evangeline has probably done
more than any history to bring the story of the
unfortunate Acadians before the reading public.
There are few school children who do not know
the famous poem, and most of us can recall the
picture it gives of the Acadian village of Grand Pr6 at sunset,
with its thatched roofed, gabled houses where the bright cos-
tumed women sat spinning the flax; with its happy, care free
children leaving their play to crowd about the parish priest
for his blessing; with its laborers turning cheerfully home from
the field as the Angelus bells tolled softly in the deepening
twilight.
Thus dwelt together in love these simple Acadian farmers —
Dwelt in the fear of God and of man. Alike were they free from
Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics.
Neither locks had they to their doors, nor bars to their windows;
But their dwellings were open as day and the hearts of the owners;
There the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance.
This little world of faith and innocent happiness was not
to be a lasting one. The pro\dnce of Acadia, or Nova Scotia, as
the English called it, was finally, after several struggles be-
tween France and England for its possession, definitely ceded
to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The Acadians,
being French and of a religion contrary to that dominant in
Great Britain, were looked upon with suspicion by their new
masters during the almost continuous trouble between the two
great Powers. Finally, the presence of the Acadians, because
of their French blood and natural French sympathies, was
deemed too dangerous for the welfare of England and the Eng-
lish colonies in the New World, and in 1755 six thousand
^Aeadle: reeonstUation d*un chapitre perdu de VhUtoire d'Amirique. Ry
Edouard Richard, with introduction and appendices by Henri d'Arles. Marlier.
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796 ACADIA [Mar^
Acadians were condemned to be exiled from their homes and
scattered among the various English colonies.
The wholesale deportation of a happy and prosperous peo-
ple, families separated one from another, torn from their
homes and condemned to perpetual banishment, was con-
doned as a military necessity. It makes a dark page in British
colonial history; but the records have always been incomplete
in the case. Before 1869, the chief writers on the subject were
Raynal, Haliburton, and Rameau. Thomas Haliburton's His-
torical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, published in
1829, is the earliest general history of the province, but is
based on very slight knowledge of the sources. He was, how-
ever, very sympathetic to the cause of the Acadians and writes :
"' I can discern a great rascality in this affair; nothing justifies
the deportation of the Acadians according to the documents
that remain." In 1869 the Legislature of Nova Scotia ordered
the publication of a volume of Archives with a man for editor
by the name of Thomas B. Akins. In the assembling and choice
of documents to make up this volume the greatest partiality was
shown, and to many it showed an ill-disguised purpose of re-
uniting everything of a nature to justify the deportation of the
Acadians. Mr. Akins evidently hoped to turn public sentiment
against the unfortunate colonists, hoping, as Edouard Richard
says, " that it (the volume of Archives) would be the arsenal
where one would come to get weapons, knowing well that few
historians would give themselves the trouble to pursue their
investigations further."
Richard feels that because of the prominence given these
one-sided documents, writers since that time have been unfair
in their discussions of the Acadian problem, and have come to
look upon the deportation as one of the stern necessities of
war. As Edward Everett Hale says : " It was a harsh act but it
seemed to be an act necessary for self-preservation. Doubt-
less it is no more to be justified than is the slaying of many
times six thousand in a gi*eat battle but on the whole, not much
more brutal and inhuman." The same writer further re-
marks: "The Acadians were many of them secret enemies,
and as a people they would not give the necessary assurance
of being trustworthy friends." Such is more or less the opinion
of Parkman, and in fact since 1869 it has come to be the one
commonly accepted by English and American writers.
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Acadie — The Reconstruction of a Lost Chapter in Ameri-
can History, recently given to the world by Henri d'Arles, is
not a new work but a revision of an old one. Many years ago
Edouard Richard, lawyer, philosopher and Acadian patriot,
wrote the original manuscript as a tribute to his dearly loved
people, but it was never published, owing to his unexpected
death. During Richard's lifetime, an excellent English version
was made from the unpublished French original by Father
Dnmunond, S. J. This, however, being only a translation, could
not adequately express the spirit of the original. It was not
until 1913 that d' Aries was able to locate the French original,
and after revising, correcting and annotating it, he has given it
to the public, *'thus creating a patriotic and national work dear
to the Acadians and to all who possess a French soul, reproduc-
ing the text of the magnificent and powerful pleading where
the iniquity of the treatment to which our fathers were sub-
jected is presented to us with a startling clearness.*'
M. d' Aries had of necessity to make many corrections, for
Richard was somewhat lacking both in patience and accuracy.
His spirit loved large horizons and he was not used to the min-
ute methods of research which characterize the modem school
of historical investigators. He was too fond of quoting from
memory and his references often lacked clearness. He wrote
at white heat and failed to revise and, as a result, his sentences
were often muddled and his thoughts repeated and confused.
Richard's great claim to be remembered is as the special
pleader of the Acadian cause. His life-long ambition
was to defend the cause of his ancestors judicially and vic-
toriously and to combat, with historical facts, the accusing
documents piled high in the Archives of Nova Scotia by the
prejudiced industry of Mr. Akins. On beginning his study, he
found the papers in the Archives relating to the most impor-
tant part of the history of the Acadians, had been either carried
away or destroyed or simply lost. This fact had already been
observed by an American author, Philip Smith, in his work
Acadia — A Lost Chapter in American History, published in
1884. A happy chance put in Richard's way fragments of
papers which threw light, if not on the secret details of this his-
tory, at least on the main lines and principal parts. Of very
great assistance to him were the papers of Andrew Brown,
Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh, who lived
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798 ACADIA [Mar.,
in Halifax from 1787 to 1795, and collected much material
relating to the history of the province. This was published by
the Nova Scotia Historical Society and the Canada Fran-
gais of Quebec. Mr. Brown's original papers are in the posses-
sion of the British Museum.
In Acadia Edouard Richard has treated that particular
period of Acadian history beginning in 1710, one hundred years
after the founding of Port Royal by the French, and ending in
1755, the year of the deportations. That the reader may have
a better understanding of the subject, he gives a brief sketch
of Acadia under the French dominion. In 1604 the Sieur de
Monts, patron and friend of Champlain, was in charge of the
first colonizing venture of the French in the New World, and
entered the Annapolis Basin in May, with about one hundred
and fifty colonists, consisting of Frenchmen from all ranks in
life. The place where they landed was named Port Royal and
was destined to play in Acadian history a role similar to that
of Quebec in New France. " It was at Port Royal that adven-
turers were to set on foot expeditions against New England,
and it was against Port Royal that the attacks of the English
against the French were to be directed. It was thus a field
suitable both for attack and defence. It did not matter
whether the two nations, England and France, were at peace or
war." Any excuse was sufficient to start the blaze of hostilities.
Later, special hostility existed between the Acadians and the
people of Boston.
In 1613 Port Royal was besieged and taken by the English,
only to be returned to France by the Treaty of St. Germain-en
Laye in 1632. In Cromwell's time the country fell into the
hands of the English and was again restored to France by the
Treaty of Breda in 1667. Then followed peace for a time, dur-
ing which period the country prospered; in 1685 there were
nearly one thousand inhabitants. The colonists were a sim-
ple, sturdy type of people, mostly petty farmers, devoted to
their homes, to the King of France, and with the most intense
loyalty to the faith of their ancestors. They reclaimed the rich
marsh lands along the water, building dikes to shut out the
tides. *' In the winter they were engaged in cutting timber and
wood for fuel and fencing, and in hunting; the women in card-
ing, spinning and weaving wool, flax, and hemp, of which their
country furnished an abundance; these, with furs from bears.
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beavers, foxes, otters, and martens, gave them not only com-
fortable, but in some cases handsome clothing."^ They had
herds of cattle; every man of property was a farmer. Their
gardens were filled with all kinds of pot herbs and vegetables,
and fruit trees brought over from France.
Richard says that it was the custom of France to found
colonies with enthusiasm, only to abandon them to their own
resources a few years afterwards; and this was true of Acadia.
The Home Government felt no interest in them and did not
wish to spend the necessary money to protect them from their
English enemies. One million alone of the thirty millions
squandered on the rock of Louisburg, would have sufficed to
send enough people to Acadia to assure its permanent posses-
sion to France. During the latter part of the seventeenth cen-
tury there was constant warfare and bloody raiding between
the English and Acadians who were utterly unaided by the
French Government. A brief period of quiet came with the
Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, until in 1702 Queen Anne declared
war against France and Spain, and Port Royal was besieged. In
spite of the desperate appeals of Subercase, its governor, to
the French Government, no assistance could be obtained. Two
violent attacks of the British were beaten off in 1707; a special
expedition under Colonel Nicholson landed three years later
and finally starved the harassed garrison of Port Royal into
submission, there being only three hundred defenders against
three thousand four hundred besiegers. Finally, by the Treaty
of Utrecht the whole colony of Acadia was ceded to Great
Britain.
By the terms of the treaty. Article XIV., it was stated that
the Acadians were to have the privilege of leaving the country,
carrying their household goods and possessions within the
period of one year after the signing of the peace. Those of the
inhabitants, however, who wished to remain and become sub-
jects of the King of England were to enjoy the free exercise of
their religion, in so far as the laws of Great Britain permitted
it. A few months later Queen Anne wrote a letter to Governor
Nicholson saying that it was her will that the Acadians who
wished to remain under the British Government should be
guaranteed full possessions of their lands and inheritances,
and that those of them who preferred tp leave the country
*Pabllc Archives Canada, Brown Collection, M-651a, 171.
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800 ACADIA [Mar.,
to settle elsewhere should have permission to sell their prop-
erty and household effects.
These terms on the face seem most reasonable and all that
could be desired; but they were never carried out in fairness.
For a period of seventeen years after the treaty every possible
artifice and trick was employed to prevent the Acadians from
leaving the country as had been agreed, and to force them to
take an absolute oath of allegiance to the British Crown. This
part of Acadian history had never been perfectly presented
until Edouard Richard did so. As a result there has been
a feeling on the part of students of the Acadian deportation
that, after all, the sentence of banishment was deserved, and
that in refusing to take the oath to England, they had displayed
an unreasonable stubbornness which drew upon them a
merited fate. This belief, as has been already said, is largely
due to the one-sided collection of documents compiled in the
Archives of Nova Scotia by Thomas Akins in 1869, which has
become the main source and authority of all* subsequent
writers, such as Hannay, in 1879, and Smith and Park-
man in 1884. Richard establishes by means of documents not
included in the Nova Scotian Archives, that it was the almost
unanimous intention of the Acadians to leave the country after
the Treaty of Utrecht; that they notified the lieutenant-gov-
ernor, etc., of their intention to do so, but that he forbade
them to leave upon the pretext that Governor Nicholson was
absent; that the latter, on being appealed to, by the French
Governor of Louisburg, promised at first to allow the departure
but finally refused, saying that he must first advise with Queen
Anne concerning the matter. This, in spite of her letter grant-
ing the Acadians full permission to leave and dispose of their
goods, which was in his possession.
The Acadians were then more bent on departing than
ever. They asked leave to embark in English vessels, but this
was denied; permission to depart on French transports was
denied them also. They attempted to construct vessels of their
own, but after trying in vain to equip them at Louisburg and
at Boston, finally had to endure the confiscation of these ships.
The papers proving these facts have always been in existence
— the correspondence between Port Royal and Louisburg in
which the French governor interceded on behalf of the
Acadians, meetings, consultations, requests and orders, proving
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the good faith of the colonists and their willingness to live up
to the terms of the treaty and depart in peace from the
country. -»
The zealous Akins has not only omitted these papers in his
collection of documents on the subject, but has also done his
utmost to make it appear that the Acadians made no effort to
depart but lingered on under the name of " French Neutrals/'
hindering and annoying the English and aiding the cause of
France whenever they were able.
Two years went by after the signing of the treaty, and
the Acadians were unable to get away; the new Governor Caul-
field gave the order to the people that they must take the pre-
scribed oath of allegiance to King George; the Acadians of the
region of Minas replied that there was no reason for them to
take the oath as they intended to leave the country at the
earliest possible opportunity. This reply is found in London
in the Colonial Archives of Nova Scotia: in the Akins collec-
tion only the command to take the oath is found, and no men-
tion is made of the answer. In 1717 a new Governor, Doucette,
tried to have them submit to the oath but they were still re-
solved to depart, which resolve the English still stubbornly
resisted. Finally, disheartened by the failure of their efforts,
they consented to take a conditional oath of allegiance to the
sovereign authority on condition that their civil and religious
rights should be safeguarded; that they should never be asked
to take up arms against the French, their brothers, or the In-
dians, their allies. The tribe of Indians known as the Micmacs
had been particular friends and allies of the Acadians since
the dawn of their history.
The fact was. the Acadians were too valuable to the Eng-
lish at that time to be allowed to leave the country. There
were practically no English in Nova Scotia then outside of the
ofiBcers of the administration and the guard of the forts. If the
Acadians left, who was to cultivate the ground and prevent
the country from going to pieces? Their friendship with the
Indians held dangerous enemies in check who would
otherwise have overrun the colony and overwhelmed
the handful of English. Fiurthermore, if they should
go and reside elsewhere, they would naturally go among the
French, their own people, and would prove a dangerous and
valuable reenforcement to the ever-present enemy of Great
VOL. cnn. — 61
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802 ACADIA [Mar.,
Britain. It therefore was the thoroughly determined policy of
the British Government and the governors sent to Nova Scotia
to insist on the oath of allegiance, and to prevent the de-
parture of the inhabitants at all costs. In 1720 another order
was made to the Acadians to take an absolute oath of fealty;
they could depart if they chose, but, if so, they were forbidden
either to sell or to carry away their property. Their reply to
this was that even so they would depart, and at once, if allowed
to. The Archives of Nova Scotia under the chastening hand of
Akins do not contain a single document on the Acadian mat-
ter between 1722 and 1725. Their departure was still forbidden
the Acadians, and in 1725 Governor Armstrong employed force
to oblige them to take the oath; delegates who attempted to plead
with him were thrown in prison. All his efforts to enforce
absolute allegiance were unavailing, and all he could obtain
from the Acadians was their willingness to take the con-
ditional oath with the reserves before mentioned.
The long and short of the matter was that, in 1729, the
Acadians finally subscribed to an oath which they believed to
contain the desired exemptions: that they should never be
forced to take up arms against the French or the Indians. On
examination of the paper it is found to be without the exemp-
tion as the condition of their remaining in the country. Rich-
ard thinks the colonists, who were very unlearned, most of
them being unable to read or write, contented themselves with
verbal assurances on the part of Governor Phillips, and were
hoodwinked into signing an absolute oath with no exemptions;
Haliburton thinks these eagerly wished for exemptions were
written on a piece of paper detachable from the main docu-
ment, which the authorities afterwards removed, because he
feels that the Acadians were not so simple as to be wanting in
the first principles of prudence.
Again, for a period of fifteen years, between 1725 and 1740,
Richard remarks that not a single note on the part of the
Acadians or their priests appears in the Archives of Nova
Scotia, although there is a great volume of complaints against
them, some of which he believes to have been altered. There
is ample evidence that on the outbreak of war between France
and England in 1744, when Acadia was four times invaded and
Annapolis three times besieged, only the faithful and strict
neutrality of the inhabitants saved the day for England. Had
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the simple farmers yielded to resentment at their treatment
and desire for revenge, Nova Scotia would have again become
a French province.
Meanwhile the Acadians' old enemies in New England were
to be heard from. In 1746, Governor Shirley of Massachusetts
submitted a plan to the authorities in London, whereby a de-
termined effort was to be made to convert the Acadians to
Protestantism; Protestant English were to be planted among
them as a wholesome example, and were to be awarded the
lands of the Acadians on which to make their homes. Park-
man, who is decidedly biased against the Acadians and against
their religion, speaks approvingly of these efforts of Shirley,
saying that ''the influences most dangerous to British rule did
not proceed from love of France or sympathy of race, but from
the power of religion over a simple and ignorant people,"
although he admits that the British had only very rarely had
to remove or reprimand a priest for disloyalty. " A priest had
occasionally been warned, suspended or removed." " Shirley
proposed that, as a measure of urgent necessity, all the
priests should be expelled from the province.
Parkman states that the most dangerous ** of these clerical
agitators " was Abbe Le Loutre, missionary to the Acadians'
old friends, the Micmacs, and after 1753 Vicar General of
Acadia. Parkman calls him a most violent zealot, "' detesting
the English and restrained neither by pity nor scruple from
using threats of damnation and the Micmac tomahawk to
frighten the Acadians into doing his bidding." Richard likens
this portrait of Le Loutre to a caricature, drawn in the most
exaggerated style. As to his immense egoism of which
he is accused by Parkman, Richard says that no man
who abandons home, friends and country to pass his life in
wild, unknown forests, among cruel and treacherous bar-
barians, risking all for his Faith and the love of God can be
said to possess " an immense egoism." He feels, however, that
Le Loutre may have been indiscreet and thus irritated the
British authorities against the Acadians; but Dr. J. E. Prince,
in a lecture read at the University Laval, in Quebec, in 1909,
will not concede this. He says that after studying the
documents on the subject, Le Loutre seems anything but a
malicious agitator, and that there is no proof whatever against
• Half Century of Conflict, v. 2, p. 195.
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804 ACADIA [Mar^
him. He further adds : " Would to God that the Acadians had
had more like Le Loutre to govern them. It would be too
long to recount the evil treatment to which the Acadians and
their admirable missionaries were subjected.**
It was now the intention of England to strengthen her-
self in Nova Scotia by establishing settlements of her own peo-
ple. In 1749, Edward Cornwallis came over to be governor,
with a fleet of transports carrying over twenty-five hundred
colonists, men, women, and children. Many officers and dis-
banded soldiers came with the colonists; and the foundations
of a new town, Halifax, were laid, which was to be a military
stronghold, a naval base, and the seat of England*s govern-
ment in Nova Scotia. A concentrated effort was made in
Europe by the British Lords of Trade to induce English, French
and German Protestants to come to settle in Nova Scotia, in
order that the Acadian Catholic population might be neutra-
lized and assimilated. These efforts, however, failed of suc-
cess. Cornwallis had instructions from the British Govern-
ment to proclaim that the Acadians must take the oath of
allegiance within three months. Trade between the French
settlements and Acadia was forbidden. ** No episcopal juris-
diction might be exercised in the province — a mandate in-
tended to shut out the Bishop of Quebec. Every facility was to
be given for the education of Acadian children in Protestant
schools. Those who embraced Protestantism were to be con-
firmed in their lands, free from quitrent for a period of ten
years.** *
Cornwallis met with determined opposition from the
Acadians in his efforts to enforce this high-handed policy. In
vain he threatened confiscation of their goods. They still were
thoroughly determined not to take the absolute oath. Seeing
«that it was useless, he wrote home to England that it was un-
wise to press them further, that he could use the colonists to
advantage until new settlers arrived from Great Britain, and
that when they came he would enforce the oath strictly and
confiscate the property of all who did not subscribe to it. The
Acadians, patient and peaceable as they were, were now thor-
oughly determined to leave the province, and by 1750, eight
hundred Acadians had escaped through the forts and taken
refuge on He St. Jean.
* Canadian Archives Report, 1905 — Api>endlz C, Til., p. 50 — quoted In The Acadian
Exiles by Arthur Doughty.
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The man finally responsible for the deportation of the
Acadians was Lawrence, who came over to be governor in 1753.
The keynote of his policy was that the Acadians must either
subscribe to the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, with-
out any reservations whatsoever, or leave the country. As
matters stood, most of the Acadians had refused to take the
unreserved oath, but the inconsistent part was that the British
Government refused to allow them to depart. War was about
to open again between England and France in the long, drawn
out Seven Years' War which ended with the final expulsion of
France from the New World. Shirley, Governor of Massa-
chusetts, the old enemy of the Acadians, wrote feelingly to
Lawrence on the subject of driving the French out of Nova
Scotia. Fear, jealousy, and above all cupidity combined to
bring the day of the great wandering upon the unfortunate
Acadians; and yet to read the correspondence of Lawrence,
one would imagine that the expulsion of the Acadians from
their homes was one of the most glorious pages of England's
colonial exploits in North America.
It is a question whether the final deportation was carried
out on the authority and knowledge of the Home Government.
Richard says that it was the act of Lawrence and his Council
and that the British Government had nothing to do with it.
Dr. Prince disagrees with him, feeling that where two great
powers were in a death grip for the colonial supremacy of the
New World, with the two cabinets at London and Paris follow-
ing with breathless interest events in this New World, no such
important project as the wholesale expulsion of a people would
be concealed from the central authorities by governors who re-
ceived their instructions directly from the Crown.
The orders for the expulsion were given on the last day of
July, 1755, after a meeting of the Halifax Council. Lawrence
ordered the deportation to be acted on simultaneously in the
different parts of the province, and entrusted the different dis-
tricts to various ofiicers to carry out his instructions. No dis-
tinction was made between those Acadians who had con-
sistly refused to take any oath and those who had complied
completely with all requirements, and had been recognized by
the Council as British subjects. All Acadians were to go, re-
gardless of age, sex or condition in life. One of the oflQcers,
Colonel Monckton, was instructed by Lawrence to use some
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806 ACADIA [Mar.,
stratagem to get the young men and heads of families into his
power and detain them until the arrival of the transports which
were to carry them away. In the meanwhile he was advised
to destroy all the adjacent villages and " use every method to
distress as much as can be those who may be tempted to con-
ceal themselves in the woods." The adult males were then
summoned to Fort Cumberland and informed that the Coun-
cil had declared them rebels on account of their misdeeds;
•* that their lands and chattels were forfeited to the Crown,'*
and that they were prisoners until they could be banished. Ex-
peditions of officers and men were sent over Nova Scotia to
burn all villages they came across, and take all prisoners whom
they met. Everywhere English soldiers, torches in hand, laid
waste the homes of the Acadians while pillage and loot were
the order of the day. The transports finally arrived, and a
fleet left for the South carrying nine hundred and sixty Acadian
exiles to the wilds of South Carolina and Georgia.
Richard accuses Parkman of most unfair partiality in his
account of the deportations; the latter has sought to white-
wash Lawrence by failing to quote the barbarous orders issued
by him to Colonel Monckton. In his letter to Monckton of the
eighth of August, Lawrence further instructs him : " You will
make every possible eflfort to starve out those who attempt to
conceal themselves in the woods." And in truth, coming down
to modern tim^s, does not the letter of Lawrence to Murray,
another officer, remind one strikingly of the commands issued
to Prussian officers on their invasion of Belgium? " If the in-
habitants conduct themselves badly, you will punish them
at your discretion; in the case there should be any attempt to
injure or molest the troops of His Majesty, either by the sav-
ages or by others, you have received my orders to punish those
in the vicinity where the offence has been conmiitted, an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, in a word, a life for a life."
Truly history repeats itself. The letter to Murray was
omitted by Francis Parkman in his history, and he would have
us think that the deportations were carried out with humanity.
The scene which took place at Grand Pr6 has been pictured
to us in Evangeline: Colonel Winslow there smnmoned the
people to appear before him at three o'clock in the afternoon,
no excuse being accepted; and there in the church which was
part of their Uves, where they had experienced the great joys
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and sorrows of their lives, was read to them the proclamation
condemning them to exile and forfeiting their lands and tene-
ments, their cattle and livestock to the Crown. Being held
prisoners, they were not allowed to communicate with their
families until Col. Winslow allowed a few, for which the
others were held responsible, to break the news to them. There
was a great delay in the arrival of transports, but finally they
came and the heartbroken procession of men and women were
divided among the different boats. Some of the vessels had
sailing orders for Maryland, some for Pennsylvania. To com-
plete the work, Winslow destroyed the villages, burning them
to the ground. A nation had gone into exile :
Exile without an end, and without an example in story,
Far asunder on separate coasts the Acadians landed;
Scattered were they like flakes of snow, when the wind from the
northeast
Strikes aslant from the fogs that darken the banks of Newfound-
land.
Friendless, homeless, hopeless, they wandered from city to city.
From the cold lakes of the North to sultry Southern savannas.
The English Lords of Trade complimented Lawrence on
his work, and considered it most excellently managed. The
correspondence between the officers engaged in the work of
deportation, which is quoted in Richard's work, is coarse and
cynical, treating it all as good sport. Colonel Winslow, being
lodged in the presbytery, was congratulated. " It is to be hoped
that you will discharge becomingly the office of a priest,'* writes
one of them. After all, these blackguards must not be taken
seriously. Richard concludes by saying: "Their jocose
references to the Holy Scripture were not meant to be * profes-
sions of piety ' and therefore do not rise even to the dignity of
hypocrisy, which is after all an indirect homage to genuine
virtue."
The expulsion of the Acadians was a great crime com-
mitted against a virtuous people; and in refusing to live up to
her agreement in regard to the treatment of the Acadians made
by her at the Treaty of Utrecht, in deceiving them for years, in
persecuting their Faith, in tricking them with false promises
and finally destroying their homes and driving them into the
lifelong misery of exile, England will always stand guilty at the
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808 CUR DEUS HOMO [Mar.,
Bar of Nations. Edouard Richard has done good work in un-
masking the studied attempts to whitewash the matter by
casting aspersions on the loyalty and good faith of the
Acadians, and by suppressing and omitting important docu-
ments giving their side to the accusations brought against them.
He has shown the unbelievable knavery of Akins in his com-
pilation of the papers in the Archives of Nova Scotia; he has
proven, in spite of Francis Parkman, the cynical cruelty of
Lawrence. It is no wonder, therefore, that an Acadian jour-
nalist said on reading Richard's work: ^*This book is our
resurrection.** " Happy are the people who have no history;"
but Edouard Richard felt that to the descendants of the
Acadian exiles, these sad memories might recall the worth
and excellence of their forefathers, whose patience under suf-
fering, whose unswerving faith and homely virtues have won
them a never-to-be-forgotten place in the history of small and
persecuted nations.
CUR DEUS HOMO.
BY TERENCE KING, S.J.
O Child Divine,
What wish was Thine
Our garb of painful flesh to wear?
Though Lord of all
In Heaven's hall,
No maiden-mother had I there.
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PADRE GILFILLAN.
BY MAY FEEHAN.
GREAT shock of red, red hair; a long body be-
neath covers tightly pulled across the bed in
approved hospital fashion; a face that I could
not see hidden in the hollow of an arm which
terminated in the biggest hand that I have ever
seen. Such was my first glimpse of Padre GilfiUan.
It was Lieutenant Carstairs, in the next bed, who en-
lightened me; "little Carstairs,'* as later we nurses by com-
mon consent affectionately called him. Until my arrival that
morning at the hospital, there had been only four nurses in
the ward; women, most of them, past their first youth and with
a motherly affection for these youngsters which they were un-
able to show. A successful nurse must be sympathetic, yes,
but not too tender hearted.
As I brushed his hair and put on the finishing touches in-
cidental to his morning toilet. Lieutenant Carstairs gave me the
news of the ward.
"You don*t know who he is?'* he asked incredulously,
" don*t know Padre GilfiUan? **
" Oh, I see,** he smiled his forgiveness, " you are the new
nurse. Of course he is not a priest, nor is his name Padre Gil-
fiUan. Littlejohn, or something of that sort, I believe it was,
but we changed it. Fancy a chap of that size with such a name;
it just wouldn't do. I believe I originated it. He reminded
me of a priest of the same name whom we met while on a
walking trip in Ireland the summer before the War began. A
big man, but better looking than this fellow here and decidedly
more genial. We were not of the same religious beliefs — Shef-
field, in the third bed down there, is a Methodist, and I am an
Episcopalian, but that made no difference to any one of us and
we had a fine trip.
" No, Littlejohn did not like the change of name a bit, even
swore some; but we soon stopped that because this priest was a
good friend of ours and we told Littlejohn he*d have to be-
have himself and be an honor to the family name. He*s a queer
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810 PADRE GILFILLAN [Mar.
sort, infernally unfriendly, but he saved our lives, you know,
and we*re no end grateful and proud of him; would like to
show oiu* appreciation, but even I can*t get him to talk.** Which
modest assertion favored less of conceit than would appear, for
little Carstairs was one of those fortunate persons blessed with
that irresistible something called charm.
" The nurses have tried to draw him out,'* my patient en-
larged his story, delighted at having found an interested lis-
tener. " K a man will not tell his troubles, his love affairs and
his whole past history to a nurse, if he can get her to listen,
well — ! " and the eloquent silence which followed made fur-
ther conmient unnecessary.
I looked across at the red, red head, and the long figure.
So this was the man of whose heroism I had heard. Big and
strong and powerful, he had saved the lives of his three com-
rades. When crawling back badly wounded himself, he had
come on the three, desperately hurt and huddled in a water-
filled shell-hole. Left alone he probably would have made our
lines in safety, but the others, unable to stand long, would have
fallen into the water and perished miserably. Between flashes
he managed to carry them, one by one, to a hole some yards
away; gave them first aid, found two dry places where he laid
Lieutenant Sheffield and Sergeant Maude, then held little Car-
stairs, the lightest in weight of the three, out of the water until
help came hours afterwards. And they had been so badly
wounded. Of the four. Lieutenant Sheffield would be the only
one to return to the front; the other two whose wounds ren-
dered them unfit for further war service were to be invalided
home and Padre Gilfillan*s case was doubtful.
"That splendid body of his could overcome all the rest,
but it's the heart," Dr. Roybet told me. " The others were just
wounded, taken care of by this big fellow, but the strain on the
heart, already overtaxed by nature, trying to make up for loss
of blood and vitality has been too much. How he managed to
carry them, badly wounded as he was, I do not know."
Adamant, indeed, was Padre Gilfillan to all attempts to
break down his reserve but being endowed, happily, with a
quality of sympathy that usually won out in time, I made him
my special care. I really liked him and snatched precious min-
utes from my sleep time to make him comfortable; so it was
during one of these times, when the lights were about to be
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dimmed for the night, and the wounded boys, tired out from
the long day, were dropping off to sleep, that Padre Gilfillan
told me his story — at least as much of it as we were ever to
know. Of his position in life and his former connections, we
were never to learn, nor were we to know the reason for such
secrecy, but that there was anything dishonorable in that
secrecy, I refuse to believe.
His mother — well, she never had been married! ** Thought
she was, though, until two years after the wedding," he added
hastily. When Padre Gilfillan was fourteen, she died — a brave
pathetic little soul, one judged from the story. His father he
had never known. " But don't tell the boys," he begged, and
I promised to keep his secret, sensing something of the agony
of mind that this sensitive man had been under all these years.
By sheer force of will he had succeeded in getting an education
of a sort, and through merit and the fact that promotion comes
quickly in these days of war, he had worked up to his present
position in the army. One point in particular in connection
with his story remains with me : his intense love for his mother.
*• It's childish," he told me pathetically, " but, do you know,
I am afraid that my mother may not know me if I do get to
heaven; may not find me in all that crowd up there. I was just
a little shaver when she died, and now I've changed to this big,
hulking son of a gun — **
** Nonsense," I interrupted, adopting a stem tone to hide
the tremor in my voice and my shocked amusement at his
language. " Trust a mother to know her own if he were gray
haired. And don't you realize that heaven is a place of perfect
happiness, how could you or your mother be happy under any
other conditions? "
He squeezed my hand gratefully. " You're awfully good.
I never could talk about these things before," and he smiled
up at me as I helped him turn over on his good side and made
him comfortable for the night. Then I hurried from the ward
for my much needed rest, turning deaf ears to sibilant hists and
whispers of " I say. Miss Warren, please tuck my back in." I
was what is known as easy in the ward.
And so under the relief, perhaps, of having shared his
secret, the infectious gayety of little Carstairs and the devotion
of the other two whose lives he had saved. Padre Gilfillan un-
bent and grew in friendliness, cheerfulness and a certain love-
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812 PADRE GILFILLAN [Mar^
ableness that made the big fellow the favorite of the ward. We
all liked him, doctors, nm^es, everyone stopped to say a few
words in passing and, once touched. Padre Gilflllan's starved
heart responded and loved everyone in return.
The day he was decorated amid the intense excitement of
the ward, proved to be the culmination of his happiness, as well
as too much for his stoicism, for after the Greneral had gone, as
I went up softly with a soothing drink, fearful of the effect on
a weak heart of such departure from routine, it was to find
three boys, little Carstairs nearly out of his bed, and the other
two, now able to be up for a time each day, standing by, dis-
tressed and embarrassed, while in their midst, face down, lay
Padre GilfiUan shaking with sobs. And I, the hardened one of
three years of horrors, inured, I thought, to every form of suf-
fering, to the intense dismay of the three offering clumsy sym-
pathy, joined in the weeping. Fortunately the humor of the
scene soon struck us, and even Padre GilfiUan added his voice
to the laughter that followed.
And so, all went well in our little world; our boys improv-
ing, even Padre GilfiUan, to Dr. Roybefs amazement, grow-
ing stronger each day. " For my sake, go slow, old man,'* lit-
tle Carstairs implored, as, wrapped in robes and blankets.
Padre GilfiUan was aUowed to sit up for a few hours.
** First thing you know. Miss Warren, here, wiU run and teU
Dr. Martin, Dr. Martin wiU run and teU Dr. Roybet, and to-
gether they wiU run and teU the directeur-giniral. You'U be
shipped off to a convalescent hospital with a lot of chaps you
don*t know. We four must hold together just as long as we
can, so crawl back into bed, old top, be a good feUow and wait
for me. Miss Warren does not know her business getting you
up this soon. Why, if it hadn*t been for Dr. Roybet she would
have had me sitting up the second day I came in here."
Which libel was considered quite a joke as it passed down
the ward, for the difficulty Ues in keeping these boys in bed
once they begin to mend.
The desire for home caused many a fight for life that other-
wise would have been a losing game, but when the trip to
BUghty was discussed in happy tones from bed to bed. Padre
GilfiUan lay subdued and silent under the covers. For him,
it was evident, there would be no glorious homecoming. Just
as the others received their packages and their letters, to Padre
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Gilfillan nothing came and he appeared to look for nothing.
This greatly worried little Carstairs, whose bed, on certain
days, resembled Christmas morning, piled high, as it was, with
letters and boxes of all description, so with my connivance and
the aid of his faithful assistants, Sheffield and Maude, a box
was made up, a wonderful box, and when mail time came, three
heads propped up on elbows and three pair of bright eyes ex-
citedly watched its reception from three near-by beds.
At first Padre Gilfillan refused the package, but the name
on the box being con\dncing, he opened. The idea that he was
being made the recipient of charity caused his anger to rise
and I, realizing the temper hidden beneath that placid exterior
and fearful of what he might do or say, hurried to him. I doubt
if he had ever received such a talking to as he did that day, but
my words bore fruit, for as I left him a low " thank you, fel-
lows,** was called across the beds, and mail time afterwards
proved as interesting to Padre Gilfillan as to the others. He
even enjoyed extracts from Carstairs' letters, and great was his
pleasure the day little Cecily Carstairs wrote to him.
She was only ten, but her letters were quaint and amusing,
and were passed around to be read by all in the ward. The
answering of them took much time, for every man sent a mes-
sage, and Padre Gilfillan*s comments on the doings of the ward,
his comical drawings of her numerous friends there and the
importance he attached to the necessity of immediate answer,
surely brought great joy to a little maid in England who was
doing her bit to make the big fellow happy. Lady Carstairs,
too, had written, a loving letter full of gratitude for saving the
life of her boy and inviting Padre Gilfillan to make his home
at Elton House for so long as he should care to remain. But as
I watched him when this was under discussion, I wondered just
what Padre Gilfillan intended to do. Of one thing I was cer-
tain : he would not live at Elton House. Foolishly magnifying
the tragedy of his birth, he had brooded over it until he had
become obsessed, while the three, bless them, were wholly un-
conscious of his origin and liked him for the man he was.
And then came the tragedy that was the cause of so much
misery and of so much unnecessary suffering. Just a Hun
aeroplane, in passing, playfully dropped a bomb on the roof
marked with the big red cross that sheltered our wounded. The
explosion killed several, our good Dr. Roybet among them, and
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814 PADRE GILFILLAN [Mar.,
from the fire which followed, it was with the greatest difficulty
that the patients were carried out, though everyone, doctors,
nurses, stretcher bearers, even convalescent patients, proved
heroes. I was off duty at the time, having gone to the little
ruined village near-by, but when I saw the cloud of smoke in
the sky my heart sank, and as I neared the place and saw the
wrecked buildings I feared the worst.
" Everyone out,** a nurse told me, ** though some are badly
biu*ned. Padre GilfiUan? Yes, he is one of them. Saved lit-
tle Carstairs again. They were hemmed in by the flames, but
he bundled him in a blanket and carried him out. He's badly
off,** she called back to me as she hurried away.
Later, in a hospitalfurther on I found them. Padre Gil-
fiUan engulfed in bandages, bravely trying to smile, though
his eyes with their expression of terrible suffering belied that
smile, and by his side, pitiful in his grief, little Carstairs keep-
ing vigil. It was only by promising to take his place that I man-
aged to put him to bed where, under the influence of a sedative.
Miss Wilson reported him quiet, though sobbing in his sleep.
The doctor held out no hope, "Heart's just about given
out,** he said. "We can*t tell, of course; he may live a few
days, but I think he will sleep off quietly, perhaps very soon."
And the good man seemingly hardened to suffering, went off
violently using his handkerchief.
As I slipped into the chair beside the bed. Padre Gilfillan
put out his hand and held mine tight. He spoke with difficulty,
but as nothing mattered now, I let him talk.
" It*s best this way,** he said, " and I'm glad to go. You
see," he explained, " I've been happy here, never knew what it
was to be happy, never was so happy before; and I'm not their
kind. Oh, I know," he added hastily, as I attempted to remon-
strate, " they would always be the same. Carstairs, here, could
not be any different, and I'd bank on the other two, but it's my-
self. I haven't been brought up as the others have, haven't gone
with the same people and I never could get on with their grand
friends. No, it is better as it is; I'd be uncomfortable
and I'd make Carstairs unhappy because of that. We have
talked it over; not that part of it, but this — I am to be buried
in the Carstairs family lot when it can be arranged, and on the
stone they'll put * Padre Gilfillan,' nothing more. You see," he
explained artlessly, " I like it that way. J. C. Littlejohn would
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mean nothing to any of the fellows but, now, if they pass by
and see a stone with * Padre GilfiUan * engraved on it, they'll
stop and laugh and say, * Well, well, and so old Padre Gilfillan
is buried here! * And Carstairs will bring his boy sometime,
for he'll marry of course, and perhaps the kid will be learning
to spell and he'll pick out the letters and say, * Why, daddy, it's
a priest! ' and I can see Carstairs smile that funny smile of his
as he tells him, * No, son, not a priest; just a big red-headed
son of a gun ! ' And Maude and Sheffield will bring their Ut-
tle girls, perhaps, dressed all in white with blue bows in their
hair. And some of the other chaps will come on Sundays when
people go such places. I am to lay right beside Carstairs; he is
to send for a lawyer tomorrow and arrange it in his will — so
near that I can reach over and say, * Tag, you're iC so Carstairs
puts it."
Then as the Chaplain came into the room, I left him, as
comfortable as possible under the circumstances, with that
brave smile on his face and the medal on his breast gleaming
dully under the dim night light.
And toward early morning when the ward was very quiet
and no one was about. Padre Gilfillan sUpped out to BUghty.
To that great Blighty from whose shore no soldier returns;
where were waiting a compassionate Christ and His loving
Mother, and quite near, we may be sure, that other mother,
who, with that curious something known to mothers, knew
her boy, though he had grown from a httle shaver to a big,
hulking son of a gim!
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Bew Books^
EVOLUTION OF THE DOMINION OF CANADA: ITS GOVERN-
MENT AND ITS POLITICS. By Edward Porritt Yonkers-
on-Hudson, New York: World Book Co. $1.50.
The first half of this volume tells of the struggle for *' re-
sponsible government " in British North America and the estab-
lishment of the Dominion Government. The latter part of the
book is an account of the distribution of power among the differ-
ent branches of government and an explanation of the actual
workings of Dominion and Provincial governments.
The two outstanding events in Canadian political history of
the past century are the rebellion of 1837 and the confederation
of 1867. Like our own revolutionary struggle in its beginnings,
the rebellion of 1837 was not an effort to overthrow British author-
ity but rather an attempt to bring to an end the vicious system of
oligarchic and corrupt government existing in Lower and Upper
Canada. The " dreary period " lasting from 1812 to 1840 " fur-
nished abundant proof that British statesmen had not learned the
lesson of 1776-1783, and were not disposed to learn it until forced
to do so by the rebellions of 1837." "When concessions were
made to the reformers of Upper and Lower Canada they were
grudging and inadequate."
Growing out of the rebellion came the legislative union of
1840. This was an attempt, by throwing the two provinces to-
gether under the control of one legislative body, to prevent the
French-Canadian majority in Quebec from attaining political con-
trol there. Although Lower Canada had at the time a larger popu-
lation than Upper Canada, they were given equal representation in
the legislature. The British minority in Lower Canada voting
with the British of Upper Canada were expected to keep the whole
legislature safely British.
Relatively few persons in British North America in 1867 had
any positive interest in the establishment of the Dominion Gov-
ernment. The consolidation of the Maritime and United Prov-
inces and British Columbia took place because that seemed to be
the best way out of a disagreeable situation. Upper Canada had by
1867 become considerably more populous than Lower Canada, and
was irritated because of the equal representation in the legislature
enjoyed by Lower Canada since the union. A reform in repre-
sentation was demanded. Lower Canada on the other hand felt
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that an injury had been done to her at the time of the union and
she was now disposed to insist on retaining the representation in
the legislature which she possessed.
In the meantime the American peril loomed large. It was
feared that the United States would help itself to the Western
lands of British North America, and so British statesmen were
friendly to the idea of a larger Canadian union which would in-
clude all of British North America.
It is interesting to note that the Canadians would have called
the new government the ''Kingdom of Canada/' but British in-
fluence toned it down to the " Dominion of Canada " in order not
to irritate American susceptibilities unnecessarily.
The author is a British journalist of liberal politics who has
for several years resided in the United States. The story is well
told, and its reading would no doubt furnish inspiration to British
statesmen of today as well as to other lovers of representative in-
stitutions.
ROMAN LAW IN THE MODERN WORLD, By Charles Phineas
Sherman, D.C.L. Boston: The Boston Book Co. Three
volumes. $13.00.
Professor Sherman of Yale has written a most thorough
and scholarly account of the history and development of Roman
law, bringing out clearly its influence upon the laws of modern
nations. It is a work designed to meet the requirements of the
jurist, the publicist, the historian and the theologian — a work
invaluable both to the law student and the law teacher.
Volume I. is an historical introduction to the development of
modern law, beginning with the genesis of Roman law as a local
city law. It describes its evolution into a body of legal principles
fit to regulate the world, sets forth its establishment as a world
law, and concludes with an account of the universal descent or
reception of the civil law into modern law.
Volume II. contains the principles of the civil law, more
especially private law, arranged systematically in the order of a
code, and illustrated by means of its survivals in Anglo-American
law and the modern codes.
Volume III. contains Roman and modern guides to the sub-
jects of the entire work, an exhaustive bibliography of Roman
law, and a good index.
Professor Sherman is a strong advocate of the study of Roman
law, and has no patience with those superficial students who say
it is of no use in the legal profession. He shows clearly that the
Roman law is by no means dead — ^it survives in new, twentieth
VOL* cviii.^-52
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century garments of various patterns such as the Roman-German
law, the Roman-French law, and the Roman-English law. It
ought to be studied, moreover, with a view to the betterment of
our American law, which in so many respects — ^particularly by its
lack of codification — is greatly inferior to other modern legal
systems.
THOMAS JEFFERSON. By David Saville Muzzey, Ph.D. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50 net.
In a modest but well-written preface the author of this work
disclaims any purpose of attempting to add an ''original con-
tribution " to the mass of literature on Thomas Jefferson and his
times. His book does, however, correct some unfounded notions
concerning the third President.
When the first Continental Congress assembled, September
5, 1774, in Philadelphia, Jefferson had completed in his own State
a useful apprenticeship for the tasks awaiting him. Thenceforth,
for five and thirty years, he constantly and ably devoted himself
to the public welfare. This is the part of his career that is best
known, but even before that time he had done worthy deeds and
had meditated things of greater note. It is, therefore, unneces-
sary to treat either his authorship of the Declaration of Independ-
ence, the Magna Charta of democracy, or the reform of the Vir-
ginia Code. It was his desire that with other achievements there be
engraved on his monument the fact that he was the author of the
Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. In relating the his-
tory of those eventful years it has been the custom to criticize
Jefferson as war governor of his State. As the subject is treated
by Dr. Muzzey, however, and his examination of this matter ap-
pears to the reviewer fully to justify the conduct of Jefferson, there
is not much with which even an advocate of a strong government
could find fault. In any estimate of this statesman, the political,
the sectional, and the religious influences have often colored the
conclusions of authors. Until there are other canons of historical
criticism than those which now prevail, we shall not have anything
like a definite picture of Thomas Jefferson.
Professor Muzzey makes it clear that Jefferson did not return
from France infected by the "frenzy of Jacobinism," for the
very good reason that there were at that time no Jacobins in
France. He believes that Jefferson's attitude toward kings was
due to the influence of Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine and the
English Parliamentary leaders of the Puritan ascendency rather
than to a reading of Rousseau. It is hinted that Jefferson's return
to America was hastened by a desire to have his daughters once
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more amongst American companions, ** especially as the elder,
Martha, had expressed the desire to take the veil and spend her
life in a French convent." If more was not accomplished for
American trade during his five years' residence in Paris, the fault
was not Jefferson's, but rather a consequence of the troubled place
and time in which fate had placed him.
The author carefully examines the question of Jefferson's
loyalty to his colleagues in the Cabinet and to his chief. To us
it appears difScult successfully to defend the whole conduct of
Jefferson while a member of Washington's ofiBcial family. As to
his administrative acts after the Republican revolution of 1800,
it appears to be impossible altogether to acquit him of the charge
of insincerity, for the system which he condemned under Wash-
ington and Adams did not appear so hideous when he himself-
had become President. But, perhaps, he thought with Emerson
that consistency is the vice of little minds, and he therefore
hearkened to the admonitions of wisdom. Dr. Muzzey's book in-
cludes an interesting section on Jefferson as an expansionist.
By many readers the struggle for neutrality in the war be-
tween France and England, which became acute during Jefferson's
second term, is the part of his career that is most difficult to
approve. His good fortune, which had been fairly constant, for-
sook him soon after the splendid success of his second election. A
concise and entertaining chapter, ** Jefferson In Retirement," com-
pletes this interesting volume. From a consideration of the Jeffer-
sonian studies which have hitherto appeared, one is forced to the
conclusion that there are some facts yet to be discovered concern-
ing this great American democrat The world is just beginning
to know of Thomas Jefferson something more than his name. In
a library of American history the volume of Dr. Muzzey deserves
a place.
INDUSTRY AND HUMANITY. By W. L. Mackenzie King. Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin Co. $3.00.
** The existing attitude of capital and labor toward each other
is too largely one of mistrust born of fear. If industry is to serve
humanity, this attitude must be changed to one of trust inspired
by faith."
In these, the opening words of the introduction to the volume
before us, Mr. King summarizes both the evil and the remedy, as
he sees them. His object is ** to point the way to a change of atti-
tude in industrial relations, and to suggest means whereby a new
spirit may be made to permeate industry through the application
of principles tried by time and tested by experience." His estimate
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of conditions and his proposals of reform are based upon some
three years investigation of industrial relations, and a comprehen-
sive study of the literature in this field. While he undertook the
vrork at the initiation of the Rockefeller Foundation, he publishes
the book on his own responsibility. Those who have been
suspicious of any industrial study fathered by the Rockefeller
Foundation, as well as those who have looked upon Mr. King as a
cleverly disguised agent of capitalistic autocracy, will be agree-
ably surprised to find that his analysis of industrial conflicts and
unrest, places more blame upon the employers than upon the wage
earners, and that his proposals for reform admit, as true, the
greater part of labor's complaints against present conditions, and
include a fairly thorough programme of social reconstruction.
The book contains twelve chapters which deal principally
with industrial and international unrest; the human aspect of
industry; the parties to industry; the basis of reconstruction; the
underlying principles of peace, work and health; and representa-
tion and government in industry. The author is in favor of the
legal minimum wage; social insurance against sickness, accidents,
unemployment and old age; systems of scientific management and
profit sharing which give adequate benefits to labor, instead of, as
is generally the case at present, being devices for exploiting labor
in the interest of capital; copartnership and cooperation; all the
essential features of genuine trade-unionism; and the represen-
tation of both labor and the public in the management of indus-
try. Space is wanting for a detailed presentation or discussion
of these or any other of the many vital topics treated in the
volume. The interested reader is referred to the book itself, with
the observation that it carries conclusive evidence of the fact that
the men who are best acquainted with our industrial conditions
and tendencies realize that the day of capitalistic autocracy is gone
forever.
CAN GRANDE'S CASTLE. By Amy Lowell. New York : The Mac-
millan Co. $1.50.
In passing through the pages of Miss Lowell's latest book,
the casual reader may be pardoned if he wonders, as Jeffrey did of
Macaulay, where " she picked up that style." But the poet has
anticipated one's marveling, and makes an .explanation in the
preface informing the reader that she has adapted the device of a
French poet to English speech. Knowing this, one reads her work
with less uneasiness as to whether it is prose poetry or poetic
prose, or neither, or both. She herself calls it " polyphonic prose."
There are four poems in the volume, entitled in order. Sea Blue
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and Blood Red, Guns as Keys: and the Great Gate Swings,
Hedge Island, and The Bronze Horses. They are all his-
torical, telling the stories respectively of the achievements of
Lord Nelson, of the modernization of Japan, of the various phases
of English life as seen by the personified hedges, of the vicissitudes
of Nero's bronze horses. Truly there is the stuff of poetry in these
themes, and Miss Lowell handles her material in a rather re-
markable manner. She is a realist, but also a romanticist, as her
work will disclose; she is objective, but also subjective. Without
further seeking to analyze her merits, we may say that she is a
poet, for she can transmute beauty into rhythmic form. There are
critics, no doubt, who will look upon Can Grande's Castle as one
of the three or four best expressions of poetry of the year that has
past. It is, indeed, a striking volume in many ways. But if the
poet has an ambition to win the genuine enthusiasm of all poetry
lovers, she will strive to cultivate more carefully the art of selec-
tion. It will be difficult for any poet to expect Catholic readers to
react with a lively joyance to ill-considered playfulness about
things holy, or to accept innuendo of false sacramental doctrine
as the clever thing, be the satire ever so gentle, or the example of
bad scholarship not more frequent than once. There is, indeed, so
much to be admired in the art of Miss Lowell, that it would be a
pity if devout Catholics could not enjoy her future poetry without
reservation; as it would also be a misfortune if the judicious in-
dividuals of every faith could not read her works without being
asked to contemplate the non videnda of life. It is possible that
the poet will satisfy us all in her future work. We hope so, and
she can if she so wishes. The gift of reticence plus the gift of the
Muses equals genius. It is plain arithmetic, and we feel that Miss
Lowell can do the sum.
SAFE AND UNSAFE DEMOCRACY: A COMMENTARY ON
POLITICAL ADMINISTRATION IN THE AMERICAN COM-
MONWEALTHS. By Henry Ware Jones. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Co. $2.00.
In the words of the author, the object of this book is ''to
set forth the fundamental and detail falsity of the partisan party
system of administration now in use; to show the impossibility
of producing the intended results of American self-government by
the use of that system; and to outline a logical system of politi-
cal administration." In his very earnest effort to attain this mani-
fold object, Mr. Jones has produced thousands upon thousands of
words. The discussion is painfully minute, diffuse, and to a great
extent irrelevant. The remedy proposed for the evils of partisan
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party government is an enormously increased control of admin-
istration by the masses of the electors. It is not convincing.
LIGHT AND MIST. A Book of Lyrics by Katharine Adams. Bos-
ton: The Cornhill Co. $1.00.
Seldom has a volume been more veraciously labeled than this,
for the quiet glow of tempered light and the quiet, obscure en-
velopment of mist alternate throughout Miss Adams' pages. The
light is evident in all such direct impressions as Color, or The
Hunt, in the one arresting fragment of free-verse, London, and
in the reaching out toward peace of A Star Lit Hour. The
mist may be taken to include all that is a little trite, a little pretty,
a little vague in the verses. Refinement of thought and expression
and sincerity of feeling are perhaps the most characteristic notes
of this tasteful little book.
THE SACRED BEETLE AND OTHERS. By J. Henri Fabre.
Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.60.
Genius is a magician. It can fashion dazzling, starry crea-
tions out of the most hopeless materials. Swift could write finely
on a broomstick; Berkeley descanting on the virtues of tar- water,
could hymn the harmonies of the universe; and Fabre excites our
interest, if not our sympathy, in the most repellent and loathsome
insects. The details are at times decidedly unpoetical, but the
unerring taste of the biographer deprives them of offence.
The high literary character of Fabre's writing cannot be too
much insisted on. His aim was to be understood, to avoid tech-
nical terms as far as possible, and to make the world at large in-
terested in the puny creatures, whose life-story he had probed so
thoroughly. In addition to his literary gifts, which won the ad-
miration of Maeterlinck, he was an observer and experimenter be-
yond compare, so that he forced nature to disclose her secrets to
him. One of his biographers says of him: '*He placed the in-
sects under the necessity of performing actions entirely new to
them ... he insinuated himself into their existences, and almost
made himself a creator in his own way."
These gifts appear in profusion in the present volume, which
deals with the Sacred Beetle and its congeners, the broad-necked
Scarab, the Spanish Copris and others. Fabre describes what in-
comparable scavengers nature finds in these creatures; for the
very refuse from which the mammals have drawn apparently all
the nutriment, is a feast of Apicius to them. He explains also the
minute and wonderful precautions taken by the beetles for the
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laying of their eggs, and for the proper feeding of the larvae; he
shows how the larvae are able to protect themselves against acci-
dents and enemies. Instinct is a perfect artist» a faultless archi-
tect, an admirable altruist within its own narrow limits; but
change the conditions or vary the problem in the slightest way,
and the faculty becomes absolutely powerless. This was one of
the reasons why the eminent entomologist could never accept the
theories of the evolutionist school. The present translation is, in
its own line, a work of art. Were it not for the occasional lines of
French poetry quoted, one would think the book was an original
composition.
THE DESTINIES OF THE STARS. By Svante Arrhenius, Ph.D.
Translated by J. E. Fries. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
$1.50 net
Under the title. The Destinies of the Stars, the distinguished
Swedish scientist, Dr. Svante Arrhenius, the President of the
Nobel Institute and himself the recipient of the Nobel Prize in
chemistry some fifteen years ago, has discussed in the light of
very recent knowledge some of the problems of the universe as
the physical scientist may now look at them. As his translator
suggests, it was almost to be expected that a genius of his calibre
would not limit his interests to the infinitely small, that is chemi-
cal atoms, but would gradually broaden it to compass the infinitely
large astronomical details.
Two subjects in the book are of particular interest for the
general reader. One is treated in the chapter called *' The Mys-
tery of the Milky Way," the other in that on " The Planet Mars."
Arrhenius' conclusion is that the canals on Mars correspond
to the geological dislocation fissures on the earth. He quotes An-
toniadi that ** the complicated network of straight lines is prob-
ably illusory." The belief that the markings on the planet are the
product of intelligent beings is founded largely on the geometrical
form of these indications, but further investigation has shown
that they are very irregular in form and the appearance of the
planet reminds one of that of the moon. The geometry is a pure
illusion. The theory that intelligent beings exist on Mars is very
popular, he concludes, and it will explain nearly everything but it
explains entirely too much, ** and therefore, in fact, nothing."
It is always interesting to let scientists work out their own
knowledge until they have solved the often supposedly insuper-
able difficulties which in previous stages of their knowledge, they
were supposed to have raised in the path of religion and conserva-
tive philosophy.
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THE WAR IN THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD. By Eleanor
Franklin Egan. New York: Harper & Brothers. $2.00.
Mesopotamia will always remain in the annals of British
history as a record of both bitter defeat and unsurpassed valiance,
with the latter preponderating. The capitulation of General Town-
shend at Kut was more than recompensed by the fall of Bagdad
under General Maude. And General Maude's death, in turn, due
doubtless to treachery, was balanced by the constructive work of
the British in the territory. That is the general impression one
gets after finishing Mrs. Egan's volume. The war in the cradle
of the world was fought at tremendous cost, but the cradle of the
world is richer for it, and English valor was once more justified
in its endeavors.
It seems strange that a woman should give us this
splendid survey of the British in Mesopotamia, yet there are few
genuine reporters so well equipped as she. Experience on the
western front schooled her for these observations and her experi-
ences were unique. She had the unfortunate experience of know-
ing more than anyone else the cause of General Maude's death.
For some days his guest at headquarters, she accompanied him
one night to a native celebration. They were the only foreigners
present and they were given seats of honor. Two cups of cofifee
were brought them, with a pitcher of milk. Mrs. Egan drank her
coffee black, and General Maude poured in some of the milk. Mrs.
Egan experienced no ill effects, but within two days General Maude
was mortally ill with cholera. While she makes no claim that the
poison was administered in the milk, the British authorities have
no other evidences of the cause of his death. A sad and unique
experience — and vividly told.
Out of the welter of war books this stands as among the most
unusual and the best writen. Mrs. Egan is gifted with a seeing eye
and a facile pen. She also has a sense of humor, which makes the
vohime pleasantly readable.
COLETTE BAUDOCHE. By Maurice Barris. Translated by
Frances Wilson Huard. New York: George H. Doran Co. $1.50.
" I am offering you here the work which I believe has best
combined the pictures which I see when I close my eyes, and those
I have taken from nature." These words of dedication to Frederic
Masson give the gist of Maurice Barr&s' novel, in which, under the
guise of fiction, the author has v^itten an account of the an-
tagonism between French and German civilization in Alsace-Lor-
raine. The narrative element is of the slightest. In the manage
of Madame Baudoche and her daughter Colette at Metz, Mr.
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Frederic Asmus, a young German professor, comes as boarder.
The process of introducing Mr. Asmus to the sentiments and
traditions of Alsace-Lorraine affords Maurice Barris, who acts as
impresario, scope for indulging in vivid memory-pictures of the
environs of Metz and Nancy amid which his youth was spent. The
partisanship of the author is responsible for an artistic flaw in
the book. The reader, while admiring the mastery with which
French finesse and artistry are set over against German uncouth-
ness, feels that, for the purpose of the story, intemperate use
has been made of this foil, and his sympathies are some-
what alienated from Colette because of her unceremonious flout-
ing of Mr. Asmus* sincere devotion.
It is fitting that the English translation of this ardent novel
should come from the pen of Madame Huard who has rendered
such signal service to France.
JEFFERSON DAVIS. By Armistead C. Gordon. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50 net.
This work is the second volume of the proposed series entitled
"Figures from American History." Mr. Gordon writes enter-
tainingly and may be suspected of being profoundly interested in
the fortunes of the particular " figure " which he was requested to
sketch. Even if no such calamity as the Civil War had inter-
rupted the progress of the United States, Mr. Davis would have
been a statesman worth knowing. The virtues which, in an era
of comparative tranquillity, had aroused interest and respect and
admiration were destined, however, to be tried on other theatres
and to be examined under other lights.
Racial gifts of rhetoric and poetry do not explain Jefferson
Davis. He had been acted upon by varied educative forces. Two
years spent as a student of the Dominican school of St. Thomas,
in Kentucky, were followed by a brief connection with Jefferson
College, Mississippi. He also profited at an academy in Wilkin-
son County by the instruction of Mr. John A. Shaw, a scholarly
Bostonian. Later he studied at Transylvania University, and com-
pleted his education at the United States Military Academy, from
which, in 1828, he was graduated with credit. But what really
made him ready and formidable in debate was the wide reading
that followed his resignation from the army. There can be no
doubt that he was intellectually superior to most of his colleagues
in Congress.
Dreaming on the principles expressed in the Virginia and
Kentucky Resolutions, Calhoun had promoted Nullification.
Though Davis never approved that remedy for Southern ills, he
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would have torn up the commission which, together with his
affections, connected him with the United States army rather than
serve in any attempt to enforce in South Carolina the offensive
tariff legislation of the time. In secession alone he perceived the
true policy of the South.
An examination of the Secession movement, though both in-
teresting and important, cannot be undertaken in the restricted
space of a review. The conflict grew out of the difference between
the unwritten constitution of the American people and the writ-
ten instrument. If the latter seemed to favor the supremacy of
the several States, and much may be said in support of this view,
the former tended rather to conform to the teachings of political
science, which regards a divided sovereignty as an absurdity.
However, it does not appear that this branch of knowledge was
generally cultivated in the United States before 1860. Pursued
to its logical conclusion the secession proposed by Southern
leaders would ultimately have led to anarchy. The author does
not discuss the later secessions from the seceding States. The
centrifugal force in politics was never better illustrated than in
the war for Southern independence.
THE SILENT LEGION. By J. E. Buckrose. New York: George
H. Doran Co. $1.50.
Mrs. Buckrose once more sketches life in the English village
of Flodmouth, now subdued and saddened by the War. Without
any of the hysterical race-hatred or the sentimentalism that marks
many of the war-novels, she shows very faithfully the effect of the
great tragedy on the majority at home — "the silent legion."
Despite the burden of their sorrows, the villagers go about their
duties as they did in normal times. The readjustment of Mr.
Simpson to the daily round after the death of his brother and his
only son, and the love-affair of his daughter Barbara and a friend-
less wounded soldier are the incidents that concrete the general
sentiment of the village in war-time. Notwithstanding the reality
of a few of the other characters, e. g., the intuitive Elsie and Miss
Felling the spinster, the novel is rather disappointing. The action
and delineation are entirely too slight. Furthermore the book
leaves the impression of hurried execution. In her haste Mrs.
Buckrose has neglected possibilities of fine characterization, at-
mosphere and tone-quality such as one expects in a novel of Eng-
lish rural life. It is a pity Mrs. Buckrose did not write with
more deliberation and intimacy, for in spite of her failure to
pause and retouch, the book has an elusive suggestion of Mrs.
Gaskell.
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THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. By Booth Tarkington. Gar-
den City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.40.
As an aid to the interpretation of Middle Western American
life Mr. Tarkington's books are invaluable, and for this purpose
The Magnificent Ambersons is of palmary importance. Not, of
course, that Mr. Tarkington's work is to provide the investigators
of a hundred years hence with what are called social documents.
His proper business is to set down, in terms of art, human life as he
sees it, with its passionate complications, its joys and sorrows, its
large simplicities. Not infrequently the result is extremely dis-
tinguished. It is so here.
The trouble with the magnificent Ambersons is their mag-
nificence. The Major is magnificent. In their varying degrees the
other Ambersons were magnificent. But most magnificent of all,
and most insufferable of all, was George Amberson Minafer, the
Major's one grandchild and a princely terror. Nothing could be
finer than the art with which the amazing George is presented.
Mr. Tarkington knows George from his heart out, and builds up
superbly his picture of the youngster's development from the day
he invited the Rev. Malloch Smith to go to hell, down to the
dark hour when, lying in the hospital, broken in body and spirit
and knowing at last how cruelly he had lacerated his mother's
heart and taken all joy out of her life, he asked George Morgan to
forgive him. This is Mr. Tarkington's finest achievement so
far.
FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE. By Philip Gibbs.
New York : George H. Doran Co. $2.50 net.
Everybody who has read the daily print knows Philip Gibbs
and the value of the service he has rendered during the fulsome
years of the War in picturing for the world the swift moving events
and scenes of the great conflict. One had only to read a few lines
to feel the master touch, to know that here was a witness who did
more than see the bare outlines of events in the theatre of war.
There was a wealth of detail, a striking touch, a intimate charac-
terization that made the picture real and complete and removed it
from the pedestrianism of the newspaper article. Under the magic
of his pen, there was revived in the dispatches the terrific clangor
and bloodshed of battle, the utmost desolation of the devastated
places, the whimsical bravery and utter abandon of heroic troops
and the indescribable suffering of outraged peoples — ^things that
make history, yet which few historians have been able to catch
up and make permanent for future generations.
All this Gibbs has done in his articles from the battle front.
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These dispatches covering the year 1917, the blackest year in the
whole struggle, the author has collected in the present volume.
They form an historical document of the greatest importance, be-
cause they embody the impression of a trained eyewitness who
saw things as they were. Besides its value as a history, the book
is of equal merit for its power to reconstruct the breath and life
of the hour and minute of battle.
THE SOUL OF SUSAN YELLAM. By Horace Annesley VachelL
New York: George H. Doran Co. $1.50.
Susan Yellam is not precisely Mr. Vachell's peak performance
but it is nevertheless a charming story. It is his war-novel, and
he dedicates it to the memory of his boy, Richard, who was cap-
tain in the Fifth Fusiliers. Mr. Vachell knows intimately his Eng-
lish countrymen and countrywomen and the fields and lanes of
England. His skill in evoking their charm is not slight.
A Catholic reviewer, however, while recognizing and acknowl-
edging such artistic quality as this book possesses, must enter
protest against the statement Mr. Vachell makes on page 191:
" Political consideration " — he says — " and expediencies kept the
Vatican silent when a voice, thundering as from Sinai, might have
awakened millions to a realization of the issues at stake.** Mr.
Vachell ought to know that the most learned and impartial non-
Catholic students of contemporary history dissent vehemently
from this point of view, and that many millions of people would
resent his statement as a calumny against the Head of their
Church.
JAPANESE PRINTS. By John Gould Fletcher. Illustrations by
Dorothy Pulis Lathrop. Boston: The Four Seas Co. $1.75.
This daintily presented volume is composed of extremely
slight lyrics purporting to illustrate the Japanese hokku (or short,
symbolic ode) as practiced by the mystical Basho. Apparently, the
idea is to produce a vivid picture of some particular impression or
mood — then to leave the ** universal application *' to the fancy of
the reader. To this trusting method we have been more or less
accustomed by professed " Imagists '* for several years : nor has
the sum of poetic knowledge been notably increased by it Be-
cause, of course, it is precisely in insuring the true application —
the authentically beautiful " criticism of life " — ^that the eternal
worth of the poet lies.
Mr. Fletcher's pastel-like " prints " are often very charming.
Some of them seem worthy of a human and spiritual development :
others, frankly, to the uninitiated do not! At any rate the burden
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of proof rests obviously upon the " printer " himself. When the
poet devotes an entire page to a three-line fragment of wholly de-
tached impression, he is taking the same chance as the preacher
who considers his work done after announcing the text of his ser-
mon. If the humble " masses '* do not carry away the desired and
transcendental interpretation — if, by reason of a faulty or per-
verse imagination they conjure up something quite different, or
nothing at all — so much the worse for them.
BEATRICE ASHLEIGH. By F. E. MiUs Young. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $1.50 net.
This well-written story describes the life of an Anglican par-
sonage of our day, and its influence upon the agnostic heroine
who enters it on the death of her father. She is just beginning to
like her new and strange surroundings, when she is driven forth
to make her own living by the proposal of her cousin, the country
curate. The man she really loves is an English army ofiScer, whose
immoral conduct in India has deterred her from accepting him.
The impasse is solved by the World War. Her hero goes to the
front, and, as happens in many a French war tale, his immorality
is washed clean by his bravery under fire. He had faced death
gladly because he had given up all hope of future happiness. In
the end the marriage bells ring out, and the past is forgiven and
forgotten.
THE BUSINESS OF THE HOUSEHOLD. By C. W. Taber. PhUa-
delphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.
The primary aim of this book is to place in the hands of the
upper high school and college student a comprehensive idea of
home economics. It is a scientific treatise on those mysteries of
home life, so essential yet seldom mastered. It is a book that can-
not be read. It must be studied. Its basic principle is that house-
hold management is a profession and should be run along scientific
lines. It explains the budget system for the home, lays down a
number of very sensible rules concerning the family income, the
bank account, and family financing. It contains some valuable
information concerning the fuel problem, taxes, fire insurance,
weights and measures and clothing. A splendid chapter gives
rudimentary yet comprehensive ideas of the legal and business
status of the family, explaining mortgages, wills, and the trans-
fer of property.
The book is a truly valuable one, because it is based on sound
common sense and a sensible practicability. It teaches many les-
sons that are learned otherwise only by experience — and experi-
ence has always proved a costly teacher.
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RICHARD STRAUSS: THE MAN AND HIS WORKS. By Henry T.
Finck. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
Naturally, there is more concerning Strauss' music than
his individuality in this volume. The items of a personal nature
are meagre and not, in themselves, especially interesting. The
critical study of the musician's achievements ds, however, exhaus-
tive, including an analysis of Lizt's works and their influence upon
the younger composer of " symphonic poems " and " programme
music." The author gives some space to the question of Strauss'
standing, whether it is that of a genius or a charlatan; a futile
query, not to be decided by writings or debates. The tone through-
out is informal and conversational, with detailed accounts and
anecdotes of the productions of Strauss' operas. The book gains
little of interest or importance from the rather hysterical " Appre-
ciation," by Percy Grainger, which precedes the main content.
ONE OF THEM. By Elizabeth Hasanovitz. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co. $2.00.
The subtitle of this book is " A Passionate Autobiography."
It is well chosen. In fact, the word ** hysterical " might have been
substituted for " passionate " without serious danger of exaggera-
tion. The volume describes in the first person the experiences of
a Jewish emigrant girl in the garment-making shops of New York.
It is a pathetic story, as are all narratives of the struggles of un-
derpaid and exploited women wage earners, but it would have been
much more effective had the author written more calmly, and
especially if she had compelled herself to avoid the strident note
of self-pity that she sounds so persistently and tiresomely. Never-
theless, she has considerable literary ability.
ESSAYS IN SCIENTIFIC SYNTHESIS. By Eugenio Rignano.
Translated by J. W. Greenstreet, M.A. Chicago: The Open
Court Publishing Co.
Dalton, to whom we owe the atomic theory, was color-blind
but discovered the fact which no one had ever done before him.
He was a Quaker and found that many Quakers were color-blind,
which is interesting, since it is a tenet of the sect that members
must not wear colors. Manifestly, they do not appreciate colors as
others do. A good Quaker elder, having bought a bright red
waistcoat, thinking it was gray, wore it to church and forthwith
was condemned as a heretic. One who wants to teach others, above
all, if he differs from the great majority of mankind, should bear
these facts in mind. He is probably lacking in some power of
perception. For this lack of perception, however, he may be re-
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sponsible by having made up his mind to think certain things and
by refusing, consciously or unconsciously, to look at the other
side.
The author of the Essays in Scientific Synthesis has a number
of what a writer in the Atlantic Monthly recently called "scien-
tific prepossessions.'' He is color-blind to anything beyond the
material.
For him, what he calls ** The Religious Phenomenon " is the
result of the chief or ruler of a tribe or people recognizing " the
necessity for keeping his vanquished and subjugated fellows in a
state of healthy terror." He thus exi)lains the origin of religion :
" And in this there is not always a question of pure astuteness, for
as he himself believed in the animism of nature around him, he
could not do less than attribute his own success to the propitious
aid of this cosmic force or that, his ally and protector, and there-
fore he must believe in his intervention and must have recourse
to it at every serious conjuncture of life."
It is easy to understand how far-reaching would be the con-
clusions that such a writer would draw with regard to Socialism,
and of course he draws them in the last of his essays. He quotes
Herbert Spencer as if he were*as much of an authority today as he
was twenty-five years ago. He quotes Haeckel as if his thorough
discrediting befof e the War had not been emphasized by the War
itself, which was the culmination of that doctrine of struggle for
life and the survival of the fittest which, to German university
men, justified their entrance into the War.
BEHIND THE SCENES IN THE REICHSTAG. By AbU Wetterle.
New York: George H. Doran Co. $2.00 net.
The story of Alsace-Lorraine is always an interesting one, but
it becomes particularly so when told by one who has given all
his talents and energies to keep alive the great protest of the lost
provinces, who suffered imprisonment for publishing the truth,
who carried the fight right into the German Reichstag, and who
did more, perhaps, than any one else to combat German rule in
subjugated France. It is a stirring, absorbing story that the Abb6
tells. He was the publisher of a journal devoted to the cause of
Alsace and dedicated to the struggle against the German control
of his country. In 1898 the author was elected to represent
Ribeauville in the Reichstag, not as a German representative, but
as an Alsatian, who accepted his seat solely in protest and not
renunciation.
For sixteen years he was in intimate contact with the leaders
of political Germany and therefore immune from the baneful in-
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fluence of German Kultur. Because he was with them, but not
of them, he had unparalleled opportunities to study the men re-
sponsible for the nation's policies. Their pictures he presents to
us in this volume etched in by the critical hand of an onlooker
rather than a friend, a judge rather than a sympathizer. This is
especially so when he attacks the leaders of the Catholic Centre
who, holding the balance of power in 1898, sold their place of
power to become supple agents of the Imperialists.
After reading Abbi Wetterle's book contemporary history
takes on a new aspect. He has supplied bodies and characters to
what have been mere names to many. Future generations will
find in it vivid portrayals of those men whose names will stand
out in history, not for the good but for the evil they per-
formed.
SOLDIER SILHOUETTES ON OUR FRONT. By William L. SUd-
ger. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25 net.
There is something fine and noble in this volume of impres-
sion by a Y. M. C. A. worker. It has a basic spirituality — a deep
insight that makes it strong in its interest and appeal. The rea-
son for this is to be found in the author's sympathetic understand-
ing of the American boy and true interpretation of the momen-
tous events at the battlefront. He was able to look beyond the
exterior into the souls of the men fighting in France and see what
was mirrored there. He took the happenings he witnessed not in
their material values and measurements but in their deeper and
truer significance.
Soldier Silhouettes are a worthy tribute to the spirit that ani-
mated our troops abroad. It is also a splendid memorial of the
unselfish work done by those who labored behind the lines.
WHAT IS THE GERMAN NATION DYING FOR? By Karl Lud-
wig Krause. New York: Boni & Liveright. $1.50 net
This is a severe condemnation of Germany by a German, who
after beginning his denunciation of those responsible for Ger-
many's policies was forced to continue his writings in Switzerland.
The book is strong in its protest at what the Prussian warlords
had done in their wanton execution of Pan-Germanistic ambitions.
However, it is so unbridled and unrestrained in its denunciation
as to lose much in force and power.
Many of the chapters might have been of interest before the
signing of the armistice but are now antiquated. The book is
poorly written and of no value, except perhaps to add a German's
evidence against Germany.
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THE LIFE OF ST, FRANCIS XAVIER: EVANGELIST, EX-
PLORER, MYSTIC. By Edith Anne Stewart. New York: E.
P. Dutton 4 Co.
The author of this new life of St. Francis Xavier is a latter-
day Protestant. Her misconceptions of history, religion, the
Church and of almost every phase of her subject are quite beyond
classification. The point of view, from which the book is written
is very ingenuously revealed in the chapter on the Spir-
itual Exercises. ** On the whole," she says, *' it is difficult to ap-
proach these pages (of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius)
without prejudice and to read them without searching for
'Jesuits' between the lines. And the book has that quality of
genius, it gives us that for which we seek.'' Instead of attempting
to get at the real objective meaning of events or penetrating to
the genuine significance of the activities, aims and thoughts of
St. Francis Xavier, her whole eflfort has been to read her own Prot-
estant prejudices into everything connected with him. In the
preface we are informed that '* Xavier, as a Protestant, would not
have been very different from the Xavier of the Company of the
name of Jesus." The fairly consistent result of such a contention
is that we are presented with an impossibility, instead of the true
Apostle of the Indies. There never was or could be such a saint
as the one described in these pages. The motives imputed, quite
gratuitously or in a spirit of modern misinterpretation, are glar-
ingly inadequate to account for the heroism of the deeds they are
supposed to have actuated. In some instances, the Saint is not
even allowed the privilege of having known his own mind, and this
for no other reason, presumably, than that his account of himself
cannot be made to tally with any data to be found in William
James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Were the author in
future to place less trust in German and Protestant would-be
authorities, and strive to gain some conception of the true Catholic
doctrine on obedience and conformity to the will of God, her next
venture into the difficult field of hagiology might possibly prove a
success.
CHRISTIANITY AND IMMORTALITY. By Vernon F. Storrs, M.A.
New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50.
This treatise is vitiated by the modernistic assumption that
doctrinal development requires revision and reinterpretation to
meet the advancing thought of the age — and of course that implies
in our author's mind denials of the most fundamental truths of
Christian philosophy and theology. With the cbcksureness of an
ultra-dogmatism, the examining Chaplain to the Archbishop of
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Canterbury tells us the future life cannot be demonstrated; that
eternal punishment is incompatible with the love of God; that our
Saviour was mistaken in predicting the Parousia in the first Chris-
tian generation; that His clear prophecy of a General Judgment
must be rejected no matter how reluctant we may be; that uni-
versalism may be held as a hope, even if it cannot be enunciated
as a dogma; that we cannot think of God as beginning to create
at a definite point of time, for creation is an eternal act
LIFE OF PIUS X, By F. A. Forbes. New York: P. J. Kenedy &
Sons. $1.25.
Giuseppe Melchior Sarto, son of the postmaster of Riese, a
little village in the Venetian plains, was born on June 2, 1835. The
boy studied at Castelfranco, traveling to school every day with
his shoes slung over his shoulder, and a piece of bread or a lump
of polenta in his pocket. His family was too poor to educate him
for the priesthood, but his pastor managed to obtain a free scholar-
ship for him, at the Seminary of Padua, from the Patriarch of
Venice. He was a brilliant seminarian, his favorite studies being
the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. He advanced steadily
from the time of his ordination in 1858. In 1884 he became
bishop of Mantua, and for seven years ruled that diocese with
conspicuous ability. In 1893 Pope Leo XIII. made him Car-
dinal and Patriarch of Venice. For sixteen months Cardinal
Sarto was unable to take possession of his See, as the Italian Gov-
ernment, claiming the right to name the Patriarch, refused to
sanction the Papal appointment. The Government, however, at
last gave way before the growing indignation of the people of
Venice, and granted the Exequatur, or confirmation of the Papal
bull.
While Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Sarto always managed
to keep on good terms with the Government, although firmly main-
taining the rights of the Church. He insisted strongly on religious
instruction for both adults and children, did much to reform
Church music, was indefatigable in his diocesan visitations and
most generous to the poor. He was ever ready to fulfill the duties
of a simple parish priest.
Cardinal Rampolla was the favorite candidate in the con-
clave of 1903, but the veto of Austria made the election of the
Patriarch of Venice certain. His return ticket was never used, and
he became Pope under {he title of Pius X. His motto " to restore
all things in Christ " was ever in mind. He will be remembered
in history for his firm stand in defending the rights of the Church
against the masonic, anti-clerical French Government, although it
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meant the breaking the Concordat; his condemnation of Modern-
ism, " the compendium of all the heresies;" and his codification of
Canon Law.
Mother Forbes' interesting study of Pius X., brings out clearly
his piety, his zeal, his kindliness, his love of the poor, his love of
children and his love of the Eucharist. Some good stories are told
of him. A layman once asked him to give a friend of his a Car-
dinal's hat. " I cannot," said the Pope, " for I am not a hatter,
only a tailor (Sarto)." When someone criticized his French policy,
and spoke of the Church's financial loss, he said : ** They speak
too much of the goods of the Church, and too little of her good"
FRANCE, ENGLAND AND EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY— 1215-1915.
By Charles Cestre. Translated from the French by Leslie M.
Turner. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons.
The chief purpose of this book, in the mind of the author, was
to help his fellow countrymen to a fuller understanding of England
and of England's contribution to civilization. It was written during
the earlier part of the War, before America had fully joined in
the cause of the Allies. Hence there is little or no reference to
American Democracy. As regards the two countries under con-
sideration we are told in the preface to the French edition that
" only known facts are used in the text; from these facts an effort
has been made to deduce a few leading ideas." This promise, how-
ever, is not very well borne out in the body of the work. The
author's mind was far more intent on conciliating the minds of
the English and French readers whom he was particularly address-
ing, than on accurate historical interpretation. The result is that
his perspective in his presentation of the past has been considerably
vitiated. Writing for the average Protestant Englishman, he has
taken the latter pretty much at his own valuation. The Reforma-
tion, therefore, inaugurated by Henry VIII. and established by
Elizabeth is, despite better recent accounts, described as the dawn
of modern liberty. In his treatment of France on the other hand,
he has omitted practically all mention of what to the unprejudiced
foreigner, whether Protestant or Catholic, is her chief glory: her
religion. The reason for this will easily appear 'to the dis-
cerning reader. The author belongs to that dominant minority in
France which has had far too great and exclusive a share in shap-
ing the destinies of the French nation. He is one for whom
the history of France apparently begins with the Revolution
of 1789. At times, moreover, there is a tendency on the
part of the author to read into the past some of the healthier dis-
positions that were not aroused until after the shock of German
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aggression. He speaks repeatedly as though France and England
had been gradually moving away from Germany for some time
previous to 1914. In this he overlooks entirely the dangerous
inroad that was being made by German thought and philosophy in
both these countries. His own admiration for Kant makes him
an instance, in point, of the contrary. Because of some one or
other of the many obiter dicta that have no logical place in his
phUosophical system, Kant is mentioned frequently in connection
with Goethe as one of the benefactors of humanity. Treitschke
is condemned for holding that **the state engenders right by
means of force," without our author seeming to be aware that
this is a direct logical conclusion from what he calls *' the noble
Kantian doctrine of autonomy.'' In his much-vaunted treatise
on ** Perpetual Peace," Kant explicitly subscribes to this very prin-
ciple. Closer examination, moreover, of the ethical system of the
philosopher of Konigsberg will reveal this principle, exactly as
stated by Treitschke, to be fundamental to Kant's whole theory
of the state.
With all this, however, M. Cestre's work is not without real
merit. As an attempt to make use of outstanding current preju-
dice, in order to bring two peoples closer together, the book is
cleverly written. Much of his criticism of England and English
ways is very well taken. The chapter on, " England's Spirit in her
Literature " will be found especially interesting for those who are
either curious or skeptical of the future possibilities of a closer
national sympathy between the French and the English.
A ROUMANIAN DIARY. By Lady Kennard. New York: Dodd,
Mead & Co. $1.25 net.
The thirty-two months between September, 1915, and June,
1917, which saw Roumania's entry into the War and her first
efforts to whip her resources into shape, are covered interestingly
in this little journal. Lady Kennard is the daughter of the British
Minister to Roumania during this critical period, and hence was
in a position to obtain perhaps the best information available to
an outsider as to the situation of the brave little Ally in the
Balkans. The fact that Roumania's most serious reverses
occurred after the date of the closing of this volume, in no way
detracts from the interest of the sketches which it contains, deal-
ing as they do vnih the evacuation of the Roumanian capital, and,
later, hospital and relief work at Jassy. The diary contains
much that is pathetic and much that is terrible. One is left with
a feeling of admiration for this small and obscure people who bore
a tragic lot so bravely.
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EVERYMAN'S LAND. By C. N. & A. M, Williamson. Garden
Gty, New York: Doubleday, Page & Ck).
The Williamsons have long since reduced their novel writing
to a science. Their annual literary output has about the
same consistency each year — one part of love, two parts adventure,
one-half part suspense, three parts local color, two parts history;
thoroughly mixed and finished with a dash of sugary sentiment.
Everyman's Land is made according to that receipt — and yet it
is a very readable story, pleasant, easy-going and providing gen-
uine relaxation to the day's work.
It is a series of letters addressed to her " Padre " by a young
nurse, a Miss O'Malley, who before the War had a fleeting day's
romance with the son of an American millionaire, James Beckett.
The War comes and young Beckett joins the French air forces. He
is reported killed. His parents come from America to France.
Miss O'Malley and her war-blinded brother Brian, attach them-
selves to the Beckett party under the pretext of the girl having
been engaged to their son. Then follows the tour of the front,
the elements of mystery and suspense, the inevitable protagonist
in a brother and sister by the name of O'Farrel who daily
threaten to reveal Miss O'Malley's perfidy. Naturally the book
ends happily and the horror is taken from war.
But the amazing nature of the story is the color, the history
and the ready dialogue with which the pages are sprinkled.
FROM THEIR GALLERIES. By A. Donald Douglas. Boston:
The Four Seas Co. $1.25 net.
The sketches that form the content of this small volume
are classified by the author as " dreams." He has indicated and
sustained their phantasmal character with skill, and he possesses
the gift of adequate expression, but the material is not worth the
pains expended upon it. It is artificially unpleasant, futilely con-
veying a tone of vague unhappiness and mysterious menace that
gives momentary discomfort. It fortunately lacks strength to
make a more lasting impression.
THE DARTMOOR WINDOW AGAIN. By Beatrice Chase (Olive
K. Parr). New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.00 net.
The public that received From a Dartmoor Window with
enthusiasm, will doubtless welcome the appearance of a second
volume of friendly confidences about the home and the environ-
ment Miss Parr loves so well. It is improbable, however, that
the present work will duplicate the success of the former, which
had a breadth and freshness that are lacking in its successor. The
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author early strikes a personal note that is of prolonged triviality,
seldom superseded by matter of deeper import.
HIS LUCKIEST YEAR. By Francis J. Finn, S.J. New York:
Benziger Brothers. $1.00.
This sequel to Lucky Bob will find plenty of eager readers.
The story chronicles the ups and downs of life in a closely united
parish, where everybody seems to know everybody, and to take
a violent interest in everybody else's concerns. The mystery cen-
tres in the hero, who is the victim of a plot which very nearly suc-
ceeds in wrecking the life of his mother. But "all's well that
ends well," and Bob has many stanch friends.
THE PROTESTANT. By Burris A. Jenkins. Chicago: The Chris-
tian Century Press. $1.35 net.
This flippant, vulgar, illogical and innane volume is a slangy
indictment of modern Protestantism, which the author wishes re-
formed by a modern Luther, who will throw aside all the dogmas
of the Catholic Church that Protestantism still retains. It is full of
cheap sneers at the Episcopalians for lack of unity, the Methodists
for their skill in the art of politics, the Presbyterians for their
intolerance. The author dreams of a Christian Church possessed
of a creed that would satisfy equally a Catholic, a liberal or an
orthodox Jew, and a Protestant of any school.
DOCTOR DANNY. By Ruth Sawyer. New York: Harper ft
Brothers. $1.35 net.
All that is most winning in the native Irish character is
brought out with delicate and sympathetic charm in these tales.
They are not so much realistic sketches as whimsical transcrip-
tions of the Irish spirit in its most childlike and elusive element,
touched with just the right measure of belief in unearthliness
and fairy-lore. The saints and the "little people" — quite char-
acteristically — blend harmoniously here, in that romantic atmos-
phere which still so closely enfolds the Irish peasantry. There is
plenty of human material, too, handled with a tenderness of
touch that recalls some of Katharine Tynan's work.
NIGHTS IN LONDON. By Thomas Burke. New York: Henry
Holt ft Co. $1.50.
Scarcely any praise can be too high for the romantic force,
beauty and sincerity of this book. Its nineteen papers deal
each with some phase of London life by night. Now it is " round
the halls " that Mr. Burke takes us. Now we spend a Jewish Night
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with him m Whitechapel. Then he wafts us to Clerkenwell and
we spend our evening in Little Italy. Anon we visit Limehouse
and under Mr. Burke's expert guidance discover what a Chinese
Night is like. (Indeed, it was a recent book of his» having for sole
theme the beauty and squalor, the fragrance and the tragedy of
Limehouse — Limehouse Nights — that won for Mr. Burke the
considerable follovring he now has among American readers.) In-
terspersed among the studies are nineteen lyrics, some of exquisite
loveliness. So we have here a book of glorious prose and the con-
tents of a slim volume of rare verse — all in one. Mr. Burke be-
lieves in giving good measure.
In spite of his undoubted interest in the foreign quarters of
the great city, no writer could be more English than Mr. Burke.
Nights in London is as English as Pickwick. In these genial
chapters as much good food and good liquor are consumed as
ever at Dingley Dell or under the Frankeleyn's hospitable roof-
tree. And he loves these Londoners of his: London working-
men, London barmaids, clerks, music-hall performers. For, with
them he can be hale and glad and free — a plain man without
trimmings. He has shrewd and searching things to say about the
pretence of the would-be Bohemians. On London bars, inns and
eating-houses, Mr. Burke pours forth a flood of the most exciting
and valuable information. Mr. Belloc himself knows not more
accurately or exhaustively where in. London to eat a chop or drink
a glass of ale.
But what stays with us is the immense and engrossing
humanity of the book. It is full of beauty and pity and tender-
ness and wholesome fun. There is not a leer or a sneer in it from
start to finish. Writers like Mr. Burke ought to be encouraged.
Like Denry Machin they are identified with the great cause of
teaching us all to be more cheerful.
THE HAND OF GOD: A THEOLOGY FOR THE PEOPLE. By
Martin J. Scott, S.J., New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.00
net. Paper, 35 cents.
This brief manual of apologetics is called The Hand of God
because it shows God's work in the world, and His guidance of
it by His Church. In a score of chapters the author treats of mira-
cles, faith, the Immaculate Ck)nception, indulgences, purgatory,
intolerance, the salvation of the unbaptized, the problem of evil,
and divorce. The volume is well written, the doctrine clearly set
forth, and the arguments solid and effective. It will give Catholics
a better knowledge of their faith, and help non-Catholics on their
road to the City of Peace. We know of at least one con-
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vert in New York City whose conversion, under God, was due to
the perusal of Father Scott's simple pages.
GIRLS' CLUBS. By Helen J. Ferris. New York: E. P. Button &
Co. $2.00 net
Miss Ferris has prepared a manual for club leaders that
should be of great practical value to those desiring to enter upon
this work. It goes comprehensively into the details of Organization
and management, showing sympathy and peneration in the sug-
gestions given as to the manner of meeting the various problems
that is conferred by experience, as she is head of the John Wana-
maker Girls' Clubs, and is one of the first in the social movement
THE Message of the Trees is an anthology of prose and verse
for the lovers of forest and wood and tree. It will be a delight
to every reader for, as Braithwaite says in his foreword, there is
no mortal who hates a tree. The author has labored long and
carefully and searched the best corners of English literature for
the treasures she sets forth. Of course, the volume includes Kil-
mer's classic, but we were disappointed not to find Lanier's classic
also — Ballad of Trees and the Master. The book is published by
the Cornhill Company of Boston, and the compiler is Maud Cuney
Hare. Price $2.50.
THE CORNHILL COMPANY of Boston has published A History
of Halifax County by W. C. Allen. Halifax County is situated
in the northern portion of North Carolina. The volume will be of
interest to those interested in such local histories, and to students
who seek different sidelights on events and personages of national
importance. Price $2.50.
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I^ecent Events*
The Peace Ck)nference which opened its
Peace Conference, sessions at Paris on the thirteenth of Jan-
uary has, so far as is known to the gen-
eral public, not decided upon any one of the terms to be imposed
upon the enemy, a fact which is beginning to excite no little criti-
cism and dissatisfaction. The members of the (inference influenced
by President Wilson and supported chiefly by the British members
of the Conference, put foremost the formation of the League
of Nations, by means of which they hope to secure, for all time,
the deliverance of the world from war. Many Commissions to ex-
amine the infinite variety of questions which the world is asking
them to solve, have been appointed. None of these have, so far,
made any report except that which was appointed to draw out
the Constitution of the World League. This report took a defi-
nite shape and received the unanimous approval of the represen-
tatives of the fourteen nations who made up the Commission, and
it was read at a plenary sitting before the whole of the
delegates. It is not, however, the final and definite constitution.
This has still to be made, the present plan forming the basis of
discussion by a plenary meeting of all the delegates, to say nothing
of jurists, statesmen and politicians the world over. Thus it would
seem that a long time must intervene before the plan as read by
President Wilson will take final shape.
Space does not permit of anything like an adequate discussion
of the published draft of the League, nor even an analysis. It
is meeting with both favorable and unfavorable criticism, and
seems to have been received with less favor in the President's
own country than it has met with in the rest of the five countries —
especially in Great Britain. The truth seems to be that it is in
the latter country that it is meeting with a larger measure of sup-
port than in any other. In France it is clear that a fairly strong
opposition to it is growing. Not to the League itself, indeed, but
to its insufficiency. The belief that the League will not form a
strong enough means of defence against possible future attempts
of Germany, and will require to be supplemented by special meas-
ures in addition to those it provides, seems to be generally held.
Amendments, however, may be proposed before the draft takes
its final shape. Drafting the plan of the League of Nations has not
been the only work which has been done by the delegates assem-
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bled in Paris. A large number of Ck)mmissions and Sub-Ck)nunis-
sions have been appointed to consider the difiScult and numerous
questions which have been brought before them. Among these
may be mentioned especially the Commission which has been
formed, with Mr. Samuel Gompers as its head, to inquire into
the questions which concern the well-being of workingmen in all
parts of the world, and to endeavor to draw up a code of regula-
tions for securing to them recognition of their just claims. It
is to be hoped that this Commission may succeed in finding a
way to regulate soberly and sanely the relations between capital
and labor, and thereby frustrate the attempts of the Socialists'
meeting at Berne, which threatened by violent methods to dis-
turb the peace of the world.
Reports appearing in the newspapers repre-
Poland. sent the situation in Poland, as bordering
upon anarchy, while the hostilities which
are being carried on in Galicia and in Bosnia, as well as in Silesia,
against the Czechs seem to indicate a disposition to take up arms
not quite in accordance with the desire of the Western world to
put an end forever to all armed conflict. It appears clear now,
however, that so far as the warfare in Galicia is concerned, the
Poles were fighting there in self-defence, the aggressors being the
Ruthenians. Lemberg, the chief scene of hostilities, is a Polish
town to all intents and purposes, but one which the Ruthenians
were anxious to possess. As to the merits of the conflict between
the Poles and the Czechs for possession of a district containing
valuable coal mines, it is impossible to give a judgment. A com-
mission, acting under the authority of the Peace Conference at
Paris, called upon the warring forces to put an end to hostilities.
This has been done. One of the last acts of the Conference at Paris
has been to call upon the Germans to refrain from an attack upon
the Poles. From this it may be inferred that the Germans were
the aggressors, although perhaps the Poles in Posnania were some-
what premature in acting before the decision of the Conference.
By the terms of the armistice just signed, a line of demarcation
has been drawn through German Posen, which gives to the Poles
the greater part of that province and also its strongest fortresses,
and secures to Poland the much desired outlet to the Baltic. By
it Poland also holds the fertile districts from which the Germans
used to derive valuable supplies of food. Both parties it is under-
stood are called upon to refrain from any military action which
would transgress the limits laid down to Germany. From Ger-
many there is reserved the right to pass over the district assigned
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to Poland in order to defend East Prussia, which at the present
time is in danger of a Bolsheviki invasion.
It is impossible to describe in full the serious economic dif-
ficulties in which the country is involved, due to the action of the
Germans while they were in occupation. As in Belgium and else-
where, they took every means of destroying the facilities of man-
ufacturers and for disorganizing the industrial situation. As a
consequence, Bolshevik principles secured many adherents, and
these adherents caused serious trouble in various parts. Their
numbers, however, have been greatly exaggerated, for in the re-
cent election not a single adherent of Bolshevik principles was re-
turned to the National Assembly. General Pilsudski's weak gov-
ernment has been succeeded by that of the distinguished pianist,
M. Paderewski. He has proved himself as great a master of har-
mony in the political world as in the domain of his art. It was
thought General Pilsudski might offer opposition, but he yielded
at once, and the former prime minister having resigned, M.
Paderewski accepted the premiership and speedily formed a coali-
tion cabinet upon which even some of the Socialists' parties look
with complacence. When it is remembered that there are already
in Poland no fewer than fifteen political parties, M. Paderewski's
success will be the more appreciated. The whole country is not
merely satisfied but full of joy, anticipating a future which prom-
ises united action for the good of the country.
The first act of the new Government was to call for a gen-
eral election of an assembly to decide the form of government of
the reconstituted Polish nation and to draw up its constitution.
This election has already taken place, and has resulted in the
choice of two National Democrats, thirty-two Populists, thirteen
Socialists, eight Jews and two Germans. Among those elected
were two women.
The constituent assembly is now at work drawing up the
constitution for the nation which, after so long a period of sub-
jection is now to be restored to a place among the sovereign states
of the world. Its claim for sympathy has been responded to by the
Peace Ck)nference, which has sent a commission to examine into '
the difficulties which have to be surmounted. The practical help
so much desired will doubtless follow. It is of supreme importance
that a strong barrier should be erected between what was once the
Russian Empire and Germany, which would be only too willing
to prey upon it. The report was circulated that the army under
General Haller, of some fifty thousand men which had been serv-
ing in France, had arrived at Dantzig; but this report seems to be
without foundation.
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Changes in Russia are so frequent and news
Russia. items are so disjointed, no very reliable state-
ment can be made of the actual situation there.
For what it is worth, however, a general survey of the sit-
uation may be given. One of the most puzzling questions is : what
part of the former Empire is still under the domination of the
Soviet Government at Warsaw? On the authority of a well-
informed student of Russia affairs, this area comprises generally
the provinces stretching from Petrograd southwest to Dvinsk,
Minsk and Homel, thence south to Kursk, Vobenya, Saratoff,
Samara, and so by Perm and Vologda back to Petrograd.
These boundaries change from day to day, following the principle
laid down by the Bolsheviki at the beginning of their rigime which
gave to every province the right of self-determination. The Bol-
shevik Government, nevertheless, in defiance of its own principle
continues its effort to control by invasion and by treacherous
propaganda several of the provinces which have acted upon this
right. The rest of Russia has either freed itself from the rule
of Lenine and Trotzky or is ehdeavoring to do so. From what
has been said, it will be seen that the new states now seeking
their freedom, constitute the major part of what was once Russia.
The expeditions sent by the Allies into Russia are therefore
cooperating with the main body of the Russian people, even assum-
ing the willing submission of the entire population in the Bolshe-
vik area to that government — an assumption far from the real
facts of the case. The Allies, therefore, by making war upon the
Bolsheviki are acting in the interests of by far the greater part
of the Russian people, and with justice cannot be said to be inter-
fering with a nation's right to manage its internal affairs.
But even if the Allies' action involved such interference, the
character of the government at whose overthrow it aims would
render it not only permissible but imperative. Irresistible evidence
proves the methods and aims of the Bolsheviki to be as great a
peril to existing civilization as was the Prussianism which has just
been overthrown, perhaps an even greater peril. The lady, who
is somewhat foolishly styled the grandmother of the Russian revo-
lution, stated recently that she had spent forty-two years of her
life in an effort to overthrow the government of the Tsar, but that
now, in view of the state to which Russia had been reduced by
the Bolshevik Government, she would, if it were in her power, de-
vote another forty-two years to its reestablishment.
The freedom the Revolution promised, so far from having
been realized, has been transformed into a tyranny much more
far-reaching and oppressive than was ever dreamed of by the
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Romanoffs. The dissolution by force of arms of the constituent
assembly which had been elected on a truly representative basis
and a substitution of the council which now sits at Moscow is a
mild specimen of the arbitrary character of the acting government.
As an example will be taken the state of things in Petrograd. Its
population, by arbitrary decree, has been divided into four classes :
heavy workers, brain workers in the Soviet and kindred offices,
lesser bourgeois, and arch-bourgeois. The privileges and rights
of free citizens and even personal liberty are bestowed upon the
members of the first and second classes. The universal corrup-
tion that prevails enables members of the two latter classes, who
have the means, to purchase certificates, stating they belong to
the manual workers. Without this certificate, everyone not be-
longing to theproletariat, unless he is a German, is liable to arrest.
In some places the prisons are so full that executions take place
in order to make room for \he newly arrested.
In Petrograd " there is a sort of Jacobin Court, which meets
in a street now infamous in Russian ears — the Gorokhovaia, or
' Street of Peas.' The chief Judge is an obese Jewess, with oiled
locks, who lolls on the seat, while all around her press a crew of
Soviet delegates, and especially of more or less self-designated
members of the Extraordinary Committee for Fighting the Coun-
ter Revolution, Speculation, and Sabotage."
As a means for perpetuating their control, organized efforts
have been made for the destruction of all religious teaching. By
Trotzky's directions " in all the schools compulsory lessons have
been organized, beginning with the youngest children, to train
them in the non-existence of a Divine being. The courses are
pompously termed ' Atheism courses.' A tax has been established
upon icons, the sacred images of the Russian Church. Divorce and
marriage have been made a matter of ten minutes before some
vague official in the Soviet offices designated for the purpose. In-
compatibility of temper secures divorce." Church property was
confiscated long ago. One bright spot is found in the fact that the
persecution which has become the lot of the Orthodox Church of
Russia has already restored to her freedom, and the fact that she
is no longer a state institution insures a greater respect being
paid to her by all. There is a possibility, indeed, that she may
become the rallying point for the best intellects to be found in the
Republic.
Trotzky, now more influential than Lenine, lives in luxury
characteristic of an Eastern despot, guarded by six thousand Let-
tish and five thousand Chinese troops.
He is active in forming an army which not long ago numbered
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about two hundred thousand, and a further report credits him
with the purpose of enlisting enough men to overrun the western
frontiers of Russia. This will require between two and three mil-
lions of men. Such a project seems ridiculous, but in view of the
transformation which has taken place in Russia, it may be more
serious than it looks. The attack on Poland and Lithuania is only
a foretaste of what may be expected if power is left in Trotzky's
hands.
Among the schemes for consolidating his rigime and extend-
ing it, are comprised not only an awful warfare but inhuman
methods of torture. It would not be fitting here to give the details
of what has been done in this way even outside the prisons, but
it may be mentioned that there are proven instances of persons,
obnoxious to the existing rigime, beiag nailed to trees and flayed
alive. In economic spheres the state naturalization of industries
has proved a complete failure, so muc^ so that Lenine has felt it
his duty and interest to call to his assistance members of other
political groups, and by so doing has met with the disapproval
of Trotzky. Many unverified reports are current, but a divergence
between these two worthies seems to be fairly well authenticated.
It was, therefore, a surprise to learn that after repeated re-
fusals to treat in any way with the Bolsheviki, the British Govern-
ment had tried to influence the French Government to favor a
conference with all the diff'erent factions now existent in Russia,
including the Bolsheviki. To this proposal of the British Gov-
ernment, the French foreign minister returned a somewhat curt
reply to the eff'ect that he would have no dealings with such crimi-
nals as the Bolsheviki. A further surprise, however, was in store.
The delegates assembled at Paris for the Peace Conference, ad-
dressed an invitation to all the governments in Russia to meet dele-
gates from the five Great Powers assembled in Paris, on an island
in the Sea of Marmora, called Prinkipo, or Princes' Island. This
invitation was accompanied by the condition that there should be
a cessation of hostilities throughout Russia. That such an invita-
tion should have been issued occasioned bitter disappointment to
all who are looking forward to the restoration of good order in
that country. Help had been given to the Omsk Government and
to that of Northern Russia by Great Britain, Japan, Italy and this
country; possibly also by France. The latter country almost
alone had taken action in the Ukraine Republic. This help given
to those fighting against the Bolsheviki was inadequate; in fact
the Allies in Northern Russia were being driven back, the Bolshe-
viki threatening their complete expulsion. Within the last few
days, things seem to have taken a better turn. In Paris, a number
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of Russians, distinguished for their services to the country, in-
cluding M. Sazonoff, Prince Lvoff, and the late Ambassador to
Washington, have made earnest appeals for assistance not so much
by sending troops as by permitting and encouraging volunteer
enlistment throughout Europe of men willing to lend their help in
restoring Russia. All this, however, produced no effect. The in-
vitation to Prinkipo was sent, putting the Bolsheviki on the same
level as the Russian governments associated with the Allies. Most
of these governments, at least the more important of them, have
refused to take any part in the Ck)nference. The Soviet Govern-
ment has tardily accepted the invitation. At the present writing,
it is doubtful whether the Conference will be held at all. At the
present moment the Supreme Council at Paris is considering this
question which is the most difficult and the most important of all
the questions to be decided, excepting, possibly, the terms of peace
to be imposed upon Germany. If no solution can be found and
no way designated of bringing about a stable and civilized gov-
ernment, there is danger that Russia will form a source of strength
for Germany in the supply of men and of raw material, thereby
making Germany again a menace to the peace of the world.
The danger of the Baltic States, especially of Esthonia and
Lithuania, being overrun by the Bolsheviki which seemed serious
a short time ago, has been averted by the help rendered the peo-
ple of those districts by volunteers from Finland. Sweden was
appealed to by the Esthonians but turned a deaf ear to the call.
Poland also does not seem to be as seriously menaced on its east-
ern border by the Bolsheviki invasion, although the danger can-
not be said to be entirely removed.
Recent newspaper reports from the Ukraine Republic are so
contradictory and so confused that any mention of the state of
affairs in this district is difficult. The account given by the min-
ister appointed to represent that state in this country, of conditions
there, should be worthy of credence, and claims our sympathy on
the ground of all it has so long suffered from the oppression of
the dissolved Empire: At the present time, it is being attacked by
the Bolsheviki on the East, the Poles on the West, and the
Rumanians on the South. Regrettable incidents, he admits, have
taken place, with reference to the division of the land which
hitherto has been owned by Polish and Russian landlords, pos-
sessing property amounting to hundreds of thousands or even a
million acres.
A determined effort was made by the Spar-
Germany, tacides to obtain possession of Berlin. A
conflict of several days between the troops.
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which placed themselves at the disposal of Herr Ebert*s govern-
ment, and the insurgents, ^ho had seized the newspaper ofBces in
Berlin, resulted in the defeat of the latter and in the violent death
of Doctor Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The renewed
efforts of the Spartacides to obtain control in several towns have
failed of success. On the other hand, the provisional government
has grown in strength and has realized its purpose of calling to-
gether, at the earliest possible date, the National Assembly, which is
to make a definite constitution. The elections took place on the
nineteenth of January throughout what was the German Empire,
with the exception of Alsace-Lorraine and those parts of Posen
where the Poles were in possession.
As a result of the elections, the Majority Socialists obtained
one hundred and sixty-four seats, having had in the Reichstag
on March 1, 1917, eighty-nine. Thereby they became the most
numerous of all the parties in the National Assembly. Next to
them come the Christian People's Party which secured eighty-eight
seats. This party is the successor of the Catholic Centre, that
is no longer exclusively Catholic in its membership, having opened
its doors to all who wished to support religious interests in the
New Republic. On March 1, 1917, the Centre numbered ninety-
one, so that it has lost three seats. The party who style them-
selves the Democrats in the recent election obtained seventy-
seven seats. This newly-named party represents the Progressives
and Radicals of the past, who numbered forty-six in the Reichstag
in 1917. What is styled the German People's Party, a new name
for the amalgamation of the Conservatives and the German Party,
obtained thirty-four votes. Their former strength in the Reich-
stag was seventy-one. The National Liberals numbered forty-four
in the former Reichstag and in the new National Assembly found
themselves reduced to twenty-three, while the Independent So-
cialists, who split off from the Social Democrats, and set up a
somewhat violent opposition to Herr Ebert's government, have in
the National Assembly twenty-four representatives as against nine-
teen on March 1, 1917. The three other parties in the new National
Assembly it is not necessary to mention, their numbers being in-
significant.
From this it will be seen that no one party would be able to
control the National Assembly and that therefore it would be
necessary to form a coalition. A great deal depended on the
course which would be taken by the parties in the New Assembly
which represented the Liberals and Radicals of the old Reichstag.
If they could have formed a coalition with all the rest of the
parties, or a sufficient majority of them, against the Social Demo-
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crats, the latter, strong though they are, would have been unable
to mold the destmies of the New Germany, but these Liberals and
Radicals have taken the opposite course and have entered into
active cooperation with the Social Democrats, as also has done
the party which succeeds the Catholic Centre. The Government
decided that the meeting of the National Assembly should not take
place in Berlin, a city under present circumstances not at all suit-
able for deliberation on such important matters, but in the capital
of the grand-duchy of Saxe- Weimar-Eisenach, which on account of
its associations with Goethe and other German writers and think-
ers, has earned the name of " The German Athens." On the sixth
of February, accordingly, the National Assembly met for a sitting
and proceeded to elect the first Provisional President of the new
German Republic. Its choice fell upon Herr Ebert. A Provisional
Constitution was adopted to be in force until the elaboration of
the definite constitution. A member of the Majority Socialists,
Herr David, was elected President of the Assembly, and members
of the Catholic and of the Conservative Parties Vice-Presidents of
the Assembly.
The newly-elected President, Herr Ebert, appointed as Chan-
cellor the leader of the Majority Socialists, Herr Schiedemann.
The latter proceeded to form a cabinet. This cabinet was made up
of seven members of the Majority Socialists, three members of the
Democratic Party which represents the Progressives and Radicals
of the past, and three members of the Christian People's Party
which represents the Centre Party with the modifications above
mentioned. Herr Mathias Erzberger is a member of the Cabinet
without portfolio and Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, anti-
Socialist, will be Foreign Minister. The preponderance of power is
possessed by the Social Democrats allied with the Liberals. This
record will show that the New Germany has made a good begin-
ning and that the prospects for establishment of a stable govern-
ment are fairly bright. It cannot be said that all danger of a
Bolshevik Government is over, but it would be a surprise if Ger-
many took further steps in that direction. The new government
is very likely to propose measures of a Socialistic character, but
there is little danger that it will go to the extreme to which the
Soviet Government of Russia has gone. With the establishment
of order, the tone of the government towards the Allies has be-
come not exactly defiant, but exceedingly firm. The decision to
raise a voluntary army to defend (it was said) the country against
the Bolsheviki and the Poles, and retention under arms of at least
some part of the old army, have contributed to the anxiety felt in
France. It is feared in France that the League will not afford suf-
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ficient protection against a reviving Germany. The tone of the
speeches of the Foreign Secretary and even of the President, show-
ing a revival of confidence in German3r's strength, has contributed
towards this. The hesitation in signing the extension of the armis-
tice conditions was proof of this attitude, but after some delay,
Gernumy felt herself unable to resist the demands of the Allies.
The pcecise terms of these conditions have not been published
at the time this is written, but they are said to include the dis-
mantlement of Heligoland, the opening of the Kiel Canal to com-
merce, the surrender, and not merely the internment, of the Ger-
man navy and the disarmament for twenty-five years of Ger-
many. The dissatisfaction felt at these terms by the Foreign Min-
ister has led to his resignation, <$r at least to a rumor of his resig-
nation.
The New National Assembly will proceed to the reorganization
of Germany; what form this reorganization will take, is, of course,
still undetermined. Some advocate the re-distribution of the
whole territory into seven equally large Republics. This re-dis-
tribution would involve the cutting up of Prussia and would put
an end, once and for all, to a power which has had a career so dis-
astrous to itself and so injurious to the world. The separation of
the southern German states which some little time ago was much
talked of seems to have met with little favor, and those who
advocated it, or who are said to have done so, now disavow the
project.
Of the events which have taken place in
Newly Formed States these newly formed states, a few notes
of Austria-Hungary, may be made. In the Austro-German Re-
public in the last few days, the elections
for the Assembly which is to settle the future of what was once
Austria proper and the other states brought in by the Germans
have been held. They proceeded in an orderly manner and re-
sulted in the victory of the Social Democrats in the large cities,
including Vienna. This was also the case at Innsbruck and the
Tyrol. No party, however, secured a victory so complete as to be
able, by itself, to control the government, and consequently, as in
Germany, the formation of a coalition is probable. The returns
show that one hundred Social Democrats were elected, eighty
Christian Socialists and seventy Liberals. Of all the states which
formerly made up Austria-Hungary, that which, alone with the
Magyars, dominated the rest, is now in the worst position. It is
cut off from supplies of food and of coal by the action of the neigh-
boring states, and as a consequence the suffering among the poor
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is of the most acute character. So great has this been that means
have been taken by the Allies to supply their wants at least to
some extent. This has been done not merely in response to their
need, but as testimony of the appreciation felt for the fairly good
treatment which the prisoners of war experienced there during
the recent conflict. The question of the adhesion of Austro-
Germans to the New Germany, and union with it, is still in abey-
ance. Nor are all of the people in favor of it. The Tyrolese, as
also the inhabitants of the Vorarlberg, having manifested their
purpose to achieve independence, have passed to the Czecho-
slovak Republic.
The chief thing to be noted is the energy characterizing the
new government. This has shown itself in a way which almost
justifies the fear expressed by Mr. Balfour when he spoke of the
anxiety he felt lest the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire would lead to the further "Balkanization" of Europe.
Troops were sent at once to the frontiers and both Hungary and
Poland were attacked, the latter for the purpose of securing a
frontier which would give to her new Republic certain coal fields
which had been claimed by the Poles. The conflict, however, has
been averted by the intervention of the Peace Conference at Paris-
It has issued a warning that any attempt to secure territory by
force would be likely to prejudice any claim to that territory when
the time for adjudication came. There is reason to believe that
it was in defence rather than in offence, that the Czecho-Slovak
Government acted in this instance, for the new President is the
last man in the world to do anything to alienate the Powers who
have so readily recognized, and even fostered, the birth of the
New Republic. France was the first to see the importance of the
Republic for the Allies and for Europe. Italy, England, our own
country, Japan, Serbia, Belgium, Greece and Cuba have formally
recognized the new regime. The Washington Government will
send a Minister to that country. The speech which Doctor
Masaryk made at his inauguration as President shows his grasp
of the situation and of the work to be done. It did not deal in
rhetorical flights about liberty and freedom, but was full of
practical suggestions as to the use to be made of that liberty and
freedom.
The Republic of Hungary seems to have made little progress
m the way of Catholic organization. Of all the states recently
formed she seems to have suffered the most both internally and
externally. Territory has been lost on the north to Czecho-
slovakia, on the east of Rumania and on the south to the New
Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; while in internal
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affairs a series of strikes have taken place that have seemed to
portend a general disorganization of society.
As to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the
thing of most importance noted is the fact, if it be a fact, that
an agreement has been reached with Italy about the line to be
drawn between the New Kingdom in the regions bordering on the
Adriatic. If a settlement has really been made, it will remove one
of the most serious difficulties which the Peace Conference has
been called upon to settle. Some members of the new Royal Gov-
ernment were so exasperated, that a determination was expressed
to carry on war with Italy to the bitter end, rather than acquiesce
in the claims which that country was making. The resignation
of the veteran statesman Nikola Pashitch who has for so long
directed the policy of Serbia, caused fear that a crisis involving
disorganization in the policy of the new Government had
occurred. This, however, proved to be unfounded for he had re-
signed the Premiership only because his presence at the Paris
Conference was looked upon as absolutely necessary
A great deal might be said and perhaps
Italy. ought to be said about the course of events
in Italy, should space permit One thing,
however, cannot be passed over, and that is the reconstruction of
Signor Orlando's Cfibinet. This was due to the acute question
of the adjustment of Italy's claims with those of the Kingdom
of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Foreign Minister Baron
Sonnino, who may be looked upon as Italy's strong man, is, it is
well known, not so favorable to the claims of the Slavs as
the Premier, while several members of the Cabinet were
even more favorably disposed to those claims than was the
Premier. So acute was the difference that four members gave in
their resignations. This led to the necessity of a reconstruction,
but as Baron Sonnino remains in charge of the foreign affairs of
Italy, it would seem likely that the reported settlement of the
question has not really been made.
Of all the countries that remained neutral
Spain. during the War, Spain wUl doubtless find
less favor in the eyes of the Allies than
any other, although Sweden's course will be far from meeting with
any warm appreciation. A large proportion of the people of Spain
seem to have been hypnotized by fear of the German power, and
by admiration for the Kaiser's frequent appeals to the Supreme
Being. The German Ambassador carried on, during the War, an
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almost open propaganda in which the eighty thousand Germans
who found refuge in Spain actively cooperated.
There is reason to think that the German submarines found
refuge in the ports of Spain itself, and it is all but certain that
they did so in the zone of Morocco which is under Spanish in-
fluence. During the whole course of the War many violations of
neutrality were permitted by the Spanish Government as repre-
sented by the many Cabinets that came and went. In the Morocco
arms, ammunition and funds were supplied by the Germans for
the purpose of inciting the tribes against those living in the French
zone. Leaflets were distributed by German agents. The notori-
ous robber-chieftain, Raisuli, became master again of the situation
and in the end deprived the Spaniards of control. German sub-
marines found shelter, resources and information in the inlets
of the Spanish-Moroccan coast, and discharged in unrestricted free-
dom their cargoes of arms and other contraband of war. Such a
course of conduct cannot have failed in disturbing the good rela-
tions between France and Spain, and the Moroccan question is
likely again to become one of the most acute that will have to be
settled. The one redeeming feature in the conduct of Spain has
been the work done by the King himself on behalf of the prisoners
of war of all the various nations. He formed a bureau under his
personal supervision to ascertain the localities to which these
prisoners were confined, and to communicate the knowledge thus
obtained to their relatives.
The course of events in Portugal during the
PortogaL War have been far from tranquil, many gov-
ernments have come and gone — ^and even
in the Presidency several changes have taken place. In the end
while remaining nominally republican, the methods of the exer-
cise of power became almost absolute, and the President, more of
a dictator than a constitutional ruler. His way of government,
however, seems to have been more honest and capable than were
those of his predecessors. He was, unfortunately, assassinated.
His successor was chosen, but had not long been in power before
an attempt was made to restore the monarchy. For a time it
seemed as if there was a likelihood of success, and had this been
the case a member of that HohenzoUern family — ^which has been
the pride of the throne of Germany, might have succeeded to the
throne of Portugal, King Manuel having married into that family.
February 19, 1919.
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TRUE poets point the way both to song and to sanctity. Music
of earth is but borrowed, and sooner or later must confess its
Owner. They who sound its chords arouse the hunger for the
music that faileth not. Song carries with it its own power of puri-
fication, forcing the soul to release itself from the lower and less
worthy and to seek the true and beautiful. So Francis Thompson
urges us to encourage the art of poetry, saying that our children
would sing and that we must teach them to sing around the foot
of the Cross. We necessarily interpret every relation of life in
terms of music, because it is another term for order and order
is the reflection of God's law. Love sings; friendship has its
melody; " in every voice lives its own music." Joy, suffering, pas-
sion, triumph — all are known by the human heart in terms of
music and of rhythm, whether such music be expressed or not.
In fact we know that in the greater experiences of the soul, music
and song and poetry are but the inadequate attempts at expres-
sion. Whereas the soul was made for God, a measure of its ex-
periences as its destiny is being achieved, can be expressed to no
one but God. Human lips are powerless and human vehicles of
communication are found wanting. The secret is God's and the
individual's : like Moses he can tell it to no man. Thus in prayer
man withdraws within this sanctuary of his own soul, a true sanc-
tuary, because God dwells therein. He must depart from the com-
pany of other men. He must withdraw from the voices of earth.
He must enter into the silences because there Truth is most
eloquent. The silences are not silent; but it is the only word in
contrast to earth that we have to describe the soul's converse with
God. The process is as old and as stable as the eternal hills. It
is what the psalmist spoke centuries ago when he put into the
mouth of God this invitation : " I will lead him into the desert and
there I will speak to his soul."
4( ♦ ♦ ♦
CERTAINLY the world was never more crowded with its own
sound, more distracted by the clamor of its own voices, than it
is today. Is there not proportionate need of our withdrawing into
the silences; there to learn the fuller meaning of those truths
which we have all been taught; there to ponder and make our own
through conduct the eternal verities, which when all else suffers
shock, alone endure? Do we not worry and fret about many things
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— when one thing alone is necessary* Again does the Church at
this season of Lent beg us to live closer to Christ; to keep our souls
safer in faithful prayer; to learn that the discords of earth are not
the music of heaven; to seek the silences where are ever found
refreshment, light and peace.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
LATELY there has been published the journal of one Arthur
Middleton, entitled The Forgotten Threshold. It is an intimate
account of his spiritual experiences. We know nothing of him ex-
cept that he went out from the world into a solitary place and there
sought the silences, that the silences might speak. He was a
Catholic and would have wished, says his editor, "to have dis-
claimed any word in his journal which conflicted with the in-
timacies of the truth of the Roman Catholic Church." The jour-
nal is impersonal, revealing but little of the history of its author,
giving now and then, however, certain hints that speak of ante-
cedent spiritual tragedy. Perhaps one is wrong in interpreting
what are only suggestions, but the curiosity is justified in
order to gauge faithfully the measure of critical statements.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE journal will be found to be the experiences of a soul on the
upward journey. It is mystical because it sees clearly and
simply the eternal, all-inclusive meaning of Christian Truth.
Dogma is both the foundation and the justification of this man's
hope, and the reason why he may interpret the catastrophe of earth
in terms of personal and immortal triumph. Steeped in poetry,
with an imagination of strong wings he soars upward, grasping the
mighty vision that helps him hear all creation singing the music
of God. Self-denial, withdrawal from the pleasures of earth —
these must his soul learn. He must keep that soul so closely and
so intimately with God that he can be conscious of His presence
even among a crowd. By meditative prayer on the truths of the
Redemption, he learns to discipline his will, so that seeking the
better way he may bring it into accord with God. The song his
conduct sings is to join the eternal chorus of heaven. In the
silences nature thunders to him God's purpose, and his eye becomes
so single that he can see the mystery of the Redemption in the
heart of a strawberry blossom. He makes us realize how eternity
inspires the commonplace; ''the highest dream is less worthy
than the simplest deed;" how submission bestows the perfect
peace.
The journal is an extraordinary experience of an extra-
ordinary soul. With wonderful poetic gift, brought oftentimes
to white heat by the intensity of spiritual fervor, he puts before
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us the captivating beauty of Catholic truth. He shames our poor
appreciation of it. We marvel at our indifference to our inher-
itance. We are lifted out of ourselves with a great desire to attain
to this perfect peace. The journal is no connected study in the
usual acceptance of that word. Its high appreciations are clear cut;
caught by an eagle eye loaded with wisdom, they provoke thought;
and perhaps the reader will bring to them a different and greater
measuring than the writer himself saw.
Were one to judge it piece by piece he would find statements
that might warrant criticism. The sensuous imagery seems now
and again almost banal. The mood at times expressed is purely
personal and does not win sympathy. That the intellect is an ebb-
tide from God is not true. As this soul advanced in knowledge, he
walked towards God, and this is the only true spiritual philosophy.
" Love," says St. Catherine of Siena, " follows the intellect and
the more it knows the more can it love." Faith precedes, preserves
and stimulates charity. But we have chosen to dwell upon the ex-
cellencies rather than the defects of the volume.
4^ ♦ ♦ 4^
[O modern poet spoke more of the holy silences than Lionel
Johnson, and the indebtedness of Arthur Middleton to Johnson
is very great. He confesses it if in no other way than by the
tender personal title of "Lionel." The latter wrote of silences:
N*
I have not spoken of these things
Save to one m^n and unto God.
And again speaking of his spiritual intimacies Johnson wrote:
Ours is the sOent eloquence of love.
So lived at the last this other man who knew the roar of
Broadway and the silence of God. And in the western isfe he wrote
" life is turning inward to the heart of silence and out of it will
come the beauty of my dream if life is willing." Johnson sang:
But life grows fuller with each hour,
Full of the silence that is best.
4c ♦ ♦ 4^
MIDDLETON felt the music of nature and later found that the
music could be interpreted only by the high harmony of God.
"The great message of future poetry will be to proclaim that
nature is the expression of man; and thus to reveal the essential
nobility of man as the image of God, rather than the image of
nature."
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Johnson wrote:
O sun and starsi O glory of the rosel
Yet eyes of light, voices of music 1 I
Know, that from mortal to immortal goes
Beauty : in triumph can the whole world die.
No poet has sung of human friendship as loftily as Lionel
Johnson.
Ah I dear our friends, ours past the mists of death I
Ours, where the loved disciple, great St. John,
Pillows his head upon
The only rest
God's breast 1
Ours, in the strength of that enamoured breath
Which rang from Patmos' exile guest,
God is love I and of all men he knew best.
Who lay upon that Breast
And heard the beating of the Heart of God.
And this spiritual journalist writes: ''The saints are pore
poets and those who have died for friends are the image of the
Sacred Heart, and in them at moments of pure reflection there is
naked light and the vision which is insupportable.'*
♦ ♦ ♦ . ♦
JOHNSON speaks of the vesper silence and this mai) ex-
claims : •' Tonight I desire only silence to love." He speaks ot
writing a spiritual volume entitled " Flame and Dew." Flame
as the symbol of time and dew as that of eternity. So does John-
son speak of '' the medicinal dews of grace; the dew of tears and
Dew of the morning sweet, and the evening falls,
Falls cool and sweet upon the scarlet flames,
The furnace of each heart
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
And yet Thou hast a perfect house of li^t
Above the four great wings, a house of peace:
Its beauty of the crystal and the dew
Guard Angels and Archangels.
Middleton speaks of the four great syllables; Johnson of the
the four great vsrinds. The latter of white souls, of the White City
of God; of white sweet fires; and the former of white magic and
white light.
The thunders of the tide and the moon and the vsrind rever-
berate as the great music of God in Middleton's soul. They urge
him on to the identifying of his vsrill vsrith the will of God. So John-
son wrote:
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Thine hounding winds rush by me day and ni^t
Thy seas roar in mine ears. I have no rest.
No peace, but am afilicted constantly,
Driven from wilderness to wilderness.
The stars are the eternal reflection of God's patience. That
patience of which Johnson sang:
Thy long sweet patience
That allows no let
Though with disdain her powers be met
Saying: They shall be yet
The captives of the Everlasting Love.
Middleton found experiences too great for expression. Music, pure
music, was not sufficient, and Johnson asks, when his soul is most
moved by eternal thoughts, that music should make silence simply
a melody.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE comparison might be pursued further. Middleton is no
plagiarist. We have written the paragraphs to show how great
is the Catholic inspiration to be found in the work of Lionel
Johnson.
THE facts that have been brought to light concerning the ex-
cesses of Bolshevism ought to be known and considered by
every one.
These excesses are not the exaggerations of otherwise worthy
tendencies, they are the absolute subversion of all moral prin-
ciples, the destruction of religion and the overthrow of civilization.
In our own country many apparently worthy journals have given
themselves to a defence, or at least a plea for the merits of
Bolshevism. They have pictured a down-trodden Russian peo-
ple making their upward way under the guidance of Bolshevism
to liberty and self-government. But such journals and their
writers have not told the facts: they have either not known or
purposely refused to tell the truth, and it now appears that the
truth is such as to stagger the world.
4( ♦ ♦ ♦
THE London Tablet recently stated that the facts ought to be
published in every paper in the country and brought home to
the mind of every woman. When one has learned the fact it is
tragic to think that Bolshevism has received from some supposedly
Christian sources the word of sympathy, of toleration, and even of
encouragement.
It must further be borne in mind that the propaganda of
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Bolshevism is backed by large sums of money. Where the money
comes from, is a mystery. In Russia, it may perhaps be money
stolen from the former government, or from individuals. It may
be that the Russian officials of the movement have had enough to
support the movement, in a measure, throughout different coun-
tries.
The attempts made to further the propaganda here are sup-
ported by large sums of money. Bolshevism is looked upon as a
movement among and of the poor. Nothing could be further from
the truth. It is supported by money, large sums of money; it finds
its followers not so much among the laborers who have too little,
as among those who want more.
A recent convention held in New York City which sent con-
gratulations to the Bolsheviki cost $2,147. The treasurer reported
he had on hand only $1,585, and asked for a collection to make up
the shortage, $562. Those present immediately subscribed $572.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
THE very plea therefore under which Bolshevism makes its most
effective appeal is usually found to be without warrant. While
there is apparently small fear of any widespread growth of Bol-
shevism in this country, indifference to any of its manifestations
is foolhardy. Forces are at work defending it and propagating it.
Subsidized journals, well edited, are championing it. The Na-
tional Socialist party is doing all in its power to further the
acceptance of its ends by such methods as the demand of the
release of all industrial and political prisoners; a general indus-
trial strike, persuading soldiers to S3rmpathize with them, to con-
tinue wearing the uniform while preaching its doctrines.
The most complete expos£ of Bolshevism yet to be made public
is found in the testimony given by R. E. Simmons, a former agent
in Russia of the United States Department of Ck>mmerce. When
Mr. Simmons' testimony was completed. Senator Overman, the
Chairman of the Senate investigating committee, told him that
no American had rendered a greater service of late than he had,
in bringing before the people of this country the real story of the
chaos, anarchism, and immorality that prevail in Russia as a
result of Bolshevik domination. Mr. Simmons testified to an
absolute reign of terror and tyranny by the Bolshevists in Russia.
Men and women were compelled to work by force of arms at the
labor designated. The old, the infirm, the physically unfit are thus
driven at the point of the bayonet. One young woman whose
family was robbed of all they possessed by the Bolshevik Govern-
ment, had to work with a pickax breaking the frozen snow in the
streets in order to keep herself from starving.
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860 WITH OUR READERS [Mar,
The Red Guards systematically robbed everyone they could.
The so-called government has insisted on a ** leveling of intelli-
gence." Any one judged to have a mental equipment beyond his
" right " is thrown into prison; frequently he is put to death. The
Bolshevik '' leaders " are judges of how much intelligence a man
or woman ought to be allowed to possess. With such judges there
is little chance for a normally sane, civilized person.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
''IF the facts regarding the nationalization of woman by Bol-
1 shevism were understood in the United States," said Mr. Sim-
mons, "the propaganda trying to justify Bolshevism before the
American people could not possibly stand before public opinion."
Mr. Simmons submitted two oflScial decrees of the present Russian
government. One was dated March 15, 1918, and was issued by the
Anarchist Soviet charged by Lenine and Trotzky with the gov-
ernment of the city of Saratov.
Another decree was that issued by the Soviet of the city of
Vladimir. This decree states that it is based on the " excellent
example of similar decrees already issued in Luga, Kolpin, and
other places."
We print below the two decrees that our readers may know
what Bolshevism really means:
DECREE OF THE SARATOV SOVIET.
This decree is proclaimed by the free Association of Anarchists in
the town of Saratov in compliance with the decision of the Soviet of
Peasants, and Soldiers, and Workmen's Deputies of Kronstadt, the aboli-
tion of the private possession of women.
Motives.
Social inequalities and legitimate marriage having been a condition
in the past which served as an instrument in the hands of the
bourgeoisie, thanks to which all the best species of all the beautiful
women have been the property of the bourgeoisie, which has prevented
the proper continuation of the human race. Such ponderous argu-
ments have induced the present organization to edict the following
decree :
1. From March 1st the right to possess women having reached the
ages seventeen to thirty-two is abolished.
2. The age of women shall be determined by birth certificate or
passports or by the testimony of witnesses, and on failure to produce
documents their age shall be determined by the Black Committee, who
shall judge them according to appearance.
3. This decree does not affect women having five children.
4. The former owners may retain the right of using their wives
without awaiting their turn.
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1919.] WITH OUR READERS 861
5. In case of resistance of the husband he shall forfeit the right of
the former paragraph.
6. All women according to this decree are exempted from private
ownership and are proclaimed the property of the whole nation.
7. The distribution and management of the appropriated women
in compliance with the decision of the above said organization are
transferred to the Anarchist Saratov Club. In three days from the
publication of this decree all women given by it to the use of the nation
are obliged to present themselves to the given address and give the re-
quired information.
8. Before the Black Committee is formed for the realization of this
decree, the citizens themselves shall be charged with such control. Re-
mark: Each citizen knowing a woman not submitting herself to the
address under this decree is obliged to let it be known to the Anarchists'
Club, giving the full address, full name and father's name of the offend-
ing woman.
9. Male citizens have the right to use one woman not oftener than
three times a week, for three hours, observing the rules specified below.
10. Each man wishing to use a piece of public property should be
a bearer of certificate from the Factories Committee, professional union
or Workman's, Soldiers', and Peasants' Council, certifying that he be-
longs to the working family class.
11. Every working member is obliged to discount two percent
from his earnings to the fund of general public action. Remarks: This
committee in charge will put these discounting funds with the specifica-
tions of the names and lists into the State banks and other institutions
handing down these funds to the popular generation.
12. Male citizens not belonging to the working class in order to
have the right equally with the proletariat are obliged to pay one hun-
dred rubles monthly into the public funds.
13. The local branch of the State bank is obliged to begin to re-
serve the payments to the National Generation Funds.
14. AU women proclaimed by this decree to be the national prop-
erty will receive from the funds an allowance of two hundred and
thirty-eight rubles a month.
15. All women who are pregnant are released of the direct State
duties for four months, up to three months before and one month after
childbirth.
16. The children born are given to an institution for training
after they are one month old, where they are trained and educated until
they are seventeen years of age at the cost of the public funds.
17. In case of the birth of twins the mother is to receive a prize
of two hundred rubles.
18. All citizens, men and women, are obliged to watch carefuUy
their health and to make each week an examination of urine and blood.
Remark: The examinations are to be made daily at the laboratories of
the Popular Generation Health.
19. Those who are guilty of spreading venereal disease will be
held responsible and severely punished.
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862 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
20. Women having lost their health may apply to the Soviet for a
pension.
21. The Chief of Anarchists will be in charge of perfecting the
temporary arrangements and technical measures concerning the re-
alization of this decree.
22. AU those refusing to recognize and support this decree will be
proclaimed sabotage, enemies of the people and counter anarchists and
will be held to the severest responsibilities.
(Signed) Council of the City of Saratov, Russia.
Decree of the Vladimir Soviet.
Every girl who has not reached her eighteenth year is guaranteed
by the local Commissary of Surveillance the full inviolability of her
person.
Any offender against an eighteen-year-^ld girl by using insulting
language or attempting to ravish her is subejct to the full rigor of the
Revolution Tribunal.
Any one who has ravished a girl who has not reached her eigh-
teenth year is considered a State criminal and is liable to a sentence of
twenty years hard labor unless he marries the injured one.
The injured dishonored girl is given the right not to marry the
ravisher if she does not desire.
A girl having reached her eighteenth year is to be announced as
the property of the State.
Any girl having reached her eighteenth year and not having mar-
ried is obliged, subject to the most severe penalty, to register at the
Bureau of Free Love of the Commissariat of Surveillance.
Having registered at the Bureau of Free Love she has the right to
choose from among the men between the ages of nineteen and fifty a
cohabitant husband.
Remarks: (1) The consent of the man in the said choice is un-
necessary. (2) The man on whom such a choice falls has no right to
make any protest whatever against the infringement.
The right to choose from a number of girls who have reached their
eighteenth year is also given to men.
The opportunity to choose from a husband or wife is to be pre-
sented once a month.
The Bureau of Free Love is autonomous.
Men between the ages of nineteen and fifty have the right to choose
from among the registered women, even without the consent of the lat-
ter, in the interests of the State.
Children who are the issue of these unions are to become the prop-
erty of the State.
A SPECIAL correspondent writes from Rome of the K. of C.
/v work there : " In the famous Piazza Minerva close to the
Pantheon a very large signboard placarded on the front of the
Minerva Hotel bears the words : ' Knights of Columbus — entrance
by the Via — ' Having read and heard of the K. of C. work,
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1919.] WITH OUR READERS 863
especially in London where Cardinal Bourne has lent the Knights
his palace grounds to dig themselves in, and burning to make the
acquaintance of the same, we boldly marched in at the address
given. There the courteous commander (Mr. Ryan we think)
explained his work, and showed us over the rooms. It's as nice a
* Welcome for American boys' as could be imagined. A portion
of the Hotel Minerva has been annexed and is locked off from the
rest of the hotel. In includes bedrooms and bathroom, rooms
downstairs for reading, writing, playing games, billiards, etc.
There is a side room on the ground floor where chocolate, coffee,
etc., are given out at almost any hour. Cigarettes are provided and,
in fact, everything the American soldier can require. Cinema
pictures and other entertainments are provided in the evenings.
Everything is first class and the commander at Rome is untiring in
his work for the boys who pass in and out. Thirty had been in the
evening before and about fifteen had slept there. He is well known
at the Vatican where he goes personally to get the rosaries, medals,
etc., blessed by His Holiness for the soldiers who specially ask for
them. Mr. Ryan told us that there was some idea of starting sim-
ilar ' Welcomes ' at Padua and Treviso. The Knights of Columbus
have done a fine work and nobody at home can do better than send
his dollars along to help them on with it."
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BOOKS RECEIVED.
Benziobb Brothebs, New York:
Meditations for the U*e of Seminarians and Priests. By Very Rev. L. Branchereaa,
S.S. 11.00 net. your Neighbor and You. By Rev. B. F. Garesche, S.J. 75
cents.
P. J. Kbnbdy a Sons, New York:
Catholic Poems. By Cond6 Benoist Palleo. 11.25.
Habpbb a Bbothbbs, New York:
Doctor Danny. By Ruth Sawyer. |1.S5 net
BiBNTANo's, New York:
Pioneers of the Rassian Revolution. By Dr. A. S. Rappoport 12.25 net
Longmans, GassN A Co., New York:
A Scholar's Letters from the Front By Stephen H. Hewett 11.50 net
The Macmillan Co., New York:
The Poems and Plugs of John Masefield. 2 vols. |5.00 net
E. P. DuTTON A Co., New York:
The Forgotten Threshold. A Journal of Arthur Middleton.
GBoaoB H. DoiAN Co., New York:
Ten Years Near the German Frontier. By Maurice F. Egan. fS.OO net
Ambrican Book Co., New York:
Webster's New Handg Dictionarg.
Catholic Fobbion Mission Sogibtt, Maryknoll, Osslnlng, New Yoik:
For the Faith — Life of Just de Breteniires. From the French of C. Appert by
Florence Gllmore.
Yalb UNiVERsmr Pbbss, New Haven:
Colonel John Scott of Long Island. By W. C. Abbott. Dutch Landscape Etchers
of the Seventeenth Centurg. By W. A. Bradley. $2.00. Dante. By H. D.
Sedgwick. 11.50. Currents and Eddies in the English Romantic Generation,
By F. E. Pierce, Ph.D. 13.00.
The Foub Seas Co., Boston:
Poems of New England and Old Spain. By F. E. Pierce. 11.25 net
J. B. LxppiNGOTT Co., Philadelphia:
Wild Youth and Another. By Gilbert Parker. |1.50 net
Catholic Music Pbbss, Wilton, Wis. :
Catholic Hgmns for the People. Edited by James M. Baker.
Abbey Student Pbbss, St. Benedict's College, Atkinson, Kansas:
Laying Up Treasure in Heaven. By F. J. Remler, CM. Pamphlet 5 cents.
Pbdp. Chas. W. Mtbbs, San Antonio, Texas:
A Minister's Surrender, or How Faith Conquered Prejudice. By Prof. C Myers.
Pamphlet
Catholic Tbuth Society, London:
The True Church. Whg Catholics Go To Confession. Christ and the Christian.
Our Common Chris tianitg. Folks with Children About Foreign Missions. By
M. Ward. A Christmas Vigil. By Mother St Jerome. Pan^hlets.
St. Bbneoict's, Warrington, England:
The Benedictine Almannac and Guide. 4d.
Bloud bt Gat, Paris:
Soiu la Rafale. Par A. Schmitz. Ceux qui Saignent. Par A. Rett£. .Lettres aax
Neutres sur VUnion Sacrie. Par G. Hoog.
LiBBATBiE Lbgoffbb, Paris:
ttudes de Liturgie et d'Archeologie Chritienne. Par P. BatUfol.
Gabbibl Beauchesnb, Paris:
Questions Thiologiques du Temps Prisent. Par A. Michel. 3 fr. 50. La Palee^
tine et les ProbUmes actuels. L'actton de Benoti XV. pendant la guerre. Far
P. Dudon.
Pontificial Pbintino Office, Rome:
Primato di S. Pietro e de' Snoi Successori in San Giovanni Crtsostomo. Bj
NICC0I6 Card. Marinl.
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Largest selling brand of 10c. Cigars in the world.
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With an abundant production of rubrical oils in the United States
and POCO, all excuses for the use of the wrong light before the Blessed
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G>nvenience was the only excuse for using the 8-day taper which cannot
possibly bum pure vegetable oil; it needs coal oil in some form or other.
POCO bums for 9 days olive oil or those oils allowed by the Rubrics.
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STUDIES
An Irish Quarteriy Review of Letters, Philosophy and Science
Vol. VIL, No. 28 CONTENTS December, 191S
I. The Argument From Irish History JDun Cairin
II. The World Policy of President Wilson John J. Hogan
III. Democracy, Parliament and Cromwell Alfred Rahilly
IV. Marshal Petain Charles Baussan
V. Prohibition in the United States Frank O'Hara
VI. Catholic Renascence in France Virginia M, Crawford
VII. Unpublished Irish Poems — No. 4 Osborn Bergin
VIII. Poetry — The Tirlough at Derryhoyle M. de V. S.
The Exile Katharine Tynan
Strife and Sweetness George O'Neil
Shakespeare M. Bodkin
At Moment of Victory John Bunker
To THE Moon K, M. Murphy
IX. Irish Vital Statistics in America Austin O'Malley
X. A Fragment of Irish Industrial History E. /. Riordan
XI. Bohemia and its Ulster Question P. /. Gannon
XII. Chronicle — I. The Influenza Epidemic William M. Crofton
II. Irish Fiction for Boys Stephen J, Brown
XIII. Review of Books.
It may be said without boast or exaggeration that Studies holds a foremost place
today amongst the Quarterlies issued in the English language and is far ahead of most
of them in the high-class nature of its contents and in the academic standing and scholar-
ship of its distinguished contributors.
The Evening News, December 31, 1917.
This Irish Quarterly, originally started by some Professors of the National University,
won a good position, and tha
and ability of its September issue.
has won a good position, and that this is well deserved is proved by the singular varied
Sec
The Times Literary Supplement, September 20, 191 7.
Altogether Studies is an admirable review, which should not fail to take its place
among the good reviews of the day.
CK,S. in The Sphere, June 23, 1917.
STUDIES is issued early in March, Juncy September and December.
The Editorial Offices are at No. 35 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin.
Price, Single Copies, 75 cents net; Annual Subscription, $3.00, post free.
Dublin: THE EDUCATIONAL COMPANY OF IRELAND, Limited
London and St. Louis: B. Herder Melbourne: William P. finelMm
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
MO^r^HLY magazine
OF
General Literature and Science
Vol. CVIII. MARCH, 1919. No. 648.
The entire contents of erery issue of The Cathouc Wobld are protected by
copyri^t in the United States. Great Britain, and Ireland. Quotations and extracts,
of reasonable length, from its pages are permitted when proper credit is given. But
reprinting the articles, either entire or in substance, even where credit is given, is a
violation of the law of copyright, and renders the party guilty of it liable to prose-
cution.
PUBUSHBD BY
THE MISSIONARY SOCIETT OP ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE IN
THE STATE OP NEW YORK.
(The Paulist Pathers.)
New York:
THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD,
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DBALEKS SUPPLIED BY TBB ASCBBICAN IffBWS COKPAITY.
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Belgium* and Italy is 6 cents per copy.
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'hether they were clerks in your
store, or employees in your factory, or
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church: whether they were exalted ia
station or obscure ; whether they fell
in the performance of their high taslo
or lived to enjoy their honors, may we
suggest that you erect some visible/
memorial to their fame as the homage
of their friends
^Port/o/io of
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ARE TOU up to the timea?
OR DO YOU Uye in the past?
TODAY the sources of supply for
Catholic missioners are almost emptied
by the unquenchable war-thirst of Europe.
THIS IS THE HOUR for American
Catholics to rise in the fullness of their
splendid strength and answer the call
from God to make known His revelation
to the Gentiles.
THE FIELD AFAR records the
progress of the Catholic Foreign Mission
Seminarjr of America.
The Field Afar appears monthly
and the subscription, including member-
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Address:
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