When, from the clouds of our actual vantage-point, we consider the date 1535, we are immediately conscious, because of the glorious event which illuminates this present year of suspense, of a scaffold and a block. Four hundred years intervene, and we shall perhaps congratulate ourselves on their passage, since the use of the headsman's axe as a means of religious persuasion has vanished with them and physical danger in the practise of our faith is at an end. We look back with humble reverence and gratitude to that scaffold set in the midst of our country and our history, where the two Blessed Martyrs, now to be canonized, welcomed the ultimate opportunity; and although we may be thankful that such an opportunity comes no more to Englishmen in England (since, by a curious paradox, we would often more willingly choose a life of heroism than a heroic death), we reverence them the more for their fortitude in a trial we are spared.

Their fame shines for us across the centuries, and we love them for holiness and wisdom, for wit and prevailing courage, timeless attributes displayed by them in a vanished time; for everything of that day has disappeared, the frame of life and its preoccupations, the look and sound of it. Gone is that world of individual efforts and harvests, and we think of it as a pastoral picture painted in clear tones, the green English scene enlivened by the peasant in his homespun, made ceremonial by the daily silks and velvets of the great. Its arguments and sufferings, its discoveries and abuses, are only knowledge for us.

But it was a time like this in which we live; new power, new danger, and new tyranny were abroad, and established things were threatened with disruption.

Both to the poets who have created high tragedy and to the critics of all eras who have thought deeply about it, its proper matter has always been that involved in some aspect or other of the Problem of Evil. In the theorists this is clear, from Aristotle down through what faint consideration tragedy was given in the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance in all lands, through the Reformation in some, through Cartesianism and Rousseauism wherever they penetrated, through English and American thought, to the twentieth century. Among the writers of tragedy the same unanimity has prevailed, from Aeschylus to Eugene O’Neill, from The Suppliants to Days-Without End. All have recognized that to be human means to yearn for happiness; and implicitly at least that tragedy is the quest of poetic insight, in so far as insight may be gained, into the riddle of high interference with human happiness.

In any consideration of the Problem of Evil, and therefore in tragedy, there is involved a theodicy: an attempt to penetrate the ways of God with unhappy mankind; a poetic exploration of human disappointment overhung by an Omnipotence that yet must be friendly; a wistfulness to reconcile in mortal vision, if it be possible, distant Divine Goodness and its permission or direction of instant human mishap; an intense effort of poetry to fuse these two factors together into one heightened picture of satisfying colour, light and shade, proportion and perspective. There is no question here of a clear-cut solution of the riddle—if that were possible tragedy would be shorn of most of its fascination and beauty; its only use would be its brief, poetic refreshment of a known answer that conceivably might need occasional rehearsal by short human memory, clouded ever anew by the turmoil of sublunary things.

The scholarship and wit, the lovable personality and frank geniality of the late Professor Drennan have been spoken of in two notices in the Times, the month of his death, January, 1935.

Therein, too, it is noted that, in his England, at seventeen he adopted Catholicism “with characteristic enthusiasm.” From these convertites there is much matter to be learnt, said Jaques. There is; and from their wandering away; and from their return. ‘Twas so with Drennan, truly a wanderer from his birth. Bom in home county Banbury, he had taught in Ceylon under the Oblate Fathers, and had been in the United States before I first knew him, when he and I taught together, in Canada in 1903. Later he was Professor of English in Galway, at the time of the European War and of the Irish Rising of 1916. And, last of all, he was in Johannesburg (from 1917), where for nigh twenty years he lived; and where he died. In South Africa he said he at last found a home wherein he could settle down. But he kept in touch with England, as a member of the Authors’ Club, London; which he joined, he said, “in the impossible event of my going over.” And he was a not infrequent jester in Punch. His humour, if it had a distinctive touch, may, perhaps, be said to be specially English; although Protestant Irish, seemingly all Celtic, was his descent. Persons of mind have praised M.D.’s Punch pieces. In Canada, he was The Canadian Month’s “Eno Poppyhock,” with his “Olla Podrida,” finding “irrational” the almanack's June 25 succeeding June 24. “It is also monotonous. Why should April 2nd always follow April 1st? Is there any reason why it should?

In the meandering of mankind through the ages the stream of vitality has flown back and forth from one system of life to its opposite. At present we seem to be in a transitional period when the main stream is sweeping back from individualism to an extreme collectivism. Since the Reformation men have done violence to their social nature by attempting to work out their own salvation independently of others. There were times when this seemed to be the only way of achieving any vital movement, since the alternative of cooperation and corporal unity lay apparently dead among a heap of legalities and impositions from a tyrannous authority. The reign of the individualist, however, though it made many new and valuable conquests, could not endure for long, for of its nature it was doomed to fall to pieces. Now we see a return to co-operation, to the united efforts of many men sharing one ideal. This is glaringly obvious in the dictatorships supported by the enthusiasm of the people, and in the growing solidarity of Communism; but it appears in religious spheres as well, in such movements as those of the Groups or leading to the absurdity of Christian and Jew attempting to find a common religious basis in a symposium entitled “In Spirit and Truth.”

Though the true Christianity of the Catholic Church has always been essentially social, it was inevitable that it should have been influenced to some extent by the common outlook on life. The stress was laid on the relations between the individual soul and God, while the idea of brotherhood in Christ, though not forgotten, was put in the background. The return of vitality in other spheres to the sense of fellowship and co-operation of men in society has been the occasion of a revival of interest in the social character of the Church.

Socialist, atheist, revolutionary—Christian, Catholic, defender of tradition—from Papini, the man of paradox, but true Florentine withal, we were bound to hear sooner or later, something new on the subject of the great Florentine poet. This Giovanni Papini has now given in his Dante Vivo}

The subdued light of conventional criticism is hardly to be expected from Papini. His volcanic mind erupts, leaving sometimes his thought buried in the cinders, but when it comes to the surface it is at least original, and holds, if it fails to convince.

By way of parenthesis it is not so extraordinary as it at first appears that Papini came eventually into the Church: a man who had taught himself everything, who had run his head as a battering ram into every form of thought and philosophy, who had tasted the bitterness of human insufficiency, what possible way was open to such a one, but to stoop and enter the lowly portal that leads to peace. But this is only by the way.

In his criticism of Dante, Papini often purposely leaves us in the dark, he is apt to lose all sense of proportion and to overshoot the mark. Then at the moment when we begin to chafe against his methods, he pulls us up by his own shrewd common sense, or else infects us with his own admiration for the poet. It is his aim to depict the man rather than the poet, but the poet often carries him away. The man Dante is his subject, a subject for which he has personal interest and sympathy. Dante with his unparalelled daring appeals to this daring modem Florentine.

In considerations of the way in which commercial transactions during the Middle Ages accorded with moral laws, the significance of the direct economic power wielded by the Church on account of her great material possessions is often disregarded. The early Church accumulated little property; this was to ai certain extent connected with the marked chiliastic attitude adopted during the first few centuries, and the Church was fully occupied in spreading her doctrine as widely as possible. In the late second century Clement of Alexandria not only upheld the institution of private property but declared that it was justifiable for Christians to amass large fortunes. There was a law dating from A.D. 321 allowing anyone at death to leave what property he wished to the Church. Statutes such as this favouring the incipient Church in Constantinople marked the beginning of an acquisition of wealth that in the Middle Ages was unrivalled by any other corporation or individual, and this accumulation of riches by the Church was even more marked in England than elsewhere.

The period of the Crusades brought a great increase in ecclesiastical property, for many raised money from the Church on the security of their lands and as a fair proportion never returned their lands reverted to the Church. This process went on for two centuries. In England for centuries before the Reformation the pious rich had been heaping up treasures for the clergy by gifts and endowments, and this tendency towards accumulating worldly wealth coupled with the policy of never alienating it made the Church a great business as well as religious corporation with interests touching the whole economic life of the people.