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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A milkmaid Cosie Lennox decided. In those far-off years he had given St. Philip Neri his seven lamps in memory of Lord Alexander Gordon Lennox, compiler of the Daily Prayer Book, and of Lady Boo, a Townley; he had the air of a young Roman patrician who shared all the pastimes of Catullus ; stage-struck but not yet a mummer; young enough to shake off the obsession of painted faces : ‘I am never attracted by anyone I have not seen made up; almost anyone made up can attract me; no attraction responded to outlasts six weeks’ he once confided to me. That conversation has weighed on my memory like a dream from which unlikely, unseemly, isolated episodes emerge. Can it all have happened, can he have told me about those Jews, the widower, the mother? (How little we had to learn from Proust.) He was not yet married to Miss Marie Tempest, nor contemplating such an alliance; he was indeed already, had we but known, an animated signpost that leads to the tragic desert.

A milkmaid, Mabel, our Mélisande: it was inconceivable that she should ever have suggested a milkmaid, unless one imagined Madame de Lamballe or Madame de Polignac at the Petit Trianon. Not that hers was a Beardsley type, either naturally or willingly, like Baroness Olga de Meyer, for instance; she had nothing of the girl with Messalina; perhaps at her most triumphant she recalled or inspired the beautiful Venus of Under the hill. Not long before her blessed release from this world, when she suffered from delusions, writing cheques, giving them away or thinking she did so, to dear compassionate friends, her face appeared to me like a gilt mask, carved, lacquered, lovable, heart-breaking.

A Railway Guide of long ago makes fascinating reading, and we know many people who can drink delight from the faded pages of a back number of an aged Bradshaw; and in the same way an old-time Catholic Directory is interesting, since it serves as a mirror of times which can never return. Just now, when our thoughts are directed towards the coming centenary of Catholic Emancipation, nothing will afford us a more illuminating view of the changes wrought in the past seventy years than a glance at one of these old Directories.

We will take the modest little volume published for the year 1850. It has an interest of its own from the fact that, being prepared of course in 1849, it was in use during the year that saw the re-establishment of the Hierarchy and consequently the passing of the old government by Vicars Apostolic of whom there had been since 1840 eight instead of the accustomed four. The Directory in question is of course drawn up on the basis of this division into eight Vicariates, and the resulting confusion during the year 1850 must have been considerable.

But apart from this, the first thing that strikes one is the curious fact that the Christian names of many priests were unknown; we find entries such as Rev.— Quiblier; in fact, the editor begs for information on the subject. Foreign names among the clergy at that time are only to be expected. Indeed, they are very numerous and sometimes rather startling.

In his Dedication of the Encomium, Moriae Erasmus writes to More: