Prejudices die hard, and I suppose the idea still prevails abroad that France is an irreligious, if not actually an anti-Catholic, country. Living in France after the war, it is a continual source of astonishment that such an impression should ever have arisen at all. I know, for instance, a very shrewd old French lady, the wife of a deputé for a Southern constituency, who regards Paris as a religious centre second in importance only to Rome itself. She has spent a great part of each year in Paris for fifty years, more or less, and she ought to be in a position to know its character. She and her husband the deputé have for twenty years never once missed making their annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. I know of another deputé, from the other end of France, who once a month stays up all night on duty at the perpetual adoration in the Sacre Cœur Basilica. These are not even isolated cases : they have both come within my own acquaintance in one typically unpretentious middle-class hotel. Neither of them are men of any particular note outside of the districts that elected them to the Chambre.

Charles Dickens must be seen clearly as a representative Englishman, a spokesman of the so largely inarticulate English people, discerned towering above contemporaries as Sir Thomas More or Doctor Johnson is discerned. How, otherwise, can we explain the hatred of Dickens for Puritanism, and his distrust of all professions of Protestantism?

The immediate recognition of his genius is evidence that Dickens’s standpoint was understood and approved by the mass of his fellow-countrymen, and this standpoint is very definitely Christian. Of all our great novelists none is more definitely Christian.

Throughout his writings Dickens insists on the fundamental beliefs of Christendom. That God rules and orders the whole universe ; that mankind has an Eternal Father, and a Divine Redeemer and Saviour, His Son—these are facts that Dickens takes for granted in all his books. With all his zest for social reforms Dickens never assumes, after the fashion of certain of our latter-day novelists, that God being absent from the universe it is the business of the writer of popular fiction to order a new heaven and a new earth and prescribe a new religion for the children of men.

Blessed Albertus Magnus was one of those unfortunate saints who get covered up with odd stories like an old castle with ivy. The castle is as solid as the rock on which it is built, but what with the thickness of the ivy and the chattering of the jackdaws that live in it, you hardly get a chance of seeing it or speaking about it sensibly, and it runs the risk of getting forgotten altogether. There was an amazing quantity of such overgrowth and bickering about Blessed Albertus, even in his own lifetime. People even said he was a wizard. As if a Blessed could be a wizard ! They painted a white horse on the side of a tower in the market-place of his native town and said that as a little boy Albert, and Albert alone, could lead that horse about. They made out that he had a magic cup in which he had but to pour wine or water and the sick man who sipped it was cured. They pretended that beside his own cell, in the Convent of Cologne, he had a little room hidden away and full of strange animals and fantastic instruments and uncanny vessels of glass. They said there was a scarlet curtain in one corner of it behind which stood a Talking Figure which could say “Salve ! Salve ! Salve !” and had taken Blessed Albertus thirty years to make. They boasted that the Four Crowned Martyrs, the patron saints of masons, had traced him out the plans of Cologne Cathedral—though all the world knows that it was Gerard of Riel, who travelled in France first and worked in a timber-yard afterwards—to whom the plans of Cologne Cathedral are owing.

In the first number of Blackfriars I promised, with the permission of the Editor, to follow a paper upon “The Author’s Tool” with another on the effect of printing on Letters. We think that we know too well the extent of our debt to Caxton to reflect, as a rule, upon the remoter consequences of the invention of printing. The advantages of a multiplication of manuscripts are obvious. The disadvantages are also worth a moment’s thought. To begin with, the multiplication of anything leads us into the realm of arithmetic, a mystic science, not because certain numbers have a peculiar significance whereby we call three and seven “mystic numbers,” but because the mere multiplication of anything changes its character. For example, a fine house is a fine thing, but a row of similarly designed fine houses is detestable. In repetition itself there seems to be something ominous. This is a fact which everyone knows, and no one can explain. All we can say is that quantity and quality seem to be by nature hostile to each other. Perhaps the advantages and disadvantages of the invention of printing can be summarized fairly in the statement, that printing has made the best books more accessible and multiplied indefinitely the worse. But before we consider whether a general accessibility of the best books is free from disadvantage, and whether the multiplication of bad books is something gained, we must remember that the influence of numbers has been apparent, not only in the increase of books printed, but also in the increase of readers. Multiplication of population soon followed multiplication of books.

To-day when, encouraged by the ostensible causes of and excuses for the Great War, the oppressed of centuries raise their heads, it behoves Catholics to look around and abroad, noting how fare their brethren in various parts of the globe. Troubles in foreign as well as adjacent lands are too often dismissed with the comfortable assurance that “these people are always fighting among themselves.” If enquiry reveals that grave wrongs are perpetrated with impunity, but also that interference entails risk of financial loss in great commercial transactions, the subject is laid aside and attention directed elsewhere. Thus only can be explained the indifference of Christian communities who equip missions for the Far East, to the desperate plight of Christians close at hand struggling for the right to live under the powerful pressure of ever-triumphant Mohammed.

Constantinople is popularly supposed to be the last stronghold of the Turk in Europe. In reality he is ensconced nearer home amid the impregnable fastnesses of Albania, whence he harries the Christians within reach, imposing his will on these fated slaves who still resist the shining lure of the Crescent. Among the recalcitrants are the Miridite, Malissori, and other Catholic tribes who mistakenly took it for granted that Turkey shared the defeat of her allies in the late war, and that they need no longer submit to the rule of Mohammed but could govern themselves on Christian lines.

“All roads lead to Rome,” and all these roads bring tourists and pilgrims. The latter are the more interesting of the two classes although both are very often intermixed. The pilgrim, whether he is a religious pilgrim or an antiquarian one, at least knows what he ought to see, or wants to see, but the tourist merely sees sights that are there, those that come in his way, or are thrust upon him. Hence one gets priceless questions addressed generally to hotel concierges or guides. The writer himself heard an anxious American ask: “I say, can you tell me if there is anything to see in Rome?”

And for this class is there? They come without any interest or knowledge, and wonder what Roman history was all about. Did not (according to the legend) another American drive to Cook’s Tourist Office in the Piazza d’Espagna and demand a guide to show him “all Rome.” “How long are you going to stay?” asked the wily official. “Well, I guess about an hour and a half.” The official said this was insufficient for all Rome, but, as a carriage was on the spot, their guide could give the tourist the opportunity of a hasty visit to St. Peter’s, and to the Coliseum. Having driven off, they stopped at the latter. “Well,” said the American looking up at the ruin, “Which is this?”