It has been the fate of a long line of patriotic young Irishmen since the days of the Act of Union to be cut short in the best promise of their youth; snatched away dramatically and suddenly in a crisis, they have left a memory which has, in all probability, been more cherished than if they had lived to a more mature age. Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, have through generations been the romantic figures of modern Irish history. It is impossible to think of them otherwise than as young men who had already done their work, in the service of the country to which they had devoted every fibre of their young strength. Thomas Davis, a generation later, is still remembered as the chief figure in the Young Ireland movement, while his abler colleague, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, is half forgotten. Anticlimax has overtaken all the older leaders of the Irish people with a depth of personal tragedy which is scarcely paralleled in other countries. In Ireland, so long as the struggle for self-government was carried on, there could be no easy retirement nor honours for old age. Daniel O’Connell, Isaac Butt, Parnell, John Redmond, each in his turn, was practically hounded out of public life. Only those who died young have left an untarnished memory.

And no generation of young men in all Irish history has been decimated to the same extent as that of Kevin O’Higgins. I was at school with him at Clon-gowes; and looking back now at the list of those who seemed most full of promise among his contemporaries to within ten years or so, one stands aghast at the devastating record of their mortality.

It is seldom that so good a book is given so good an Introduction as the Rev. Spencer Jones gives to the book of the Rev. S. H .Scott. We have rarely read a statement which made a greater appeal to be quoted in full. But we can quote only the following :

’ After all, we shall find no sanction in Scripture for contradictory communions of Christians; nor at any time in its history does the Christian community appear without a prominent visible personage at the centre, in the Person of the Man Christ at the outset, of St. Peter, afterwards of the Pope; while it is into this community, not into the Church of England as such, that we are all baptised, and to which our profession expressly pledges us.

‘Now, as the great Tractarian leaders came to see this, and to appreciate the significance of the Anglican appeal to antiquity and particularly to the four first Councils, an appeal to which all parties alike are pledged and committed, they came to see also that the Catholic revival was resolving itself gradually and inevitably, not only into a counter-reformation movement, but also into a movement towards Rome; and that if “Rome” was not always meant by the mover, “Rome” was certainly what the movement itself always meant’ (pp. 8, 9).

Something was said, in the last number of Blackfriars, about the modern liturgical movement and about a German centre of that movement, the Abbey of Maria Laach. It was hinted also in that article that behind the movement, especially in Germany, there lay a definite theory, or body of theory, regarding Catholic worship and devotion. The movement in Germany is in fact especially characterised by its insistence on the doctrinal foundations as distinguished from antiquarian or aesthetical considerations. It is essentially theological in its nature, bases its appeal upon doctrine, and asks for a full realisation of the implications of the official Christian liturgy. In the present article some attempt will be made to expound the criticism which this militant movement would pass upon our present practice, and to set forth the claims which it makes for the liturgy. We shall not attempt to set the matter out in full, but endeavour only to give a few of the main ideas which lie behind the liturgical attack.

Abbot Herwegen is of the opinion that there has been nothing short of a revolution in our devotional attitude as compared with the devotional attitude of the early Church. On the one hand, he argues, we have an objective, sacramental and social worship; on the other, a highly subjective, personal and individualistic effort. He conceives it to be the main work of the ‘liturgical apostolate’ to reform this state of affairs and to infuse into our present-day religion some measure of the ancient spirit. And he believes that the instrument of such a reform lies ready to our hands, is in fact nothing else than our current and official liturgy.

Of old, the name of Jones of Nayland was an honoured and familiar one, and the twelve volumes of his collected works found a place in the library of every self-respecting clergyman. To-day his is a quite forgotten personality, while as to his writings, the strain of false philosophy which runs through most of them would of itself be enough to warn off the ordinary reader.

When Sir Isaac Newton first propounded the theory of gravitation, it appeared to many religious-minded persons to contain within itself the seeds of atheism. Their alarm was eventually voiced by John Hutchinson (1674—1737), in his Moses’ Principia, in which was built up an opposing system of philosophy based on that inner significance which Hutchinson professed to discover in the sacred scriptures. Our modern books of reference decline altogether to make for us any analysis of Hutchinsonianism, and brush it aside as a worthless and exploded fallacy, utterly inconsistent with the received principles of physics. Yet, crude and wrong-headed as it may have been, in its day it exercised a powerful influence, and made many disciples. Of these the most conspicuous was Jones of Nayland.

The great lines of the Alps, and their sweet perfumes and haunting voices, reach the mind through the senses, and the mind in its impotence deals with them in a succession of images. Mont Blanc is a tidal wave that never falls, the crash for ever imminent above the valley; you watch it and feel that the very next moment it will surge forward and curl over in a dreadful arc and drop down upon the villages beneath in a glory and confusion of snow-white foam shot with innumerable rainbows. The Dents de Midi rears his great heads against the sky, a diabolic Trinity with his three dreadful faces staring over into Savoy. But he is a giant who has his mood of repentance for whatever stony sins have so scarred his forehead. From the top of the Col de Chesèrie in July, as you come up the final slope, there he is, quite suddenly, almost leaning over you, iron-grey and terrible, his granite faces streaked with tears of melting snow. From down on the shore of the lake of Geneva the Spring climbs the slope with difficulty : first the cherry-blossom : then the sharp green of the lower beechwoods, and higher up browny-green beech-woods half in bud, and, above them, brown woods where the winter still holds its own. The blending bands of colour mount upwards to the old dark green of the pines, to the stony crags, to the snow. It looks as if the light-foot Spring will never conquer up there.

In the general hunt for centenaries, which is surely one of the fashions of the day, it may seem somewhat trivial to claim to be the first in the field in announcing the discovery of a centenary that no one else, to my knowledge, has so far noticed, or at any rate taken the trouble to put on record. By a happy chance, when reading the Life of Père Marie-Theodore Ratisbonne, I noticed that the Venerable Father had received the sacrament of baptism in the year 1827, on September the 12th, the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary. It was actually only ‘the supplying of the ceremonies’ that took place on this day, because Theodore Ratisbonne had, by virtue of an unusual dispensation granted by the Bishop of Strasbourg, been privately baptised in the previous April, on Holy Saturday, by Mademoiselle Humann, the wonderful woman whom others besides Ratisbonne could claim as the human instrument God had used to work their conversion.

Now the fact that the son of a wealthy Jew was baptised in Strasbourg in 1827 may seem at first sight scarcely a matter for comment a hundred years afterwards. Yet actually that one act, seen in its multiplied effects, must undoubtedly strike us as having been the beginning of a movement, certainly as extensive in its range and influence as that associated with the name of Newman. The baptism of 1827 was followed fourteen years later by the still more remarkable and romantic conversion of Ratisbonne’s younger brother Alphonse.