The author of this work, The Facts of Lourdes, has held his position since 1917, and had previously worked at Lourdes under Dr. Boissarie. The book is one of intense interest not only to Catholics, but to those of all creeds, because no one could get up from reading it without being certain that cures of a kind outside the ordinary laws of cure do take place at Lourdes.

The object of the book is, however, to show the general public what is the work of the medical bureau, and to demonstrate that the blind acceptance of all ‘cures’ as miraculous is very far from the truth, and that a very thorough investigation of all those who claim to be cured is made by expert physicians and surgeons of all nationalities and creeds.

The Bureau is hampered in its work by at least two things, one of which it should be at once the care of medical men sending cases to Lourdes to remove, viz. insufficient certification. Doctors will send cases with the bare statement that the patient is ‘very ill,’ has ‘agraphia,’ ‘constant cough.’ On many a page Dr. Marchand implores doctors to co-operate with him and send full reports, with laboratory reports and X-ray photographs where necessary. The object of the Bureau is not to add haphazard to the list of miracles, but to investigate and demonstrate inexplicable cures. The second difficulty is of course much greater, because it arises from the attitude of mind of the patients themselves.

Spain presents a very interesting problem to the foreign observer, and especially to the English observer. The problem lies in the discovery of what factors have produced a result apparently at issue with itself; a result containing an apparent contradiction. The reason this problem is of special interest to Englishmen, is that many of the factors at work are those which have applied to England in the past or are beginning now to apply to her.

Let us sum up the main characteristics of the position :

(1) Spain was the product of an amalgamation between several distinct provinces, one of which, Catalonia, is still more or less hostile to the rest. Spain so amalgamated conquered, colonised and completely transformed in her own image a large tract of the earth’s surface, to wit, all South and Central America with the exception of the Amazon Basin, and spread her language and institutions over the earth.

(2) Spain, while so acting, became the undisputed mistress of the seas and planted her influence by sea throughout the world; Spanish architecture, language and even cooking are to be found in the depths of the Pacific and on the islands of the Atlantic, as well as upon the mainland of South America.

(3) At the same time the Spaniards were so powerful by land that they controlled a great part of the Mediterranean countries, furnished the best infantry for the German dominions (at one time united with their throne), fought magnificently with a handful of men a losing battle, half a lifetime long, in Holland, and were in general by far the first military power of their time.

The result of the French general elections has been to overthrow not only M. Poincare, who had the goodwill of the great Catholic soldiers like Foch and Castelnau and Gouraud and Mangin, but also M. Millerand, who has been particularly connected with the restoration of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. They are now replaced by a group of politicians who have been regarded by those Catholic generals, and by most French nationalists, as their determined and dangerous enemies. These new leaders of France have, moreover, stated quite clearly in their public manifestoes that the immediate rupture of diplomatic relations with the Catholic Church is one of the principal planks in their programme. Their attitude in this respect is all the more disquieting because a rupture with the Vatican is almost the only part of their policy which they can bring into operation at once without fresh legislation. Their record in regard to the Vatican is, moreover, consistent and logical, and they have demanded so often in recent years that diplomatic relations with the Pope should be broken off that they cannot be expected to forget their previous declarations on the subject. It is, unfortunately, a question upon which they also feel very strongly, just as the Labour Party here felt strongly on the question of recognising the Bolsheviks; so that the rupture with the Vatican would seem likely to be their first public action, just as the recognition of Moscow was the first action of the British Labour Government.

The first night of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, Saint Joan, at the New Theatre in London was an event of consequence not only in society circles, but in artistic circles as well. Not for many years had Mr. Shaw produced a new play in London. Since his last, the war had fallen, altering in varied ways his audience, altering no less Mr. Shaw himself. How would its effects be seen in his attitude to Saint Joan? Of course he would remain Shavian, but how? Would he approve or disapprove? At what angle would he cut across popular conceptions and show the world upside down?

The skill and artistry, the imagination and fine historical and dramatic sense of Mr. Charles Ricketts had been invoked to give due and proper setting to this Chronicle Play. Playgoers were enchanted with the result. To some the feast of colour and design, the humour and imagination shown in it, the delicacy, the effectiveness of scenery and dress, were the most impressive and haunting part of the performance. We cannot touch on these, however; we must leave their praise to those who have been happy enough to have seen them.

Writing some months ago in this review on the probable attitude of the new French Government towards the Catholic Church, I ventured to anticipate that the first action of the new government would be to declare its hostility to the Church at the outset by undertaking to abolish the recently re-established Embassy at the Vatican. The Embassy has not yet been withdrawn, but the new Government in fact lost no time in announcing its intention of abolishing it. Only the unexpected strength of the resistance by the Catholic forces in the Chambre des Députés, and the critical situation created by the London Conference, have prevented the Government from pressing its attack to a successful issue. The Government has found itself confronted with a problem which it had not sufficiently appreciated in advance, through the resolute determination of the Catholic populations of Alsace and Lorraine to maintain the immunity from anti-clerical innovations which has been accorded to them since the lost provinces were restored after the defeat of Germany in the war.

It is not only the Catholics of Alsace and Lorraine who are in revolt against the threat to bring them under the anti-clerical regime from which they have been spared under German rule. The Jews and the Protestants have joined forces with them in a vigorous and organised protest against interference. Not many weeks ago the Protestant organisations of Alsace simultaneously published in all their religious periodicals the following protest:

Captain Francis McCullagh, author of an interesting book, A Prisoner with the Reds, has just given us another, The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity It is a sincere book which will provide some future historian of Bolshevism with invaluable material. For the last six years a thick veil has hidden Russia from the eyes of the outward world, a veil behind which it was known that unspeakable outrages were committed. Captain McCullagh lifts this veil for us, at least so far as the Churches are concerned, his book dealing exclusively with the Communist persecution of Christianity, which can only be compared to the persecutions in the first centuries of the Christian era. Previous visits to Russia, knowledge of the people and their language have given the author a great advantage over those numerous excursionists to that unhappy country, whose ‘tours’ had been so skilfully organised that they saw only what their hosts intended them to see and brought home glowing accounts of the Marxian Eden. The Methodist Bishop, whose participation in the Congress of the Red Church Captain McCullagh describes, is an example of such innocent dupes.

It is to be regretted that the author has not moderated some of his judgments, and he is particularly severe when speaking of the Russian Church. It is too early to bring in a final verdict against this Church or her Patriarch. Many believe that the latter’s surrender was due not to cowardice, but to the desire of saving the Church; it is even thought that events have justified his policy and that the old Church is strengthening whilst the Red Church is on the wane.

On every wrapper of every volume, Everyman’s Library engages itself to supply its readers, for a few pounds, with a whole bookshelf of the immortals; and for a comparatively small expenditure to make a man intellectually rich for life. This promise is strangely fulfilled in two of its latest volumes—752 and 753. They are thus described on the title-page :

They are immortal in the same sense that a mutilated mummy is immortal. They will make their readers intellectually rich for life by obliging them to incur the comparatively small expenditure necessary for the purchase of James Gairdner’s edition of the Paston Letters. For there alone, and not here at all, can the average reader hope to form any adequate notion of what the Paston Letters are, and what is their title to immortal fame.

At first sight it appears that, except for a quotation from the Catalogue of the British Museum, Mrs. Archer-Hind ignores James Gairdner and his work altogether. But on closer inspection this proves to be too charitable a supposition. Mrs. Archer-Hind has used Gairdner’s work, but she has misread it superficially and clumsily, and ineptly travestied it.

In this year of Byron’s centenary, Leigh Hunt’s name inevitably recurs. His relations with Byron are told and re-told, and ‘the common weakness of throwing the principal character into a high light by darkening the shadows around those who surrounded him’ at times relegates Hunt to the outer darkness. He is ‘sly and venomous’ according to one critic, who on Byron himself is admirable. It is not, however, our intention to discuss the Byron-Hunt episode. A severance of friendship is always a tragedy. And an attempt to justify the one at the expense of the other is only to accentuate the tragic note. We can afford to forget that they ever ceased to be friends. We may leave Byron in his ‘high light,’ but we would fain dissipate somewhat the shadows that surround Leigh Hunt’s name, not by putting forward a reasoned defence of the man and his actions, but by recalling one of his Essays wherein he describes his discovery of a Saint. The genuine appreciation of goodness and virtue which the Essay exhibits may help us to see him in his true light—to see him, perhaps, as Shelley saw him :

The essay is to be found in The Seer; or, Commonplaces Refreshed, a collection of Hunt’s Essays published in 1841.

It is not superfluous to praise the divine gifts much and often. Certain weapons, the sledge and its derivatives, among which the wheel with its derivatives, are given man together with his environment, a true revelation by the Beneficent. At a chosen moment, as a civilization unfolds, man is allowed to economize his powers, to increase and multiply those things which, rightly used, lead him through rational to the uncreated Beauty. The moment is that of mechanical invention.

This new thing—I call it new with necessary reservations—is so familiar that only the observant detect it. To the many, turning on the tap or the electric light, travelling by the railway, are underivedly natural processes; the postage stamp hardly differs from a leaf.

Yet, blind and deaf men, think of a bridge, a beautiful concrete bridge, and the white ribbon crossing it in long and splendid curves, marvellously engineered; and the exquisite vehicles speeding upon it, so fair and swift, so strong in their sweetness, that they have to brake down at villages. 10 MPH brings tears to the eyes. What seems to be a word ‘yomph’ means ten miles an hour. There is exultation in the word if it is remembered what blows rained on the buttocks of the war prisoner marching to Shusan the Palace before the driver got two miles an hour out of him. You read at the foot of hills : ‘Loosen the hame rein,’ ‘Give him his head.’ I have never read, ‘For God’s sake carry her bundle or her baby.’

The ‘Faith that seeketh understanding’ is so laudably active at the present time that we offer our readers the following positive and summary statement on one of the most vital and discussed problems of our day.

‘Quia et Christus passus est pro nobis relinquens nobis exemplum ut sequamini vestigia Ejus . . . Eratis enim sicut oves errantes, sed conversi estis nunc ad pastorem et episcopum animarum vestrarum’ (I Pet. ii, 21, 25).

Because Christ also died for us leaving you an example that you should follow His steps ... For you were as sheep going astray; but you are now converted to the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.

‘Credo in unum Deum. Patrem Omnipotentem . . . Et in unum Dominum Jesus Christum. Filium Dei Unigenitum . . . Qui propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis . . .

. . . Et homo factus est . . .

. . . Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est’ (Symb. Nic.).

‘Since under the former Testament—for such is the witness of the Apostle Paul—by reason of the weakness of the Levitical priesthood there was not perfection, the Father of Mercies so ordained that another Priest should arise, our Lord Jesus Christ, who should be able to consummate and lead to perfection them that are to be sanctified’ (Cone. Trid., Sess. xxii: de Sacrificio Missae : c. 1).

[While the name and the story—a spiritual romance—of Blessed Edmund Campion are known to all, we are probably less familiar with the name of his contemporary and friend at Oxford, Gregory Martin, one of the notable scholars of the day, who spoke the word that under God converted Edmund Campion.

Martin, after giving brilliant promise in his studies, left Oxford in 1569 to accept the post of tutor to the sons of the Duke of Norfolk, but resigned it in the following year when the duke’s household were ordered to conform outwardly to the new religion.

Before leaving England to practise his religion unmolested in Flanders, he made his appeal to his friend Campion, entreating him to abandon the idea of a merely worldly career, to choose the better part, and to accompany him into poverty. The pleading prevailed, in that as we know, Campion turned his back on Oxford and entered the Society of Jesus.

Martin went to Douay, there presided over by Dr. Allen and was ordained Priest in 1573. He then went to Rome to take part in the foundation of the English College—but in 1578 was recalled to Rheims. There his great work was the translation of the Bible from the Vulgate into English, the version which came to be known as the Rheims Version. Martin died at Rheims, 1582. His death was a blow to Dr. Allen and the College; for he was not only a fervent Catholic, but a ripe scholar, and one with the intellectual modesty that characterises the true scholar—one of Oxford’s most distinguished sons.

As Père de la Taille has honoured me by giving in the American Ecclesiastical Review (July) an answer to my criticism of his theory of the Last Supper and the Mass, readers of Blackfriars may be interested in knowing what may be said in reply.

In Blackfriars of September, 1923, I ventured to cull the following passages from Père de la Taille’s now famous book, Mysterium Fidei. These passages shall be given in English :

(1) The Last Supper and the Cross are complementary. At the Last Supper was begun that sacrifice which was to be consummated on the Cross.

(2) The reality of the Immolation is found in the suffering of the Death. But in the symbolical immolation of the Last Supper is especially shown the quality of the liturgical oblation.

(3) Hence the sacrifice of redemption on the Cross and at the Supper was one.

Nor must it be reckoned a preliminary sacrifice at the Supper; and another subsequent on the Cross.

But in the Supper room there was made the unbloody Oblation of the Bloody Immolation to be made on Calvary.

It is the first decisive victory of Life over Death. In the truceless war between these two—living Spirit and dead Matter—we read the whole story of Creation. Many victories had been claimed for the spirit before the Resurrection of Christ, but none that was not indecisive and incomplete: half-victories, all of them, and after each the enemy succeeded in consolidating his advantage, through the very new types which Death created and in which Life seemed to triumph. What a triumph for life it seemed when, amidst the inert mass of inorganic matter, myriads of living things began to stir and swarm—the rudimentary forms of the vegetable and the animal world ! The spirit of life had made the dead elements its own, had used them as material for types of its own creating, had pressed the mechanical into the service of the organic process. What a wealth of types, countless yet continually multiplying! How subtle, how bold, how carefully adapted were its works, from the infinitesimal zoophytes to the gigantic flora and fauna of the tropics. But Death only laughed at all this splendour: Death is a realist, not to be hoodwinked by beautiful images and symbols, not to be deterred by premonitions and presentiments. Death knows that the beauty of nature is only a glittering pall, hiding a corpse that is for ever falling into decay.

It is not a little curious that, with the exception of a chapter in one of Lafcadio Hearn’s most delightful books, nothing seems to have been written in English about Père Labat. Although one of the greatest of the old travellers, and often quoted or alluded to, we never recollect meeting with one single article concerning him in any other book or periodical: and of our encyclopaedias and biographical dictionaries, very few notice him or his labours. However, out of his own interesting and voluminous works, and with the help of some French books of reference, it is not difficult to reconstruct his life. Perhaps the fullest of all accounts of him is that given by Dr. Rufz, the historian of the Island of Martinique.

Jean Baptiste Labat was born in Paris in the year 1663. When nineteen, he received the Dominican habit in the Convent of the Annunciation in the Rue S. Honoré. The succeeding eleven years, he spent partly in Paris, partly in Provence, where he preached a little, and taught philosophy and mathematics at Nancy. He had already felt attracted towards the foreign missions of the Order, when one day he read a Letter from the Dominican Superiors in the French West Indies, appealing for volunteers, the greater part of their missionaries having recently fallen victims to the yellow fever. His mind was quickly made up, he sent in his name, obtained the necessary permissions, and betook himself to La Rochelle to await the sailing of a ship for Martinique, and to furnish himself with passports, credentials, books, outfit, and mathematical instruments.

The little church of St. Peter the Apostle at Edinburgh, which has been so richly blessed in many ways, has lately been adorned with two windows, the work of Morris and Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams. These windows dazzle not only the eye, but the understanding; for it is difficult to believe what is here so evident, that modern artists have vindicated skill and courage even in competition with the great glass which is among the highest achievements of man. Mr. Meredith Williams has been good enough to put his signature to some remarks on the early glass which he and his gifted wife have specially and deeply studied, and the hopes there are of emulating what has been done in the past.

The windows are small, namely, seven feet or so in height. They are situated in the Chapel of the Madonna and back the north. The chapel has the choir chamber above it, and is separated from the church by an arcade of two arches opposite the windows. If this description is clear, it is evident that the jewel lights have an unparalleled position; and that ‘the eyes of a panther in the dark’ are severely outclassed by them.

From August 4th to August 9th, the annual meeting of the Summer School of Catholic Studies at Cambridge took place. Each year this Cambridge Summer School has devoted itself to a particular subject, which it has set itself to study and explain. Previously the Religion of the Scriptures, the Eucharist, the Papacy, had been so treated; this year, in accordance with the desires of the Pope, expressed in his encyclical Studiorum Ducem, the principle matter discussed was St. Thomas Aquinas, his Life, Times and Teaching.

The solemn opening of the School was made in the impressive Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs with a sermon by Father Martindale, S.J. In an interesting way Fr. Martindale examined the break-up of thought and life that had taken place since the sixteenth century, its dissociation of part with part, in matters intellectual and spiritual, in culture, and, especially, in the principles of action. Saved as Catholics were from spiritual and doctrinal separation, they yet remained caught in the cleavage of politics and culture, and severed therefore in large measure through Protestant and over-nationalised party narrowness from proper contact with each other. To bridge this gulf betwixt nations, sciences, and religious groups was the ideal and hope of many; but it could be effected only by a common possession of principles, and these in turn must depend upon a common philosophical basis and a common faith. Both philosophy and faith sprang from the teaching of Christ. The statement of this teaching by the Early Church Fathers held Christendom together for two hundred years, by St. Augustine for another eight hundred, by St. Thomas from the thirteenth century till the Reformation.

In early non-Catholic days one of the men to whom I gave a boy’s devotion was George MacDonald, poet, novelist, preacher, the centenary of whose birth falls to be observed this year. Occasionally he was a guest at our house; at other times I heard him lecture in different parts of London or met him in the home of a neighbour whom he sometimes visited. His books were devoured with the uncritical voracity of the youthful hero-worshipper. It was with special interest, therefore, that I turned to the biography which his son has just published.

Mr. Chesterton, in the introduction which he supplies, contrasts George MacDonald with Carlyle. The latter, he says, never lost the Puritan mood even when he lost the whole of the Puritan theology. So far, however, in Mr. Chesterton’s estimation, did MacDonald escape the Calvinism of his early surroundings that he says of him ‘in his particular type of literary work he did indeed realise the apparent paradox of a St. Francis of Aberdeen, seeing the same sort of halo round every flower and bird. It is not the same thing (he continues) as any poet’s appreciation of the beauty of the flower or bird. A heathen can feel that and remain a heathen, or in other words, remain sad. It is a certain special sense of significance, which the tradition that most values it calls sacramental. To have got back to it or forward to it, at one bound of boyhood, out of the black Sabbath of a Calvinist town, was a miracle of imagination.’

The old, far-fetched notion of religion, which commended itself for so long to the rude intelligence of our ancestors, has fortunately given way, in our own time, to a more reasonable understanding of it. We find it difficult to think ourselves back into that complexion of mind, which conceived of religious truth as a body of philosophical statements and alleged historical facts; as, that grace was or was not indefectible, that it was Paul and not another who wrote to the Ephesians, and the like. Had such facts been demonstrable, is it not certain that in so many centuries of earnest controversy the common judgment of mankind must have resolved the question with ‘aye’ or ‘no’ long before this? And could it be credibly maintained that it might be a man’s duty to resign his benefice, forgo the comradeship of his friends, and find himself a new way of living, merely because he had revised his notions about certain doctrinal points, without abating anything of his general zeal for righteousness? The wonder is, assuredly, not that we should have come to think otherwise, but that so defective an apprehension of religious truth should have so long dominated the superstitious fancy of human kind.

In these latter days, men of emancipated intelligence have set before us a view of the whole question better accommodated to the enlightenment of our times. We are now assured that religion is nothing more or less than an attitude of the mind, or rather not of the mind only but of the whole being, towards it matters not what.

The present writer’s earliest recollections are of an old-fashioned square of solid, red-brick, Georgian houses, all long since ‘improved’ off the face of the earth. From the windows of his home, he could see on the front of an adjoining dwelling a stone tablet which bore the legend :

This Edmund Hector was a Lichfield man who practised in Birmingham as a surgeon from about the year 1731, and whose praises in graceful Latinity may yet be read on a monument in the church of St. Philip in that city. His sister was Dr. Johnson’s first love; Boswell saw her fifty years later,’ a clergyman’s widow, advanced in age, a genteel woman, very agreeable and well-bred.’ Hector had been the Doctor’s school-mate in the early Lichfield days, and almost all we know of that period of Johnson’s life we learn from the good surgeon’s reminiscences. He it is who has told us of Johnson’s predominance over the other boys, the submission and deference with which they treated him, how he would help his favourites in their lessons, how he seemed to learn by intuition, how he never forgot anything he either heard or read.