The past year has been one of intense anxiety for the Catholics of France, and although, after steering a bold course through great dangers, they can for the moment regard the situation with much more confidence than was possible even three months ago, it is too soon to say that their trials or their dangers are yet at an end. Their leaders have at any rate shown themselves capable of making the utmost use of their tactical advantages, which have given them, in the present time of national crisis, a strength out of all proportion to their numbers in relation to the rest of F ranee. And so long as the present critical conditions continue, the Catholics, as a powerfully organized and coherent minority, will be able to exert constant pressure on any Government which contemplates a policy of internal discord.

Yet less than six months ago M. Herriot was still in power, fulminating against the usurpations of the ‘clerical reaction’ during the years of the war and threatening to carry out a whole programme of anti-Catholic legislation. He had already decreed the abolition of the Vatican Embassy. His Minister for the Interior had carried out a thorough investigation all over France to discover how many members of the proscribed religious communities had come back to France, with a view to expelling them once more. His Education Minister was delivering violent tirades against the Jesuits and the other teaching orders, and was preparing a complete scheme for re-establishing a State monopoly of education all over the country.

‘Expositio fidelis de morte D. Thomae Mori et quorundam aliorum insignium virorum in Anglia Anno mdxxxv.’

This small Latin book, printed in Paris during the very month following their deaths, is interesting from the fact, besides other points, that it is the most contemporary account at any length which we possess of the death of the victims of Henry’s cruelty. It is not exactly a rare book, but is certainly not a popular one, and in any case the story which it gives is worth making more widely known.

The author shows a considerable local knowledge of London, as well as being fairly acquainted with the English judicial system, English titles, habits and so forth. We will leave the question of the authorship of this and one or two related accounts until the end of this paper.

After the usual introduction the author goes on : ‘You will receive, therefore, my dearest Sir, from your far from cheerful friend an account of the death of certain very eminent Englishmen, but especially that of Thomas More, who was during his life a famous baron and supreme judge of the kingdom whom those people call the Chancellor.

Voltaire (or was it Lord Chesterfield?) once declared that human beings should be divided into three classes, ‘Men, Women and Herveys’; while Dr. Johnson was wont to say, ‘Call a dog Hervey, and I shall love him.’ These two celebrated utterances aptly hit off the characteristics of a brilliant family intimately associated with English history and literature. For the Herveys were almost all of them eccentric to a degree, and yet at the same time possessed of a superlative charm.

John, Lord Hervey of Ickworth, the friend of Queen Caroline of Anspach, and the writer of those invaluable memoirs on which every historian of the reign of George II to-day so greatly relies, had for his third son a remarkable being who figures largely in not only the England but the Europe of the eighteenth century. Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, the ‘mitred Proteus’ of Horace Walpole, the ‘wicked prelate’ of George III, the ‘episcopal patriot’ of Northern Ireland, the ‘modern Maecenas’ of artists and sculptors, and the ‘man plenteous in good works’ of John Wesley, if he left no mark on his age as author or statesman or courtier, was a cosmopolitan personage whom we meet with in every memoir, diary, newspaper, and letter of his time, and whose memory as a wealthy epicurean, open-handed globe-trotter is still kept alive by the inevitable ‘Hotel Bristol’ found in every continental town. The foreigner’s fixed and traditional idea of the rich, mad, restless English ‘milord’ can be largely traced in its origin to him.

It has been reserved for our own age—the age of wireless telegraphy, of ships like floating towns, of monopoly, of millionaires and of mammoth beauty-choruses, the age in which four out of every five get it and in which no man may afford the handicap of unattractive teeth—it has been reserved, I say, for this age of ours to produce a heresy which eclipses all heresies.

We have seen the savage Puritanism of the Commonwealth, when men denied that the worship and service of God could be other than things of gloom and horror. We have seen the cold, dispassionate rationalism of the age of Voltaire, when faith was contemptuously dismissed as mere superstition and when the continued presence of Our Lord upon earth was spurned as a childish fable. We have seen a revival of Manichaeism, though nowadays they call it Christian Science. A new Puritanism has initiated and directed the Prohibition movement in America; and has made it illegal to sell cigarettes in the state of Kansas and elsewhere. We have seen, at one time or another, every article of the Christian Faith denied by men who called themselves Christians. We have seen God’s Vicar on Earth locked up like a dangerous criminal, ridiculed, insulted and despised. And now the crowning horror is upon us; I have seen it blatant and unashamed in America, though I believe it has not yet crossed the Atlantic. But it will come. For it has behind it the power of American finance.

Few things are more nauseating nowadays than all the modern cant about the Ideals of Big Business, Efficient Salesmanship, Truth in Advertising and all the rest of the nonsense.

The growing revolt against British supremacy, political and commercial, among oriental peoples from Egypt to China is causing grave disquietude and anxiety to many people in this country while it rejoices our enemies. To some of us, however, things are not so black as they seem, notwithstanding the fact that a certain knowledge of the East makes us fully conscious of the grave implications of this revolt. We believe that there is a silver lining even to this dark cloud; unless we are greatly mistaken, England is going to gain much more than certain citizens of England (by no means all Englishmen) are going to lose on account of this movement in Egypt, India and China. England stands to win by the success of this movement. Let us not be fooled by the outcry against the supposed Bolshevist instigators of the revolt: it is only injuring our own interests. The Bolshevists are delighted to see themselves saddled with the blame and thus thrown into the arms of these people who consider themselves oppressed. But the revolt is not due to Bolshevist inspiration : it is far too noble in its principles for that, as we shall try to show. It is an endeavour on the part of these oriental peoples to prevent their own civilisation from being swamped by Western civilisation at its worst, namely, commercial industrialism.

It is often asked why the Catholic Church, for some centuries past, has apparently ceased to be the Mother of Poets—why, in Francis Thompson’s phrase, whilst retaining the palm of Sanctity, she has foregone the laurel of Song? The fact is scarcely in dispute : one could easily count upon the fingers of a hand the outstanding Catholic poets of the last three hundred years. All the greatest names are either pagan or heretic. Is there an explanation of this lamenable condition? For it was not always so. Time was when the courts of the Temple outsang the groves of Parnassus, and all the sons of God made joyful melody like birds in the woods of a spring morning.

‘Poetry,’ says Thompson, ‘sinned, Poetry fell: and instead of reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her forth from the door, to follow the feet of her pagan seducer.’ This is true : Poetry became the instrument of evil—the very lovely and effective instrument of a worldly and sensuous philosophy. She lost her good name, and her very beauty only made her the more an object of suspicion.

But how came it that poetry fell from grace? The Protestant Reformation has been rightly blamed for many evils: it must take the blame for this too. Previously, Christendom had been one—not only in faith, but in life also, and in genius. The same warm, vital stream flowed freely through every part of her. But, in an evil hour, the poison of heresy got into that life-stream, causing atrophy here, paralysis there, and everywhere inducing fever and delirium.