Then it is not impossible for us to break in on the dead as still living, and settle for ourselves historic problems that have troubled the specialists : Did Louis XVI die nobly or in cowardly fashion? Was the Church of England, as by law established in the reign of Elizabeth, really considered to be continuous with the older Church that had been certainly continuous in England for a thousand years? Could Charlemagne have written a hymn? Were the Gospellers accurate in their chronology? What did the blessed Master mean in His teaching on the Eucharist or Divorce? Actually to watch and listen and be convinced: is this likely? No one knows. Is it possible ? Certainly, if Einstein’s theory is correct. The historian, alas ! can’t tell whether Einstein’s theory is correct or no.

At seventy-eight Father Fletcher, constrained by the infirmities of age to the retirement of Twyford Abbey, was persuaded to set down his recollections. It was forty years since he and Lister Drummond had started the Guild of Ransom—taking for their models ‘two old orders for the redemption of captives from the Moors, viz., that of Our Lady of Ransom (de Mercede) and that of the Trinitarians, both founded in the thirteenth century. . . .’ For forty years Father Fletcher had been identified with the work of the redemption of England from heresy. It is appropriate that his autobiography should be called the Recollections of a Ransomer ; appropriate, too, that the responsibility for the book, since its author did not live to see it through the press, should be upon two of Father Fletcher’s old friends—Mr. G. Elliot Anstruther (‘one of the best speakers, indoors and out, that the Catholics of this country possess’), and the Rev. William A. Spence. Simplicity, our editors note, and rightly, as the distinctive quality of Father Fletcher’s style; Le style, c'est l’homme même. It is the simplicity of a large-hearted man, a great lover of England and its people, of Ireland, of little children and the poor, that is revealed in these recollections, as it was revealed to all who knew him. Preeminently a man of prayer from boyhood : at sixteen, at his confirmation in the Church of England, ‘prayer and praise became a delight to me, and religion took possession of me and became first, instead of a long way behind.’

‘Mr Whistler is, for all I know to the contrary, an artist who has the suffrages of his brother artists, a great painter in the judgment of those who live by painting, but if he had not followed the example of Mr. Oscar Wilde his name would be comparatively unknown. He had the wit to see that genius must in these days wear the crown of eccentricity. . . . He developed a little group of characteristics which pleased the fancy and impressed themselves on the memory of society. First, he cultivated a lock of hair sprouting from amidst his tresses and fashioned after the model of a feather. Next, he substituted for a walking-stick a staff .... exaggerating his American twang [he] invented a species of Yankee dialect hitherto unknown. In this he made it his business to utter grotesque antithetical incoherences, and to ramble on in a maundering monotone from theme to theme. Some clever things he contrived to say, for he is undoubtedly an exceedingly clever man. Concurrently with this he imported a novel mode of painting.

‘The critics were divided in their opinion. Some said it was genius, others said he was a daub. Society (being already prejudiced in favour of the man) now welcomed the artist, and saw in everything which came at long intervals from his studio the transcendent gifts of a great original. . . . From the artist he rose to the oracle. Having induced many gay and lively persons in London society to believe that he was the sole painter of the period who had the slightest notion of the rudiments of art, it occurred to him that he might as well explain from a public platform what these were.

From time to time Educational Authorities have set up Committees whose members have individually and collectively advocated a liberal school syllabus to produce a definite and desirable result: but it is often convenient to invite and publish criticism; one can go one’s own way afterwards without disturbance. Education may have two aims : either it can endeavour to produce good citizens; or it can turn out a product malleable to the industrial tools. The first course is called ‘liberal education’ ; the second is simply called ‘education,’ and it is the mode generally employed in modern schools.

The Charlotte Mason and the P.N.E.U. schemes are still in experimental stages, and are for the most part confined to elementary and progressive preparatory schools. There are other schemes of an unorthodox nature which receive less and less attention as time goes on. It is true that ideas promulgated by these systems are adopted in many secondary schools, but in the main they are included for purposes of variety or as links between two grades of teaching.

In a preceding paper, we were concerned to show firstly what was the real mind of the theologian, Bellarmine, concerning the theories and teaching of his confreres, Lessius and Molina; and, secondly, how his own treatise called Controversies came to be altered and mutilated in order to be brought in line to some extent with the new theories. In the following pages, which are concerned with some of the moves in the heated debate between Molinism and the traditional Thomism, it is necessary to bring into light certain activities of Bellarmine, when the theological consensus in Rome was becoming more and more convinced of the necessity for passing condemnation upon the dangerous ideas then being promulgated. The account will largely serve to reveal the zeal of obedience which Blessed Robert Bellarmine gave to his superiors, and the extent of his efforts to shield the good name of his fellow religious from public condemnation.

After the third examination of Molina’s Concordia by the commission appointed by the Holy See, approximately sixty different passages taken from that work, were reduced to twenty, in which the whole of the doctrine condemned as heretical, erroneous, temerarious, and dangerous, was compendiously gathered together. It is said by Fr. Brodrick (vol. ii, p. 55) that as the examinations of the Concordia increased in number, so the numbers of propositions condemned decreased;