Among those people who are conscious of and annoyed by the complete badness manifest in the building and decoration, in use in the Catholic Church in our days, there are very few who regard the matter as anything more than a superficial defect that can be, with care, remedied. There are few who realise the essentially malignant and even mortal nature of the infection that so ails us.

Most of these people speak with varying degrees of confidence about ways and means of ‘improving the taste of the Faithful,’ of educating people up to this or that notion. Again, others propose the copying on a vast scale the works of certain respectable and accredited masters of the past centuries, thereby improving the ‘outward appearance’ of churches and images. By this manoeuvre they hope to get the unsuspecting worshipper used to the form and comeliness of the Italian primitives and other work of men who lived in more civilized periods than our own— so leading them on until, after a very few years of this aesthetic welfare-work, the most suburban Catholic will revile the pink and white Madonnas as supplied by the ‘church-furniture shop’ and have nothing less than exact reproductions of Giotto or sixth century Byzantine.

Whatever may be said for these sincere attempts of pious people, the root of the matter is left untouched ; it is not even approached. The issue is usually confused by a notion of ‘giving the best to God.’ I say confused because it creates in the mind the notion that there can be constructed a kind of scale of beauty,

Fratres Minores sicut et nostri caritative et hilariter recipiantur, et secundum facultatem domus pie et honeste procurentur. (Constitutiones Ordinis Praedicatorum).

Let the Friars Minor be lovingly and cheerfully welcomed as our own brethren, and let them be worshipfully and fittingly entertained according to the means of the house.

The love which St. Francis and St. Dominic bore each other has become a lasting tradition and example among their children. The rule of special charity towards the Minors was one of the last legacies of St. Dominic to his Preachers; it is to be found in the Constitutions drawn up by him and approved by the General Chapter held at Bologna in 1221 a short time before the Saint’s death. At the same Chapter was decreed the foundation of the English Dominican Province, and straightway St. Dominic carried it into effect by sending from his side fit friars for the undertaking. Filled with the holy Founder’s own spirit they arrived in England in August, 1221, and were already settled in London and Oxford when in 1224 the Blessed Agnellus came with the first Minors. Mindful of St. Dominic’s rule of love, the London Dominicans eagerly welcomed the newcomers and made them tarry with them fifteen days, feeding and lodging them as though they were of their own family.

From the year 1221 to the present year of Grace is a long period, even in the life of a great nation; and yet that is the length of time during which the Dominican Brethren, with long and short intermissions, have exercised their influence in this country. A reminder of this, the great part which the Brethren played in the development of English Character at a period when mediævalism was on the wane and the glimmerings of the New Age were appearing on the horizon, has recently been presented in the form of relics in stone recovered from the church of the Blackfriars in London. For some time the position of the church at Ludgate had been known to a close degree of accuracy, such that when, in September, 1925, the site of the quire was once again in disturbance, the expectation that remains of the Priory would be brought to light was realised. An excavation of the site afforded an opportunity for examination at close quarters of the material cast up during the progress of the work before its consignment, threatened and actual, to the river barges, which within three hundred yards away lay in waiting.

Of France, yet not in their own opinions French, in spite of the distance apart in race, in language, in country, Breton and Basque have much in common. Both agricultural people they cling to their old traditions as races apart from the French of whose country their lands form part, to their own languages, and they are devout Catholics.

The Breton is a Celt, he claims, and history supports his claim to be descended from Celtic immigrants from Great Britain. The Basque knows not whence he came, some people say the Basque people are the only remnant of the population of the lost continent of Atlantis, the last of an earlier wave of immigration from the East than those which bore Westwards the other peoples of Europe. The language of the Breton bears out his claim to a British origin, for it is near akin to Gaelic, in Finistère and the Cotes du Nord very near indeed to Welsh, less so in Morbihan, but there the difference is more a matter of pronunciation than actual language, the people of Finistère say those of Morbihan speak a patois. The Basque language gives no clue to the origin of the race, it bears no affinity to any known language, with one solitary exception, so it is said, of the language spoken by a tribe living in a remote corner of Manchuria.

We set out in this essay to make two discoveries. In the first place we have to discover what the Catholic Church has done for Art, and in the second place what, according to the Church, is the relation of Art to Life. The discovery of the practical effect of the Church upon the Arts is of much less moment than the discovery of the necessary implications of Catholic doctrine, for observations upon the fruit of the tree are less important than the knowledge of the tree itself. But as a tree is known by its fruit, so we will attempt to get knowledge of the doctrine of the Church, in the matter of Art and Life, by examining first the artistic product for which the Church may have been responsible. It is true that by examining the artistic product we might, if we conducted the examination with sufficient insight, historical sense, and knowledge, arrive at a true view of the implications of Catholic doctrine, and that, therefore, it would be unnecessary to do more than summarise the results of the examination to discover a Catholic doctrine of the relation of Art to Life. But the artistic product of which the Church appears to be the instigator is so manifold and so various, and the period of time with which the examination would have to deal has seen so many changes and revolutions of thought and manners, that it is better to deal with the matter in two distinct parts, in the first to note simply the material facts, and in the second, not drawing conclusions from the first, to set out, with but brief reference to any examples, the fundamental principles of Catholic faith and philosophy and the resulting æsthetic.

The Saints have their spiritual lineage, their spiritual fecundity. We can trace, for instance, in one direct line of vital influence, the mystic genealogy of St. Theresa of Jesus through St. Catherine of Siena to St. Gertrude. But the great Avilan, that giantess among the Saints and ‘Mater Spiritualium,’ is invited to rejoice more ecstatically, because a whole world of Carmels is peopled with her daughters,

The noblest quality of the Saint is the power he possesses of begetting others in his spirit. Each friend of Jesus in his turn finds in himself, in some degree, a superabundance of exceptional graces by which he can help in giving life to others: to others who will, in due time, be able to stand up to the world and answer for themselves. Among the offspring of Theresa of Spain one sweet violet has drawn to herself, in love and veneration, the whole Catholic world of our generation. Jesus is in her, reconciling the sinful, sentimental multitudes to His holy love. There is now a gospel according to Theresa. It is a gospel poured forth upon a thirsty world from a heart so full of grace that no barrier of age or sex or enclosure could prevent it from leaping forth into the sunlight, to delight Christendom. ‘We cannot help uttering what we have seen and heard,’ protested the Apostles; and the new St. Theresa has seen and heard, and she, too, must needs speak, teaching her ‘little way,’ better than the best of bodhi-sattvas.

If ever I become a trifle eccentric I shall take it very ill of my friends and relatives if they shut me up with anyone more demented than themselves. It has always seemed to me both extravagant and unkind to put a more or less amateur and occasional lunatic among hard-bitten professionals. Mild madmen are better with their families and their families better with them. As for madmen with no or reluctant families, why not attach them to religious communities as jesters were attached to royal households in the Middle Ages? This would be an excellent plan all round. The community could concentrate on one official imbecile the forbearance they now exercise on each other. And the imbecile, unlike the average religious, could lap himself round with forbearance as with a garment, and hug the warmth. This, at any rate, was how it worked with the only lunatic I ever met in such circumstances—John-Theodore de la Vigne of Cope in the County of Wessex, the Pensioner of the Pied Brothers.

In the March BLACKFRIARS I reviewed Dr. Coulton’s Medieval Village and pointed out that the title of the book was ‘misleading and inaccurate,’ that neither the middle ages nor its village was the subject of Dr. Coulton’s study, and that ‘a false view of village life’ was presented. Dr. Coulton in his reply does not question the truth of my statements.

I also picked out no less than seventeen sentences from the book (giving in each case the page on which the sentence could be found) for evidence that Dr. Coulton is untrustworthy as a historian.

Four of these sentences were badly phrased. Dr. Coulton thinks otherwise. The reader can decide. But the blunders and errors in the other thirteen sentences Dr. Coulton leaves unanswered. They were not trivial or unimportant mistakes; they were serious misrepresentations. I could have made the list of mistakes longer, for the Medieval Village is disgraced by inaccuracies.

The ‘Reformation’ was fundamentally a negative movement. It bound together any who had a grievance against the Church. The essential character of the revolt which found its leader in Luther was the refusal to accept the authority of Rome. In spite of many differences among themselves, this still unites the various sections of Protestantism enabling Evangelical Anglicans to co-operate with Modernists and Modernists to make common cause with those still adhering to old-fashioned views of Biblical inspiration. The wide variety of views represented among the signatories of the famous ‘Call to Action’ provoked by the militant tactics of ‘Anglo-Catholics bears powerful witness to this agreement in negation. But no movement can live on denials, and instinctively the ‘Reformers’ felt bound to find some substitute for the authority of the Church. It was profoundly characteristic of their age that they should have fallen back on the authority of the Bible. That age had seen the development of the printing press and a vast increase in the number of those who could read its productions. The mere possession of the sacred volume, together with the ability to spell it out, seemed to give the individual a new and higher status. It encouraged the belief that he was at the source of authority, and held in his hands the key to all wisdom and knowledge—a latch-key which enabled him to dispense with paternal control in the matter of his comings and goings.

A few months ago a Southampton lady, a recent convert to the Catholic Faith, showed us an ivory triptych, about nine inches high, which appears to have been in the possession of her family since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and proves to be a fourteenth century ivory with the arms of John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter (1327-1369). In the centre piece (slightly damaged) are carved the Crucifixion in the upper compartment, and in the lower the Madonna and Child. The wing on the left has standing figures of St. Peter and St. John the Baptist; and that on the right corresponding figures of St. Paul and St. Thomas Becket. The authorities of the British Museum have arranged to secure this ivory for their collection of mediaeval antiquities.

There now exist but comparatively few English ivories of the later Middle Ages; doubtless their rarity is due to the Reformers’ fanatical zeal for the wholesale destruction of sacred images. In the British Museum have been for some time two ivories with the arms of Bishop Grandison : one of them is a triptych somewhat similar to the one mentioned above, and the other a panel of a diptych of which the other leaf is in the Louvre at Paris. There also is a mediaeval English diptych in ivory in the Salting Bequest at South Kensington. Such ivories now have a market value of nearly ;£1,000 each.