Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW 21 delight in England and in America, where a new edition, giving additional information about religious orders and societies on this side of the Atlantic, appeared three months after the first English publication. This valuable work has since been vastly improved upon in point of size and scope by the Catholic Encyclopedia; but in one respect it has not been superseded. Connoisseurs will always turn with renewed zest to those conspicuously absent in most of the articles of the most celebrated encyclopedias. But when practically all the articles are written by two men, each one of whom is alone responsible for his department, as happened for the Catholic Dictionary, the preface of which states: ““Аз a rule, the articles on dogma, ritual, the ancient Church, and the Oriental rites, are by Mr. Addis; those on medizval and modern history, the religious FORTY HOURS IN COLLEGE CHAPEL articles of the Catholic Dictionary in which the personality of the editor makes itself felt. Except when the writer's mental power rivals that of his biographical subject as when Dr. William Barry writes on Car- dinal Newman in the Catholic Encyclopedia, or when R. Н. Hutton dissects George Eliot in Chambers's Cyclopedia of English Litera- ture, the charm of the personal touch is orders, and canon law, by Mr. Arnold ; then we are not surprised at the expression of personal opinions. Take, for instance, the following passage in the article Ascete by Thomas Arnold. After explaining that the object of Christian Asceticism is to master, not to eradicate, man's lower nature, he makes this wise reflection, a rather unusual one in a book of reference: “Modern

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20 LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW she had never heard of that great book. Then I tried another subject. Was she aware that the character of Helbeck of Bannisdale was recognized in this country as echoed in that of a man called Beck, judge of the Alberta Supreme Court and one of the most able and uncompromising champions of the Church in Canada. She certainly had heard of this curious coincidence and was greatly amused at the partial coincidence of names. Now, ladies and gentlemen, please note these two contrasts. Mrs. Humphry Ward had been and was still keenly interested in the fact that the name of the most prominent figure of that celebrated novel of hers, Hel- beck of Bannisdale—that one of her many novels in which she showed such deep sympathy with the truth that she seemed just to have missed a great chance of seeing the light —had suggested a real man of like caliber. On the other hand, she professed complete ignorance of her father's share in “The Catholic Dictionary. To understand how it is possible charitably to account for the genuineness of such as- tounding ignorance one must remember her extraordinary family history. Mary Augusta Arnold, her maiden-name, was the grand- daughter of Thomas Arnold, Sr., the famous Head-master of Rugby, immortalized by Thomas Hughes in his ‘Tom Brown's School Days. Doctor Arnold, as he was generally called, was one of the founders of the Broad Church, that section of Anglicans which tolerates the most widely divergent views on fundamental doctrines. Her uncle, Matthew Arnold, was the celebrated Apostle of Culture, whose essay on Sweetness and Light might deceive an archangel who did not know how godly language may clothe the most complete scepticism. Her father, Thomas Arnold, Jr., began as a liberal Anglican, and, at the age of thirty-two became a Catholic. But his first conversion seems not to have been sufficiently motived, for he reverted the next year to the Anglican Church and went to Oxford, where he lived twenty years, editing very learned works on ancient English literature. It was during this period, from 1857 to 1877, that his daughter Mary Augusta, born in 1851, knew him best. These early associa- tions with a life of scholarship and religious conflict have left a deep impress on her own later literary career. As she married Thomas Humphry Ward in 1872, she was not a close witness of her father’s return to Catholicism in 1877, and of his editing, with W. E. Addis, the. Catholic Dictionary in 1883. As her recently published autobio- graphy, A Writer’s Recollections, shows, she never seems to have forgiven the father, whom she really loved, for having made his family uncomfortable by his second and REV. J. MULDOON, C.SS.R. final break with the City of Confusion. Knowing, as we do, what an impassable barrier a definite acceptance of the Catholic faith used to set up, forty years ago, between the convert and his family, we can under- stand how all her father’s literary activities during the years from 1877 till his death as a fervent Catholic, a fellow of the new Royal University of Ireland, in 1900, may have remained deliberately unknown to her. The Catholic Dictionary was the first complete book of reference in the English language on points of Catholic doctrine, ritual, and discipline, and was hailed with

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22 LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW life, especially when permeated with Baconian ideas respecting the true task of man in the world, is pointedly unascetic. If we turn over a series of pictures of eminent modern men, there is one common feature which we cannot fail to notice, whether the subject of the picture be artist, or literary man, or man of action, and whatever intelligence, power, or benevolence may breathe from the face— namely, the absence of an expression of self- mastery. А similar series of portraits of men who lived in the middle ages, when law was weaker than at present, but the sense of necessity of self-control stronger, reveals a type of countenance in which the calmness of self-conquest, gained by Christian asceti- cism, is far more frequently visible than in later ages. ы This seems to have been one of his favorite ideas: for he had already given it a different form іп an article on ‘“‘Ritualistic Reasons against Conversion, which appeared in The Month for February, 1879. “ Aus- terity, he there wrote, gives the hard, clear-cut life, the fully persuaded man, readiness to suffer, prompt obedience, and (through this promptitude) capacity for ruling. Without austerity there can be no sanctity, and without sanctity, which is the beauty of the soul, the eyes of the multitude will not be opened to the exterior beauty. It was not the artists, nor kings, nor rich men who built and ado rned our cathedrals; these, indeed, all labored; but the aspiring heart of the saint, thirsting for the greater glory of God, was what set in motion, directed, and co-ordinated their labors. Austerity is still honored in countries which adhere to Rome, though obsolete in Pro- testant England; and this—such at least is my own conviction—goes far to account for that remarkable difference in respect of art and the beautiful which exists between those countries and our own. No wonder the man whose heart was so nobly attuned to the highest spirituality was not appreciated by a daughter who had become the self-sufficient apostle of religious revolt and an open disbeliever in the divinity of Christ. For it was in this guise that she first became famous. Нег Robert Elsmere was the great sensation of 1888 and the following years, though it was almost for- gotten when I met her twenty years later. The cynical Squire Wendover, who upsets the Rev. Robert Elsmere's traditional Anglican belief, was an exaggerated portrait of a certain principal of Brasenose College, Ox- ford, from whom Mrs. Humphry Ward imbibed blind belief in the so-called dis- coveries of that Higher Biblical Criticism which was then shaking the foundations of Protestantism. This craze culminated in the Polychrome Bible, an edition of the Bible in which the authorship of each verse was shown by a different color in the text, some chapters exhibiting half-a-dozen colors. This supposed authorship of particular passages was based exclusively on the internal evi- dence of the words and phrases used in the original Hebrew text. The use of one special word proved that that particular verse had been written five or six hundred years after the hitherto accepted date of the whole book. Proofs of this sort were at that time, thirty or forty years ago, deemed conclusive by people who adored German learning. This style of criticism has s ince lost much of its spurious popularity. It still passes in Protestant circles with, how- ever, considerable discount. It was never accepted by the most learned and truly critical Catholic Orientalists. But on the appearance of Robert Elsmere the Protest- ant world went mad. Elsmerian churches and Elsmerian. workingmen's homes sprang up overnight. Gradually, however, it dawned on really philosophic critics that one man may use different styles and different words at different periods of his life or in totally different circumstances; a common sense truth, you will say; yes, but there is nothing less common than common sense, especially among learned men when they peer into religious subjects without the illuminating torch of the true faith. Has any of you ever heard of a Robert Elsmere church existing to-day, only thirty- two years after the first one? In fact, twelve years ago, when I talked with Mrs. Humphry Ward—who, by the way, was extremely simple and never intro- duced the subject of her own works—the most fervent Protestants thought that she herself had come round to more orthodox