Books

...Whatever was pure and saintly in the religion of the Church, they aimed to preserve or perfect, and the abuses that had crept in among clergy and people, they sought to do away with or hide under the cover of love...

...The entire Christian Renaissance—insofar as it was a Catholic revival and not a Protestant revolution—was a flowering of traditional fervor and a transmission of traditional practices of a renewed piety...

...Michael, muttering all his prayers, flies, as any Christian fisherman would do, 402 THE COMMONWEAL September 2, 1925 the fear of God in his heart...

...Colum finds a sea-woman's cloak...

...Henry C. Watts is a London correspondent of The Commonweal...

...CONTRIBUTORS Frederick Joseph Kinsman is the author of Principles of Anglicanism and Salve Mater...

...Hyma luminously shows, is the outgrowth of a religious revival, a movement that "inspired men and women of all ranks and of many nationalities to increase their religious fervor, to follow Christ's instructions more faithfully, and to imitate the apostolic church more earnestly...

...Catholicism builded upon the past, applied to the present the wisdom of her saints and her doctors, the legislation of her canonists and councils...

...And withal, Dr...

...The Path to Rome, so far as it was a travel and adventure book, necessarily is of wider and more general interest, for only those few (and, alas, a declining number) who still care for sailing boats (not racing craft, but honest cruisers) will care to keep company, even with a Belloc, through all the pages of the stout volume which is devoted to the Nona...

...When she haughtily refuses, declaring her own gods are older, Colum will not listen to the pleadings of his mother and the priest to part with her, and when they see that^ he means to keep the pagan in his cabin he is excommunicated...

...15/s...

...This house sprang from one of Flemish origin and gave birth to the monastery now at Haywards Heath in England...

...It is a commonplace that, next to the Bible, The Imitation is the book that contributes most spiritual sustenance to presentday Catholics and Protestants and neo-pagans of every degree of culture and in every walk of life...

...He knew the passions better than those who feel them, for he knew their utter vanity...

...Here is no mere embroidery of fantastic words but drama sturdy with life...

...How can a man be happy when his love "sends her mind on long journeys to places your thoughts cannot be following after...

...Hyma's volume possesses as much vivacity of style and appeal to popular interest as any book of the sort could be reasonably expected to possess...

...A Link between Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs, by C. S. Durrant...

...but he might well find, in the very persistence of the contrary opinion, a pretty sure indication that the aims of Luther and the aims of Saint Ignatius were antithetical...

...Dorothy Thomas...

...Not even disinterested scholarship can well reconcile the irreconcilable...

...Finally someone of the gathering concludes that it is a strange world and another that—"It's strangers we all are in a strange world...

...When she brings the sinner to confess to the priest, then at last comes a cry of sacrifice—"O my heart's desire...

...But in the midst of fairy happiness Ilva thinks of the poor murderer lying friendless on the moor, and must go to him—though she lose her mystic lover...

...Hyma rightly observes, all the essential traits of the New Devotion ; and it is familiar to ever so many twentieth-century readers who know next to nothing of Gerard Groote and the Brothers of the Common Life...

...4.50...

...he implores, as he serves her with honey and sweet cake...

...He had penetrated to the secrets of the soul and of the senses...

...At last the handsome, high-spirited Sarah Darcy discovers what it is that will rid her of her rival, and nearly succeeds in restoring to its owner the mantle of crimson, but Colum thwarts her...

...To his amazed family and neighbors he tells a fine story about the strange lady being a princess he's saved from shipwreck...

...Durrant's volume is full of histories of absorbing interest and aside from the vivid sketches of the men we have alluded to above, and to many of the nuns—more especially the "Olde Mother Margaret Clement," a most heroic personage—the accounts of early Flemish life and the narrative of the martyrs of Gorcum, one of whom was a Canon Regular, make this book worthy of a place in any library...

...Brother Leo...

...He tells the boy how he has heard some have seen "the red hair of sea-women spread out on the water like a royal carpet...

...That masterpiece of Thomas a Kempis embodies, as Dr...

...But Colum cries out in delight —"I would be seein' your face...

...IT is at once a tribute to American scholarship and a witness to present-day interest in religion that this big book of 500 pages is sponsored by a prominent New York publishing house...

...Are ye gettin' no smell of scorching and the door of hell gapin' for ye...

...Helene Mullins is a contributor of poetry to The Forum and other magazines...

...The remarkable religious movement of the fifteenth century known as the New Devotion is still a living thing, for eminently alive is its most remarkable literary product, The Imitation of Christ...

...In November Eve we feel the gentleness and compassion of Christ...

...November Eve is the tale of a "fairy-struck" child, whose heart is filled with love and pity for everyone—even the dead and the wicked...

...Hyma's volume, is, like that of the Jesuits, for example, or of the Christian Brothers, based upon the principles of the religious life laid down by Saint Augustine in his famous rule...

...Her imagination transmutes a very scholarly knowledge of Celtic folk-lore into a delightfully readable book...

...but I doubt if he is sufficiently impressed with the importance of the fact that while the one enlisted a company of spiritual free lances to conserve the kingdom of Christ under the authority of "our lord the Pope," the other hurled defiance against the Catholic tradition and the papal claims...

...It specifically quotes Saint Augustine and is conceived in harmony with his fundamental precept that—"Those who live in community should first love God above all things, and next their neighbor...

...Selecting noble and helpful sayings from the literatures of the ancients, and combining these with the wisdom of philosophers and saints of later periods, the followers of Groote and Gansfort interpreted all learning in the light of Christ's teachings...

...And this extraordinary volume, as Dr...

...BRIEFER MENTION The Cruise of the Nona, by Hilaire Belloc...

...Protestantism repudiated the past, discarded the doctrinal and devotional teachings of the Catholic tradition, set at naught the rulings of the teaching Church...

...The 'New Devotion' reached down to the people, and welled up from the people...

...It is generally accepted by a Kempis scholars that the book draws freely upon von Huesden, Gerlach, von Mande and von Schoonhoven, and that they in turn were indebted to Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome, Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Bernard, Saint Bonaventure, and Saint Thomas Aquinas...

...New York: D. Appleton and Company...

...Hyma, for The Christian Renaissance will supply a broad and comprehensive background for their study of a Kempis and will inform many a familiar passage of The Imitation with deeper and fresher significance...

...While he gazes on her in adoration he asks if she has "leapt with a magic leap into the blue sea to be free of the hot loves of men...

...Searching for the murderer up and down the drear lonely moor, Ilva meets her heart's desire...

...After the labors of such scholars as Loth, Vacandard, Becker, Veratti, Santini, Kettlewell, Cruise and Semeria, the authorship of The Imitation seems to be definitely settled, and Dr...

...But there is worse to come...

...and in his appendix he has made available the constitution of the Brothers of the Common Life, as contained in a manuscript in the Royal Library of the Hague...

...and when Michael speaks disrespectfully of the sea-women's "fishtails," Colum assures him he's all wrong, that they have instead "little feet, slim and pale as the tips of the new moon...

...O the loneliness...

...where the great humanists refused to go, it readily came, and where they were forbidden to enter, it approached unhindered...

...Madelon Stubbs, John Hanlon, Loretta Roche, Virginia McCormick, and Morton Zabel are contributors of poetry to current magazines...

...And when she hears that a neighbor lad has murdered his wife in a fit of justified jealousy, and that the priest and all the people have turned against him, she goes out into the witch's night to find and comfort him...

...Finally, embittered by the coldness of his love, he himself flings the cloak about his beloved in anger and tells her to be gone...

...But as both books chronicle the travels, explorations, and adventures of the mind of their author, as well as his merely physical haps and mishaps, and as that mind is one of the first intelligences of the world today—a mind of rich culture, creative, original, the mind of a genius, expressed in a prose style which has no superior among living writers of English—The Cruise of the Nona is as well worth reading as The Path to Rome—which is the equivalent of saying that nobody who can appreciate true English literature can afford not to read it...

...1N the history of the various vicissitudes of the Church, there are few more interesting than the resurrection of religion in England...

...It is just here that the attempt to establish a synthesis of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation must result in futility...

...Hyma rightly insists that the Society of Jesus was not deliberately organized to oppose Protestantism...

...overflow of the Catholic devotional tradition...

...Diversity of style does not necessarily connote diversity of authorship ; and the Liibeck manuscripts prove nothing more than that many of the thoughts and analogies met with in The Imitation were common property among the followers of• the New Devotion...

...For, though some of the reformers looked upon certain phases of it with admiration, the Devotio Moderna was an essentially Catholic movement, and, as Dr...

...the other being the logbook (original, personal, in a word, Bellocian) of voyages in his sailboat, the Nona, about the coasts of England and Wales...

...Lovers of The Imitation—and their name is legion among all nations and tribes and tongues—will turn eagerly to this new volume by Dr...

...Is it not a kind word you'll be givin' me...

...His sentences are psychological jewels before which adepts remain astounded...

...Boston and New York: Houffhton Mifflin Company...

...Hyma points out, there can be no doubt of the unswerving Catholic loyalty of Groote and his followers...

...When the play opens Colum has persuaded Michael, a timid younger brother, to come to the shore with him while he makes offerings to the sea—the sea, he reminds Michael, is really "Mary's Treasury," an observation doubtfully received...

...When he reminds her that he has given his soul to possess her, when he pleads the greatness of his love, she answers—"How can a prisoner believe in the love of his jailor...

...Gerard Groote and Saint Ignatius stood for the Catholic idea, Luther for the Protestant...

...if it's the match to your voice it's sweeter than the birds of Eden, O woman of the sea...

...His book is the book of the best of men, since it is the book of the unhappy...

...Then, as if in answer to the tenderness of his words comes the actual cry of a sea-woman...

...The Sea-Woman's Cloak is an old wives' tale of the Irish sea-coast, and warns mortal man that he who finds a seawoman's cloak shall be cursed with ill luck ever after...

...His notes are adequate, copious and exceptionally interesting...

...As soon as the lady has her freedom she gives Colum her love, and he follows her into the strange seaworld, leaving his soul behind...

...Amelie Rives's eerie, dreamlike gift has charmed two generations of readers, and in these two plays she has built around old Irish legends of fairies and mysterious sea-folk...

...Hyma, in one place, draws a highly entertaining analogy between Saint Ignatius Loyola and Martin Luther...

...it entered the kitchen, the farm-house, and the workshop, as well as the schoolhouse, the pulpit, the office, and the September 2, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 401 palace...

...Mary Dixon Thayer is a writer of short stories and poetry, and the author of Songs, of Youth...

...IT is not probable that Hilaire Belloc's newest book (at least, we suppose it to be his newest, but Belloc is so prolific that perhaps it is only one of his newest) The Cruise of the Nona will threaten the fame of his The Path to Rome—yet it contains a great deal of the best prose of this master of prose, and is a book that in general can be compared to the earlier one...

...Both books record the travels of its writer, the earlier one being the narrative of his pilgrimage, on foot, from France across Europe to the tombs of the Apostles...

...the priest cries in desperation...

...There is no surer counsellor and no more intimate consoled...

...R. A. McGowan is an official of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference...

...Rarely does the beautiful princess condescend to speak to her mortal lover...

...For twenty years Colum and his sea-woman live together, while neyer a human foot crosses the threshold of the banned house...

...London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne...

...Hyma has made assiduous and intelligent researches in the libraries of Holland, Germany, Austria, France and England, has handled manuscripts practically inaccessible to the ordinary student, and has had his industry and perseverance blessed by that angel of fortunate discoveries who seems to exert special watchfulness over American investigators abroad...

...Nothing in the world of appearances amid which we struggle with cruel weakness and touching illusions was hidden from him...

...When she does, it is only to ask for her crimson mantle, which means her freedom...

...There can be no question as to the scholarship...

...in The Sea-Woman's Cloak, the power and mystery of the old pagan gods which remind us how reluctant ancient Ireland was to forego them for Christianity...

...Hyma's analysis of the book in substantiation of this view is keen and interesting, but, it seems to me, hardly convincing...

...The love-stricken youth accepts the ban of the Church and sends them all off with his blessing—"Let it be easy and a long life to you...

...The study of its influence opens up a very attractive field of largely unexplored history...

...This is not the only section of this admirable volume to form a distinct contribution to existing knowledge and to place all thoughtful readers in debt to the very evident learning and assiduity of Dr...

...The lines are full of power and beauty and poetic imagery, bringing us the superstitious gloom and wild passion of a primitive people...

...The constitution, as printed in the appendix to Dr...

...Once having accepted the new faith, she became the devoutest of followers...

...Michael cries out—"She's wild with longin' to be warmin' her wet breast on the flesh of mortal man," and he prays Colum to be true to his sweetheart, Sarah Darcy...

...Arthur F. J. Remy is a member of the faculty of Columbia University...

...In her mother's cabin, among the many guests gathered there to celebrate November Eve, "a power of tales do be passin' around" about the fairy-struck child...

...Hyma wisely declines to reopen the question...

...But he does incline to the opinion that a Kempis was a compiler rather than an original author, that several considerable portions of The Imitation are really the work of Radewijns, Zerbolt or some other members of the Brothers of the Common Life...

...The community life led by the Brothers of the Common Life—who, though not bound by vows, aspired to the practice of the virtues of the religious state—differed in no essential point from that prescribed in the monastic orders...

...The sea-woman begs for her mantle of crimson that she may go back to her kingdom, but Colum captures her, carrying her off to his mother's cabin...

...Though he has his heart's desire his life is empty happiness...

...On a fearsome November Eve, when the priest lights twelve candles for the apostles, Ilva lights some for the "little good people...

...The Flemish congregation sprang from that great organization, now defunct, in Flanders, to which belonged Ruysbroek, de Groote and above all, Thomas a Kempis...

...The late Anatole France, whose religious convictions were notably nebulous and eccentric, made himself the spokesman of an astonishing variety of readers of The Imitation when, in a review of Bourget's Mensonges, he thus wrote of Thomas a Kempis— "He knew life profoundly...

...But the jealous eyes of Sarah Darcy penetrate the fiction, and the priest urges the pagan enchantress to accept Christianity...

...2.00...

...Colum Dara loves the old pagan tales of the sea, and besides, when he was "only three weeks in this bitter world" his mother "waved him in the ebb tide," putting a charm upon him that bound his life with that of the sea...

...The Sea-Woman's Cloak and November Eve, by Amelie Rives...

...Substantially, The Imitation, like the New Devotion itself, was an...

...FOR those who have had enough dreary novels about Main Street and depressing plays about harlots, this little book enchants through its very remoteness from all the sociological problems in the world...

...The pith and marrow of this book is the account of the foundation and progress of the monastery of Canonesses Regular of Saint Augustine, now the only house of English nuns of any kind not on English soil—apart, of course, from missionary orders...

...Especially valuable in The Christian Renaissance is the study of the educational work in which the Brothers of the Common Life engaged at Zwolle, Deventer, Schlettstadt and elsewhere, a work that bore fruit in countless vocations to religious orders, in the diffusion of ideals of piety among the learned, and ideals of learning among the pious, in the effulgence of such significant individual pupils as Thomas a Kempis and Erasmus...