Books
MSchwertner, Thomas & Liljencrants, Johan & Stuart, Henry Longan & Maynard, Theodore & Walsh, Thomas & Ryan, John A. & Bates, Ernest Sutherland
33O THE COMMONWEAL January 27, 1926 BOOKS The Pleasure Haunts of London during Four Centuries, by E. Beresford Chancellor. Illustrated. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. ...
...2.00 Sea Life in Nelson's Time, by John Masefield...
...Thence to Paris during the war, with graphic scenes of the darkened city, and on to Berlin during the Spartacist revolt...
...The remedies proposed by Dr...
...The following bit of powerful and concise description must suffice: "Now, with the mill a heap of ashes and twisted iron...
...There is a good review of older, as well as modern, theories of the universe...
...Many diversions that have disappeared from daily life are recalled by this historian of metropolitan amusements...
...Instead, he describes the surgeons in the ill-lighted cockpit giving the wounded, as each descended in his turn, a swig of rum and a gag to bit on while the saw rasped through the bone of the limbs to be amputated...
...Masefield tells no story of battle...
...It recounts her favorite devotions from earliest childhood—the birds, the skies, the familiar faces and scenes of home, the lovely spots and exquisite days never forgotten, and ends in an exquisite climax within the cloister : "O Thou, in whom creation lies, The myriad forest-germs arise, Made fruitful by one glancing of Thine eyes...
...The relation of the Dominicans with the other religious institutes in England was always amicable, probably because they enjoyed so much authority with the kings, and also because they feared no rivalry on the part of less rapidly developing orders...
...Beresford Chancellor is the one who most appeals to readers with a strong sense of locality...
...With only occasional slips in minor details, the story is clearly if rather choppily told, reference being given in almost every case, to first-hand documents...
...but the selection of it appears to have been rather haphazard and to have had little shaping at Mr...
...But he will not suffer us to turn our eyes to the glory that covered them all...
...A move across the Thames to where the city warrants did not run, and where the Surrey justices showed a lamentable laxity in prosecuting, was also of service to the infant stage...
...They sing in Carmel in a garden enclosed...
...BRIEFER MENTION Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith...
...In this light it is difficult to see any other natural explanation of the celebrated words on which the pro-evolutionists chiefly rely, viz.: "Terrestria animalia, tanquam ex ultimo elemento mundi ultima: nihilominus potentialiter, quorum numeros tempus postea visibiliter explicaret...
...Individual churchmen thus have been in error and have shown unwarranted conservatism and opposition to new ways of thinking...
...The existence in all—not only in big—cities throughout every country, of a class that can always be trusted to abuse and pervert opportunities for honest amusement is one of the problems with which authorities in every age are called upon to deal...
...The quaint prettiness of this plea for Bonbons will be seen in its final lines: "Sweetmeats from our Carmel given Greatly charm the King of Heaven, Offer them each sacrifice, Sister dear, thy poverty, Thine austerity to see Will His happy heart entice...
...ANYTHING that throws light upon the careers of the founders of our republic, must be appreciated warmly...
...As the mission of the order is frankly dual—Saint Dominic himself introducing the principle of dispensations into the rule, the better thus to make the existence, side by side, of preaching activity and university teaching, with all it implies, possible and workable—the author shows how the English friars never failed to be powerful preachers of the Word, and the better to accomplish this did not disdain to become "lords of language," even while teaching in Oxford and Cambridge, and other lesser seats of learning, writing books, especially of a biblical kind, that throw a welcome light on the intellectual interests and standards of the times...
...There still would remain, however, some very grave problems—for example, an ever-increasing increment of mine values to the owners at the expense of the consumers, and continuous waste and expense on account of over-development in the bituminous industry...
...The opening chapter is entitled Dubious Remedies...
...Some chapters confined to the exposition of scientific discoveries and theories contain much that is interesting and instructive to the general reader...
...Shaughnessy, who has analyzed statistics bearing on the matter from 1790 to 1920, concludes that there has been no abnormal loss and that the success with which the Church in America has assimilated those coming here from foreign shores is nothing short of marvelous...
...John A. Ryan...
...Chancellor, "are fastened behind, and then worried by great English bull-dogs...
...The first is that the Christian church or churches throughout the ages, but most particularly during the middle-ages, have strenuously opposed the advance of knowledge, and substituted for true knowledge of the universe, so-called orthodox theories founded on superstitious traditions and a narrow, literal interpretation of Scripture...
...Sackerson is the best remembered, because Shakespeare has immortalized him, but others were as popular—Ned of Canterbury, Don John, Blind Robin, and the rest...
...Henry Longan Stuart...
...Beginning with the best of intentions, with lavish facilities for blameless amusement, and frequented by decorous citizens, their wives and families, the destiny of one and all, after a few brief years, was to find themselves invaded by pickpockets, confidence men, prostitutes, and ruffians, until the authorities were forced to step in and close down the lid...
...JOHAN LlLJENCRANTS...
...The truth is quite evidently in this book—but, quite as evidently, not the whole truth...
...The analysis which it presents of the facts gathered by the Coal Commission is more systematic, coherent, and thorough than in the latter work...
...Tradition and belief in the supernatural must be discarded and the theory of evolution applied to religious truths which at the best are relative...
...Each of these groups or agencies can do something toward solving the problems of the coal industry, and each is told in detail what it can do> If all these parties were to follow the recommendations of Dr...
...One, called the plea for A Golden Throne declares: "Love, Sister give That sinners live...
...Waldron's novel of that name, is a dreamer, an idealist, at least in the sense of one who seeks without finding the ideal...
...Thomas Walsh...
...Thomism did not always have a fair chance in England probably because of the prejudice created early in the province's history by Robert Kilwardby and the Platono—Augustinian school which survived there longer, if more fitfully, than anywhere else in Christendom...
...It must have been a gentle pastime...
...He thus ignores not only the meaning and nature of dogma but also an important distinction in the value of the subject matter contained in the writings of the fathers and theologians...
...If their speculations were in part erroneous, what of it...
...criminals sent from the prisons or dragged by empressment from the brothels of the sea-ports...
...Nothing of this character is included in What the Coal Commission Found...
...Two chapters are devoted to the history and theories of evolution and to the facts on which these theories are based...
...Part five is taken up entirely with a discussion of remedies...
...In the opinion of the reviewer, the obstacles to the effective adoption of the remedies proposed by Dr...
...As illustrations of the Church's opposition to science in the post-reformation era are mentioned the activities of the inquisition and the condemnation of Galileo...
...Coal—Economic Problems of the Mining, Marketing and Consumption of Anthracite and Soft Coal in the United States —Facts and Remedies, by Edward T. Devine, member of the United States Coal Commission...
...If the biblical accounts of creation, which the Church always has regarded as inspired and therefore true, tally with traditions from non-Hebrew civilizations, this in no way prejudices their veracity...
...Bankside in Southwark, with its Rose and Swan and Globe theatres always will be closely associated with Elizabethan drama, although Mr...
...And technicalities are made as interesting as they are in that greatest of sea-songs, the Spanish Ladies— "So stand by your stoppers, see clear your shank-painters, Haul up your clew-garnets, stick out tacks and sheets...
...Sea Life in the Time of Nelson, however, is as vivid a piece of work as Mr...
...Masefield can solemnly say—"The badness of the meat may be guessed from the fact that sailors spoke of it as junk, or old condemned hemp rope...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Through Science to God, by Floyd L. Darrow...
...The rest of the volume deals with matters of religion...
...Most of his proposals are in themselves sane and valuable, but they will not be put into operation to any worthwhile extent within the next twenty-five years...
...From the first poem—My Song of Today—with its charming overture— "My life is but an instant, a fleeting hour above me, My life is but a moment escaping swift away: Thou knowest, O my God, on earth, in time, to love Thee Naught have I but today"— to the Shepherdess of Domremy Listening to Her Voices, we have a sample of the little cloister interludes of ancient times that were developed into the mystery and parable plays, the foundations of our modern theatre...
...Of course, we miss here the quiet humor, literary finish, and historical perspectives, not to speak of the immense erudition of a similar work covering the same field by the provincial of the English Dominicans, Father Bede Jarrett—The English Dominicans—published after the composition of this work and, therefore, not laid under contribution...
...Chancellor observes, may well have nerved the mayor's arm when he struck down the popular leader of the Kentish "rioters" on Smithfield...
...Devine relies...
...He can tell us just what numbered house in a drab terrace stands upon the site of the orchestra where Handel conducted his great oratorios, and what prim chapel has been built upon the foundations of the theatre where David Garrick made his first appearance on any stage...
...There is plenty of action, but the realism of vivid fact is skillfully hung in an unreal atmosphere which toward the end creates a kind of idyllic spirit even in the adventures of Shanklin and Judith through the mud and blood of the German revolution...
...On this subject the author maintains two theses...
...The second thesis is that Christianity can survive only by constantly adjusting its teachings to new scientific theories...
...So far as owners, operators, miners, distributors, and consumers are concerned, Dr...
...It is quite natural that in the absence of scientific data, Christians and non-Christians alike should speculate on the origin and arrangement of the part of creation which they could see...
...In this simple setting we hear speeches from Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael...
...This latter is an admirable edition, reproducing with great fidelity the text of the originals and touched with a marked tenderness and delicacy of taste...
...Atoms, molecules, and electrons are discussed, and the theory of relativity is made fairly comprehensive in another section of the book...
...Incidentally, we glean the curious fact that the Bordello or London red light district of the fifteenth century paid high rentals to Sir William Walworth, the Lord-Mayor of the time, and was demolished by popular indignation during Wat Tyler's rising...
...The stock-in-trade accusations against the Church referred to these sources have been so frequently refuted that it is actually laughable to see them repeated in our day...
...1.60...
...These versions are highly creditable to the taste, discretion, and truly literary gifts of the Carmelites of Santa Clara...
...This is no milk for babies...
...2.00...
...There is no specific divine revelation of religious truth, but nature constantly reveals God and His work...
...with half the population of the settlement suddenly departed, an unwelcome desolation fell upon the unfinished Shanklin dock, warehouse, hotel, mansion...
...Poems of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, translated by the Carmelites of Santa Clara, California...
...Devine's book contains several chapters on remedies for the evils of the coal situation...
...Masefield instruct us...
...The Commonweal requests its subscribers to communicate any changes of address two weeks in advance, to ensure the receipt of all issues...
...The statistical aspects of his work are scholarly and exacting, so that it is impossible to see how other conclusions could be justified...
...Devine than to continue their present course of action...
...This, in which one may perhaps surmise the distant influence of Thomas Hardy, gives a haunting quality to the book...
...Nobody who has read Dauber can doubt that Masefield drew there a picture of himself...
...The method amounts to a positive superposition of new upon old...
...We are given with an exactness of detail, that no writer, with the exceptions of Melville and Marryat, has approached, the actual life of the sailor...
...In the cloister of Carmel to which Therese retired in her fifteenth year, she found a literary tradition dating from the foundations of Avila...
...One can readily believe that, in days before canning had been invented and when meat had to be salted for long voyages in sailing-ships, the food of seamen was not very good...
...Old pigtailed seamen would tell of horseshoes found in the meat casks...
...Moreover, Dr...
...Another element in Shanklin's tragedy is that, like most men who live in a world of perception instead of reason, he insists upon incarnating his ideal in living people or social movements, first in the form of a lost friend, then transiently in the cause of a political revolution, finally in the form of a woman—and all three fail him, as every external ideal must...
...I love Thee—none I crave to see Save Thee...
...Masefield has ever done...
...2.50...
...The early church is taken to task for contemporary ignorance of cosmology...
...If he alludes to the materialistic idea of psychical evolution certainly no one would look for help from Saint Augustine in pushing that idea, nor would any Catholic entertain it for a moment...
...His erudition can locate for us within a yard the spot where Romeo and Juliet (amazing literary event...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Devine's program requires them all to pursue a policy of enlightened self-interest, instead of short-sighted self-interest...
...In 1597, an order by the justices for Middlesex ordered The Curtain and The Theater (the spelling of the word is interesting, as an instance of how often American orthography reproduces the older English) to be demolished, on the plea that "lewd matters are handled on the stage...
...London: Burns Oates and Washbourne...
...Chancellor as his guide, the sentimental pilgrim to London is sure, not only of his information, but of his orientation as well...
...2.40...
...of curious barkings and neighings heard in the slaughter-houses...
...However that may be, the reader will find Dr...
...EVEN in our modern commercial world, the Hamlet type, to judge from literature, is still prevalent...
...Augustine and Evolution: A study in the Saint's De Genesi ad Literam and de Trinitate...
...We do not quite catch the meaning of the writer's words in the preface in which he seems to indicate that a Catholic cannot go any part of the way with the evolutionist, for Father Wasmann of his own society, Canon de Dorlodot, and quite a number of others have gone as far as any of them along the purely physical lines and have gone their way under the most formidable imprimaturs...
...THE poems of a canonized saint call for special consideration on the part of all who regard literature as human documentation...
...Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merrill Company...
...If statisticians of all Christian creeds agreed that their losses have been "normal"—which is not wholly beyond the range of probability—we should then confront the interesting problem of trying to account for the vast non-Christian population actually existing in the United States...
...Into a couple of hundred pages is compressed almost the whole of the classic age of English seamanship...
...But what it tells is nowhere to be found in so convenient or so vivid a form...
...But it is just as well for us to have the story told by one who apparently is not of the faith and hence not so open to certain influences that are almost unescapable for a Catholic author...
...It opens with the pathetic failure of Shanklin senior's life dream—like son, like father—of promoting the development of a great port on the shores of Lake Superior...
...To a man so sensitive such a life could be only one of unmitigated horror...
...five lets goes out of hand [?] which goes fairest and farthest in wins all...
...THE first of these two books, which is an account of some of the English forays on the Isthmus of Darien, and of the buccaneers, is the longer of the two, and the less interesting...
...What a whole, brutal, clamorous, vagrant and vanished world is called up for us by the following announcement—"At the Bear garden in Hockley in the Hole, near Clerkenwell Green, this present Monday, there is a great match to be fought by two dogs of Smithfield Bars against two dogs of Hampstead, at the Reading Bull, for one guinea to be spent...
...Professor Dale gives us facsimiles of these letters written by the Lafayettes in very good English, and containing biographical matter that illustrates their marked affection for the United States, their recognition of its generosity and their desire to advance the new world among the scientists and philosophers of France...
...Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merrill Company...
...Not only, therefore, is the Old Testament not infallible, but "some of its conceptions of God are morally degrading...
...neither need step back for, nor readjust itself to, the other...
...Thomas M. Schwertner...
...Some theologians covered every field of knowledge of their day...
...with no more lumber barges coming and going...
...The material has been taken from Hakluyt, Exquemeling, Dampier, and Burney...
...If churchmen have invoked supernatural agencies in explanation of natural phenomena, advanced erroneous theories of the universe such as Duns Scotus's scheme in which the earth is surrounded by spheres supporting the stars, or stubbornly defended their views in the face of more rational ones, they have done so as private individuals granted full liberty of expression by the Church on subjects beyond her clearly defined jurisdiction...
...One of them was bear-baiting...
...The present work is divided into five parts dealing respectively with the characters, the anthracite industry, the bituminous industry, the transportation and marketing of coal, and a national policy...
...The bears," Mr...
...He completely ignores Catholic scholarship, including the work of the Biblical Commission, than which none has been more thorough and scientific, but which has reached very different conclusions...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...with the whine of saws, the slap of piling lumber, the siren morning, noon, and night stilled forever...
...The tendency to rhapsodize must be controlled just as the tendency to denigrate must be obviated...
...As an antidote to books where we get nothing except the glory, Sea Life in Nelson's Time could not be more effective...
...Here we have presented to us each member of the crew, from the captain in his lace and cocked hat to the cabin-boy in his rags and grease, and we see each in his turn and all of them together engaged in the working of the ship...
...Shanklin, the hero of Mr...
...The bulls and bears," says a contemporary account written by a German visitor and quoted by Mr...
...In some of the minor characters in the New York portion, various well known figures may be recognized...
...The ferocious floggings, the bad food, the evil stench, and the endless labors of a crew gathered from all nations...
...Professor Edward Everett Dale of the University of Oklahoma has unearthed on the unlikely bookshelf of an Oklahoma farm house a series of letters that passed between the Marquis de Lafayette, his son, George Washington Lafayette, and Captain Francis Allyn, commander of the ship Cadmus in which the French patriots voyaged on their last visit to America in 1824...
...Masefield's hands...
...Devine are far greater than the obstacles to government ownership and operation...
...Theodore Maynard...
...In the initial chapters the tang of the north country is sharply felt...
...The Genesis accounts fully realize their purpose without infringing upon the domain of science...
...The first four parts present and discuss every important fact relating to the coal industry, whether affecting consumers, miners, operators, owners, wholesalers, retailers, or the railroads...
...The last two chapters are devoted to the Second Order for women which always enjoyed great popularity in the Island...
...Their souls, the throne this Child aspires, But ah, still more Doth He implore Your heart the throne of His desires...
...But let them buy it for themselves...
...It is hard to discuss the poems of such authors as Saint John of the Cross, or Saint Teresa of Avila in the pragmatical matter of modern criticism, preserving a proper righteousness of judgment as well as a full recognition of the facts of moral and spiritual considerations, It is as easy to rhapsodize over hymns and liturgical writings as it is easy to discover literary beauties in the consecrated texts of the Holy 33* THE COMMONWEAL January 27, 1926 Scriptures...
...The startling lack of humor that characterizes all of this great writer's work may be noticed once again...
...But, when Mr...
...The style is versatile and varied, so that no single quotation could do justice to it...
...One of his most curious chapters is a record of human depravity in three centuries...
...There is no real issue between science and traditional Christianity...
...After a rapid account of the rise, constitution, character, and spread of the Dominican order, we see how the friars lived in mediaeval England—loved and enriched by the pious, favored by the kings for whom they acted as confessors up to the time of Henry VI, ridiculed by the pamphleteers of the day...
...Oklahoma City: Harlow...
...In proof of these opinions the author invokes higher criticism which, according to him, is but an application of science to the study of the Bible, invariably leading to extreme liberalism...
...But, indeed, the history of all the London "spas," pleasure gardens, ridottos, grottos and fair-grounds over which an avalanche of brick and mortar has descended, and whose memory is only kept alive today by quaintly named courts and streets, shows an almost inevitable drift to disreputability...
...Chancellor tells us, "were known by special names, and were hailed by the multitude with the joyful recognition now accorded to stage favorites...
...Among these, the first mentioned is nationalization...
...Shanklin, by Webb Waldron...
...It would be interesting to see whether attempts by scholars associated with Protestant churches would lead to similar conclusions...
...Of this it has been remarked by the great Macaulay that its suppression at the hands of the Puritans took place "not on account of the pain it gave the bear, but on account of the pleasure it gave the man...
...What needs to be supplemented in it can be found all too easily elsewhere...
...I would like to whisper a secret into Mr...
...Also variety of bull-baiting and bearbaiting, it being a general day of sport by all the old gamesters...
...The book is well thought out and well constructed...
...By Gerald Shauffhnessy...
...Fathers ought to be warned not to be beguiled by the title of Sea Life in Nelson's Time into buying the book as a gift for their sons...
...The Dominican Order in England before the Reformation, by Beryl E. R. Formoy...
...Father Woods is of this latter company in his very carefully written book...
...She who promised after her death to let fall a rain of roses, began to weave in her cloister days garlands twined with the "unpetaled roses" of her own life and simple aspirations after the divine...
...They will find it to be one of the most fascinating books ever written...
...There is a supreme mystical poem among Saint Therese's songs—"What I Have Loved...
...With Mr...
...Their proprietors were enjoined "forthwith to pluck downe quite the stages, galleries, and roomes that are made for people to stand in, and so to deface the same as they maie not be employed agayne to such use...
...THE avowed purpose in this volume is "an attempt to clarify the confused thought of scores of troubled souls concerning spiritual problems of fundamental significance to this life and the next," consisting mainly in a criticism of the Church's attitude toward science, and a plea for readjustment January 27, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL of Christian beliefs to the scientific theories of the present day...
...The main obstacles are constitutional difficulties, the wide diffusion of ownership of the bituminous mines, and the small amount of sentiment in favor of nationalization among the people of the United States...
...Chancellor's curious and intensely interesting history of the pleasure haunts of London...
...He never pads his narrative, as too many are accustomed to do, with a mass of twice-told and accessible anecdote...
...The king, the queen, the chamberlain, and the Earl of Leicester lent the aegis of their names to the hardpressed actors, and even the sour-visaged city fathers hesitated before they meddled with men publicly advertised as the "servants" of such magnates...
...This refers specially to monastic architecture which the English Dominicans fostered more generously than their brethren anywhere else in the order...
...On the Spanish Main, by John Masefield...
...MANY have been the discussions over the exact meaning of Saint Augustine's celebrated Rationes Seminales and their bearing on evolution, one side maintaining stoutly that they cover everything reasonably likely to be proved with regard to evolution, the other as hotly protesting that they do nothing of the kind...
...2.00...
...Perhaps the explanation may be that Masefield himself suffered so acutely during the brief period he spent at sea...
...New York: The Universal Knowledge Foundation...
...Bloomington, Illinois: American Review Service Press...
...1 HIS book discusses the important question of Catholic losses due to immigration...
...The great majority of persons in industry seem unable to see beyond the "short run...
...Devine rejects this, not on any theoretical ground, but because he believes "it is not a remedy within the present range of practical statesmanship...
...The stages of the earth's development presented in the Genesis accounts are essentially those contained in modern scientific theories, but the purpose of these accounts is to teach God's relation to His creation in terms comprehensible on any level of cultural development rather than to expose scientifically the processes of nature involved in the work of creation, which task, therefore, has been left to man's own efforts...
...Of course, the bonds with the Franciscans, although generally close, were sometimes stretched to the breaking point on account of the theological disputes which then elicited the crusading spirit of thinkers...
...In the long run, it would be better for both operators and miners to adopt the policies proposed by Dr...
...Chancellor shows that in Shoreditch, and not in Southwark as is commonly believed, the first playhouses in London were erected...
...What the attitude of pre-reformation London might have been we have scant means of knowing, as the history of the stage in England only begins with the last two decades of the sixteenth century...
...On the other hand, the tendency to underrate the intellectual development of the middle-ages because the empirical sciences had not then yet made their appearances, is unjust in view of the achievements of deductive thinking in that period, culminating in the universal philosophical system of Saint Thomas Aquinas which not only has stood the test of centuries but which anticipated many later exploits of empirical sciences...
...Miracles become impossible as "contrary to the laws of nature...
...Their selfishness is not "enlightened," either in the sense of Adam Smith or Dr...
...There was a dark side to the amusements of old London, and Mr...
...Mine is Thy Heart, Thy face adored— Thine arrow pierceth as a sword...
...It was early in the years following the death of Sister Therese in 1897 that her scattered songs and poems were collected and published at Bar-le-Duc by the Saint Paul Press— some years later the Carmel Press of Boston published certain English versions made by Susan L. Emery, and today we have a very fine edition of translations by the Carmelites of Santa Clara, California, and published by Burns Oates and Washbourne in London...
...According to the author, the early Christians drew their notions of the universe from biblical texts based on legends of non-Hebrew origin, and from these texts churchmen also evolved an orthodox cosmological theory which was stubbornly maintained in opposition to more advanced knowledge...
...The author speaks of "theological dogma," apparently a product of the early Church fathers and the theologians of the middle-ages who, he says, were generally opposed to scientific advance...
...An author of books dealing with historical subjects has no excuse for not acquainting himself with facts in a day when libraries are to be found in every community...
...It is part five which provides controversial matter and which will evoke many differences of opinion among the readers of the book...
...Masefield could really have been a sailor after all, or have even talked to sailors, or, for the matter of that, to schoolboys expatiating, in accordance with the traditions of their kind, upon the school "grub...
...Biblical inspiration is to be understood only in the sense in which Lincoln or any other great person was inspired to high achievements...
...about all these does Mr...
...The array of documents at the end adds a peculiar value to a work which, taken all in all, is well done, fair, honest, and comprehensive...
...it's a way they have in the public schools...
...The same high value has not been necessarily attached to their opinions on secular topics...
...upon the streets of staked-out unsold lots, and the gap in the bluff through which no railroad came...
...But the Church, while defining and defending religious truths concerning the relationship between Creator and creature, at no time elevated a cosmological scheme to the status of dogma or obligatory belief...
...What is held by these men is that the passages in Saint Augustine, so far from being opposed to evolution, in reality cover by implication anything that a Catholic believer in evolution can want...
...With this in mind, the literary reader of the poems of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus will be highly gratified to find in her a poet who answers to most rigorous critical demands— a pure soul clearly and simply revealed in a series of songs flooded with a soft sunlight as of a morning sanctuary...
...was first performed in public...
...How it can best be met is a question that each must put to itself...
...Likewise two bear-dogs to jump three jumps apiece at a bear, which jumps highest for ten shillings to be spent...
...This point of view necessitates an attack on the Bible, which is "vastly more a book about men and their growing conception of God than it is a book of divine revelations...
...A pitiless January 27, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 333 —or, more correctly, a pitiful—realism strips aways every shred of the illusion which has fired every romantic boy who ever dreamed of running away to sea...
...sensitive, true-hearted, but continually defeated by his irressolution and his inability to separate fact from fancy...
...It is a pleasure to read of the appreciation amounting to enthusiasm with which they were welcomed by the Americans of their day...
...Masefield's ear, in the words of the famous song—"It's a way they have in the army...
...The Pleasure Haunts of London, his latest book, covers very interesting ground indeed...
...Shaughnessy's careful book informative and inspiring...
...Both wrote on religious as well as on secular topics...
...it's a way they have in the navy...
...He should never have been a sailor—that is why he writes so vividly about the sea...
...The opinions of the fathers and of certain theologians on religious subjects always have been considered of greatest importance...
...And yet the reader must often feel that the colors upon Masefield's brush are too lurid...
...Again we encounter in these pages an exquisite allegorical scenes—the Divine Little Beggar of Christmas, 1895, called a Pious Recreation, in which an angel appears with an image of the Infant Jesus which is laid in the manger and then presented to the mother prioress and to each of the nuns with a basket from which each extracts a note and gives it back to the angel who sings the alms asked for by the Heavenly Child...
...Devine, by far the greater number of the evils would be remedied...
...IF, as the author declares in the opening chapter, the history of the Dominican order has been pitifully neglected because of the dearth of documents, we cannot but welcome a study like the present one which gives us in rapid review a 334 THE COMMONWEAL January 27, 1926 picture of the coming and the activities of the friar preachers in pre-reformation England...
...It must be understood that no partisan of the other side ever claimed that Saint Augustine held what today is understood by evolution—that would have been impossible...
...AMONG the many clever Englishmen who are writing about old days and ways in London, Mr...
...This may seem like a rash prophecy, but it is based upon the lessons of experience concerning the human nature of the various interested groups upon whom Dr...
...We learn that the unceasing war upon public amusements at the hands of the Puritan and "snouter" (Mr...
...Ernest Sutherland Bates...
...Chancellor does not shirk it...
...6.00...
...But the main defect in the author's list of remedies is that they are quite unlikely to be adopted to a degree that would be effective...
...WHILE this volume is not as large as What the Coal Commission Found, by Tryon, Hunt and Willitts, it is more serviceable to the general reader...
...Devine occupy some seventy-five pages and are assigned to owners, operators, miners, dealers, railroads, Inter-State Commerce Commission, Pennsylvania, the President and Congress, and the consumers...
...The joys of her spiritual abandonments seem to suppress the shadows and sorrows of the mystical longings of the Spanish saints—there is more of the idyl than of the tragedy—it is the radiant northern piety, the aspiration of the Gothic spirit, rather than the clamorous appeal and the luxurious gloom of the Romanesque and Byzantine soul...
...they certainly never were obligatory...
...fresh ones immediately are supplied in place of those that are wounded or tired...
...The old ruffians...
...The fact, as Mr...
...As a fact, learning and its distribution were almost completely in the hands of churchmen during the middle-ages...
...The theatre weathered the storm because great nobles and the Court itself took these "rogues and vagabonds" under' their protection...
...Darrow has built a straw man under cover of which he attacks Christianity by stretching scientific theories far beyond the problems they are devised to cover...
...Lafayette Letters, edited by Edward Everett Dale...
...One feels that his books are the result of first-hand and painstaking search through old records and maps...
...No proof, however, is offered for these assertions...
...2.50...
...2.50...
...This same principle of independence appears again in the interpretation and application of certain of the order's rules...
...and of negroes who disappeared near the victualing yards to be seen no more— then one wonders whether Mr...
...There is nothing Parnassian or sculpturesque in these works—for her the cameo and the carved cherry-stone did not suggest a permanency like to eternity, as in the way of the literary schools—her songs were wayside flowers, fresh from the soil of a pure heart, moving to the morning winds of the spirit and unplucked from their stems without the arrangements that recall Japan...
...B.ut that it is never successfully grappled with by a system that oscillates between license and outlawry is sufficiently proved by Mr...
...The Divine Beggar also implores Some Milk, Some Little Birds, A Star, A Lyre, Roses, A Valley Reaper, A Cluster of Grapes, A Little Host, A Smile, A Toy, A Pillow, Some Bread, A Mirror, A Palace, Lilies, Bonbons, A Caress, A Cradle, Linens, Some Fire, Cake, Honey, and A Lamb...
...The Roses of Thy mouth, my sole award...
...In any case, the Puritan and "Bible Christian" element, so strongly represented in the city corporation, led the Elizabethan Thespian a sad dance...
...Devine...
...but not without great risk to the dogs, from the horns of the one and the teeth of the other, and it sometimes happens that they are killed on the spot...
...Mencken is to be given credit for the word) is no affair of yesterday...
...Thou dost pursue me from above with love...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Other Pious Recreations, as these naive dialogues are entitled, are called The Angels of the Crib, The Flight Into Egypt, Jesus at Bethany, with Martha and Mary Magdalen as interlocutors...
...Economic history, however, records very few instances of important reforms effected through policies deliberately adopted for the "long run" by employers, or employes, or any other economic group...
...Then the story moves to New York and is shaken with the pounding life of the metropolis...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 12
