the Roman Church is the adulterator of the traditional Christian faith, the contriver of anti-evangelical novelties, the gnawing worm of Christian piety, Russian theologians may spread such heinous falsehoods even in America,1 but their beliefs ought not to be put into practice by methods which throw a sinister light upon the self-styled spiritual mission of Russia with regard to Western Christianity. We have no doubt of the high destiny of Russia. Her people so profoundly devout and so ardently Christian have certainly a noble mission to fulfill in the history of Christendom, in the onward sweep of civilization, in the ceaseless development of the human mind. But it is not the popes hired by the Holy Governing Synod; it is not the bishops who so degrade their dignity that they become mere wheel-works in the political machinery of Russian bureaucracy; it is not tchinovniki after the manner and style of Bobrinski who will accomplish the Messianic expectations of Russian thinkers. A spiritual mission may be achieved only by breaking the fetters which hamper the free exercise of spiritual power, and, as a Spanish Catholic review recently observed, in Russia as well as in Byzantium, Cæsarism, or the dense atmosphere of an omnipotent autocracy, has swept away the religious liberty and the doctrinal independence of the Church. Catholicism, the Roman Catholic Church, was alone able to maintain freedom and independence in the fulfillment of her divine mission on earth.2 The claims, therefore, of Russian Messianism will be satisfied only when Russia will rid herself of Byzantine routine, cease to violate in the Russian bureaucratic style, the civic, religious and national rights of the so-called allogenes, and above all, look upon Catholicism not as a foe to be crushed, but as the vital strength of Christianity, the defender of the ideal of a free Christian Church throughout the world. 'Allusion is here made to a superficial paper of Ivan Sokolov, on Byzantium as the Preserver of Orthodoxy, inserted in the Constructive Quarterly Review, the well-known magazine of Silas McBee. The paper is filled with historical enormities and veiled, but poisonous, attacks against the Catholic Church. As the Preserver of Orthodoxy, Byzantium before its fall into the hands of Turks experienced the purity of faith of nineteen heretic Patriarchs (their list is to be found in the accurate work of Duchesne: Autonomies Ecclésiastiques), and after its fall, it counts a confessedly Calvinistic Patriarch, Cyril Lucaris, and a Roman Catholic, Cyril of Verria. By the way, it seems strange to us that a review devoted to the rapprochment of Christian Churches and denominations should accept as pure gold reviling tirades against a Church which numerically and morally holds first place in the United States. 'Anhelos de Unidad, La Ciencia Tomista, VI., 1916, p. 386. THE WRITINGS OF MONTGOMERY CARMICHAEL.1 BY CHARLES H. A. WAGER. HERE are, fortunately, a good many ways in which a writer may serve his generation. He may instruct it, he may amuse it, or he may refresh it, and we are not sure that the last way is not the most serviceable of all. For instruction is likely to be rather a strenuous thing, requiring a good deal of effort from the beneficiary, and such effort, however salutary, is likely to prove a burden. Amusement, even when it is kept within discreet bounds, is necessarily transient, and generally, except in very happy instances, appeals to a side of human nature that does not require fostering. We need to be taught to feel rather than to laugh. But the literature of refreshment is neither exacting nor dissipating. It demands nothing of us but a receptive spirit. Its function is to spread peace upon the troubled waves of life. We have all read books of refreshment, and we have generally read them more than once. They are books which give us, as we turn their pages, a feeling of restfulness and content, a sense of relaxation, of liberation, of the lightening of a burden. They are usually small books, descriptive or meditative in character, without acerbity or conscious cleverness or effort of any kind. They are seldom elaborate in style, or, if they are, the art is so perfectly concealed as to leave no trace of itself except an admirable simplicity; but, for the most part, they are as natural and spontaneous as they sound. They never attract much attention, for their readers are necessarily few, and intellectually akin to their writers. Rather than do without them, we would spare many a more pretentious or even, in the ordinary sense, more useful book. They have a special place upon our shelves and in our hearts. Of this sort are the writings of Montgomery Carmichael. To anyone whose taste inclines him to the green pastures and still waters of religious meditation, who loves to dwell in thought with those rare beings-exiles they seem from another age and another 'Sketches and Stories Grave and Gay. London: Constable & Co., 1896. (Long out of print.) In Tuscany. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1902, third edition, 1906. world than ours-who lead or aspire to lead the hidden life of the soul, these books have an unfailing charm. They are not religious books, in the usual sense of the word; that is to say, their purpose is not edification and their tone is not hortatory. They are vigorous pieces of religious psychology, based on long acquaintance with the highest manifestations of the Catholic mind, and rich with the ripest Catholic wisdom. The power of giving reality to types of character that are perfectly alien to the life of our own day seems to us Mr. Carmichael's best gift, a gift that marks him as an artist in fiction, though these books are not, in the strict sense, novels. Such a sketch as that entitled "Fra Pacifico," in the delightful volume called In Tuscany, is a little masterpiece of imaginative realization. So lavish and yet so discreet has the author been in his use of characterizing detail that it seems incredible, when one has finished the moving story, that the hero of it never lived. In Italy particularly, the brown habit and green sack of every questing friar reminds one of this typical son of Francis who "lived a holy life of sixty-two years, and died a holy death on March nineteen, 1893." In the case of John William Walshe it will be remembered that many readers were actually beguiled into thinking that they had come upon the track of an unknown modern saint. We defy any unwarned student of things Franciscan to read the introduction to that fascinating book without being deceived by the circumstantial account of "the Walshe manuscripts," and without being consumed with regret that he cannot lay hands upon them. We are convinced, too, that more than one visitor to the little Campo Santo of Assisi has looked eagerly for the grave of this holy and beloved man. Such circumstantiality is evidently the fruit of the ripest knowledge of things Franciscan and the profoundest sympathy with them. It is known to all who have delved in that infinitely rich and fruitful field that Mr. Carmichael is the originator of an ingenious interpretation of the celebrated Blessing of Brother Leo, preserved in the Sacro Convento, at Assisi, and the translator of that most exquisite allegory, the Sacrum Commercium-to name only the best known of his Franciscan studies. Yet it is doubtful whether his most absorbing interest is Franciscan. In Tuscany contained indications that he felt a more intimate and personal sympathy with monastic or even anchoretic ideals, and his latest book, The Solitaries of the Sambuca, confirms that impression. It is the story of a wealthy Englishman, Paul Casauban, who finds in an abandoned Italian hermitage the happiness that he has long been seeki He establishes himself there quite alone, and in spite of grea comfort from the greedy and brutal peasantry, he enjoys for a short time a deep and refreshing peace. After a little, a small community grows up about him of men who are seeking the solitary life. They dwell apart from one another in cottages which he provides, their material wants are supplied, at his expense, by an old servant who has followed him to his retreat, and they hear Mass daily in a church of his building. They do not connect themselves with any order of Religious; they have no rule. Their bond of unity is the desire to live the life of prayer and contemplation, undisturbed by the noises of the world. In solitude and silence is their strength. Presently there arrives among them an old friend of the founder, who feels compelled to let others know a peace which they too may win, and this book is the result. Yet the exact site of the "Sambuca " is not revealed, so that only those who have the perseverance and intuition of a true vocation are ever likely to find it. The book is really a prose hymn to solitude; it is a reduction to practice of certain precepts of the Imitation. The ideas of it are sure to be unacceptable to an age whose native element is noise. Many religious persons, even Catholics, will feel it to be out of harmony with the tendencies of the day. To linger with pleasure upon such a vision of peace will seem to them a repudiation of the social obligations of the modern world. But there must be, even yet, a good many readers to whom such words as the following will come with a strange sweetness, and who will find in them the expression of a deep human instinct which current practice ignores to its own hurt: There the inhabitants are innocent, humble and pure; secluded in solitude, they hear no scandal; immersed in silence, they speak no evil; free from want, they seek no gain; having nothing, they know not avarice; cleansed by the fires of holy prayer and contemplation, the fires of all concupiscence have died within them; eating only of the fruits of the earth, drinking only at Mother Nature's breast, they know neither gluttony nor ebriety; they hurt no man's body; wound no man's honor; flatter no man's vanity; beneath the shelter of God's wings they give neither scandal nor offence. In the constant presence of the all-seeing God, mean acts and idle words pass from their lives, and like the immaculate in the way, they walk in the law of the Lord forever. That there should be here and there in the world a perpetual protest against the needless noise and chatter and distraction, the unblest daily intercourse of men who think only of gain and amuse ment, whose mere contact with one another is corrupting, and who, as a recent writer puts it, know exhilaration and depression but never joy nor sorrow-that there should be such a protest ought, it would seem, to be an unspeakable satisfaction to many to whom the meaningless routine of every day seems sometimes a burden too heavy to be borne. Such a protest serves the same purpose as the Franciscan denial of the all-importance of wealth. The world cannot go on without noise any more than without money, but the picture of what life might be without them is at once a rebuke and a challenge. We are too ready to yield to our limitations, to be content with a second-rate world of our own fashioning. Few men are saints, and so we acquiesce in mediocrity for ourselves, and grow impatient with aspirations that we do not share. But books like these show us the possibility of the never-failing miracle of sanctity, and this is one of the highest services that literature can perform. Nearly all of Mr. Carmichael's books abound in sketches of Italian life and character, with which his long residence in Italy has made him familiar. Few writers of our day know their Italy so well and love it with a love at once so tender and so sane. He makes little use of formal description, but his backgrounds and his types are saturated with intimate Italian feeling. His books abound also in evidences of his wide and profound acquaintance with Italian art. In Tuscany contains some interesting pages on the sculptures of Matteo Civitali at Lucca, and even The Life of John William Walshe, the main interest of which is far from being artistic, offers more than one indication of the author's expert knowledge of pictures. Francia's Masterpiece is, of course, his most distinguished piece of work in this field-a book characterized by so much scholarship, taste, and devout feeling as to give it a place almost unique among artistic monographs. Its purpose is to show that the great altar-piece of Francia in the church of San Frediano at Lucca, which a score of guides and critics have named an Assumption or a Coronation of Our Lady, is really a representation, one of the earliest in painting and certainly the most beautiful, of the Immaculate Conception. But the book is more than a successful attempt to explain the meaning of a misunderstood picture; it is a fervent plea for a proper attitude towards all religious painting. The legalized sack of Italian churches and convents has brought together in galleries numberless pictures that were painted to be hung in a certain place and to convey certain ideas. Wrested from the altars to whose cultus they gave concrete ex |