In this manual* of about two hun

THE CHURCH IN ENGLISH dred and eighty pages, the au

HISTORY.
By Stone.

thor gives an attractive sketch of the outlines of English ecclesiastical history, adapted for pupils in higher schools and colleges. The arrangement is clear, and the course and correlation of events, causes, and consequences set forth with as much detail and philosophic analysis as the grade of students for whom it is intended, can be expected to master. The author states facts in a fairly objective way, and, while evincing the staunchest loyalty to the Church, does not descend to needlessly blackening the character of her opponents, nor to the tricks of the special pleader. In our day, when Catholics of any education are sure, some time or another, to meet with the non-Catholic view of historical facts, where the perspective is often very different from our own, the important point is that the teacher and the text-book should teach the pupil the facts, just as they are. Otherwise he may one day find that he has been deceived in some things; and thenceforward he will cease to trust the guides of his youth. Very rightly this manual insists on the evidences that establish the subordination of the English Church to the Holy See up till the Reformation; and the substitution, in the Tudor settlement, of the Royal Supremacy for that of the Pope. The pupil who will have mastered, as he can easily do, the contents of this comparatively small text-book will have a very respectable knowledge of the ecclesiastical history of England down to the time of James I. The subsequent period, and especially the last century, is rather too briefly disposed of. And, perhaps, the author has somewhat deviated from her general standard of sincerity when she leaves the impression that James II. was an advocate of the principle of religious liberty.

GOLDEN SAYINGS OF
BROTHER GILES.

One of the first companions of St. Francis, Brother Giles, achieved during his life the reputation of possessing a singular power of expressing the truths of the spiritual life and the wisdom of the saints with vivacity, terseness, and the distinctive Franciscan

* The Church in English History. A Manual for Catholic Schools. By J. M. Stone. St. Louis B. Herder.

character. His golden sayings were compiled soon after his death by the disciples who had committed them to writing after they had heard them fall from his own lips; and have come down, more or less adulterated, to the present day. Four collections of the Dicta exhibit many variations. Father Paschal has taken for translation the Dicta B. Ægidii; and adds an appendix giving other sayings from compilations more or less corrupted. Apologizing for the meagreness of the biographical sketch of Brother Giles which he draws, Father Paschal, after noting the paucity of reliable information existing concerning the subject, writes:

The purely historical features of a saint's life, everything in fact which illustrated only the human side-features which we have come to regard as almost essential to a complete grasp of the subject-such things were of little or no interest to the thirteenth century hagiographer. Moreover, the medieval legends of the saints were mostly, as their names imply, intended for reading in the refectory. Hence their comparative disregard of all save what actually tends to edify. Remembering this-and how much depends on the point of view-we must not look for a methodical account of the actions of Blessed Giles in the Leonine life as it has come down to us.

This life by Brother Leo, treated critically, is the basis of Father Paschal's sketch. Here, and in the editing and translating of the Sayings, Father Paschal displays the erudition and the grasp of historical method which have won him a place in the front rank of the large band of scholars who to day have devoted themselves to the study of "Franciscana."

PHILOSOPHERS OF THE

SMOKING-ROOM.
By Aveling.

The exposition and defense of
Catholic ethics and theology in

some lighter literary form, rather than in the systematic lecture or treatise, is too seldom attempted. Hence the present effort of Dr. Aveling † deserves, apart from

The Golden Sayings of the Blessed Brother Giles of Assisi. Newly translated and edited, together with a Sketch by his Life, by the Rev. Father Paschal Robinson, of the Order of Friars Minor. Philadelphia, Pa.: The Dolphin Press.

The Philosophers of the Smoking-Room. Conversations on Matters of Moment. By Francis Aveling, D.D. St. Louis: B. Herder.

its intrinsic value, warm commendation. A party of passengers on a steamer from Liverpool to Montreal, consisting of an artist, somewhat poetical and dreamy, with his heart in the right place, a doctor of a sceptical and materialistic turn of mind, a genial Protestant clergyman, and a secular priest, who unites a good grip of philosophy and theology to a sound store of common sense, tact, and good nature, drift into friendly discussion in the smoking-room on such topics as suicide, God, drunkenness, free-will, myths, spiritualism, etc.

The priest, with occasional assistance from the parson when the debate is confined to philosophical or common religious grounds, champions the orthodox views, in opposition to the doctor, who is occasionally assisted by the artist's wife. A good deal of solid philosophy and theology is conveyed in popular form and in colloquial language. A listener well up in Spencer, Hartmann, and the other gospels of positivism in all its forms, would be likely to protest that the priest wins his triumphs too cheaply over his somewhat superficial opponents, and would probably push him much harder, while some colleagues of the worthy parson would accuse him of having allowed his sympathy with a brother fisherman to have dulled his polemical wits. But it would have been a violation of all the probabilities, and entirely incompatible with the simpler aim of Dr. Aveling, to have treated us to the spectacle of an exhaustive dialectical duel on any of the burning questions of religious thought in the smoking-room of a transatlantic steamer. Conveyed in this lighter vein Catholic doctrine may obtain a hearing in quarters where it would knock in vain were it arrayed in its characteristic garb.

A MIRROR OF SHALOTT.
By Benson.

A number of priests and two or three laymen meet on several occasions to "swap stories" of their respective personal experiences in the realm of the preternatural. Presentiments, ghostly apparitions, visions, and uncanny manifestations of various kinds are related with all the indications that the writer asks us to believe that they are records of real experiences. In some of them the Mass and the sacraments are introduced. If true, they are wonderful. If mere exercises of the imagination, it is surpris

* A Mirror of Shalott. By Rev. Robert Hugh Benson. New York: Benziger Brothers. VOL. LXXXVI.-17

ing that Father Benson should have employed the most sacred rites of religion as part of his machinery.

Probably the aim of the composition has been to convey the impression that there is a good deal of truth in the accounts of spiritistic and diabolic manifestations which are engrossing attention just at present. If this be the case, it would seem that Father Benson would have done better to state clearly whether he set forth these stories as genuine histories, whatever they might be worth, of real persons, or as mere fiction. And if they are but fiction, why should they be given to the public under the prestige of his name?

LIFE OF ALLIES.

*

The author of The Formation of Christendom has found in his daughter a graceful, sympathetic, and competent biographer. The earlier years of Allies' life are related with a good deal of detail. The story of his conversion, with its intellectual struggle, is passed over more rapidly-a mark of judgment in the biographer, since Allies himself has given us an ample account of the journey of his mind from Canterbury to Rome in A Life's Decision. The long years of his life after his conversion, in privacy and in the comparative obscurity of the secretaryship to the Catholic Poor School Committee, afford little matter of interest except to personal friends of the family. Some letters of Newman to Allies, conveying criticisms and suggestions regarding The Formation of Christendom, are interesting reading. So, also, is some correspondence that passed between Allies and Aubrey de Vere, his life-long friend.

A significant revelation of Allies' inner thoughts is his complaint that when he came into the Church he could find no official occupation for the employment of his talents, and was condemned to a life of obscurity. But this fact he turned to good account for himself, by making it a stepping-stone to the high level of spirituality which he attained. And he found profitable vent for his literary ambition and activity by becoming, with his pen, the ardent defender of the Holy See, with the happiest results for many Anglicans, who were led to the truth by his writings. The composition of The Formation of

*Thomas William Allies. By Mary Allies. New York: Benziger Brothers.

Christendom was the work of his life. In his diary he writes, on March 8, 1890:

This is a great anniversary to me. On March 10, 1860, I wrote to my wife from the Minerva at Rome: "I have accomplished the main object of my journey, having had an audience of the Pope on Thursday. He recalled my visit to Gaeta, and asked me whether I had been at Rome since. I told him I had not been able. But you have been well employed at home; you have defended St. Peter, so I must give you St. Peter'; upon which he gave me an intaglio of St. Peter in red cornelian. Thirty years have now elapsed since that day, and the work for which I asked the blessing of Pius IX. has occupied me ever since. It has set before me a definite task to which I have devoted every thought-I might say almost every hour. It has reached fifty-four chapters, and I hope, in a short time, to complete it as far as the crowning of Charlemagne, seven volumes. Without this task I should certainly have expired from ennui, at the loss of my ergon in life, and the feeling that I was cast out of the sea of heresy as a piece of seaweed on the coast of the Church, whom no one cared for or valued. And it remains to me as the sole personal raison d'être. I mean that, after the work of saving my soul, it is my work in life to defend the See of Peter, and without this I should be utterly discouraged and purposeless as to my external task."

The last volume of his work was written between 1892 and 1895. The author died in 1903, at the ripe age of ninety. His biographer has given the world a full and definite picture of a noble man whose work will live long after him.

HAGIOGRAPHY.

The purpose of this book is to show the application of the ordinary rules and methods of historical criticism to our hagiographical literature in order to winnow some of the chaff from the good wheat-to separate, and to indicate by copious examples, the necessity that exists for separating, from the authentic lives and other records of the saints, a vast mass of spurious stories, baseless legends, and pious in

The Legends of the Saints. An Introduction to Hagiography. From the French of Père H. Delehaye, S.J., Bollandist. Translated by Mrs. V. M. Crawford. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.