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THE PETRINE OFFICE. A Reply to the Rev. F. W. Puller's Pamphlet, 'The Relation of the Church of England to the Monarchical Claims of the Roman See.' By Herbert E. Hall, M.A. London: Catholic Truth Society.

THE tract that Mr. Hall sets about to refute forms one of the series of Modern Oxford Tracts. The author of it has long been known as a persistent and laborious opponent of the Holy Sec. The subject of the tract has been dealt with by many Catholic writers, especially, by Dr. Rivington and Dom Chapman. Mr. Hall feels himself called upon to take the salient points of the tract and deal with them individually, because for years he himself clung to the hope that Mr. Puller's main contentions might be true. The four points of Mr. Puller's attack are: The alleged ecclesiastical origin of the Primacy of Rome; the opposition to Rome of the Church of North Africa; the alleged transformation of belief about the Papacy by the False Decretals; the corruption of morals in the Church preceding, and conducive to, the Reformation. Mr. Hall shows that Mr. Puller has written nothing, adduced nothing, to invalidate or overthrow the general tradition of the Church, and the Primacy of the Roman Pontiff. Mr. Hall points out the mischievous species of controversy adopted by Mr. Puller, that of first creating an atmosphere according to his own preconceived notions and then analysing historical documents through this distorted medium. Mr. Hall does not attempt an exhaustive treatment of the subject. He confines himself to registering just a few telling testimonies in each case, and succinctly and firmly drives his arguments home. He shirks no difficulty, but honestly and candidly takes them up and defends his own position by appeals to history, to the Fathers, to Councils and Synods. His chapters on the specific point of the relations of England with Rome are extremely interesting and contain a great deal of historical information that is particularly useful at the present day. His concluding chapters on the Petrine texts of Scripture show his competence as a Scriptural scholar and a critic. He writes simply and explains clearly and intelligibly for the ordinary reader. It is a useful book for students, and an admirable résumé of the whole subject of the Primacy of the Sovereign Pontiff.

M. R.

ROME: A Weekly Paper. Rome: Piazza San Silvestro.

WE have received a notice in advance of the re-publication of this important weekly paper. Our confidence in its future success is ensured by the fact that it is to be placed in the capable hands of the Rev. Dr. Conry, whose distinguished abilities will, we are certain, win for Rome a prominent place amongst the Catholic papers of the world. Published and edited at the centre of Christendom it will be thoroughly au courant with all the latest developments. Judging from the programme which the editor has mapped out, it will leave no department of Catholic activity unrecorded. The reliability of its information is sufficiently

guaranteed by the following statement of the Editor: It is of interest,' he says, 'to add that before taking any step in the project of a Catholic journal the management laid their project before the ecclesiastical authcrities in all its details. They asked the Holy Father simply for the nihil obstat to the project, and a word of encouragement to its initiators. This His Holiness Pope Benedict the Fifteenth graciously gave. Hence the confidence with which Rome, in its new form and under new management, invites on its subscription list the names of the Bishops, priests, and lay Catholics of Australasia, Canada, the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and South Africa.' We wish Rome a full measure of

success.

P. M.

BOOKS, ETC., RECEIVED

America: A Catholic Review (August).
The Ecclesiastical Review (August). U.S.A.

The Rosary Magazine (August). Somerset, Ohio.
The Catholic World (August). New York.

The Austral Light (July). Melbourne.

The Ave Maria (July). Notre Dame, Indiana.

The Irish Monthly (August). Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, Ltd.
The Catholic Bulletin (August). Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, Ltd.
The Month (August). London: Longmans.

Études (August). Paris: 12 Rue Oudinot (VIIe).

Revue Pratique d'Apologétique (August). Paris: Beauchesne.

Revue du Clergé Francais (August). Paris: Letouzey et Ané.

The Fortnightly Review (August). St. Louis, Mo.

The Lamp (July). Garrison, N.Y.

Missionary Record of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (August).

O'Brien Bros., College Street.

Dublin:

The Annals of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart (August). Cork: Guy & Co.
Luttes de l'Église. Par Yves de la Brière. Paris: Beauchesne.

La Bible du Paysan. Par Prosper Gérald. Paris: Beauchesne.

Notre Foi. Par R. Compainy. Paris: Beauchesne.

L'Âme existe. Par Henry de Pully. Paris: Beauchesne.

Saint Martin et les Destinées de la France. Par P. Aloys Pottier. Paris : Beauchesne.

Etincelles de Foi et d'Amour. Par le P. de Nadaillac, S.J. Paris: Beauchesne. Great French Sermons from Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Massillon. Edited by Rev. D. O'Mahony, B.D., B.C.L.; with an Introduction by the Rt. Rev. Dom. F. Cabrol, O.S.B. London: Sands & Co.

Irish National Tradition. By Alice Stopford Green. London: Macmillan and Co.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE

BY REV. W. H. POLLARD, B.A.

WAR

It is no hard thing to a Catholic to admit that philosophy, true or false, must in the end have a profound influence on practical life. The mass of men, however, do not dream of such a thing. If they glance at philosophy at all they only become the more impressed with the immense distance which separates it from their own busy lives. They catch glimpses of a few harmless dim-eyed old men, morbidly given to abstraction and left becalmed in a quiet backwater of life, while the eager flood goes by regardless. The man of pure science, they see, finds out truths which are afterwards turned to account by others; but they are much less prepared to believe that any close relations exist between philosophy and practice. Nor is this reluctance surprising. There seems to be an inbred human instinct of repugnance to any attempt to lift the veil of Nature and so come to close quarters with the empirical or commonsense' view of the primary facts of life. Another reason may be found in the ridiculous figure that so many philosophers have made in all ages, with their odium philosophicum and their incapacity to understand each other's meaning. But is it not largely also through an unworthy contempt of mere theory, at least when theory has no obvious material advantage to offer by way of a bribe? Men dislike abstract thinking; it gives them the headache. Consequently, they easily conclude that it is of no use.

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It must be owned that the word 'philosophy' is a badly damaged one after centuries of rough handling. Here we may simply define it as the study of first principles; meaning by that the very first principles of all, not those that are only relatively first, for instance, the fundamental truths of chemistry. Clearly the distance between first principles rightly so called and their practical applications must be for the most part immensely long. The philosopher is not often very successful as a statesman or as a

FIFTH SERIES, VOL. X-OCTOBER, 1917

leader in social reform. Minds quite untrained in philosophical thought are found far more helpful in such matters; and that is natural. The fact is that the workings of a healthy mind are founded on an implicit acceptance of true first principles. The multitude, if only false theory would let them alone, have right instincts; and, though these are continually being nullified by men's passions, they remain very powerful as a whole. But when we begin to reflect and form theories and try to squeeze the facts of life into the rigid frames of those theories, we gravely lessen thereby (at any rate, if the theories are false) the activity of our rational instincts. Unfortunately, the reflex thought which now succeeds to the command is infinitely more fallible than the promptings it has displaced. A defective philosophy, to the undisguised amusement of all intelligent non-philosophers, notoriously renders its victim almost incapable of viewing the universe with a truly candid mind. Wherever he looks he sees his precious system

'Tis the blot upon the brain
That will show itself without-

and these strictures must be applicable even to a true system, since it is sure to be only partial at best. Philosophers would not be the best masters of the Republic after all.

But a prudent mistrust of philosophers when they pass out of their province is easily distorted into something very different. It can turn into the average Englishman's attitude towards them, an attitude purely empirical. In this country we have slowly accumulated a hoard of practical experience in political and social questions, and a tradition has formed itself of sober and shrewd action on the basis of that experience; and that action has the stamp of success on it, and success confirms the maxims by which it is guided. But the principles, the living root of all this, seem to our minds wholly remote from the ends we have in view, and they therefore remain unthought-out. We simply shrink from first principles, we abhor them; we suspect them as something occult and remote.

And yet all the while there is a living nexus between headquarters and the furthest outpost, between great principles and the last petty application of them. It is the relation of a seed to a plant. The whole plant springs

from its seed, even though the popular eye cannot drill down to the roots and recognize there that which implicitly contained the whole. And that is why the leading philosophers of a country are really important persons; and their teaching, which seems circumscribed by the narrow walls of lecture-rooms which very few students frequent, or enclosed in volumes read by a very minute public, is, in fact, exceedingly self-diffusive and hard to control. As soon as propounded, it begins to filter subtly into the whole body politic and social. There is quite a series of agents; first, the manufacturers, then the distributors, the retail dealers, and finally the widespread consumers of philosophic doctrines. These do not, of course, reach the consumer in philosophic form, but he swallows them worked up into a tasty compound, in which the other ingredients disguise from him the grave step he is taking. In short, the evils of our time have their root in a lying philosophy which pretends to go down to first principles and does not.

It is evident that a true philosophy will give us the key, not merely of many things, but in some sense of all things. That is, it will show us that all things form a coherent system, and that they rest ultimately on something which the mind in its very first act knows to be the truth. The investigation may begin with the gathering of particular facts and the sorting of them into groups. We should thus arrive at certain general truths which relatively to their own departments were first principles. The next step would be to find the common element in them. As the process of broadening the principles goes forward, their number grows less and less, and we begin indistinctly to see our system as a sort of inverted but not unstable cone. At length one general principle is arrived at which enters into all things and lays the foundation of all; and such a first principle every philosophy promises us. cannot go deeper than that. It must be such that of necessity you cannot go deeper; that is to say, it must contain its own proof, its ratio. If it is not self-evident and allcontaining it is not a philosophical basis, but a cul de sac; and not only the blind leaders but the multitude of dupes who follow will soon find themselves at a hopeless standstill, most likely in the ditch.

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Naturally enough, it is in the later and decaying stages of society that false philosophies have their strongest influence. In its earlier and healthier periods the machinery

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