worth living. Our moral activity is the determinant. We must believe that our life is worth while, and our belief will help to create the fact. Religious faith is belief of this sort. We know nothing positive of the unseen world, but we believe that the significance of our present life consists in our relation to it. This is our nearest clue to a knowledge of its nature. Any definition which we make of this unseen world or of God must be in terms of significance for human life, especially significance in calling forth our most strenuous moral powers. Life is a real fight, and ultimate reality must be understood as taking cognizance of and even having a part in it. -JULIUS SEELYE BIXLER, Religion in the Philosophy of William James (Boston: Marshall Jones Co.), pp. 122-124. INTELLECTUal Life. WHAT a fascination over the human mind is exercised by the great problems that concern the evolution of the universe, from what of old was called chaos and modern science calls the initial nebulous state, down to the state of differentiation which we see and wonder at today. And whether in the case of the inert or of the living universe, what a joy it is to know and understand even the mere facts, without an explanation of them, without seeing the how or the why! What a joy to read those books which make the bee, the ant, all the insect world, live before the reader's eyes-that world whose habits are a mystery many people, a mystery which the scientist's patience has pierced and his pen described. What interest is aroused in every mind, even though it be not very cultivated, by what passes in the different countries we know of. How enchanting are descriptions of lands, seas, people, everything that exists! But what shall we say of those to whom the universe has begun to reveal the depths of its mysteries and the laws which govern it? You have read accounts of their travels to the pole, through the Sahara, or across the reputedly unscalable summits of Tibet. The scholar does not recoil before long and weary labours or danger or repugnant tasks; nothing matters to him when there is an opportunity of gaining some new piece of knowledge. And look at the price which mankind sets on their labours and discoveries! Look at the honours we bestow on those who have enlarged the circle of human knowledge only a little! Assuredly the importance attached to science arises from the practical utility that may proceed from it, and from the fact that it can be drawn upon to increase the sum of man's well-being. But independently of this, the fact of knowledge gives sufficient enjoyment to justify every effort and recompense every hardship. Did Archimedes think of the usefulness of his discovery when overwhelming joy seized him at the moment of his discovery of the first law of hydrostatics? His exultation was due to his feeling a morsel of truth alive in him, at having snatched from heaven a spark of the divine fire, at being in communion with the truth. Yet what was that spark in proportion to the immense blaze of truth? "A body plunged into a liquid loses as much of its weight as the weight of the liquid it displaces." What is that, in proportion to the whole of the harmonies of the world, even the material world alone? And yet this was enough to make the man who discovered it beside himself with joy and enthusiasm, and to make his name repeated for all time by grateful humanity. Add together all the joys of all men of learning at all their discoveries; then add in your imagination all the truth that can still remain to be discovered and all the joy its discovery will give. For if man has had to wait thousands of years to realise that he moves in the ether, if the existence of X-rays remained unknown till yesterday, can we reasonably suppose today that we have exhausted the treasury of facts to be discovered? Add together all this, and attempt to value the sum-total of joy which remains latent in the possibility of human knowledge. If ever this sum of joy were realised, and poured forth in its entirety into man's heart, would it not be enough to overwhelm him with its happiness, even to make him die of it? The taking possession of the world by means of thought and knowledge is one of the currents, one of the communions, one of the joys of the intellectual life. Like animal life, the life of the intelligence knows another communion and another joy. It begets. It begets by bringing its works to light, by giving to others a part of what it knows. Who can describe the ecstasies of the mind at seeing what is born of it? From the smile of bliss or the foolish exclamation of the child who sees in motion the tiny machine it has conceived, to the "Now speak!" of Michelangelo as he gives to his Moses the last touches of the chisel; from the loving contemplation of the young writer before the binding of his first volume, to the grave joy of a de Lesseps as he sees the first ship pass through his Suez Canal; and why should I not add, to the smile of the divine Artist as He saw "all the things that He had made, and behold, they were very good"—is it not the joy of spiritual fatherhood no less elating than that of fatherhood after the flesh? -CANON M. DEBAETS, The Hymn of Life. Translated by Alan G. McDougall (New York: Benziger Brothers), pp. 38-42. ON READING WHAT IS INFERIOR. THE evils which the habit of reading what is inferior entails, are serious. It wastes time which might be profitably employed; it leads to inati ion, since poor writing invite ind to wander, having in itsen no attractiveness; it prevents the development of a taste for what is excellent, enfeebles the power of discernment, dulls the edge of the intellect, and accustoms one to content himself with the superficial and the commonplace. Its effects are similar to those which are produced by association with the foolish and the vulgar. "I hate books," said Rousseau; "they teach us only to talk about what we do not know." This is true of those who read but the books of facts; it is not true of those who read the books of power. It is not difficult to find those who are indifferent to books or who have a distaste for them. Shut such a one in a library, and he is as lonely as if he were confined in a prison cell. For him the books are as dead as the walls; their presence may even irritate him and add to his wretchedness. He stays gladly with men or horses or flowers, but books are as mel ancholy as tombs: they give him a sense of discomfort as though they were haunted, having heard, perchance, that there is some sort of mysterious presence in them. It is the man or woman, the brave, generous, thinking soul we find in the book, which makes it precious, makes it a friend. But magazines and newspapers, like corporations, like the syndicates that publish them, are soulless. They merely represent something or nothing, like a member of Congress, whom we hardly think of as a man. A book, like a living person, may inspire love or hate; but who can love or hate magazines or newspapers? They are idle things for the idle and for idle hours. They have no power to take firm hold of us and to rouse us to selity. They have no character. yes, and are therefore powerless to form minds and hearts. They are for the moment, and their readers' live aimlessly in the present. Their world is what happened yesterday or an hour ago, and their educational value is not greater than that of gossip and other trivial pastimes; but since they touch upon everything, those whose reading is confined to them, talk about many things, understanding nothing. Put your daily newspaper aside for a week and then look through all the numbers, and you will need no argument to prove of how much valuable time it robs you. The newspaper reader lives in a crowd, in the midst of a mob almost; and in such environment it is difficult not to lose the sense of responsibility or to retain a sense of refinement, decency, and self-respect. He becomes callous both to what is noble and to what is vile. The deeds of heroes do not move him, and crimes and calamities only in as much as they minister to his passion for novelty. He is capable even of a semi-conscious longing for wars, famines, floods, and wrecks, that his craving for news may be fed. He tends to become the Roman multitude, whom the sight of men butchering one another made drunk with pleasure. The houses of the powerful and the rich may be closed against us, but if we are lovers of books, we feel that we are the equals of the best, for we live in the company of prophets and apostles, of philosophers and poets. Socrates will ask us questions, Plato will admit us to his garden, and Cicero, lying at ease in his Tusculan villa, will discourse to us of all high things. I rode with Milton all day long, "O thou who art able to write a book," says Carlyle, "which once in two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror, or City-burner.' In the library of even a poor man we may easily find a company of the wisest and wittiest, gathered from many lands and ages, for his instruction and entertainment. He need but put on his wishing-cap and any one of them will begin to talk or sing. -J. L. SPALDING, Thoughts and Theories of Life and Education (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.), pp. 183-186. Foreign Periodicals. THE CHURCH FARES BETTER IN AMERICA. AMERICAN Catholicism-this is one of the reasons of its vitalityhas benefited by an atmosphere of liberty, of benevolent neutrality, and often of union and active cooperation with the different civil, moral, and religious forces of the nation. On our travels, to and from Chicago, we met no trace of political sectarianism. But not all the States of the Union are animated by the same liberal spirit. I have, on a former occasion, traveled through Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma, and other less favored States; I know that their laws and their press are not always fair to Catholics. I am not ignorant of the Ku-Klux Klan. I have followed the splendid struggles of the Catholics of Oregon in defense of freedom to teach. Even the federal Constitution contains some tyranny, side by side with liberty-witness the prohibition law, incorporated in the Constitution by Protestant influence, as a result of a peculiar perversion of praiseworthy principles. None the less, to consider the situation in America, as a whole, it cannot be denied, that the atmosphere into which the American citizen is born and in which he lives, is one of incomparable freedom. Religion profits greatly thereby. The Catholic layman, the priest, the religious, are not treated as pariahs. There is no discriminatory law to paralyze them. Citizens of a great Republic, they enjoy peacefully all their rights. They know it. They realize it. The transfer of the property of churches and of religious congregations is accomplished with a facility that might well arouse our envy. If I had said to anyone of my neighbors at the Congress, that the eminent members of religious orders, who were our traveling companions, were in France, as religious, deprived of the right of teaching young children, I should not have been understood. Perhaps I should hardly have been believed. Our Christian Brothers, our nuns from the religious orders of France, teach freely, and wear their religious garb in America, and those who have been driven out of France, while still treasuring in their heart an imperishable love of their mother country, cannot avoid saying, "Here, in a free country, we can do what we could never do in France." Anything that could be considered a mark of religious intolerance seems repugnant to the American character. One evening, at the Congress, in the Coliseum, Secretary Davis, representing the President of the Republic, delivered a thrilling address, in praise of harmony, tolerance, and respect for all religious convictions, and even though a Protestant, called upon the moral power of Catholicism for the greatest good of the nation. He excoriated, without naming, the persecutor in Mexico; he declared that any American who did not respect the rights of Catholics, was not worthy of the name of citizen. When the enthusiastic applause of the crowd had quieted down, a French bishop, sitting next to me, expressed to me his desire that in our country a similar régime of freedom could be established, first, no doubt, for all Frenchmen, but also for the numerous foreigners, Italians, Poles, and Russians, where assimilation into the French Republic would be greatly facilitated, if they found amongst us, as in America, an atmosphere of religious justice, in which would be safeguarded their national traditions, their denominational schools, their churches and their priests. . . . ... The American "man in the street" cannot understand how our country, the ancient champion of tolerance, can be, now for a half century, in alliance with the ugly business of persecution. The American Catholic asks himself and he asks us-why the Catholics of France submit to being outlawed by discriminatory legislation. It puzzles them and irritates them. Quick to come to extreme conclusions, they pass severe judgment on our government and our institutions. They forget that no government-not even their own-is faultless. Is it surprising that they show their bad temper on questions of international politics, or of international finance, which have nothing to do with religion? -ABBÉ P. FLYNN, "Recollections of the Rector of The Madeleine, of Paris, at the Eucharistic Congress," in Le Correspondant (Paris), 25 Aout, 1926. CRIME AND SOCIETY. WHAT is crime? Who is a criminal? The questions persist... Father Francis Day, in his booklet, The Community and the Criminal, offers as "a working definition of crime":"A deliberate act contrary to those laws of the State which enforce or interpret the Natural Law." And this Natural Law, Father Day reminds us, is "universal, based on human nature and manifested by reason." If this definition be true, and far be it from the layman to suggest doubt, how few, how very few, are the inmates of prison-past or present-who can justly be labelled "criminal." The State, indeed, makes no pretence of requiring general obedience to Natural Law. It acts on the principle of punishing those who are convicted of breaking the laws framed for the convenience of contemporary society; it imprisons, now as heretofore, those persons whom the law decides by judge and jury, or on summary conviction, endanger the welfare of the Community or obstruct the comfort of their neighbours. The State is not cognisant of sin, mortal or venial; its interference in morals is, it would seem, entirely arbitrary. Neither drunkenness nor fornication, neither avarice nor idolatry, is "crime"; but incest is a crime; and the sin of Sodom and of the sexually perverted (called by its apologists "homogenic love") is a very serious crime. So serious that under the Act of Edward VI, which noted the grave increase of this offence on the general break up of morals at the coming in of the Reformation, its penalty was capital punishment until 1840. Polygamy, again, is a crime in Great Britain, presumably as an offence against Natural Law, but not in India or Burma, where Mahommedan and Buddhist may lawfully maintain a plurality of wives without let or hindrance. In Great Britain the |