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Translated by Brother Arnold, M.Sc. With Introductory Notice by Brother Potamian, D.Sc., 1904. Pp. v.-xix. 1-41. Price $1.50 net. ANGEL GUARDIAN PRESS, Boston, Mass.: Credo; or, Stories Illustrative of the Apostles' Creed. By Mary Lape Fogg. Pp. 82. B. HERDER, St. Louis, Mo. : Catholicity and Progress in Ireland. By Rev. M. O'Riordan, Ph.D., D.D., D.C.L. xvi.-506. HEROLD DES GLAUBENS, St. Louis, Mo.: Der Familienfreund. Katholischer Wegweiser für das Jahr 1906. THE TRUTH SOCIETY, Chicago, Ill.: Father De Smet. Reprinted from The Messenger. Pp. 24. UNIVERSITY PRESS, Notre Dame, Ind.: The Priests of Holy Cross. By the Rev. John Cavanagh, C.S.C. Pp. 203. Paper. ART & BOOK COMPANY, LTD., London, Eng.: Pp. Rex Meus. By the author of My Queen and My Mother. With Preface by Rt. Rev. Bis hop Hanlon. Pp. ix.-183. LIBRAIRIE DE P. LETHIELLEUX, Paris, France: L'Histoire, le Texte et la Destinee du Concordat, de 1801. Par l'Abbé Em. Sevestre. Pp. xxiv -702. Paper. L'Année des Malades. Tome Premier La Vie du Malade. Pp. xvi.-232. Paper. BROWNE & NOLAN, LTD., Dublin, Ireland: Summula Philosophie Scholastica. In Usum Adolescentium. Seminarii Beatæ Mariæ de Monte Mellario Concinnata.-Volumen III (Pars Prior) Theologia Naturalis. 1905. Pp. iv.-233. Price 25. net. REF Dublin Castle is the symbol of English domination in Ireland, Trinity College, the citadel of Protestant ascendency, the beneficiary of thousands of acres of the lands wrested from the ancient Catholic owners, and the most extensive recipient of tithes wrung from the peasantry to support a creed which they detested, is the grandest monument that exists to typify and perpetuate the memory of the ruthless spoliation which the Irish Church suffered in days happily no more. thorough was the policy of the plunderers that the Irish Catholics were allowed to retain little of their inheritance except St. Patrick himself. So One day a worthy Fellow of Trinity, Dr. Todd, as if struck by the idea that it were a pity to leave the record of Trinity incomplete, resolved to rob the Irish Papists of their sole possession, so he wrote a learned life of the saint; proving to demonstration that the Apostle of Ireland never was a Roman Catholic, but a true-blue Protestant, born, like St. Paul, a little The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History. By J. B. Bury, M.A. Formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Regius Professor of Modern History, and Fellow of King's College, in the University of Cambridge, etc. New York: The Macmillan Company. Copyright. 1905. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUI. THE APOSTLE IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK, VOL. LXXXII.-10 out of due time. The learned world politely suppressed a smile, and gravely thanked the doctor. The Catholics laughed outright. Nobody took Dr. Todd's mare's-nest seriously. Well, it would be be more correct to say, hardly anybody. Occasionally some Anglican divine, desirous of finding, by hook or by crook, a non-Roman source for British Christianity, made much of Dr. Todd's view. And, now and again, it has been exploited from some American pulpits, for the glorification or consolation of that most hyphenated body of our citizens, the "American-Scotch-Irish," on the Sunday preceding, or following, the seventeenth of March. Now another and a more distinguished son of Trinity has, with a graceful apology for the mistake of his reverend predecessor, returned St. Patrick to the Papists. If one could, by any stretch of the imagination, associate Trinity with the idea. of shamefaced sorrow, we might fancy her making the act of restitution in a spirit of tardy repentence. It would, however, be more consistent with her character, though not with the honorable fashion in which her present representative has fulfilled his task, if she returned the stolen property only because she found that, to use a stock phrase of the enquirer after missing goods, it is absolutely valueless to anybody but the rightful owner. When Catholic readers begin to perceive how unreservedly Professor Bury has satisfied the claims of justice, they almost feel that they are implicitly bound by the condition usual in such transactions—no questions asked to abstain from all querulous criticism. A few reservations, however, must be premised before we can proceed to testify to the high excellence of the work which the brilliant Cambridge professor has produced. In the first place, the biography is not a saint's life in the usual sense of the term. It does not pretend to be one. It is an account and an appreciation of the man and his work as they fall within the range of the purely secular historian, who concerns himself, not with the supernatural, but with the natural, with the kingdoms of this world, rather than with the kingdom of God. Professor Bury's outlook is that of one unconscious of anything that implies the existence of the eternal. Evidently a work which represents that point of view must be esteemed essentially incomplete when the subject is a great apostle whose labors or character cannot be viewed in their proper medium when the supernatural is excluded as an unnecessary hypothesis. "But," it might be objected, "cannot we study the course of events, the doings of the man, the means that he employed, his success or his failure, the permanent results of his life, his ethical character, just as they appear to the carnal man in the categories of time and space?" Perhaps. But our present concern is not with what might be done, but with what the present writer has done. Certainly Professor Bury has conscientiously striven to produce an absolutely impartial, objective, biography with the above scope. In his Preface, after remarking that Todd's work is vitiated because "he approached a historical problem with a distinct preference for one solution rather than another, and this preference was due to an interest totally irrelevant to mere historical truth," Professor Bury observes that the business of a historian is to ascertain facts. "There is," he continues, "something essentially absurd in his wishing that any alleged fact should turn out to be true or should turn out to be false. So far as he entertains a wish of this kind his attitude is not critical." To this profession, which enunciates the guiding principle of the modern scholar, Mr. Bury has not. been intentionally unfaithful. He is entitled to claim that "the justification of the present biography is that it rests upon a methodical examination of the sources, and that the conclusions, whether right or wrong, were reached without any prepossessions." We may grant, too, in all cheerfulness, that his "interest in the subject is purely intellectual." But besides deliberate bias, there is a bias that is indeliberate, and, therefore, all the more likely to escape the notice of the person who entertains it unawares. It is the personal equa tion that refuses to be eliminated. One of Professor Bury's former critics, himself an eminent historian, reminded the Regius Professor of Cambridge that history, after all, is not and cannot be a pure science. Its subject-matter cannot be approached in the serenely impersonal frame of mind with which the mathematician faces his problems. Be as scientific as one may in the discovery, collection, and classification of facts, the interpretation of them involves a subjective personal factor. And Mr. Morley affirms, and everybody must agree with him, that the historian's interpretation governs, from first to last, his collection and classification. Mr. Morley, points for confirmation of his statement to the various historians of the Papacy: "The an nals of the Papacy are one thing in the hands of Pastor, the Catholic, another thing to Creighton, the Anglican, a third to Möller, the Lutheran, and something quite different to writers of more secular stamp, like Gregorovius or Reaumont." "Talk," he well says, "of history being a science, as loud as we like, the writer of it will continue to approach his chest of archives with the bunch of keys in his hand." One key which Mr. Bury keeps constantly in his hand-applying it not alone to unlocking a considerable number of particular incidents, but also the entire meaning of Patrick's life-is the assumed principle, not that the miraculous lies outside the purview of the historian, but that there is no miraculous. He does not merely ignore the supernatural, he denies it. If the denial is only implicit, it is, for that reason, all the more uncompromising, since it permeates and colors the entire work. If he has shown himself superior to partizanship in the case of Catholicism versus Protestantism, in the wider contest of Rationalism versus Christianity he is so completely pledged to one side that he does not even pay the other the compliment of noticing its pretensions. His whole intellectual temperament places him uncompromisingly on one side in the wider and more important conflict between the Christian and the rationalistic attitudes towards the problems of life. And his prepossessions are sufficiently manifested when he uses such terms as "superstition," "superstitious," "old Jewish tale," in reference to Christian doctrines and Christian rites. These shortcomings, however, reflect principally upon the value of the book, when its claims to being considered a satisfactory life of a Christian saint are under consideration. They do not afford grounds for imputing to the writer any failure to employ all due diligence, and to exhibit all the rigid impartiality expected of the historian, in the execution of the task, according to the plan which he proposed to himself. There are, however, some other blemishes, which, had he taken the measure of pains that his own reputation, as well as respect for his readers, made incumbent on him, would not have appeared to mar the fair face of his work. In a section devoted, rather gratuitously, to Pelagius and his doctrine, we are informed, with iteration, that the Church teaches that unbaptized infants are condemned to eternal suffering; also, that the doctrine of original sin implies a denial of the freedom of the will. One |