Irish Monthly

The many kind friends who take a personal interest in the prosperity of this Magazine can serve it best by forwarding at once their subscription of SEVEN SHILLINGS for 1916, its forty-fourth year, to

THE EDITOR,

RATHFARNHAM CASTLE, Co. DUBLIN.

THE IRISH MONTHLY

JANUARY, 1915

MONSIGNOR BENSON

By Rev. FRANCIS C. DEVAs, S.J.

ANY an ambitious man must have envied Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson living: still more must have envied him dead; for from every country where English is spoken, has gone up a chorus of praise for the dead priest, and in many cases the praise has been heightened by expressions of genuine personal affection, and the sense of personal loss, even on the part of those who knew this gifted man only by his writings.

In truth Mgr. Benson deserved this rich tribute of loving admiration. As a priest, as an author, as an Englishman, he stretched out such helpful hands to so many classes of men; he spoke so simply, he wrote so candidly, he acted so unselfishly, that it is not wonderful he won in so short a time such a wide popularity. That Catholics should rally round one who spoke and wrote of the Church, and of our Blessed Lord with such insight, such variety, such freshness, was natural: but the triumph of his public career lay in this, that those to whom his gospel was unpalatable, found themselves compelled by the very charm of the man to give him a hearing from the beginning to the end.

These two things stand out clearly in all Mgr. Benson's printed work, namely, that throughout he was preaching a gospel, and that in each successive book he wrote, he revealed more and more of his own attractive personality. There was no Benson mystery. His gospel was always the same-the

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Catholic Church: she is true; she is beautiful; she answers all our needs; she is a mother, not only wise, checking our frowardness, but indulgent, making allowance for our incurable childishness. There is no need to labour the point in detail, but putting aside such directly and beautifully spiritual books as Christ in the Church, The Friendship of Christ, The Religion of the Plain Man, no one can rise from reading those historical romances which began with By What Authority, and ended with Oddsfish, without feeling a glow of enthusiasm for the Old Religion. Even those who cannot distinguish transient and accidental abuses from enduring and essential error, who think that the Old Religion was hopelessly overlaid with superstition, incurably eaten into by fatal corruption, must sigh for the loss of what was once so fair.

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is pass'd away.

But it needed Mgr. Benson's genius to show them how great, and how lovely, and how worth dying for, was that whose shade they imagine to have been destroyed, or at least permanently discredited, in the sixteenth century. It is not so difficult a task to enquire into the rights and wrongs of a case, when certain blinding prejudices have been removed, and certain undeniable truths have been well and wisely stated.

In the old-fashioned, Scriptural way of speaking good seed was sown in those romances, and Mgr. Benson's full harvest from them is yet to reap.

The other novels-modern, analytic, psychological (the epithet is of little moment)-are all too, in their different ways, sermons. But then just because their ways are so different, and so excellently different, they are read one after the other, each for its own intrinsic interest. Only when each is finished does the reader see the meaning of the whole.

The cheap sneer at "novels with a purpose" has passed out of date and these are all with a purpose. But the purpose is not a moral tacked on at the end: it is not even a hobby, a theory, a "King Charles' Head," that Mgr. Benson could not keep out. He wrote with a purpose, because without it he would have had no heart to write at all.

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