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New Zealand Tablet, 11 April 1918, Page 26

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Things Worth Knowing From the Star : "The New Zealand Methodist Times states that Canon Garland, late organiser of the Bible-in-Schools League in New Zealand, was the first to celebrate Holy Communion in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre after the British army entered Jerusalem." Quite so And why not mention that Howard Elliott sang a Lamentation in St. Peter's, Rome, during Holy Week, and that Mr. Nosworthy gave solemn Vespers at the Milan Cathedral. Nothing like being impartial. Browning on Motherhood The ephemeral popularity of Tennyson has waned and the sterling poetry of Browning is coming into its own. Tennyson attracted readers by reason of his felicity in retailing the news of the latest movements of his day in easy, musical verse, or by the simple sentiments and homely thoughts of his shorter poems. Browning was what is called obscurewhich indeed means that there was a depth of sense in him that entailed labor before it became the reader's. In the main he stood for old-fashioned things, and for healthy things and robust ideals. What a lesson for the cowardly degenerates of to-day the following lines contain : Womanliness means only motherhood ; All love begins and ends there, —roams enough, But having run the circles, rests at home. And what a scathing in these: I hold that, failing human sense, ' The very earth had oped, sky/fallen, to efface Humanity's new wrong, motherhood's first disgrace. He was right in his view that the whole creation was like a pulsation of love from the Divine Heart. Dante tells us that even in the making of hell Love had its part. To Browning all things spoke of the love of God, and motherhood most, potently of all. For him. the betrayal of the gift /was rightly the "unexampled sin." How he must have hated the abominable propaganda of the race-murderers !

German Philosophy ! •-—•-;;--:/; --—--. }:p_l We have often thought that '■ Kant's i position- is one' of s .the 'most'pathetic in history. Like Descartes he set '> out'to make a way clear v out -of the maze of doubt and scepticism, and the result' was • the epochmaking Kritik : Reinen Vernunft, which laid, ; . broad and deep, the foundations of idealism. In DieKritik'"■:■ der Prdktischen Verminft he tried to erect a bulwark around old beliefs which he knew the world could not • go without. His disciples were not so concerned about religion as he was, and they pushed his principles forward. Schopenhauer resolved all things into the Will;' Hegel made Intellect absolute : Fichte, Schelling, Hartmann, Nietzsche, and a score of others of less repute, built on the bad foundations which were due to Kant; and German philosophy became so ridiculous that the criterion of common sense is its best refutation. « , ■ English "Philosophy Common sense saved English thinkers from going universally to the ridiculous extremes to which a cold logic, working on unsound premises, led Germany. But English philosophers are by -no means above reproach. In England the abominable doctrine of Utilitarianism was made a State institution, and during this war it is a matter of no small shame to Britain that her principles, logically carried out, lead to Lou-' vain, as indeed they led to Limerick. And if we regard the latter school, called Pragmatism, it is only exteriorly more respectable. Arthur Balfour and his friends are as far from a certitude about Truth as the Germans. And the plea that institutions must be supported because they work well is at root another form of Utilitarianism and a confession of the bankruptcy of thought in " England. Sometimes in the works of Spencer, of Hamilton, and of Drummond one feels that we are coming nearer to the old, sane principles which taught men that normal, healthy, sense-perceptions, duly controlled and checked, werethe surest roads to Truth, inasmuch as they supplied the intellect with solid data upon which to work No later sculptor has taken the palm from Phidias; Sophocles is still the master in his own sphere; and only when men come back again to the sound doctrines of the greatest of Greek sages, Aristotle,— . d maestro di color chi sail no—will we have a -philosophy in which experience and common-sense and intelligence will walk hand-in-hand for ever. Thomas of Aquin built his reasoning on Aristotle, and his teaching continues fresh and ■ reliable to-day. If you would find out for yourself how fresh and how reliable Aristotle and St. Thomas are read Cardinal Mercier's Psychologie, where you will find how the old truths are made still more luminous in the light thrown upon them by the researches carried out in a modern, well-equipped University.