aims at securing at any rate the intelligent believer from sacerdotal control which was already becoming onerous . . . it was in this aspect that Origen was so dear to the fathers of the English Reformation'; and again, in the same allegorical manner he treats the words altar, sacrifice' (pp. 435, 436). Whatever residuum of truth there may be in this sort of valuation of older modes of thought in terms of modern controversies, is not the result a grave misrepresentation of the sum total of the facts? We learn much from M. Paul Sabatier's study of St Francis of Assisi, but we resent the attempt to represent the saint as a Protestant; and Origen is no less definitely Catholic, in the sense of a whole-hearted allegiance to the Universal Society, than St Francis. It is doubtless true that Origen depreciated the literal and the material, wherever found, as a veil that concealed the true world of the Spirit; but he does not apply this principle one whit more thoroughly in the direction of depreciating the external aspect of sacraments and ordinances than in slighting the plain literal meaning of the Scriptures or obscuring the real humanity of the Saviour. Our recognition of the great and incalculable services rendered by Origen to Christian theology is not really helped but hindered when they are estimated by the alien preoccupations of the sixteenth century.

Neither of these two English histories, then, provides us with the ideal history of the early Christian Church of which we stand sorely in need. To what extent is material easily accessible elsewhere which may serve to fill the gaps in our home production?

The entente cordiale between ourselves and our neighbours across the Channel would be robbed of half its promise of durability, if it rested on no more than a political basis. There is, in fact, to the average Englishman a flavour of intimacy in his relation with French literature and history which does not extend to other countries. Nor, in spite of confessional differences, has this mutual interest quite stopped short of religion, while between the Church of England and the Church of France there have been indications, since the days of Courayer and Archbishop Wake, of a certain reciprocal

friendliness, and that not only among the moderate or Gallican section of French Catholics.

One obvious source and ground of this sympathy has lain in the long tradition of a common productive study of early Church history. In this field German work can hardly be said to have attained serious dimensions before the rise, contemporaneous with the Oxford Movement, of the school of Tübingen. Italian ecclesiastical scholarship achieved a sudden brilliance in the circle of Veronese savants, Maffei, Bianchini, Vallarsi, the Ballerini brothers, towards the middle of the 18th century. But it was France and England that divided the inheritance of Erasmus, the one great patristic scholar of the Reformation: the appeal to antiquity was made by 17th-century Anglicans and 17th-century Gallicans on the same lines and in the same spirit. Savile and Ussher and Pearson among ourselves, in France Sirmond and Richard Simon, Baluze and Tillemont and the illustrious succession of Benedictines of St Maur, laid deep the foundations on which we are still building to-day. Nor did the great tradition come quite to a sudden end with the close of the Stuart age and the death of Louis XIV. Sabatier's vast patristic collection, the Bible in the early Latin Fathers,' appeared in 1741, Mangey's edition of 'Philo Judæus' in 1742; Bentley's long career of service to learning ended in the same year.

It is true that the last half of the 18th century witnessed, in this as in other fields, a drying up of the springs of life; a dully conventional world needed to be born again through the throes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. Just as with us a strong movement of revolt from a 'liberalism' which the subjective and unlearned religion of the day was judged ill qualified to meet, and of recall to the example and principles of the primitive Church, gathered force in the University of Oxford, so in France the reaction against the Revolutionary spirit evoked a regenerated Catholicism which in some at least of its forms showed vitality enough to shed its reactionary element and to thrive without it. In France, as in England, the religious movement went hand in hand with a revival of historical study on new and critical lines. The École des Chartes of Paris, founded

in 1821 and still after nearly a century unique in Europe, if its primary object was to promote the scientific treatment of French records, has contributed much, especially through the writings of its distinguished alumnus, Léopold Delisle, to our better knowledge of the documents of Christian antiquity. Similarly the more modern French School at Rome has had no more eminent representative than Louis Duchesne. And not less remarkable than the work of these two great French Catholic scholars is the work which is being done, in the French language if not all by Frenchmen born, within the two great religious orders of St Benedict and of Jesus.

Of all literary undertakings which the European world has known, the 'Acta Sanctorum' must certainly have had the longest continuous history. The first volume was published by Bolland in 1643-indeed the impulse may be traced a generation further back to the issue of Rosweyd's 'Vita Patrum' in 1614-and the little congregation of Flemish Jesuits who continue his work and are known after him as the Bollandists have only advanced in the volume last published (1910) as far as the saints of the earlier days of November. Hagiography had earned an ill notoriety as a department of history, but within the last fifty years so complete a revolution has been effected in the principles and methods of the Acta Sanctorum, that an ordinary historian, paradoxical as it may sound, is likely to prove a more lenient judge of the historical value of hagiographical material than the Bollandist Fathers. The keynote of the new development was struck by Pères de Buck and de Smedt, and the quarterly publication of the Analecta Bollandiana,' begun in 1882, carries out in detail the business of amplification and rectification. When one reflects on the gigantic nature of their task and on the paucity of their numbers-they are seldom more than four or five, and they have recently lost Père C. de Smedt and Père A. Poncelet-the net result can only be pronounced astonishing. To the credit of Père Hippolyte Delehaye alone we have to reckon a whole series of illuminating monographs within the last ten years, 'Les legendes hagiographiques' (1905), 'Les legendes grecques des saints militaires' (1909), 'Sanctus' (1909), 'Les saints de Thrace

et de Mésie' (1912), and, most important of all, Les origines du culte des Martyrs' (1912).

From the days of Petau and Papebroch in the seventeenth century there has been an element of the audacious and unexpected in the scholarship of the Jesuits which finds an appropriate foil in the solidity and sobriety of Benedictine work. The present congregation of Solesmes reinforce the tradition of learning inherited from Cardinal Pitra with the critical sagacity of the older Benedictine scholars. While most Englishmen would probably judge that the Waldeck-Rousseau law against associations was in large measure justified as an act of political selfdefence on the part of the State, one cannot but regret that so purely religious an order as the Benedictines should have suffered under it, and hope that in their new home on English soil the monks of Solesmes will find the unhampered security in which great literary undertakings thrive. Nothing else, either in German or in English, at all fills the place of their elaborate 'Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne' (32 parts so far published, 1903-1914, A-Constantine), which is planned on the scale of an encyclopædia and yet staffed in the main by a mere handful of contributors, Dom Cabrol, Dom Leclercq and Dom Wilmart.

Less definitely French-indeed it belongs to the German congregation of Beuron-is the abbey of Maredsous in the Belgian province of Namur; but the Maredsous organ, the 'Revue Bénédictine,' is not only conducted entirely in French, but its most eminent contributor, Dom Morin, is a native of France, and indeed of the most English province of France, Normandy. Morin is undoubtedly the greatest living authority on Latin patristic literature. He is understood to have been for many years engaged in preparing a definitive edition of the writings of his countryman, Cæsarius of Arles; in his Anecdota Maredsolana' he has added notable material, exegetical and homiletic, to the literary remains of St Jerome, besides recovering an early Latin version of the epistle of St Clement of Rome. His minor contributions to patristic study, such as the vindication of the Te Deum for the almost forgotten writer Niceta of Remesiana, are well-nigh beyond count; his recently published Études, Textes, Découvertes' (tome 1, 1913) is

an astonishing although unfinished survey of the work accomplished in this sphere by an individual scholar still in middle life.

Mention may also be fitly made of another great undertaking, entrusted by Pope Pius X to the Benedictine Order, namely, the preparation of a critical edition of the Vulgate Bible; since, though the president of the Commission is Cardinal Gasquet (a Report of work done' also lies before us in English), the systematic collection of material is mainly in the hands of two younger monks, both of them French-speaking, Dom Quentin of Solesmes and Dom de Bruyne of Maredsous. Dom de Bruyne emulates in his 'Voyages Littéraires' the example of illustrious predecessors in his Order, and brings to his business a ripe scholarship which has already been fruitful of result; Dom Quentin is in charge of a photographic apparatus constructed specially for the Commission, and probably no such elaborate machine has ever been in use in even our largest libraries. To produce a complete photographic representation of all the leading MSS of the Latin Bible is the aim in view; and, considering the bulk of the task, it may be said to mark a new departure in the application of photography to the purposes of critical work. The photographs are bound in volumes, collated first with the MS. itself (in order to see if anywhere the evidence of the MS. is clearer than the evidence of the photograph) and then with the printed text, and afterwards stored for reference at the headquarters of the Commission, the monastery of Sant' Anselmo on the Aventine.

All this constitutes a splendid record of work by French scholars, done and doing in the sphere of Christian antiquity. And yet it would, of course, be true to say that all or nearly all lines of study of which we have spoken belong to the preparatory department of history. It is material, and first-class material, for history, but is it history itself? Whatever we may think of the historical positions adopted either by the Oxford Movement or by the school of Tübingen, this merit at least belonged to both, that they did try to connect and fit their historical data into the construction of a coherent theory: the whole was never lost sight of in the parts. Before we can speak of French Catholic