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 and teaching, he would confirm by giving his flesh for the life of the world. How does the redemption follow from that?

Farther: This is my body which is given for you (Luke xxii. 19). And he took the cup, saying, This is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins (Matt. xxvi. 27-28).

Bidding his disciples farewell, with a cup of wine and bread in his hands, he says to them that he is supping with them for the last time and that he will die soon. “Think of me at your wine and bread; with your wine think of my blood, which will flow for you that ye may live without sin; with the bread think of the body, which I am giving for you.” Where is here the redemption? “He will die, will give his blood, will suffer for the people,” are the simplest kind of expressions. The peasants always say about martyrs and saints, “They pray, work, and suffer for us.” This expression means nothing more than that the saints intercede before God for the unrighteous and the sinful.

But that is not enough: they adduce as proof from the Gospel of John the following reflection of the author of the Gospel on the words of Caiaphas: And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; and not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad (John xi. 51, 52).

It is evident that there are no indications in the Gospel, not to speak of proofs, about the redemption, if such words are adduced as proofs. Caiaphas predicts the redemption, and immediately afterward has Christ killed. That is all which is adduced from the Gospel in proof of the redemption of the human race by Jesus Christ.

After that follow proofs from Revelation and from the writings of the apostles, that is, from those books which


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 the church collected and corrected when it already professed the dogma of the redemption. But in these books, in the Epistles of the apostles, we do not yet see the confirmation of the dogma, but there occur here and there obscure expressions, with which all the Epistles are filled, and which may rudely be interpreted in the sense of the dogma, as has been done by the consequent so-called fathers of the church, but not by those of the first centuries. It is enough to read the history of the church to be convinced that the first Christians did not have the slightest conception about this dogma. Thus, for example:

“The Apostle Peter commands the Christians: Pass the time of your sojourning here in fear: Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers: But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter i. 17-19).

Peter says that it is possible to mend only through faith in the teaching which was branded by the death of him who was as innocent as a lamb. And this is taken as a confirmation of the dogma of the redemption.

“Because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow his steps—who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed (1 Peter ii. 21, 24). For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1. Peter iii. 18).

The cruel death of Christ, who left us an example of life to follow him by, ought to make us heal ourselves. from sins and come to God. The expression is concise and metaphorical, just as the masses speak when they say that the martyrs have worked for us. And that is taken as a proof: “For I delivered unto you first of all

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A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 3

One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched...
 * When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honour at the table, he told them this parable: 'When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honour, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, "Give this man your seat." Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, "Friend, move up to a better place.” Then you will be honoured in the presence of all your fellow guests. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.'
 * Then Jesus said to his host, 'When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbours; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.'
 * When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, 'Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.'
 * Jesus replied: 'A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, "Come, for everything is now ready."
 * 'But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said,
 * "I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me."
 * 'Another said, "I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I'm on my way to try them out. Please excuse me."
 * ‘Still another said, "I have just got married, so I can’t come."
 * 'The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.”
 * '‘Sir," the servant said, "what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.”
 * 'Then the master told his servant, "Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet."'
 * Luke 14:1, 7-24

Familiarity breeds contempt, they say. In my experience that's certainly true where religion is concerned. The hardest people to talk to about Christian faith are invariably the people who've grown up surrounded by it.

G. K. Chesterton, in this connection, tells a story of a young man who lived centuries ago in the rolling downland of Wessex. He'd heard of a huge white horse which had been mysteriously carved into an unknown hillside by ancient hands. He was so captivated by this rumour that he set off in search of the fabled horse, travelling the length and breadth of the West Country. But, alas, he couldn't find it. At length, weary and disappointed, he returned home, reluctantly concluding that the white horse of his dreams didn't exist, after all. Then, as he surveyed his own village from a distant vantage point, after his long absence, he was astonished to see the object of his quest. The white horse had been there all the time. His village lay at the very centre of it, but he'd never been able to recognize it before, concealed as it was in the familiarity of his environment.

Chesterton, of course, intends that story as an allegory. His point is that there are people (particularly perhaps young people), who set off on an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage. They have deep questions that they want answered. They visit exotic places looking for answers. They read foreign books; they sample weird experiences. Some travellers may even enrol for outlandish university courses. Deep down this is because they're conscious of some mystery that's summoning them, a holy grail they need to discover. Sadly, in spite of all their efforts, and as time goes by, they become increasingly disillusioned, cynical, agnostic. They don't find the 'white horse' they're seeking.

Perhaps, suggests Chesterton, they need to return home. His logic is that if they did, maybe they would be amazed to find that the answers they're looking for are there already, as close as the Bible on the bookshelf or the church on the street comer. They simply haven't recognized the unique value of these things because they are too commonplace, too familiar. Familiarity breeds contempt.

To try to break down such a wall of indifference, or even contempt, and to help people to discover the novelty and the relevance of the Christian message, is not an easy task. This is especially so when people think they know that message already. It's a bit like the measles vaccination given to babies. All too often a dose of religion, especially if administered in childhood, simply increases your resistance to the real thing when you encounter it later in life. Sunday School classes, unhelpful RE teachers at school, boring morning assemblies in chapel, and, of course, tea parties on the vicarage lawn—they all come back into your mind like a flood, immediately an evangelist stands up to speak. It's like antibodies descending upon some invading virus in your bloodstream. Those memories all conspire to ensure your spiritual immunity to everything that preacher might want to say. Even the best sermons fail to penetrate such defences!

Jesus himself, as a teacher of the good news, experienced just the same problem. Frequently the people he had the hardest trouble with were those with strong religious backgrounds.

Take this incident, for instance. It is the Sabbath day. Jesus has been invited to have a meal at the home of what Luke calls 'a prominent Pharisee'. The scene is a little like those sherry parties that Cambridge college chaplains like to throw after evensong. Everybody is wary of each other, and trying hard to make a good impression. It looks as though Jesus, observing the pretentiousness of this particular gathering, had decided that he would liven things up a little. He offers some controversial advice on how to organize a really good dimer party. Don't invite wealthy friends and neighbours, he suggests. That's really naff and boring. After all, if you do that, they'll simply feel obliged to invite you back again, won't they? Instead, invite the homeless youngsters you see begging on the High Street. Invite the alcoholics and the drug addicts you see propped against the wall in the shopping mall. Invite the outcasts and the destitute to your party, because they haven't got a penny. The only reward you can expect if you invite them will be in heaven, won't it?

These words of Jesus must have fallen like a lead balloon on this particular gathering. It doesn't take much imagination to realize what a conversation-stopper it must have been. Outcasts and destitute people, one suspects, were conspicuous by their absence from this prominent Pharisee's respectable table. No doubt there was an embarrassed silence. It was a bit like being reminded of the starving millions when you're just about to dive into your third helping of Black Forest gateau. Of course, there is always someone around at awkward moments like that who considers it his bounden duty to ease the atmosphere by making some inane comment or other. There was just such a fellow at Jesus' table. Determined to keep the conversation within everybody's comfort zone, he nods sanctimoniously at Jesus' allusion to the resurrection of the righteous and adds his own plaudit. 'Blessed is the man,' he says, 'who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God' (Luke 14:15).

This was merely a conventional platitude, the kind of empty cliche that you hear at funerals when people don't really know what to say, but feel they must say something religious. 'Ah, well, vicar, he's gone to a better place now. What is it that old hymn says? There is a happy land far, far away.' You know the kind of thing. In first-century Jewish society, the rabbis talked a great deal about the coming kingdom of God. Prophets like Isaiah had likened it to a huge free feast laid on by God himself that would make even the most lavish banquet at Buckingham Palace look meagre and parsimonious by comparison. So if you were a first-century party-goer, and short of something sufficiently pious to say in the company of clergymen, a useful standby was, 'Blessed is he who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.' This immediately marked you out as a respectable supporter of the ecclesiastical status quo. It was a coded way of saying, 'Oh, you don't have to worry about me, Jesus, I'm very religious.'

And, no doubt, the man expected an equally conventional reply as a result; the first-century Jewish equivalent of 'Amen, brother! Hallelujah!' perhaps, followed by a rapid change of subject to something a little more conducive to the digestion of Black Forest gateau. But if so, he gravely miscalculated. Jesus was far too shrewd to be deceived by his unctuous piety, and far too good a pastor to allow it to pass unchallenged.

You see, it was a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt. This fellow thought he was spiritually OK. He knew about and believed in heaven, and was quite sure he was going there. He naturally assumed Jesus would want to support him in this confidence. But, interestingly, Jesus doesn't. The master teacher had a special weapon in his armoury of rhetoric with which to prick the bubble of this kind of religious complacency. We saw him wield it against that lawyer in the last chapter. Here he displays it once again, to devastating effect; a parable with a sting in its tail.

 * A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests... (Luke 14:16).

This fellow was looking forward to the heavenly banquet secure in the knowledge that he would be there. He's waiting for a conventional reply to his conventional cliche about the blessing of the heavenly feast. And as Jesus begins to tell his story he must feel reassured that that is exactly what he is going to get.

By speaking of a great banquet Jesus is clearly taking up this well-known metaphor of the kingdom of God to which his fellow guest had already referred. The story opens, you will notice, with preparations for the coming feast already well under way. Guests have received their invitations. Jesus' audience would have no trouble decoding this. It is clearly a reference to the preparatory work of the Old Testament prophets who had given preliminary notification of the kingdom's future arrival. As for these guests who had been invited, they (of course) were the Jews, God's chosen people to whom the prophets had addressed their inspired words. No doubt Jesus' audience anticipated that the story was going to go on, through its extended metaphor, to expound the bliss of the kingdom of God, to describe how rich the menu would be, perhaps, or how honoured the guests.

But at this point Jesus' story starts to take a less conventional line.

 * At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready' (Luke 14:17).

In the ancient world a host would often invite guests a day or two before a feast so that he could determine how many to cater for. Then, when the food was prepared for the expected number, he would send a second invitation summoning his guests to come without further delay. In his story Jesus exploits that contemporary protocol, but in doing so he injects a slightly unexpected note of urgency and imminence. 'Come, for everything is now ready,' the host in the story urges. If they had thought about it (and I'm sure their minds were working overtime to try to do so), Jesus' audience couldn't miss the implication of that. The ancient prophets had announced the coming of the kingdom in the future tense. But Jesus here is suggesting that a new stage in God's timetable has been reached. God is now sending a servant to announce, not that the kingdom of God will come at some future date, but that it has already come. The banquet is ready; the kingdom is here; it's time, therefore, to act. 'Come, for everything is now ready.'

Who is this servant, charged with so revolutionary a message? I don't think there can be any doubt that Jesus has introduced himself into his parable here. For this was precisely the role he understood God to have given him, his unique messianic mission. He had not simply come to prophesy about the coming kingdom of God, but to inaugurate it! And before Jesus' audience can recover from this startling claim implicit within his words, the Stealth bomber starts dropping its Cargo.

 * But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, ‘I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.'
 * Another said, 'I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I'm on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’
 * Still another said, I have just got married, so I can't come.'

Here is an astonishing suggestion: that people could be personally invited to share in the kingdom of God, and yet decline. Even from a friend, an invitation to dinner isn't lightly turned down. To refuse God's invitation, however, is not just folly, but downright insolence.

It might not have been so bad if these people had dreamed up some good excuse. But the pretexts upon which they made their refusal were so feeble and contrived as to be quite insulting. Can you imagine anybody buying a house without going to look at it first? No more could any first-century Jew imagine someone buying ten oxen without seeing whether or not any of them were crippled. Can you imagine anybody getting married at such short notice that they have to cancel a dinner engagement made a day or two before, so that they can go on their honeymoon? Still less could a first-century Jew, for whom a wedding was something planned months ahead, imagine such a thing!

Every one of these excuses is a transparent fabrication, a deliberate slap in the face. They don't even pretend to be real excuses. Each of these people, in their own way, is saying to their would-be host: 'Frankly, old chap, there are lots of things I'd much rather be doing with my time than spending it in your company.'

'Dinner is ready, you say? Yes, I know I said I'd come, but that was yesterday, old man. I'm terribly sorry to say I've just decided I need to repaint the bathroom tonight.'

'Dinner is ready? Well, yes, I know I said I'd come, but that was yesterday, old man. I'd decided to go for a little spin in the sports car this evening instead; the weather's so nice.'

'Dinner is ready? Well, yes, I know I said I'd come, but that was yesterday, old man. Please forgive me; I've made a date with this delicious blonde from the office, and you know what they say about "two's company"?'

None of Jesus' hearers could fail to detect the outrageous impertinence of such excuses.

And Jesus of course is suggesting by means of his parable that men and women turn their backs on the kingdom of God with just the same insolence. They do so for the sake of mere trivialities, the pursuit of material gain, personal pleasure, or sexual adventure. They choose such things rather than accept God's invitation. Don't they realize what they're missing? Alas, the implication of Jesus' story is that all too often familiarity breeds contempt. There are far too many counter-attractions bidding for the time and attention of these people. They may have been interested in going to the party once, but all sorts of other things have invaded their life since then.

One suspects that at this point Jesus' story was beginning to get uncomfortably close to the bone for some in his audience. The Stealth bomber had indeed penetrated their defences and had dropped its load. But Jesus wasn't finished. In a final coup de grace he goes on to press the detonator.

 * The servant came hack and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, 'Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.'
 * 'Sir,' the servant said, 'what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.'
 * Then the master told his servant, 'Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet' (Luke 14:21-24).

Do you see what I mean about a sting in the tail? Not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.' To get the point, we must ask ourselves: 'Who were these original invited guests? Who did they represent?' The answer, of course, is the Jews, the religious people, the Bible-believing people, those who saw themselves en route to heaven, like Jesus' smug colleague at the Pharisee's dinner party. Yet, in this scorching punch-line, Jesus concludes: 'Not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.'

Can he be serious? He's implying that the religiously privileged will be excluded from the kingdom of God. Who then is to be included? 'Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.' Here were the very same outcast and destitute beggars, the poor and the disadvantaged, whom Jesus advised the Pharisees to invite to their dinner party, but who were conspicuous by their absence at that particular table. Such people will be there at God's banquet, affirmed Jesus. And, as if their admission to the kingdom were not offensive enough to Jesus' respectable audience, he adds: 'But there is still room.' Then, says the master, 'Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in.'

It is possible, of course, that this second sending out of the servant just reinforces the first, thus intensifying the humiliation for Jesus' audience. Most commentators agree, however, that Jesus is doing a little more than that. He's anticipating the incorporation of the Gentiles into the kingdom of God. The gospels certainly teach that Jesus did foresee such a development. 'The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit,' he told some chief priests and Pharisees a little later (Matthew 21:43). Though admittedly it's not absolutely clear from this parable, it does seem likely that those in the roads and country lanes represent non-Jewish outsiders whom Jesus would soon draw to himself by his Spirit after his death and resurrection.

The irony, then, could not be more complete. Those who were expecting to enter the kingdom because they had received advance invitations through the prophets would miss out. But those who expected to be shut out because they were not good enough, or had never even heard of the banquet because they were downright pagans, would be the ones to enjoy it.

Familiarity, this parable emphasizes, does indeed breed contempt, and Jesus responds that contempt is a sin that God does not lightly forgive.

What does the sting in the tail of this parable mean for you and me, then? Perhaps it depends on where we're coming from. Some, like Jesus' dinner guests at that Pharisee's table, come from a religious background. We may have been baptized or dedicated as children by believing parents. Maybe we attended Sunday School or church youth clubs. We may have made some response to gospel meetings in our early teens. We may have heard the Christian faith set out, not once but dozens of times, and as a result we think we're Christians. But are we? That's the question this parable puts to us. We may know how to say grace before meals, but Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God demands more of us than pious platitudes. It demands decision and commitment. 'Come,' he says, 'for everything is now ready.' There was, maybe, a time when you could mark time spiritually, but now that Jesus has come, an active response is required, for the kingdom is here. That kingdom must take precedence over all the other interests and ambitions we have. Are we ready to accept such a radical reorientation of our priorities? he asks. The warning of his story is that many are not. Not everybody who hears the invitation, or even everyone who shows some initial response to the invitation, actually comes up with the goods when decision and commitment are required of them.

For some, perhaps, it's career that takes first place; for others it may be sport; for some it could be the pursuit of academic study; for others it may be a boyfriend or a girlfriend. I have bought a field; I have bought five yoke of oxen; I have married a wife. The excuses change, and yet, in another sense, they are always the same—feeble, contrived, and as far as God is concerned, downright insulting.

Jesus says of such excuses: 'Then the owner of the house became angry.' This is not surprising. If you'd gone to great pains to prepare a banquet for much-valued friends, and they turned their backs on it, wouldn't you be angry? It is naive to think that God is not angry with us when we find excuses for putting other things before him in our lives. It cost God a lot to lay this banquet of his kingdom before us. He had to pay a price to open the door of heaven for us. A cross stood on a Jerusalem hillside, stained with blood. It stood there so that we could be absolutely sure that this banquet, though free, was not cheap. He paid that price because he wanted to invite you to the banquet. Turn your back on the invitation and you slap the face of a divine host who has given everything because he loves you. No wonder he's angry.

So there is a solemn warning here in this parable for those who are familiar with Christian faith: don't let that familiarity breed contempt. But the parable also carries a very strong encouragement for people without a religious background. God is planning a party for you. All the jubilees and carnivals, banquets and fiestas, laughter and festivity of a thousand years of human history won't compare with the wonder, the glory and joy of the celebration which the King of the universe has on schedule. It will be a magnificent occasion, beyond human imagination, the prelude to a whole new world. Who wouldn't like to be part of that celebration? Jesus tells us, in this parable, that you are invited to it. Admission is free and each of us is welcome to share in it.

Perhaps for some this is a problem. As the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame felt out of place at a Pharisee's table, so they feel like a fish out of water in church. 'I'm not the religious type,' they say. 'It's no good these church-goers inviting me to become a Christian; they don't know what I'm like. If they did know, they'd immediately show me the door. I'm just not good enough. If they knew what a mess I'd made of my life, if they knew all the habits and sins hidden beneath this polite and respectable exterior of mine, they would know I could never become a Christian. There can be no place for me in Jesus' kingdom of God. The invitation can't be for me.'

Alternatively, like those in the roads and country lanes who didn't even know the banquet had been arranged, some may feel completely bewildered by Jesus' invitation. Perhaps they come from a culture completely alien to Christianity; a country where another religion altogether claims the allegiance of the majority of the people. 'It's all very well for Europeans and Americans to think they're invited to this party,' they say to themselves. 'It can't be for me. I'm from Asia (or Africa). I'm a Hindu (or a Muslim). Me a Christian? That's impossible; unthinkable. There can't be any place for me in Jesus' kingdom. The invitation can't be for me.'

But Jesus in fact tells this story precisely to point out that you are wrong to feel excluded in that way. This story reveals that there is more room in the kingdom of God for people like you than for anybody else. Notice the word the host uses to command the servant: 'Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in' (Luke 14:23). The verb 'make' is a very strong one. Some translations render it, 'Compel them to come in.' Translated like that, it has occasionally led to illegitimate conclusions, as when it was quoted to defend the Spanish Inquisition.

But such applications fail to understand the function of this strong injunction to the servant. He is not being sent out with ropes, chains and machine guns to drag reluctant strangers back to his master's house! That isn't what the master means when he says, 'Compel them to come in.' The master's command is born of his recognition that the people he's sending the servant to reach out to will be utterly surprised when they receive the invitation. Their immediate reaction will be that the servant has got it wrong; the banquet can't be for them. They will feel that they are far too poor to be invited to a great house like that of the servant's master. They will feel that as Gentiles or strangers, they can't be intended as guests. The invitation must have been delivered to the wrong house. Hence the master says, 'Make them come in.' He means, grab them by the arm, persuade them, convince them, cajole them even. The servant is to use all the means at his disposal to assure them that the host's invitation really does include them. And that's why we can be so confident that God's invitation includes us, whoever we are. It is not qualified or limited by 'ifs' and huts'. No matter how unworthy we may feel, no matter how 'unchristian' and alien, the invitation is for all. You are invited. God wants you in his kingdom. He urges you to come along; the party is ready for you now. Why delay?

No doubt we have our plans for the coming months and years. Perhaps a student is studying for a degree. What is he going to do then? Perhaps another has found someone she wants to marry. What about when the wedding is over? Maybe they have ideas about a career. Maybe they are planning to have a family. But the career will end and the children will grow up. What then?

The truth is that however much you can cram into these fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years that God has given you, it only ends in one place. The estate or the five yoke of oxen we've just bought, even the wife we've just married, seems so very important to us. And of course, they are, in their way. But none of it lasts. It all ends in a wooden box with brass handles and a small engraved name-plate.

In contrast, what Jesus is speaking about here will last for ever. He's concerned about the kingdom of God, something we human beings were designed to share with our Maker. We are meant to live for ever in God's company in God's world. Even though we've thrown that unique destiny away, he's giving us a chance to have it back again! Are we going to turn our backs on such a prospect yet again?

By all means study for your degree, but study for it for him. You may well get married one day, but that home you build can be a home for him. Certainly you'll have a career; make it a career for him. Come, he says, the kingdom is ready, and it's waiting for you. You can start putting up the decorations for the party even now. God wants you to use the life he's given you to prepare for a kingdom that will last for ever.

So why delay? Come, he says. Everything is now ready. No matter how unworthy and alien you feel in respect of this Christianity business, the invitation is for you. If you're already familiar with the invitation, be warned. Familiarity can breed contempt. The invitation can be refused, neglected, forfeited. And the people who are most in danger of that are the people who know it all already. There are no exceptions to Jesus' imperative: 'Seek first the kingdom of God,' he says. He insists that there will be ho place at all in that kingdom for those who make feeble excuses for putting it second to anything.

title: A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 3


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 that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. xv. 3). “For” means in consequence of our sins. “Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour” (Eph. v. 2). Christ’s love for us brought him to a shameful death. That, too, is considered a confirmation of the dogma. “Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Rom. iv. 25). The resurrection is mentioned as a miracle, and it says that he was delivered on account of our sins. “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past” (Rom. iii. 25). Again a misty, tangled sentence, like all of Paul’s expressions, which denote one and the same thing, namely, that the death of a just man has freed men from their previous errors. And all that is regarded as a proof. But the chief proof is found in the interpretations of the fathers of the church, that is, of those men who have invented the dogma of the redemption.

“(a) St. Barnabas: ‘We will believe that the Son of God could not have suffered except for us—for our sins he wished to bring as a sacrifice the vessel of the spirit.’ (b) St. Clement of Rome: ‘We shall look up to our Lord Jesus Christ, whose blood was given for us—we shall look up attentively to the blood, and shall consider how precious his blood is before God, since, having been spilled for our salvation, it obtained the grace of repentance for the whole world.’ (c) Ignatius Theophorus: ‘Christ died for you, in order that you, believing in his death, might be saved from death.’ (d) St. Policarp: ‘He suffered death itself for our sins—; he suffered everything for us, that we might live in him.’” (p. 142.)

Or another place, as a sample of that arbitrariness and blasphemous pettiness, with which the whole book is permeated.


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 “If one of us should ask, not from love of controversy, but from a desire to know the truth: ‘Why did the Lord suffer death on the cross rather than any other?’ let him know that that particular death, and no other, could save us, and the Lord suffered precisely that for our salvation, for, if he came for the purpose of taking upon himself the curse which had been upon us, then how else could he become a participant of the curse, if he did not suffer the death which was under the curse? And that is the death on the cross, for it is written: Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree (Gal. iii. 13). In the second place, if the death of the Lord is the redemption of all, if by it the middle wall of partition is broken down (Eph. ii. 14) and the calling together of the tongues takes place, then how could he have called us to the Father, if he had not been crucified? For it is only on the cross that one can die with extended hands. And so that is the reason why the Lord had to suffer death on the cross and on the cross to extend his arms, in order with one hand to attract to himself the ancient nation, and with the other the pagans, and thus to unite them in himself. He predicted that about himself when he wanted to show with what kind of a death he meant to redeem all: If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me (John xii. 32). And again: the enemy of our race, the devil, having fallen from heaven, is wandering here in the aerial sphere and ruling over demons who are like him in disobedience, and by means of them he entices with visions those who fall victims to his deception, or in every way tries to hinder those who are tending upwards; thus speaks of him the Apostle Paul, calling him the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience (Eph. ii. 2). For this reason the Lord came to depose the devil, to clear the air of him, and to open a new path for us to the heavens, as the apostle has said, through a curtain, that is, through his flesh; but that he


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In an age hatthat [sic] leads itself with inquisitorial sapience to open courts of criticism the name of Hubert Crackanthorpe remains singularly unkownunknown [sic]. A fine and searching essay by Arthur Symons, a note by Richard Le Gallienne, seven citations in Holbrook Jackson’s fin de siecle encyclopedia, as many pages in Bernard Muddiman’s “The Men of the Nineties”, J. M. Kennedy’s “English Literature: 1880–1896” and the tale is soon told. Vincent Starrett, it is true, makes an interesting attempt to bridge the vast gap toward the recognition of Crackanthorpe in his “Buried Cæsars”, but there the honors are evenly divided with Richard Middleton (a strange and unfortunate choice for a bedfellow) with no great critical appraisal of either.

To many Crackanthorpe occurs as a sort of medifiedmodified [sic] “Enoch Soames”, with all the tragedy and none of the exhiliratingexhilarating [sic] farce of Max’s famous verbal caricature. Born May 12, 1870, his body was found in October of 1896, a suicide in the Seine, after six weeks of mysterious disappearance. Contemporary newspaper obituaries mention his “morbid lucubrations”, while a notice in “The Critic” for January, 1897, refers to his “literary work of a strange sort”, followed by the inevitable “Who’s Who” assortment of instructive facts. Lionel Johnson alone, in a note in the “Academy” for March 20, 1897, quotes Rossetti in defence against the assertion that his “work makes a goblin of the sun,” and with words that veil his own personal tragedy writes: “The terrible pages are full of an aching poignancy. The straightforward sentences hide an inner appeal. The telling of misery becomes a thing of dreadful beauty and its intensity goes nearer to the heart of the whole dark matter than many a moving sermon. The artist’s abstemiousness in Mr. Crackanthorpe, the refinement of his reticence, never chilled his reader. ‘The pity of it! The pity of it!’ That was the unspoken yet audible burden of his art.”

Crackanthorpe was the author of four books in a literary productiveness that extended for less than five years, yet in that brief boundary of a life of sheer tragedy began (as we now know it) the genuine realist movement in modern fiction. “Wreckage”, the first book, published in 1893, marks a monument to realism of the modern period. Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” was to come in 1895. George Moore, it may be, had gone a step further in “The Mummer’s Wife” than any one since Trollope, Hardy, Gissing, or Henry James in depicting the sorrows and bypaths of pessimistic impressionism. But if the hand was the hand of Moore, the voice was assuredly the voice of Zola. The sodden sodality of the provincial theatre, the tart yet nebulous taint of viciousness made manifest in the commonplace heroine, are all identities boldly abstracted from the men and women in the series Rougon Macquart. In Zola, at least, we touch life and soil our fingers in boldly touching it. “The Mummer’s Wife” mirrors the real thing only as one would find it in a spectroscope. The emotional actress, so pathetic in her drab negation of the joy that could actually have been hers, suffers and dies in true story-fashion. The whole book is a coroner’s inquest. The process of dying has been a business—no more.

With Crackanthorpe’s “Wreckage” we come to something definitely new. Here are seven stories told in the English idiom, with excellent touches of art. We read in the prefactory quotation: “Que le roman ait cette religion que le siecle passe appelait de ce large et vaste nom: ‘Humanite’;—il lui suffit de cette conscience; son droit est la.” Humanity—that was what Crackanthorpe never forgot. It makes each of the stories in his book the shelter and vindication of pity, with a something underlying, an intelligent tragic sense that De Maupassant, for all his vivid, illusory world, never quite persuaded himself into conveying or projecting.

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 They be called watchmen and wardeins, for they béeing neuer ouercome with sleepe of wanting skill, warne men of perills that may fall or come to passe. And they also bée named Haruesters, for they gather the people that is chosen into the Garner of the kingdome of Heauen. And they bée called Souldiers, for they warre and fight for vs against wicked fiendes. And they be called Dukes and Leaders, both because they teach vs the manner of fighting against Ghostly enimyes: and also for they shewe and teach vs the way to the countrie of blisse.

In these and manye other figures and lykenesses, Angells vertues be tokened to vs, and vnderstoode in Scriptures, touching the substaunce, vertue, and working of them. But these few that be set héere for example shall suffice at this time.

Of the orders of Angels Hierarchies, and of their offices. Chap. 6.
Seeing that the properties of Angells be in part rehearsed and determined in generall, as it belongeth to this worke, wée shall intreate of all the Hierarchies of the orders of Angells: that wée maye knowe the office, conuenience, and difference of all the orders by theyr proper conditions.

Of the three Hierarchies. Chap. 7.
The holy man Saint Denis speaketh of thrée Hierarchies, the first is aboue heauen, and standeth in three persons, the seconde in heauen, and standeth in holy Angells, the thirde vnder heauen, and standeth in Prelates. Denis sayth, that a Hierarchie is an ordeined power and might of holy things: and reasonable, holding a due principalitye ouer Subiectes. Thrée Hierarchies bée in heauen, the highest, that is called in Gréeke Epiphania, and is described of Denis in this manner.

Epiphania is in the burning hot affection in the highnesse of high motion and vnderstanding, and in the ballaunce of the perticular iudgement. And this Hierarchie conteineth thrée orders. Seraphin, that passeth other in burning of loue: and Cherubin, that is ioyfull in priuiledge of cunning: Thrones, that passe other in perpending of righteousnesse. And of the other two Hierarchies, wée shall speake héereafter in theyr owne place. In euerye Hierarchie néedeth thrée thinges, order, cunning, and working. For as Denis sayth, a Hierarchie is a godly order, cunning, and worke, lyke God, as it is possible likening and supposing thereto the illuminations by proportion, taking héede to the lykenesse of God. Loe hée setteth thrée in the discription of an Hierarchie, order, cunning, and working: for if one of these thrée should want, it is no Hierarchie. Therefore a Hierarchie is sayde a godlye order, as it were a might that is ordeyned and disposed after Gods owne will. Therefore in order is office noted, in cunning, readinesse, in working seruice. Without order presumption is the worke, without worke negligence is the order, without cunning, the worke is then reprouable, and the order is vnprofitable. And therefore as well in order as in cunning and working, euerye. Hierarchie followeth the conformitie and likenesse of God: And by the manner and measure of his illuminating that God giueth thereto, bée profit•th in his order, and supposing rightlye, and working well, to the following of God as néere as is possible, hée ascendeth vp.

Such is the disposition betwéene the Angells of the order of Hierarchies. They that be of the higher orders, receiue more plenteous light of God. And then to those that bée lower then they in order, they transfound and departe the lyght, they receiued. For this lawe is holden and kepte in the order of Angelles in participation of grace and of blisse. Some be the first, and some the seconde, and some the laste: as they the which in order and in receiuing

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 “Profiles,” the first, is much the longest of the set. It is not, as Mr. Muddiman infers, entirely unsuccessful. Lilly, the heroine, finely manipulated in the transition from her innocent girlishnesgirlishness [sic] to the horror of prostitution, burns violently if with some crudity. The story of the girl whose temperament takes her from average domesticity to a ghastly life in the streets has a force that still drives home. “What had become of her, no one knew and no one cared,” says Crackanthorpe simply at the end. The second, “A Conflict of Egoisms,” really an annihilation of two discordant individualities by marriage, ends first in the spiritual then physical suicide of the hero as an idolatrous offering to his sickeningly sentimental wife. One may find passages that are obviously autobiographical. “As time went on the thought of death began to haunt him till it became a constant obsession,” we read of the hero who is a novelist. “In the daytime, fascinated by it, he would lay down his pen and sit brooding on it; at night, he would lie tossing feverishly from side to side, with the blackness that was awaiting ever before him. And with the sickly light of the early morning, there met him the early relief of having dragged on one day nearer the end.”

“The Struggle for Life” and “Dissolving View,” the first merely ordinary but the second magnificent in its concentrated pathos, are followed by “A Dead Woman,” the story of a volcanic upheaval among the ordinary types of an English countryside. This is Crackanthorpe’s masterpiece. The austere and heroic suffering of a reticent peasant who by chance discovers the betrayer of his dead wife in the person of a life-long friend, a neighboring inn-keeper, is the very essence of tragedy. Rushout, the husband, lifts her photograph from the wall. “He watched the whole scene as it was played before him; she, giving herself with all the gestures and caresses with which he was familiar, till its vividness became almost unbearable. He lifted up the photograph once more. But underneath the faint smile lurked a wealth of smothered corruption; on the half-parted lips he detected the imprint of Jonathan’s kisses.”

“When Greek Meets Greek,” the tale of a faithless wife of a card-sharp at Nice, is melodrama, quick and poignant, but with a method and consideration for the sordid malefaction of the principals that sears in the telling. Duncan Ralston, the lover, is passive but vehement. The woman Pearl is best described in the flickering light “which played about her face” as fragile and “little more than a child.” Simon, her gambler-husband, the peak of the triangle, plays more than an average game of cards. His is a compelling soul, hard and reckless in effrontery, but with something of unusual largess for the possessor of so despicable a vocation. “Embers,” the last story, directs two intensely parallel temperaments that pause, give each their sign of divergent recognition, but in the tragic depository of the writer’s brain never meet.

Crackanthorpe’s second book, “Sentimental Studies,” with the subtitle of an additional “Set of Village Tales,” was published in 1895. The “Village Tales,” which take up only a small portion of the volume, may be briefly dismissed. They contribute, with a gesture of plot and denouement, some slight elaboration to the “Vignettes” of a year later. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon studies in “Wreckage” and totally dissimilar from the “Sentimental Studies,” these miseries of the poverty-stricken peasantry in the hazy, French villages, with their long roads and slim poplars, their peaked roofs and “noisy battering rains,” are inextricably woven to make distinct the overwhelming misfortunes of the inhabitants. “The White Maize,” not more than the hint of a sketch, contains probably the best descriptive writing in the book:

“For eight days and eight nights the ceaseless hiss of rain. During the day-time, neither sky nor sun, nor breath of wind—only the grey veil of mist enshrouding all things. The nights were dark as pitch, and full of the hiss of rain; and from sunset to sunrise the frogs chanted their long, dismal mass.

“On the eighth day of the rain, about six o’clock in the afternoon, I went out. A sickly glimmer of muddy light flickered from the west; a breeze was shaking drops

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 extends over all sins, (a) redeems the original sin, (b) every sin, (c) all previous sins, (d) all future sins. This truth was unanimously preached by the teachers of the church, for example:

“(a) By St. John Chrysostom: ‘That the benefits given by Jesus Christ are more numerous than the evils destroyed, and that not only the original sin was destroyed, but also all other sins, that the apostles said in these words: The free gift is of many offences unto justification (Rom. v. 16),’ and farther: ‘By the grace was destroyed not only the original sin, but also all other sins; and not only the sins were destroyed, but righteousness was given to us, and Christ set aright not only what was injured by Adam, but reëstablished everything in a greater measure and a higher degree.’” (p. 157.)

“(3) For all times, that is, from the beginning of the fall of man to the end of the world. Therefore, (a) Christ is called, on the one hand, a lamb, and, on the other, a high priest. Similarly, (b) the redemption achieved by him is called eternal, (c) and his priesthood unchangeable, for he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Heb. vii. 24, 25). How to understand this intercession for us by Christ the Saviour in heaven, is explained by St. Gregory the Divine: ‘To intercede means here (Heb. vii. 25) to negotiate (πρεσβεύειν) for us in the capacity of a mediator, as is said of the Spirit who maketh intercession for us (Rom. viii. 26) Thus also we have an advocate in Jesus (1 John ii. 1), not in the sense that he humbles himself before the Father and falls down before him as a slave: far be from us such a dreadfully slavish thought, which is unworthy of the Spirit! It is not proper for the Father to demand it, or for the Son to suffer it, and it is not right to think so of God.’ The blessed Theophilactes of Bulgaria: ‘Some have understood the expression to intercede for us to mean that Jesus Christ had a body (and had not put it off, as the Manicheans speak idly). That is


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 from the trees; the road was powdered with acacia-bloom, lying thick like sodden snow; great pools of yellow water were in possession of the lanes; and new-born streams, bubbling of their own importance, trickled sleek and swollen, across the fields and under the hedges.”

In “The Sentimental Studies,” consisting of three long and two short stories, we find a real advance over the earlier volume. For the first time, if we except “A Dead Woman,” literature begins to creep in. Never altogether absent, the influence of Henry James is made more suggestive and conspicuous in the motivation or mental activities of the characters concerned. They suffer, not so much for the things they do as for the things that of their own diffidence they leave undone. One and all, analysis would find them potential victims of what Crackanthorpe discerningly terms their “trepidating curiosity,” a delicate but aloof spiritual sluggishness that continually fringes the line of complete decision—yet never quite comes up to it.

“A Commonplace Chapter,” really a novelette in two parts, opens the volume. Here we have Crackanthorpe with his favorite motif, the man of genius, in this instance a successful poet, beloved by a beautiful and impulsive young woman. This type of Crackanthorpe’s femininity possesses the power, when occasion calls for it, to leap into instant maturity; adolescence being only temporary and a foil to match the complete sophistication of the male. Hillier Hasleton, the poet, dreams of marriage, “an ideal marriage—a simultaneous satisfaction of intellectual, emotional and physical desires.” Yet over this marrigaemarriage [sic], following an association of professed respectability in which the heroine, Ella, remembers “nothing but his goodness and the abandomentabandonment [sic] of the intoxication of his love”—arises the shadow of another, a certain Mrs. Hendrick, beneath whose smile and gentle voice there lurks “an air of bitterness restrained and refined.” Hillier is drawn body and soul into her toils. So completely does he justify himself in his intrigue, that he finds himself unable to live without her. Swann, a cousin of Hillier’s, enters into the story, and between the alienated wife and this high-spirited relative an attraction is formed that grows insensibly into love. “Swann had become necessary to her, almost the pivot, as it were, of her life; to muse concerning the nature of his feeling towards her, to probe its sentimental aspects, to accept his friendship otherwise than with conscious ease, that was not her way.” Aware of Hillier’s unfaithfulness, Swann approaches him and in a burst of pleading exacts a promise that the poet, who is traditionally weak, will explain the entire matter to his wife. This he does, but not before Swann has secretly bidden her farewell. We are led to believe that ever after this man who had so spurned and cheapened her love would be hers devotedly and alone; we are certain, however, that this woman could never love her husband again. He kisses her as he pleads:

“ “‘ [sic]I have been punished, Nellie,’ he began in a broken whisper. ‘Good God! it is hard to bear…… Help me Nellie…… help me to bear it!”’ [sic]

”“ [sic]She unclasped his fingers, and started to stroke them; a little mechanically, as if it were her duty to ease him of his pain.…”

“Battledore and Shuttlecock,” the second long story, with its gentle yet bitter cynicism treats of the eternal cocotte, the refined woman to whom fidelity or infidelity are merely experiences in a life of absorbing futility. Of all Crackanthorpe’s heroines, “Midge” (Nita) Bashford is by far the loveliest. Ronald Thornycroft meets her in a theatre and beside her “he felt himself clumsy and clownish.” He notes her “large-brimmed black velvet hat; the soft duskiness of her skin, which a feather boa caressed; her white, tight-fitting gloves, and the golden bangles on her wrists.” They spend days together, idly and pleasantly chatting in her rooms, walking the streets of the city that ceases to be only a conventional assembly of dreary thoroughfares; the man, on his part, never entirely unconscious of the complete elusiveness, the delightful uncertainty of this mercurial being at his side. She disappears, and her return a few days later elicits the astounding information that only recently had she been separated from her husband, an actor. He had beaten her, she tells him. Her trip to Brighton was with another man, she

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 161. The ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven, and the opening of the kingdom of heaven to all who believe in him.

“Before the descent upon earth of the Son of God, heaven was, so to speak, shut against all earth-born men and, though in the house of the Father there are many mansions (John xiv. 2, 3), there were no places in them for the sinful posterity of Adam; the just men of the Old Testament, after their death, themselves descended with their souls to hell (Gen. xxxvii. 35). But, after our Lord appeared in the flesh and reconciled God with men, heaven with earth; after he had freed the just men of the Old Testament from hell, by his descent into it, and had risen from the dead, he, at last, solemnly ascended heaven with the human essence which he had assumed and in this manner opened for all people a free access to the kingdom of God.”

A proof of this is the expression of the symbol, which is to be taken in the direct sense: Having ascended heaven (in the body), and sitting (in the body) on the right hand of his Father.

162. Will the royal ministration of Jesus Christ come to an end? The kingdom of Christ will end when there will be the judgment. All will be resurrected. Then Christ will transfer the kingdom to the Father, say some, “but the Evangelist Luke (i. 33) and Solomon (Wis. iii. 4-8) understood the original power, in which, having an uninterrupted dominion from eternity to eternity, the Son never received his dominion from the Father and never will turn it over to the Father.” (p. 178.)

Thus there appears an explanation of the royal dignity of Christ. The words about the kingdom of heaven give the church an idea about the royal dignity of Christ. The royal dignity is considered by the church as something very good and it attaches it to Christ, to him who proclaimed the blessedness of the poor, who preached to


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 with a tinge of cruelty: “I suppose I can go where I like, can’t I? I needn’t ask your leave first. Since you’re dead keen on knowing—well, I went because I was hard up.—There!” But she deserts him for good, leaving a note in which he is admonished, “never, never to find out where I’ve gone, and never to come down after me.” He meets her, all unknowingly, twelve years later in a stable-yard at Huntington. “Her husband kept the yard, and she was the mother of three chubby-cheeked girls… She knew him at once, but because of her husband refrained from betraying it. And he just glanced carelessly at her and never recognized her.”

The revival of a love, bygone and forgotten, forms the substance of “In Cumberland.” It fails to keep close in rendering convincingly the sense of appeal in Alec Burkett, who, taken ill in a tiny, unkempt mountain village, “a choppy pool of black slate roofs, wanly a-glimmer in the wet,” meets once again with a former sweetheart, and in the course of events (she had meanwhile married), being passionately urged by Burkett to elope with him, she brings the affair to an untimely end. The close of the story bites like etcher’s acid. “He strode away across the lawn, and as she watched his retreating figure, she felt for him a shallow compassion, not unmingled with contempt.”

“Modern Melodrama” and “Yew-trees and Peacocks” are two short stories that close the “Sentimental Studies”. In the latter we find great verbal beauty and retrospection. “Modern Melodrama” reverts to the naked style of journalism so succinctly used in narrating the stories in “Wreckage.” The two characters, who have been coarsened in a world that makes life adventitious only to those steeled and hardened by it, talk of hell-fire and “wince under the fierce feeling of revolt”—but for all that their fame and fury scarcely suffice to make them live. The mood of a languorous afternoon, with the foliabefoliage [sic] turned ever so faintly by Autumn, is in “Yew-trees and Peacocks.” The heroine is delicate and mobile, her lover perhaps a little too vague and courtly. An atmosphere of saddened and mellow placidity colors this tale, which makes the common contention that Crackanthorpe was concerned solely with the trough and gutter of existence a fallacy.

A motto prefixed to “Vignettes” (1896), reads: “The pursuit of experience is the refuge of the unimaginative.” In this slender volume of only sixty-three pages will be found some of the most stimulating and exuberant prose of the Nineties. “In a work like this Crackanthorpe was perfect., [sic]” writes J. M. Kennedy. “And if there are beautiful subjects to choose from, there is no special reason why an artist of Crackanthorpe’s qualifications should deliberately choose ugly ones. Even when writing about Naples he does not forget to remind us of the garbage in the Strada del Porto and the squalidness of the Strata del Chiaia.” None the less it is this very insistence on Crackanthorpe’s part to accentuate the occasional misshapen hideousness of the human scene that converts with touches of versimilitudeverisimilitude [sic] his perfect but ordinary prose, into broad and astonishing writing. Beauty alone he could never altogether disassociate from the element of humanity. “I dreamed of this great, dreamy London of ours,” he writes on returning to England, “of her myriad fleeting moods; of the charm of her portentous provinciality; and I awoke all a-glad and hungering for life.” Movement and the joy of movement there are in even the least of these notes, with the never-failing, ever-shifting, emotional agony that makes them distinct and discoverable as a part of life.

The “Last Studies”, a collection of three long stories, was posthumously published in 1897 with a memorial sonnet by Stopford Brooke and an appreciation by Henry James. “The troubled individual note” of Crackanthorpe, we are told, is a difficult thing to interpret. Of stories of this type, we further read, “it may be an effort preferably pictorial, a portrait of conditions, an attempt to summarize, and compress for purposes of presentation, to ‘render’ even, if possible, for purposes of expression.”

The first, “Anthony Garstin’s Courtship,” is written in complete subjection to a tragic mood. It shows the subtle but resistless antagonism of a dominant, masculine woman who pits herself in all hardihood and contention against a light and flighty creature, the choice of her son. She declares: “T’

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 them. But heretofore there has been no definition of the church, of what is to be understood by the word. From everything which I knew before, from everything which had been expounded so far, I assumed that the church was a collection of believers, established in such a way that it can express and determine its decrees. But now begins the teaching about the church as being an instrument for the sanctification of men. It says that the church is Christ’s kingdom of grace, that it communicates to us the grace of the Holy Ghost, and that it has sacraments, but nothing is said about the church on which the dogmas which have been expounded heretofore are based; on the contrary, the church receives here an entirely different meaning from what I ascribe to it as the foundation of the whole teaching about faith. Then follows:

166. The different meanings of the word “church.” The sense in which the teaching about it will be expounded here, and points of view on the subject. The various meanings of the word “church” are explained. All three meanings which are ascribed to the word “church” are such that with them is impossible the conception of that church which has established the dogmas.

The first meaning of the word “church” is, according to the Theology, “a society of all the rational and free beings, that is, of the angels and of the men who believe in Christ the Saviour, and of the men who are united in him as in their one head.” (p. 187.)

Such a definition of the church not only does not make clearer the conception of the church which establishes dogmas, but imparts in advance to the forthcoming definition of the church certain symptoms, with which it is still harder to understand how such a church could ever have established any dogmas. The further elucidations of this first meaning do not clear it up. All it says is: “that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in


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 hoose be mine, t’ Lord be praised … an’ as long as he spares me, Tony, I’ll not see Rosa Blencarn set foot inside it.” The same sort of solidity makes Anthony at odds with her. This story is faintly reminiscent of “The Return of the Native”; Mrs. Garstin, “stalwart almost despite her years”, derives in strength of purpose, not wickedness, from Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights”. She would have dominated any person, anywhere.

“Trevor Perkins”, second of htethe [sic] three, stresses the element of sex. Trevor, who loves a waitress in a bunshop, is typical of his kind. Here again we see how easily and with what deliberation Crackanthorpe can conjure up and clarify a situation at hand.

The last story, “The Turn of the Wheel,” is weak and fine-spun in spite of its inordinate length. It gives us nothing new, but the description of London society is good. The rebellious daughter who worships her father but despises her deserted mother reveals with perhaps too much fidelity the complexities that force themselves into Crackanthorpe’s characters. Yet their lives are lines, pure and severe, like Crackanthorpe’s own, that run with no deviation straight to an end.

The re-discovery of Herman Melville, of Ambrose Bierce and (thanks to Thomas Beer) of Stephen Crane, leads one to hope that not so far in the future will come the recognition of one who wrote not only with consummate courage but who—more than any one else of his time or period—showed unmistakable signs of a superlative talent. “He was one of those who fight well, who fight unselfishly, the knights errant of the idea,” says Arthur Symons.

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text: Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886/Preface


text: Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886/Corrigenda


text: Executive Order 14110

title: Executive Order 14110


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130 front on the left side, and caught with a roseate of the same color as the dress; the body juste and à pointe, faced with velvet of the same color; the others trimmed en tablier with black lace and choux of satin; a pelerine cardinale, very large, entirely covers the arms; the pelerine being trimmed with a fringe, headed with a silk network, and fastened in the front with des Brandebourgs.

WALKING DRESSES.—The most fashionable style adopted for out-door costumes are les robes redingotes, made in pearl grey satin, faced with velours épinglé, edged with a plain lace, and down the centre of the skirt are placed bows en choux. A distinguished toilette, was a dress of satin grenat, trimmed en tablier, with a fancy silk cord trimming, disposed en brandebourgs. A row of olives are placed down the centre of the skirt, and another row decorates each side of the net-work; the corsage juste and high, with network and olives arranged like those on the jupe; the sleeves demi larges, and trimmed with two bouillonnées at the elbow, separated by a net-work trimming. For the material, silks are in a decided majority, though we do not mean to say that they are exclusively fashionable; the cachemire d'été and the popeline brochée mentioned in our last number, enjoy a certain vogue, and so do some of the new mousselines de laine and the bareges; but none of these materials enjoy anything like the vogue of silks. We shall present our fair readers then with a list of those most in request: foremost in it will be the different kinds of foulards; these for morning dress and the promenade are foulard Zelia, double-sided foulards, and also those printed, and broché. Plain poult de soie, gros d'été, and levantine. An immense variety of striped and shaded silks; others in lozenges, or in small patterns borrowed from those of the Turkish and Chinese silks.

BONNETS.—The most airy style in which bonnets can be made will be the most fashionable. Many are made of a delicate net-work of straw, ornamented with flowers. On this point, however, the taste of the owner may be consulted. We may cite among the most distingué of the bonnets of poult de soie glacé, those of straw color, ornamented with a bouquet of têtes de plume paille, placed on one side of the brim, the interior of which is ornamented, we may say lined, with a voilette of English point lace, which falls en écharpe on each side of the face, and is intermingled with small blue and yellow daisies. We must not forget the rice straw bonnets ornamented in the interior with tulle scarfs. This is a style of trimming admirably calculated to set off the complexion, as the color of the scarf is always adapted to it. Drawn bonnets, both of crape and poult de soie, have regained all their vogue. A particular description of the generality is unnecessary; but we must say un petit mot for those of pink crape, trimmed in the interior with several rows of tulle rûches, and on the exterior with a bouquet of pink marabout panache de blanc.

FLOWERS.—Flowers still maintain their supremacy, as indeed nothing can be more elegant. The most approved are wreaths of white and grey lilac, rose-buds, white heath blossoms, jonquils, Bengal roses, red camelias, gerbes of oats, the stalks gold, and the grain either beads or pearls; cactus and daturas of velvet, some exotics, and the most of the early flowers. The majority of the bonnets trimmed with them are also adorned with lace, and the flowers are generally partially concealed by the lace. We see a great many bonnets trimmed with tufts of heath blossoms, or honeysuckle, and point d' Angleterre.

SUN SCREENS.—These delightful accompaniments to a walk have been in use for more than a month.

A letter from London, says:—

I have noticed an infinite variety of bonnets. Those of rice straw are becoming decidedly popular, though the old style yet prevails. Light green and purple pou de soie are the materials mostly in use. They are trimmed with very small wreaths of flowers, and are without inside ornaments. They still continue to be made very small, but efforts are making to give a slight increase to their size. Out door costumes are somewhat novel, and all that I have seen are very pretty. For this description of dresses, plain goods are used in nearly every instance. Carriage and riding dresses are made of cloths, merinoes, velvets and cashmeretts, and promenade dresses consist of spencers with light fancy silk or satin skirts. These dresses are trimmed handsomely with small chene or bright fine gilt buttons—three rows on the corsage and one on each cuff. Some riding habits fit close around the neck, with a narrow collar, and have a single row of buttons down the centre; the top button and three or four of the lowest ones only are buttoned, leaving the corsage open about half its length to display the chemisette underneath. It is easy to observe that gilt buttons are becoming all the ton. All varieties are now blending into one—the plain gilt buttons with a flat bright surface having become the general favorites. The latter are certainly the neatest buttons that can be worn, and no one without seeing them on a dress can form an idea of the charming appearance they make. The ball dresses cannot be well described, for there are as many varieties as there are persons wearing them. The spencer does not appear to hold sway any longer in the ball room. Light colored satins are all the go; trimmings diversified; roses, knots and laces very popular. There are also many varieties of head dresses, but as every one follows her own taste in this matter, I need not attempt a description. In short the rice bonnets and plain gilt buttons are the only real novelties I have noticed. The former are yet not in general use, but the latter are seen glittering in all directions.


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 and not in parables! (Matt. xiii. 24, 44-47; xxii. 2; xxv. 1; Luke viii. 10, and elsewhere).” (p. 192.)

All that so far only tells us that Christ wanted to disseminate his teaching,—the teaching about the kingdom of heaven. So far nothing contradicts the meaning which the Theology ascribes to the church. All believers in Christ naturally had to unite in faith in Christ. But after that the Theology says:

“(2) What Christ intended to do, that he accomplished. He himself laid the foundation for his church, when he chose his twelve disciples, who, believing in him and being under his power, formed one society under one head (John xvii. 13) and formed his first church; when, on the other hand, he himself arranged everything necessary in order to form a definite society out of his followers, namely: (a) he established the order of the teachers who were to disseminate his faith among the nations (Eph. iv. 11, 12); (b) he established the sacrament of the baptism, in order to receive into that society all those who believed in him (Matt. xxviii. 19; John iii. 22; iv. 1; Mark xvi. 16); (c) the sacrament of the eucharist, for the closer union of the members of the society among themselves and with him, as the head (Matt. xxvi. 26-28; Mark xiv. 22-24; Luke xxii. 19, 20; 1 Cor. xii. 23-26); (d) the sacrament of repentance, for the reconciliation and new union with him and with the church of those members who violate his laws and decrees (Matt. xxviii. 15-18), as also all other sacraments (Matt. xviii. 18; xxviii. 19; xix. 4-6; Mark vi. 13, and elsewhere). For that reason the Lord spoke in the days of his public service about his church as already existing (Matt. xviii. 17).” (p. 193.)

Here with the words “definite society” begins the obvious departure from the given meaning of the church, and there is introduced an entirely different idea of the church than as being a union of believers. Here the Theology is apparently speaking of the teaching church, of


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62 plays in the disputations of the schools, and from the fact that there are still extant four manuscripts of the complete translation, one of an epitome thereof, and there is evidence that a fifth manuscript existed in 1375 in the Papal library.84 As Ibn Sina was corrupted by the Latin writers into Avicenna, and Ibn Roshd into Averroes, so Ibn Gabirol became in turn, Avencebrol, Avicembron, Avicebron; and the Scholastics who fought about his philosophy had no idea he was a Jew and celebrated as a writer of religious hymns used in the synagogue. He was regarded now as a Mohammedan, now as a Christian.

This peculiar circumstance will help us to get an inkling of the reason for the neglect of Gabirol's philosophy in the Jewish community. It is clear that a work which, like the "Fons Vitae," made it possible for its author to be regarded as a Mohammedan or even a Christian, cannot have had the Jewish imprint very deeply stamped upon its face. Nay more, while the knowledge of its having been translated from the Arabic may have been sufficient in itself to stamp the author as a Mohammedan, there must have been additional indications for his Scholastic admirers to make them regard him as a Christian. An examination of the work lends some semblance of truth to these considerations.

Gabirol nowhere betrays his Jewishness in the ' Fons Vitae." He never quotes a Biblical verse or a Talmudic dictum. He does not make any overt attempt to reconcile his philosophical views with religious faith. The treatise is purely speculative as if religious dogma nowhere existed to block one's way or direct one's search. Abraham Ibn Daud, the author of the philosophical treatise "Emunah Ramah" (The Exalted Faith), and the predecessor of Maimonides, criticises Gabirol very severely, and that not merely because he disagrees with him in the conception of matter and finds Gabirol's reasoning devoid of cogency and logical force — many bad arguments, he says, seem in the mind of Gabirol to be equivalent to one good one — but principally because Gabirol failed to take a Jewish attitude in his philosophizing, and actually, as Ibn Daud tells us, maintains views dangerous to Judaism (below, p. 198).

This will easily account for the fact that Gabirol, celebrated as he was as a poet, was lost sight of generally as a philosopher. The matter


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 fall on me. I certainly had no rah confidence in my qualifications otherwie; and my friends beides knew, as well as I did myelf, that neither my habits nor inclinations were greatly academical. Yet the tation was mot honourable: and in my circumtances alo (if my abilities could at all compas the duty) to decline the offer would have been a crime. I did not deliberate long: and I lot les time till in taking the neceary meaures upon my reolution. So far as in a mot inignificant peron, and in a till more inignificant life, any thing could have been done by me to create either enmity or favour, there was nothing that I had to hope (as I was well aware) from the ruling political interet in Scotland. It was then with me jut as it is now; in power equally and in wihes. Neither was want Rh


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 That is, lie before God, and we will not excommunicate you; but seek the truth and dare not to agree with us, and we will curse you. The church, in the sense in which the Theology takes it, consists in all the believers in Christ, and this church separates the heretics and excommunicates them.

169. The aim of the church is the sanctification of sinners “The church is ordained and therefore obliged: (a) to preserve the precious pledge of the saving faith (1 Tim. vi. 20; 2 Tim. i. 12-14) and to disseminate the teaching of that faith among the nations; (b) to keep and use for the good of men the divine mysteries and sacraments in general; (c) to preserve its government as established by God and to make use of it in conformity with the intention of the Lord.” (p. 206.)

The church is understood as all those who believe in Christ, and yet it speaks of the church as having to perform sacraments, and govern. It is evident that all the believers are not able to perform the sacraments and rule themselves, and so the Theology by the word “church” understands something different, which it puts in the place of the first definition of the church. Farther on it says:

170. Outside the church there is no salvation, and the proof is given that it is necessary to belong to the church. This is asserted in the following way:

“(1) The faith in Jesus Christ who reconciled us with God: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved (Acts iv. 12), and even before that the Saviour said: He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him (John iii. 36). But the true teaching of Christ and about Christ is preserved and preached only in his church and by his church, without which there cannot be a true faith (Rom. x. 17).” (pp. 206 and 207.)


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79 forbidden tree. This means that when the lower soul succeeds in controlling the reason, the result is evil and sin, and man is driven out of the Garden, i. e., is excluded from his angelic purity and becomes a corporeal being.

It is clear from all this that Gabirol's omission of all reference to Jewish dogma in the " Fons Vitse" was purely methodological. Philosophy, and religion or theology should be kept apart in a purely philosophical work. Apologetics or harmonization has its rights, but it is a different department of study, and should be treated by itself, or in connection with exegesis of the Bible.

While it is true that Gabirol's influence on subsequent Jewish philosophy is slight — at most we find it in Moses and Abraham ibn Ezra, Abraham ibn Daud and Joseph ibn Zaddik — traces of his ideas are met with in the mysticism of the Kabbala. Gabirol's "Fons Vitae" is a peculiar combination of logical formalism with mystic obscurity, or profundity, according to one's point of view. The latter did not appeal to pure rationalists like Ibn Daud or Maimonides, and the former seemed unconvincing, as it was employed in a lost cause. For Neo-Platonism was giving way to Aristotelianism, which was adopted by Maimonides and made the authoritative and standard philosophy. It was different with the Kabbala. Those who were responsible for its spread in the thirteenth century must have been attracted by the seemingly esoteric character of a philosophy which sees the invisible in the visible, the spiritual in the corporeal, and the reflection of the unknowable God in everything. There are certain details also which are common to both, such as the analogies of irradiation of light or flowing of water used to represent the process of creation, the position of the Will, the existence of matter in spiritual beings, and so on, though some of these ideas are common to all Neo-Platonic systems, and the Kabbala may have had access to the same sources as Gabirol.


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.

THE TWO PORTRAITS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH.

"Es quelque lieu que soit cette figure adorable, quelque corps qui la porte, quelque main qui l'ait faite, elle aura tous vœux de mon cœur. Oui, ma seule folie est de discerner la beauté; mon seule crime est d'y être sensible. Il n'y a rien la dont je doive rougir."— (Pigmalion) J. J. ROUSSEAU.

In the Rue Saint Lazare, at the corner of the Rue Larochefoucald, there is a large, very fine-looking house, with its upper apartments so arranged, as to be admirably suited for the studio of a painter. It was at the gate of this very house that toward the middle of March in the past year, an elegant carriage was observed to draw up. The carriage door opened, and a young lady instantly descended from it. You could tell by the first glance that she was in second mourning. Her robe was of pearlish grey, and over it she wore a satin pelisse of the same color, bordered with chinchilla. There was, too, a black veil over her chapeau de soie blanche. In short, her dress displayed her wealth and her taste. Before quitting her carriage she had sent her footman to enquire if the painter M. Alfred Louval was at home, and if so to announce her. She was told that he was in his studio, at the top of the house. She proceeded thither, and as the Countess de Lucy was not much accustomed to this species of exercise, she mounted slowly, either to take breath, or to reflect upon the course that she should adopt. The lady was twenty-four years of age, she had a large fortune in her own right, and she was the widow of a Ministre Plenipotentiare.

While she was deliberating, she encountered the artist upon the stairs. He had descended to meet her, and stuttered out excuses that his profession compelled him to seek the best light. Surprised at this meeting, and still more surprised when she beheld the features of the gentleman, the Countess de Lucy remained perfectly silent, and mechanically followed the young gentleman, who seemed to be still more surprised, and even still more agitated, than the lady.

It is not, however, for any considerable length of time, that a woman can be deprived of her presence of mind, and thus it happened that no sooner was the Countess in the sitting-room of the artist, than she recovered her self-possession, and thus explained the object of her visit.

"The motive, sir," she said, "that has induced me to visit you is one that would very probably induce many other women to keep away from you. I have seen your works at the exhibition. You are, I perceive, the pupil of M. Ingres, and you tread in the footsteps of your master. I have seen your portraits of the Duchess de O.—-s, and the Countess N——, both of whom I know very well, and I was able to remark in their likenesses, even the minutest defects of the originals."

"I do not know, Madam, whether I am to interpret your words into an epigram or an eulogium."

"Do not take me, sir, as saying any thing else but what I think. In my eyes, a perfect resemblance constitutes the first merit of a portrait. You smile, and perhaps it is a heresy in the Catholic creed of painting. But then remember, that I speak as a woman, and do not pretend to judge as an artist. In fine, I am particularly glad to see my own features copied without any flattery, and with—all their imperfections."

"Imperfections! Madam I shall find it very difficult to discover them."

"A truce to compliments, sir; tell me, will your numerous occupations allow you to give me a few sittings?"

Louval replied that he was completely at the service of the Countess de Lucy; and that he would see her at her hotel any day she should choose to name. She then expressed a desire to see some of his pictures that had not been yet exhibited; and that she observed had all their canvas backs turned to the spectator. He turned the surface of them all but one. She praised all that she did see—and what delicious flattery was this for their author? At length she observed that there was the one not turned. She asked why it was not, and he seemed to be greatly embarrassed by the question.

"Is it," said she, " such a picture as that a lady ought not to look at it?"

"Not at all."

"Why, then, have you it so carefully concealed?"

"It is a more study-a study that I made for myself -for myself alone."

"That is to say, that no one else is worthy of looking at it."

"Ah! Madam do not think me guilty of such vanity."

During this short dialogue her servant, thinking it would gratify his mistress to see the picture, turned it round; but on seeing it, the Countess shrieked with amazement, and then in an angry tone she said to the painter—

"Tell me, sir, how come you to be the possessor of that portrait-a portrait of me, for which I never sat?"

"It is not your portrait," replied Louval, greatly agitated.

"You blush, sir. For pity sake tell me—explain to me—how or by what means it is you have caught my resemblance so exactly-you, that I believe, have never, until now, in all your life, seen me.”

"It is perfectly true, Madam, that until this day, I never had the honor of knowing you.”

"Cease, I pray you, this dissimulation. It does not very well become a man of honor, and, I trust, a gentleman."


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November 2023


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1 MEDIAEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER I

ISAAC ISRAELI

We know next to nothing about the condition of the Jews in Mohammedan Egypt in the ninth and tenth centuries. But the fact that the two first Jewish writers who busied themselves with philosophical problems came from Egypt would indicate that the general level of intellectual culture among the Jews at that time was not so low as the absence of literary monuments would lead us to believe. Every one knows of Saadia, the first Hebrew grammarian, the first Hebrew lexicographer, the first Bible translator and exegete, the first Jewish philosopher of mediaeval Jewry. He was born in Egypt and from there was called to the Gaonate of Sura in Babylonia. But not so well known is his earher contemporary, Isaac ben Solomon Israeli, who also was born in Egypt and from there went later to Kairuan, where he was court physician to several of the Fatimide Califs. The dates of his birth and death are not known with certainty, but he is said to have lived to the age of one hundred years, and to have survived the third Fatimide Calif Al-Mansur, who died in 953. Accordingly we may assume the years of his birth and death as 855 and 955 respectively.

His fame rests on his work in theory and practice as a physician; and as such he is mentioned by the Arab annalists and historians of medicine.26 To the Christian scholastics of mediceval Europe he is known as the Jewish physician and philosopher next in importance to Maimonides.27 This is due to the accident of his works having been translated into Latin by Constantinus Afer,28 and thus made accessible to men like Albertus Magnus, Vincent of Beauvais, Thomas Aquinas and others. For his intrinsic merits as a philosopher, and particularly as a Jewish philosopher, do not by any means entitle him to be coupled with Maimonides. The latter, indeed, in a letter which he wrote to


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 © Commonwealth of Australia 2023

ISBN: 978-1-925365-36-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-925365-37-5 (Print)

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© Commonwealth of Australia, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme – Government Response.

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"Robodebt was a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal, and it made many people feel like criminals. In essence, people were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money. It was a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms."

With those words, the Royal Commission summed up the human tragedy that was the Robodebt Scheme–a Budget measure introduced by the Abbott Government, expanded by the Turnbull Government and defended, until the last minute, by the Morrison Government.

The Robodebt Scheme was not an innocent mistake.

The Royal Commission found that "[t]he beginning of 2017 was the point at which Robodebt's unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty became apparent". But, instead of abandoning or revising the Scheme, the Royal Commission found that the path taken by the former government "was to double down, to go on the attack in the media against those who complained and to maintain the falsehood that in fact the system had not changed at all".

It was not until mid-2020 that the Robodebt Scheme finally came to an end. Not because the former government saw the error of its ways or finally came to its senses–but because the Federal Court found that the Scheme was unlawful. And yet to this day, people who served as senior Cabinet ministers in the former government continue to maintain that "[w]hen the problems were brought to the attention of the government at the time, the program was stopped". Such claims are demonstrably false and an insult to the hundreds of thousands of Australians harmed by the Robodebt Scheme–most of whom were targeted after the point at which the Royal Commission found the Scheme's "unfairness, probable illegality and cruelty became apparent". Those who shared their stories with the Royal Commission and who campaigned tirelessly to raise the alarm bells about the gross betrayal that was the Robodebt Scheme deserve better.

While ministers of the former government bear ultimate responsibility for the Robodebt Scheme, the Royal Commission found serious failings within the Australian Public Service and with the institutional checks and balances that should have put a stop to the Robodebt Scheme long before the Federal Court found it unlawful.

Commissioner Holmes AC SC made 56 recommendations for reform.

We have worked through the Commissioner's recommendations carefully. The Australian Government has accepted or accepted in principle all 56 recommendations. This is backed up by resources to ensure we deliver meaningful change. For some recommendations, we have gone further than the


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“I have said, and I still tell you the truth. It is not at all a portrait. It is the study of a Madonna, that I have made after a picture of the Italian school”

“But the costume is modern.”

It is pure invention.”

There appeared to be such perfect candor in the manner of Louval, that the Countess began to think she had wronged him when she thought of asking, where the original of his study was to he found.

“In Paris itself,” answered Louval: “It is in the museum of M. Aguado; and you can yourself ascertain the truth of my assertion.”

The young portrait painter then assured the lady, that this museum, now one of the finest in the world, was open to the public every Wednesday and Friday, and that as she had expressed a doubt of his assertion, he would be happy in waiting on her next day, in order that be might see, that with her own eyes she could be convinecd of the truth of his asrcrtion, Now, there would be some rashness in affirming that this pretext for paying a visit, appeared to the Countess a very plausible one, but this it is sufficient to know, that the offer of M. Louval was not rejected. She seemed ill at case, and soon left the artist's studio followed by her servant. Upon her return to her hotel she directed the strictest inquiries to be made as to the conduct, morals, manners, and family of Louval, and the result wos that she learned he was a young man universally respected, that he was admitted into the best society in Paris, that his family were respectable, and many of its members had acquired a high name in different professions, Why did the Countess make these inquiries} Was it because she had promised to go to a museum in company with an artist?

Then, on the other hand, Louval was so taken up with the visit that he had just received, and particularly with his appointment for the next day, that he left his studio in haste, and immediately set on foot inquiries: respecting the Countess de Lucy. He learned that she was the daughter of an old general of the Emperor's —that she was now more than a year left a widow, by the Count de Lucy, who had died in a foreign country, where he filled a high diplomatic office—that the Countess had passed the entire time of her mourning in retirement. These facts explained to the young painter why he had never seen the Countess de Lucy; but there were a great many other facts that he did not know, and that he was destined to be acquainted with.

We might dilate, if we chose, upon the visit paid by the Countess and the painter to the Museum of M. Aguado, It is sufficient to say that there the Countess saw the Madonna of Andrea del Sarte; she saw enough of resemblance in features to herself, to prove that the artist had been telling her truth. After some interviews she told him, that she desired a proof of his skill in making ancient saints look like persons now living, and to his astonishment she showed him the portrait of a Spanish monk, in an attitude of the most fervent prayer, and the Spanish saint he at once saw had some resemblance to himself.

“Draw for me,” said she, “from this, your own likeness; and if success crown your efforts, then I will be convinced, that you have not invented a fable for the purpose of justifying, in my eyes, your illegitimate possession of my portrait.”

“I submit myself to your will, Madam,” replied M. Louval,—“and may my obedience be to me as if it were inspiration.”

When the work was finished, it obtained the approbation, without the slightest reserve, of the Countess de Lucy. “He may know his own face thoroughly well,” said the Countess, “from having so often looked at it— but how could he have divined mine. There is certainly predestination in it.” And this suggestion made the Countess think a great deal. As to Louval he did not know how to speak or to be silent, In his perplexity, he retained a declaration that was on his lips, and to take him from his embarrassments, he eagerly pressed upon the lady permission to commence her portrait But, notwithstanding, she declined doing so for a fortnight to come.

During that interval love was making rapid progress in the heart of Louval, and the Countess felt that the artist was not indifferent to her. Such were their mutual feelings when the lady’s portrait was begun— but never yet was painter slower in his work. He had always something to alter—something to amend—something to change—and, at length, the Countess somewhat maliciously said to him—

“You are going on very well; but still you do not surpass—perhaps you do not equal, that study picture of yours, which you began and finished as if it were at a glance.”

“I agree with you, Madam. The work that I then regarded as the mere production of chance, I am now disposed to attribute to destiny. Know, then, that when I first saw the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto, I was seized with an involuntary trembling, and I cried out— ‘Here in the very type of the female who is to decide my fate,’ and never did I enjoy repose but until my hand had traced, after the same manner, that delicious head, the portrait that you considered as yours. A new Pygmalion, I became enchanted with my own work— and, like him, I have, too, seen it animated with the breath of life, when you appeared before me. But this thought disturb my reason—pardon, Madam, pardon an unhappy-—”

“I excuse you, and I thoroughly comprehend you,” replied the Countess with emotion. “All is now

�


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 Commissioner recommended. For others, we are implementing them in a way that achieves the objective and ensures lasting effectiveness.

The Australian Government thanks Commissioner Holmes and her team for their dedication, professionalism and forensic work on the Royal Commission.

To those who shared their stories with the Royal Commission–thank you. Throughout the Royal Commission we saw courage, leadership and ethics on display from victims, advocates and whistleblowers.

To the millions of Australians who interact with government services every day–we are committed to putting you back at the centre of policy design and service delivery. We are here to serve you respectfully and responsively, with your needs and aspirations at the heart of what we do.

To the Australian Public Servants delivering services, and to those developing policy and programs–your work matters. Your integrity matters. Each day dedicated to public service is a day dedicated to working for Australians and making their lives better.

The Australian Government and Ministers must act in the best interests of the Australian community. Many of the Royal Commission's findings align with the priorities and reforms the Australian Government took to the Australian people at the last election–building trust in government, investing in a capable public sector, delivering strong institutions and ensuring humans are put back at the centre of human services and service delivery.

This Response reinforces the Australian Government's reform agenda–an agenda founded on integrity and a commitment to leave no-one behind. We are putting in place changes that will deliver enduring benefits for all Australians. The Australian people deserve no less.

Attorney-General

The Hon Mark Dreyfus KC MP

Minister for the Public Service

Senator the Hon Katy Gallagher


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