A few words may be necessary to explain the mediaval view, which is also substantially that of the Catholic Church at the present time.

Any casual visitor in such a strictly Catholic household as, say, that which Mrs. Humphry Ward has depicted in Helbeck of Bannisdale, might notice, if he were of an observant turn of mind, a very curious survival of the Sunday of the first Christian centuries. He would probably remark that when the Angelus bell was heard, morning, noon and evening, on ordinary week-days, it had the effect of making his Catholic friends place themselves for a minute or two on their knees; but that when the same signal was given on Saturday evening or on the Sunday, the same short form of prayer was gone through, but said on this occasion standing. The rubric which enjoined that Christians on the Sunday and in paschal time should pray standing may be traced back through the centuries to the very beginnings of Christianity, and it even attracted the notice of Mohammedan writers in the East. Its significance becomes plain when we compare it with a canon found in many of the oldest penitential codes. This last affords in brief a complete treatise on Sunday observance :

On the Lord's Day both Greeks and Romans (i.e. both the Eastern and the Western Church) are free to travel by sea or to ride on horseback, but they do not make bread, nor do they drive in a chariot, save only to church, neither do they bathe. The Greeks do not write in public, but still when there is need they write in private. As for those who labour on the Sunday, the Greeks for a first offence admonish them, for a second they take something away from them, for a third they deprive them of a third part of their property, or whip them, or inflict seven days of penance. The head may be washed on the Sunday and the feet may be cleansed with lye. If anyone through heedlessness should fast on the Sunday let him do penance for a week; if he do it a second time let him undergo twenty days' penance; and if a third time, forty. If he fast out of contempt for the day like a Jew, let him be excommunicate and excluded from all the churches.33

The idea which underlies these last curious regulations is clearly the same as that which forbade servile work, and which forbade prayer on Sunday to be offered kneeling. The Lord's Day was a day of rest and joy and thanksgiving, and the works and the attitude of penance at such a time were conceived as a kind of slight upon the Church at large.34 The same strong feeling during the Middle Ages manifested itself in the encouragement of every form of innocent amusement and recreation. Provision was made first of all for duties of praise and thanksgiving, and especially for the supreme act of worship offered in the holy Sacrifice of the Mass, but, this being secured, there was no idea of interfering with the rational enjoyment of the people. The curious thing is that this conception of Sunday

23 Schmitz, Die Bussbücher und das kanonische Bussverfahren, vol. ii. p. 248 (1898).

34 This also appears clearly in Tertullian, De Corona, ch. 3.

as a day both of rest and amusement was by no means abandoned at the change of religion. John Knox found Calvin at Geneva doing honour to the Lord's Day in a game of bowls. Elizabeth and her successor habitually assisted at dramatic representations on Sunday, and the chief objection to the bear-baiting in the eyes of the Puritans, as Macaulay has long ago told us, was not that it gave pain to the bear, but that it gave pleasure to the spectators-on the Sabbath. At any rate, in the early years of the seventeenth century the bear-baiting took place almost invariably on that day. In Wales and in the remoter parts of the kingdom, into which Puritanism never completely penetrated, the Sunday sports lasted on down to the beginning of the present century. The football, tennis, dancing and other amusements took place most frequently in the churchyard, and in many a Welsh village to this day the public-house will be found adjoining the churchyard, with a private entrance made of old times through the churchyard wall, for the convenience of the players.35 Of course, grave abuses often went hand in hand with such celebrations. Medieval preachers complain frequently of the drunkenness and brawling with which the Sunday was desecrated, but the principle of encouraging reasonable amusement was nevertheless surely a sound one. There was not more, but less, drinking when the Sunday afternoons were spent, as the statutes directed, in the use of the bow and in feats of strength and skill. In the London of our own days much change for the better has taken place of late years, and the bicycle is effecting wonders everywhere. But there must be many country clergymen who would welcome cordially a return to the freedom of the Middle Ages, and would find such occupations as cricket, football, Volunteer drill, or practice at the rifle-butts an improvement on the Sunday afternoon which at present prevails over a great part of England. I know no more satisfactory or sensible discussion of the principle of rational amusement on the Sunday than what may be found in the fifteenth-century religious treatise Dives and Pauper, already referred to. The quotation is rather long, but it sums up so admirably the teaching and practice of the medieval Church that it is difficult to curtail it :

36

Dives: Then it seemeth by thy speech that in holy days men may lawfully make mirth?

Pauper: God forbid else. For, as I said, the holy day is ordained for rest and relieving both of body and of soul. And therefore in law of kind, in law written, in

35 Much interesting information on this subject will be found collected in Mr. Owen's Old Stone Crosses of the Vale of Clwyd.

36 The treatise Dives and Pauper can be accurately dated from a passage which occurs in the forty-seventh chapter of the First Precept, which mentions that the kalends of January fell upon a Thursday in the year 1400, and this yere ben comyn agen on the Thursdaye,' which occurred in 1405. The reading of the printed editions is borne out by MSS. Royal 17, c. 21, and 17, c. 20.

VOL. XLVI-No. 269

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law of grace, and ever from the beginning of the world, the holy day hath been solacious (comforting) with honesty both for soul and body, and for worship of God, whose day is that day, solacious in clothing, in meat and drink, in occupation honest, with mirth making. And therefore the prophet saith, This is the day that God made, make we now merry and be we glad.

Dives: Contra te, St. Austin saith, that it were less sin to go at the plough and at the cart, and card and spin in the Sunday, than to lead dances.

Pauper: St. Austin speaketh of such dances and plays as were used in his time, when Christian people was much meddled with heathen people, and by old custom and example of heathen people, used unhonest dances and plays that by old time were ordained to stir the people to lechery and other sins. And so if dancing and playing now on the holy days stir men and women to pride, to lechery, gluttony and sloth, to over long waking on nights, and to idleness on the work days, and to other sins, as it is right likely that they do now in our days, then be they unlawful both on the holy day and on the work day. And against all such spake St. Austin; but against honest dances and plays done in due time and in good manner on the holy day, spake St. Austin not.37

I have said nothing, I am afraid, about that feature of the Sunday which, as Pauper elsewhere insists, occupied the first place in the mind of the mediaval religious teacher. It was by public worship in the Church, offered to God especially at the parish Mass, in the service of early Matins, and at afternoon Vespers, that the day was to be sanctified. With the discharge of this duty no amusement could be permitted to interfere; but if this were fulfilled the canonists dealt indulgently with all other reasonable employment. The subject, however, would need an article to itself, and in many respects-as, for instance, the question of Sunday preaching-is a difficult one. Let me conclude, therefore, by noticing that the spirit of the medieval Sunday is well summed up in the Scriptural introduction of the canticle regarded of old as peculiarly appropriate to that day-the Gloria in excelsis Deo: Glory be to God on High and on earth peace to men of goodwill.' The praise of God must occupy the first place, but, that being secured, the Church thought next of man's physical and moral well-being-rest of body, peace of soul, and all that makes for charity and goodwill between class and class.

HERBERT THURSTON, S.J.

37 Dives and Pauper, p. 125.

THE NATIVE AUSTRALIAN FAMILY

THERE is no department in which it is more difficult to obtain a revision of the chose jugée than those realms of inexact science in which the decision takes effect through the acceptance by an incompetent jury of a question-begging definition. To this day competent authors, well acquainted with Australian natives, their languages, their manners and customs, and the voluminous literature dealing with Australian ethnology, are still compelled by the vogue of an unhappy phrase, ' marriage by capture,' to repeat one after the other, carefully and explicitly, the emphatic assurance that a respectable writer of the year 1798 was mistaken and misinformed in his description of the customary wooing of Australian women by suitors who knock them on the head and carry them off by secret force. And, as the error was vulgarised in less bulky and more popular works than the refutation, it is even yet possible for a wedding guest of antiquated erudition to inform ingenuous bridesmaids that best men and wedding favours are interesting survivals from that primitive custom typically illustrated by Australian blacks.

It is not yet, however, we may hope, too late to deprecate the propagation in text-books of another phrase likely to be equally dangerous from its misleading ambiguity, as it gives a name, implying the existence of a thing, to a set of customs in which the thing named only exists in a way that no two words can serve to describe. 'Group marriage'-the term in question-was introduced by Messrs. Howitt and Fison, who interpreted the curious and interesting customs which they described as pointing to a former state of things existing at some unknown period in Australia, when it was customary for all the men of one tribe to marry indiscriminately all the women of another, and conversely, so that 'brothers, blood and tribal,' married collectively sisters, blood and tribal,' with the result that language confounds fathers and uncles, mothers and aunts, cousins and brothers: and, though no direct evidence to this effect is forthcoming, the authors of the hypothesis and their followers speak, as Curr complains in his Australian Race, of the ancient rule' as an ascertained fact of history.

There is no question about the data upon which the above theory

rests, and, as the facts are exceedingly complicated and difficult to ascertain, it is not surprising that the busy explorers and administrators to whom we owe them are willing to welcome any thread of hypothesis that promises to string them in some semblance of a rational order, and are not too critical of the terms in which it is couched. It is here proposed to show, in as few words as possible, that, whatever the historical antecedents of Australian marriage law may be, no expression is more misleading as a description of the existing state of things than to say that now men of one group marry women of another group, without clearly explaining that the 'groups' in question are not local, not tribal, not-as a ruletotemistic, nor held together by any bond of kinship compendiously describable in terms of European thought, least of all by the simple bond of brotherhood.

The pièces justificatives of this somewhat audacious statement may be most conveniently taken from the recent valuable work of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen on The Native Tribes of Central Australia, though, with slight variations, the system of relationship therein described is or has been spread pretty well over the continent, till the arrival of the white man broke up the traditional usages of the tribes nearest to his settlements. These authors observe :

The one most striking point in regard to marriage at the present day is that a man of one group is absolutely confined in his choice of a wife to women of a particular group, and that it is lawful for him to marry any woman of that group.

And again:

In all the tribes with which we are acquainted, all the terms coincide, without any exception, in the recognition of relationships, all of which are dependent upon the existence of a classificatory system, the fundamental idea of which is that the women of certain groups marry the men of others. Each tribe has one term applied indiscriminately by the man to the woman or women he actually marries and to all the women he lawfully might marry—that is, who belong to the right group- one term to his actual mother and to all the women whom his father might lawfully have married; one term to his actual brother and to all the sons of his father's brothers, and so on right through the whole system. To this it may be added that, if these be not terms of relationship, then the language of these tribes is absolutely devoid of any such.

Perhaps the reader will be prepared to embrace, if possible, this last hypothesis, when he learns that another able ethnologist finds himself unable to name the group into which a Queensland native must marry other than as a gamo-matronym, while the more complicated arrangements of the central tribes would necessitate some such term as gamo-amphigononym. If ethnologists were compelled, as circumstances demanded to speak at length of gamo-matronymic group marriage and gamo-amphigononymic group marriage, the theory would run little risk of becoming too popular. At any rate, the above lucid passage contains in substance all the facts upon