LONDON IS A PLACE

Leonard Feeney

BOSTON

The Ravengate Press

MCMLI

TABLE OF CONTENTS

“Whenever London had on its hands anything larger than a small poet, he either became a pantheist, and therefore too unlocal for London; a transcendentalist, and disappeared into China by way of opium; or else a man with a good honest heartache, who ran off to the Continent and was buried in Rome or drowned on the shores of Greece.”

“The London politician always receives you in a formal and conservatively arranged office, seated at a neatly tidied desk. And when you finally get in to see him (past the various secretaries and sub-secretaries who have tried so urbanely to discourage the visit), you never have an audience with the London politician, as you might with the Pope. He always has an audience with you. The American politician is all mouth. But the London politician is all ears.”

“When the Jew from the Holy Land went to the Rhineland, he found Christian corruptions there to ease his conscience and soothe his religious nostalgias. This gave the Jew his chance to be a mental Messiah, and to start a procession of prophetic intellectualism that has lasted down to our day. The climax came when an apostate Catholic from Austria ran into Germany with a queer mustache, took over the militia, and out-Jewed the Jews. He became the super-German. And that was the end of Germany.”

“Greece and Rome issued into London by way of a French aqueduct, and the loving London heart, and the resolute London mind, had no power to cope with them according to the French formula. And so Athens and Rome divided again, once they reached London. All the heads went resolutely into the universities, and all the hearts went regretfully into the gutter.”

“John Henry Newman was constantly praised for the clarity of his English prose and the limpid lucidity of his style. That he possesses these qualities, no one can deny. But his is the cold clarity of clear water in a fish bowl, in which one looks in vain for the fish.”

“Lord Russell started a school for children, with a curriculum that would do credit to a stable. The children were exposed to all temptations, and encouraged to settle them in terms of their own instincts. No counsel or correction was allowed to be given them. It was a school where impulses were fostered, and noted, and statistics constantly kept. Lord Russell was forced to close this school. The children had turned into savages. Light begets light. Darkness generates darkness. The offspring of a demon are little devils in the flesh.”

“Speaking of policemen, there is no place in the world where crime is more difficult to commit than in London. And this is because of the swiftness and severity with which crime is detected, sentenced, and punished. London’s laws are so strict, and punishment is so extreme, and judicial sentences so swiftly made, that a potential criminal does not dare to come within a mile of the crime he would like to perpetrate.”

“One might think that because Archbishop William Temple, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, was an Anglican on a higher plane than Dean Inge, that he would be definite about things that are doctrinal, authoritative about them, and occasionally apostolic. He was not. Many of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermons disregarded entirely the facts of Faith. They were concerned only with Faith as a function. It can be truly said of him, no matter how shocking it sounds — that he did not believe in God. He believed in belief.”