Word: maitland
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...written attempts to limit the powers of the English King and to set forth the rights of his subjects. Lord Bryce, the historian, has described it as "the starting point in the constitutional history of the English race." In The History of English Law, Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland go even further. Magna Carta, they write, is "the nearest approach to an irrepealable 'fundamental statute' that England has ever...
...such, The Meanings of God causes deep offense to Des Boyle, a local L.C.L. (Leading Catholic Layman), who heads something called the Knights of St. Patrick and has all the tricks of chancery politics at his blunt fingertips. Boyle has talked the Archbishop of Sydney into asking Maitland to write a refutation. It would be a refutation of his own book, but the time has passed when Maitland can possibly admit to his own duplicity. It can be seen from this exquisitely complex confrontation that Keneally is far from making a loaded brief for the modernist clergy against the hard...
...Maitland, God is not so much a presence as an "absence in the heart," and faith is a yearning to fill the void. His natural enemies in the faith are the Irish dogmatists for whom God is not an unknowable otherness but a "kinsman" -in his most ignoble form honorary president of an Irish friendly society. The ecclesiastical embodiment of the dogmatist faith is Dr. Costello, a clerical bully who heads the House of Studies and, perhaps prophetically, grows to bishop-size before the reader's eyes...
Costello is not a mean man by his own fixed lights. Even when presiding over an ecclesiastical kangaroo court that is investigating a nun suspected of heresy, he is not lacking in charity but in imagination. It can be seen that the nun on trial has grace; Maitland seeks it and Dr. Costello believes that he is already blessed with...
...Father Maitland's dilemma is intricately worked out like a fine, stout piece of convent lace. In the process, the author shows himself as a dealer in the comedy of the spirit far different from Graham Greene's celebrated psychodramas of doubt, doom and-damnation. His scenes are as funny as J. F. Powers', but without their cozy in-joke comicality. Keneally's humor is white, not black-a blessed relief. His book is infused with a pawky clerical awareness that human life, though sometimes capable of holiness, is more often merely funny. Thus perceptively armed...