Jotter I Beautifying

our Churches
Gay Baptistery
IHAD occasion a few weeks ago 1 to write about the restoration and marvellous embellishment of the church of St. Mary Magdalen, Wandsworth, undertaken by Fr. Edward Mitchinson, probably best known to many of our readers as the Chaplain for so many years of the Young Christian Workers. 1 am able this week to print two pictures which give some notion of the originality of the work. No picture can give any idea of the gaiety, brightness and scriptural context of the Baptistery which should always reflect the joy of spiritual regeneration and union with the Body of the Church. Another picture shows the charming down-to-earth Holy Water stoup whose water should be a constant reminder of Baptism. As with so many older churches in London, St. Mary Magdalen has its history. It was originally Salesian, but perhaps the most interesting point about it is that it stands right on to a large cemetery in which many refugee Huguenots are buried. and I am told that Newman's mother's grave is in it. Her maiden name was Jemima
Fourdrinier and she belonged to a Huguenot family of engravers and paper-makers.
Burial or Cremation
ARECENT article in the "Times" gives some interesting facts about cremation. It seems that this country has the highest cremation rate in the world, nearly 35 per cent of those who died last year having been cremated, and the rate of increase being two per cent per year. Seventeen new crematoria were opened last year, whereas local authorities find it very hard to get land for new cemeteries, The maintenance of the latter is far costlier than the maintenance of
crematoria. I am surprised that the number of cremated is still very significantly less than the number of buried, and this certainly seems to reflect the enduring strength outside the Church of the Catholic tradition against cremation. But it is also well to remember that cremation is not forbidden by the moral law in itself, but by the Church. Like clerical marriage, cremation could he permitted if and when the Church thought fit. One wonders whether one of the practical grounds for the Church s law, namely that cremation is associated with disbelief in immortality and resurrection, still holds in Britain, It smacks more of Continental anticlericalism,
`Correctors of the Press'
IT is always one of the rewards of writing this column that the occasional reader will write and tell me more about a subject mentioned in it. A note on the low standards of modern proof readers brings me a letter from an "Old Westminster Cathedral Choir School Boy", who tells me that the older and more correct term is "Correctors of the Press". His predecessors in the work included Erasmus, Dr. Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Alexander Cruden, whose Scripture Concordance is always by my desk. But if the work is highly dignified and important, it tends to he thought in many printing works "nonproductive". Hence increased remuneration is oat easily come by. "Alas, your modern materialist management seems more often to how to the Machine. not the Mind". The speed of the work demanded, he thinks, is one of the reasons for the bad "reading" of today.
'High' Mass
T"Anglican Bishop of Pretoria was travelling in France —so the "Southern Cross" reports —when a lady asked him who he was. "Art Anglican priest," he answered. And the lady replied: "0 yes, 'ere we 'aye ze Mass in Latin, but you 'ave it in ze funicular."