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 POPULATION

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POPULATION

Indulgences are also granted for the novena and other exercises in honour ol St. Francis of Assisi during the same month. We may note that the consecration of March to St. Joseph, of September to the Seven Dolours, and, less directly, that of July to the Precious Blood, are also recognized by the grant of indulgences. Again, there are other devotions whose popularity has been limited to certain periods or certain localities. For example, the various sets of " Little Offices" (e. g.of the Passion or of the Blessed Trinity), which occupy so much space in the printed Hor» and Primers of the early sixteenth century, are hardly heard of at present. The "Seven Blood-Sheddings" or the "Seven Falls" of Our Blessed Lord, once so much honoured, have now passed out of recollection. Similarly the exercise of the Jesus Psalter, which was incredibly dear to our ancestors in the old penal days, seems never to have spread beyond English-speaking countries and has never been indulgenced. On the other hand, the prev- alence of more frequent Communion since the six- teenth century has introduced many new practices of devotion unknown in the Middle Ages. The Six Sun- days of St. Aloysius, the Five Sundays of St. Francis's Stigmata, the Seven Sundays of the Immaculate Con- ception, the Seven Sundays of St. Joseph, the Ten Sundays of St. Francis Xavier, the Ten Sundays of St. Ignatius Loyola, and especially the Nine Fri- days in honour of the Sacred Heart are all in various degrees authorized and familiar. And, as these last examples suggest, there is everywhere a tendency to multiply imitations. We have now not one Rosary, but many rosaries or chaplets (of which imitations perhaps the best known is the Rosary of the Seven Dolours), not one scapular but many scapulars, not one "miraculous medal" but several. Neither must we always expect to find consistency. In the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries, the Seven Dolours and Seven Joys of Our Lady were commonly Five Dolours and Five Joys (see "Analecta Bollandiana", 1893, p. 333), while this last reckoning probably owed much to the great popularity of the devotion to the Five Wounds. On the other hand, indulgences, which may be found in the Raccolta, have been granted to certain prayers in honour of the Seven Sorrows and Seven Joj's of St. Joseph.

It must not, however, be supposed that devotional extravagances are suffered to multiply unchecked. Although the Holy See as a rule refrains from inter- vention, except when abuses are directly denounced to it (the practice being in such matters to leave the repression of what is unseemly or fantastic to the local ordinary), still, every now and again, where some theo- logical principle is involved, action is taken by one of the Roman Congregations, and some objectionable practice is prohibited. Not very long since, for exam- ple, the propagation of a particular form of prayer was forbidden in connexion with the so-called "Brief of St. Anthony". The history of the slow recognition by the Church of the devotion to the Sacred Heart might very well serve as an illustration of the caution with which the Holy See proceeds in matters where there is question of any theological principle. The precise number of Christ's blood-sheddings, or of Mary's joys, the fashion or colour of scapulars, medals, or badges, the veneration of Our Lady under one particular invo- cation rather than another, are obviously matters of subordinate importance in which no great harm can result if some measureof freedom is allowed to the pious imagination of the faithful.

No good purpose would be served by attempting a catalogvie of approved Catholic devotions. It may be sufTioient to note that the list of indulgenced jiraycrs and practices i)roviclc(l in the Raccolta cir in the larger works of BeringiT and Mocchegiani affcird a suHiciciif practical indication of the measure in which such iirac- tices are recognized and recommended by the Church. Most of the principal devotions are dealt with sep-

arately in The Catholic Encyclopedia, whether we regard different objects and motives of devotion — such as the Blessed Sacrament (see Eucharist), the Pas- sion, the Five Wounds, the Sacred Heart, the Seven Dolours, and, in a word, the principal mysteries and festivals — or, again, devotional practices — e. g., the Angelus, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross — or, again, confra- ternities and associations identified with particular forms of devotion — e. g., the Confraternity of the Bona Mors or that of the Holy Family.

There seems to be no authoritative general work on popular devotions, but for the Indulgences and some historical details connected with them see Moccheoiani. Colledio Indulgentiarum (Quaracchi, 1897) ; Beringer, Die Ablasse (many editions and a French and Italian translation); L^picier, Indulgences, tr. (Lon- don, 1906). Several of the more familiar popular devotions have been treated historically by the present writer in The Month (1900 and 1901).

Herbert Thubston.

Population, TnEdRiEs of. — Down to the end of the

eighteenth century, very little attention was given to the relation between increase of population and in- crease of subsistence. Plato (De republica, V) and Aristotle (De republica, II, vi) maintained, in- deed, that in a communistic society marriage and the birth of children ought to be regulated and re- stricted by law, lest the means of support should be insufficient for all the citizens; and in some of the city-states of ancient Greece, abortion, unnatural love, and infanticide were deliberately recommended and practised for the same general end. As a rule, however, the nations of ant iquity as well as those of the medieval period regarded the indefinite increase of the population as a public good, since it multi- plied the number of the country's fighting men. In the words of Frederick the Great, "the number of the population constitutes the wealth of the State". Before his time over-population had not occurred in any civilized country, or at least it had not been recognized as such. It was prevented or disguised by disease, plagues, wars, and various forms of economic hardship; by fixed and simple standards of living; and by customs which adjusted the marriage rate, and consequently the rate of reproduction, to the contemporary planes of living and supplies of food. The Mercantilists, whose opinions on economic matters were widely accepted in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, agreed with the military statesmen that increase of population was an unqualified blessing; while the Physiocrats of the eighteenth century were less confident, some of them insisting that shortage of food was a possibility that ought to be taken into account by a nation, none of them concei^'ed the problem as of pressing importance, or dealt with it in an extended and sys- tematic way. Several other writers, such as Montes- quieu, Hume, Steuart, Wallace, Arthur Young, and Julius Moser, who had recognized the existence and general nature of the problem, likewise failed to discuss it thoroughly. This was true even of Adam Smith. Although he noted the fact that increase of population among the poorer classes is checked by scarcity of subsistence (Wealth of Nations", Lon- don, 1776, I, viii), he did not develop the thought or draw any practical conclusions therefrom. Writ- ing when the great industrial inventions were just beginning to indicate an enlargement of the means of living, when the new [jolitical and economic free- dom seemed to promise the release and expansion of an immense amount of productive energy, a.nd under the influence of a philosophical theory which held that the "unseen hand" of Providence would so direct the new powers and aspirations that all classes would have abundant sustenance. Smith was an un- qualified optimist. He believed that the pressure of Iiopvilation upon subsistence had become a thing of the past.