In the general hunt for centenaries, which is surely one of the fashions of the day, it may seem somewhat trivial to claim to be the first in the field in announcing the discovery of a centenary that no one else, to my knowledge, has so far noticed, or at any rate taken the trouble to put on record. By a happy chance, when reading the Life of Père Marie-Theodore Ratisbonne, I noticed that the Venerable Father had received the sacrament of baptism in the year 1827, on September the 12th, the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary. It was actually only ‘the supplying of the ceremonies’ that took place on this day, because Theodore Ratisbonne had, by virtue of an unusual dispensation granted by the Bishop of Strasbourg, been privately baptised in the previous April, on Holy Saturday, by Mademoiselle Humann, the wonderful woman whom others besides Ratisbonne could claim as the human instrument God had used to work their conversion.

Now the fact that the son of a wealthy Jew was baptised in Strasbourg in 1827 may seem at first sight scarcely a matter for comment a hundred years afterwards. Yet actually that one act, seen in its multiplied effects, must undoubtedly strike us as having been the beginning of a movement, certainly as extensive in its range and influence as that associated with the name of Newman. The baptism of 1827 was followed fourteen years later by the still more remarkable and romantic conversion of Ratisbonne’s younger brother Alphonse.