THURSTON, HERBERT. - Jesuit, hagiographer, and liturgist, b. in London on 15 Nov. 1856, d. there on 3 Nov. 1939.
Having entered the Order on 28 Sept. 1874, from 1894 he was attached to the periodical The Month, while enjoying ample freedom to pursue his particular studies. He dealt especially with subjects of hagiography and the history of the liturgy, on which he wrote many articles in The Month, The Tablet, The Dublin Review, Studies, the Catholic Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethic; separately he published: History of the Eucharist in Great Britain, The life of St. Hugues of Lincoln; The holy Year of Jubilee, Lent and holy Week; The Stations of the Cross; The Rosary, etc. He edited the new edition of A. Butler’s Lives of the Saints, now edited, revised and copiously supplemented (12 vols., London 1926–38), in which the critical observations on the individual biographies are noteworthy. He also devoted himself, with zeal and critical spirit, to studies of psychology, mystical facts, and spiritualistic phenomena; on the latter there are the works: Spiritualism (London 1935; Italian trans., La Chiesa e lo spiritismo, Milan 1937; 2nd ed. there 1945) and the posthumous The physical Phenomena of Mysticism (London 1952). He enjoyed the esteem and reputation of an acute and objective critic, a serious and learned scholar, although he sometimes fell into a degree of hypercritical exaggeration.