The Exhibition of Flemish Art on view at the Royal Academy should not be missed by any lover of art. Not only will he there find a feast of colour and beauty sufficient to satisfy the most fastidious, but a complete exhibition of the art of Flanders from its earliest beginnings to the present day. It is seldom so representative an exhibition of the art of a nation in all its periods is available for the student to note its entire origin, growth and development. But more. The exhibition should not be missed by any student of Christian economics, especially any Catholic student. For here he has an unparalleled object-lesson of the effect of the Church’s social influence on the world when her guidance and direction were acknowledged. The display of masterpieces in painting alone is so superb that, as one writer in the daily press was led to exclaim : ‘there are times when one is tempted to cry out that painting began and ended with the early Flemish artists.’ But painting was only one of the arts brought to perfection by the Church in the Middle Ages; Flanders only one of the nations of Europe under the influence of the cultural tradition of Latin Christendom. Painting may have blossomed earlier in Flanders and Italy than among the other nations of Europe, owing to their more flourishing commerce and intercourse with the East; but all were in the same line of tradition and cultural development until destroyed by the disruptive influences of the Reformation with its subsequent confusion of ideas from which we still suffer: and only a return to unity can heal the wounds of society.