The news that Dominicans—and English Dominicans—are, under the active encouragement of the Holy See, to recommence work in Persia is calculated to stir our blood and turn our thoughts towards that ancient country, and Dominican connections with it.

‘ Behold, I make all things new ’—such is the glorious claim of Jesus Christ and, through Him, of the Church. In the fourteenth century Dominicans, encouraged by Pope John XXII, went out to Persia and did a great work there among the Armenians. So great, indeed, was the expansion of Dominican missionary work in the East, that a special congregation within the Order, named Fratres Peregrinantes,’ was set up, and certain distinctive features in their costume —a red sash or cummerbund, and red socks—marked out its members from the rest. The story of the reunion, effected by our friars, of large bodies of Armenians together with their clergy, is a curious one. So great was the prestige of the Order among them that the Armenian liturgy was abandoned and the Dominican liturgy, translated into Armenian, put in its place. This step proved in the’ long run to have been imprudent. Those who, among the Armenians, had refused to join the movement protested loudly, and with some justification, against so unwise an abandonment of the ancient and beautiful Armenian rite, and this was, no doubt, among the causes wdiich ultimately brought about the arrest and decline of a work so gallantly begun.

While a torrid August shrivels up the pleasant green earth, the minds of many Englishmen turn hopefully towards Canterbury. I do not mean that the whole Ecclesia Anglicana in The Church Times sense suddenly feels grateful, obedient, or even reverential in relation to hallowed Canterbury. I do not imagine that this Ecclesia Anglicana waits with more assurance in August than at any other time for a voice of authority to speak out of Canterbury. Nor do I refer in such general terms to the devout few Catholics of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, who still go thither yearly, ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke,’ making their pilgrimage as did their forefathers in the days of Chaucer, ‘from every shiris ende of Engelonde.’ If the average Englishman were heard to say something like this : ‘Last yean I had to miss my first Canterbury festival since I was ten,’ his hearers would more naturally assume that it was cricket rather than the blissful martyr that drew him to Canterbury with yearly regularity.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning of such an August day, when the morning sun gave promise of taking up the baking qualities of the sweltering night it came on to relieve, that I stood in the market square of Bromley, some ten or twelve miles out of London. We had made up a little party, the Lumboroughs and I, to go dowrn to Canterbury by motor-coach. We had been assured that, in the words of the agent, the party would be ‘very select.’ The Franklins and Dr. Smiths had already booked seats. So at the appointed hour we took possession, noting that our fellow travellers seemed a very ‘decent’ crowd.

What a whirl of memories are stirred up by this new book of Sir Philip Gibbs! To read its pages is to be confronted by forgotten hopes, by noble plans that failed of their purpose, and again by ignoble greeds that equally failed to secure the accomplishment of their designs. Even the mistakes of postwar policies are hardly less in evidence than the inability of selfishness to establish its controls. A cynic would have merely given a catalogue of the blunders of the politicians; a sentimentalist would have talked glibly of the records of disarmament, of the League of Nations, and of the increase of the standard of comfort of the working man. Sir Philip is neither cynic nor sentimentalist, at least he is neither for very long, though he is sometimes each by turns : however, he chiefly sets himself to the task of telling us the story of what has actually befallen our world since the war ended. By ‘our world’ is meant exclusively the world that went to war. Thus Spain, the first of the dictatorships, the earliest of the new fashion of government, gets no mention : Holland and Scandinavia are equally and deliberately ignored.

But the spirit in which the book is written is amply demonstrated on the front page of it: it is called Since Then, The Disturbing Story of the World at Peace. You realise that Sir Philip is considerably disturbed by what has happened since the war ended; and as you read the volume, and especially as you read the last pages of it, you also realise why he is disturbed.

The sub-title of this work is ‘A study in the Counter-Reformation,’ and this indicates its real importance. As Mr. Evennett remarks, the unfortunate name ‘Counter-Reformation’ invites a disastrous over-simplification’: it was not a mere reaction to the ‘Reformation’ —another misnomer—it was a most complex movement’ : it was ‘essentially a hybrid.’ The present volume deals with that curious and interesting group of moderate men—among whom the Cardinal of. Lorraine is the most significant figure —that became a vital centre in France during the period between the election of Pius IV, December, 1559, and ‘the moment when the Fathers at Trent turned their attention to serious considerations in April, 1562.’ The movement culminated and broke down in the Colloquy of Poissy, and petered out in the Conference of Saverne. It was a lost cause—at least in its eirenic projects—but while it lasted it was ‘one of the gravest crisis for Catholicism,’ and its effect can be felt in the attitude of the French hierarchy in the ensuing sessions of Trent.

The Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles de Guise, Archbishop of Rheims, was regarded by contemporary Protestants as a sinister and untrustworthy person, and later historians have, on the whole, endorsed their view. This attitude is probably in great part due to the permanent inability of the Nonconformist mind to appreciate any greatness that is rich and diverse and unconfined to one single fanatical aim. Mr. Evennett, completing the work of M. Romier, has succeeded in rehabilitating the Cardinal’s character.

This book may be classed at once as on the sane side in Shakespeare research. It is also on the side of the humaner letters, beautifully written and excellently produced, and striking a golden mean between Textual Criticism and Higher Criticism, begetter of so much futility and freak. Monsignor Kolbe prefaces his analyses of the plays with some simple and profound general remarks on the analogy between great pictures and great dramas. Both alike, he says, display the subconsciousness of the artist, appealing to the subconsciousness of the onlooker. Modern thought is much handicapped by a wilful ignorance of what ancient thought took for granted, and is perpetually bewrayed with startling discoveries of what everyone knew when the world was comparatively young, or at least unstaled. They, the ancients, knew that each man keeps a treasure-house of his experiences organic or mental, and that some have a larger and better store, some a choice and ordered store, and others a parti-coloured rag-bag. And this they called Memoria. Samuel Butler alone and early, rediscovered this mysterious mother of the Muses to be the mother of specific differences in organic matter, and the author of instinct; in one pregnant phrase undoing, or at least gainsaying, the disastrous error of Darwin, who stressed environment as one of the parents of specific differentiation.