No age in Christian history has gone without the grievous accompaniment of martyrdom. We are not singular in this affliction. And so it seems vain upon its occasion merely to protest as if at some monstrous political anomaly. Should we not rather suspect and seek to uncover the profounder connection between it and the economy of our redemption which was effected upon the Cross?

In this enquiry a natural starting point is afforded by St John’s vision of the Apocalypse. He wrote the record of that vision about the year 96 A.D., when the Emperor Domitian’s systematic oppression of the Christians impended. They were a prey to the deepest discouragement. They had already undergone the capricious cruelty of Nero’s persecution. Was there to be no end to their suffering? They must call Domitian, now, Lord and God; this would be the test of their civic loyalty, and it would be a loyalty enforced at the point of the sword. Less and less did it seem possible for the elect to live at peace with the world. St John’s vision brought them the answer. He saw all time stretched over age upon age of persecution and struggle; but he saw simultaneously the same ages gathered in a single syllable of time, made over to victory in the blood of the Lamb. Through the ages Satan, the great dragon—cast down to earth where alone his power remains unloosed—persecuted the Woman whose children are the brethren of Christ. Deprived of power against her and her Firstborn, he ‘went to make war on the rest of her children, the men who keep God’s commandments, and hold fast to the truth concerning Jesus’. ‘Day and night he stood, accusing them in God’s presence. But because of the Lamb’s blood, and because of the truth to which they bore witness, they triumphed over him, holding their lives cheap till death overtook them.’

One day when the blessed Peter was making his way through the country about Milan he happened on two men sowing their fields, of whom one was a Catholic, the other a heretic. The Catholic before beginning his work called on God to help him, but the heretic invoked the devil, whom as the maker of the visible world he believed to have the government of the earth and its crops; and when they heard one another each condemned the other for the perversity of his faith. The blessed Peter who by the will of God was passing that way drew near. . . .’ The outcome is hardly in doubt: St Peter prophesied, and when in time the field of the Catholic bore a plentiful crop and the heretic’s none, the heretic was convinced by the miracle and became a Catholic. But St Peter was not always as confident as on that occasion. Another day he met a heretic who challenged him to a disputation. St Peter, unprepared, was momentarily overwhelmed by his subtleties and went into a church to pray; even there, before the Lady altar, he was visited by doubt and trepidation, and it required the voice of the Blessed Virgin herself to reassure him.

A great deal has been heard of late of the problem of reconciling one aim of economic policy, that of stability, or full employment as it is usually expressed nowadays, with another aim, that of economic efficiency. But stability and efficiency do not exhaust the list of the rightful aims of economic policy. There is a third, since the economic system should be not only efficient and reasonably stable but should also be just. This third element, justice, has received relatively little attention in modern economic analysis, but this is in direct contrast with the discussions of economic matters found in the scholastic philosophers. In their treatises, the one thing about price which they emphasise is that it must be a just price. They devoted little space to any direct consideration of those aspects of human economic activities which bear upon the stability or efficiency of the system, but a great deal to those aspects which treat of justice as between man and man. Does this mean that the medieval writers were very poor economists? They have indeed been treated as such in the textbooks on the development of economic thought. But recent developments of economics are giving cause for some reassessment, here as elsewhere.

When Wilfrid and Alice Meynell visited Francis Thompson at Pantasaph, Alice wrote of her fellow-poet who was lodging in a cottage at the monastery gates, ‘There is no disturbing renown to be got among the cabins of the Flintshire hills’. She envied the Franciscan peace to which her friend came homeward at nightfall. Viola Meynell’s gracious and discerning account of Wilfrid Meynell and Francis Thompson shows a strong personality and a weak one fulfilling each other in the Christian charity that makes give and take possible, and united in serving three things recognised by their age as worth individual sacrifice—religion, domestic love and poetry. Journalist and poet, happy if hard-pressed father of seven children and waif of the London streets, their unique and self-effacing collaboration did more for the conversion of the England of their day than any publicist is likely to achieve for ours. As in some sort one of their converts, I should like to glance at this aspect of Viola Meynell’s book and endorse it from my own experience.

Mr John Pope Hennessy’s recent study on Fra Angelico has already been widely and appreciatively reviewed. Yet it is curious how few of its reviewers seem to have noted the profound originality of his treatment and conclusion.

The volume is in itself an admirable specimen of the Phaidon productions at their best. It would be possible to criticise some of the colour reproductions but we are still at the stage when the majority of colour reproductions are liable to criticism. The photographing is excellent, the selection of details ideal for its purpose. The reproductions are predominant over the text as is so often the case in English Art History publications, yet here this is counter-balanced by Mr Pope-Hennessy’s rare capacity for conciseness. In ninety pages of introduction and of catalogue he describes definitively three previouly unknown yet major Italian painters of the Quattrocento.

One of these may still be described as Fra Angelico, but there is little in common between this Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, ‘Fr Ioannes Petri de Magello iuxta Vichium Optimus Pictor’, and the Angelico popularised by Rio in De l’Art Chrétien. He is a consummately accomplished and professional painter, employed by many patrons, working from carefully considered and balanced schemes, and consistently influenced by the ideals in the Lucula Noctis of his Dominican master Giovanni Dominici. The author of the Lucula Noctis was familiar with the technique of his contemporary Italian humanists and could write as well as they of ‘Myrrha, Phaedra or Ganymede’, but he rejected so many of their standards of value. To him the art of rhetoric seems over-prized. ‘The beautiful form of the poem is like clothing.