Rousseau once ridiculed the British Constitution by declaring that the Englishman was only really free during a General Election, and that then he used his freedom so badly that he deserved to lose it, A great number of Rousseau’s most cherished ideas have perished long ago, and yet our ‘ridiculous’ Constitution remains, fundamentally the same. Very soon every elector will be asked to exercise that political freedom, which, apparently, is so rare a privilege, and the time may be ripe for a little hard thinking as to what that power really involves. The world now offers a variety of political systems, all claiming to be more genuinely democratic than our own, the old-fashioned mother of them all. How does the power of the British citizen compare with the newer developments in the power of the people in the U.S.A., or even in the U.S.S.R.? What is involved in this declaration by each elector every five years? These are questions which those rare electors who have either the time, leisure, or interest to read the less sensational periodicals may well bother to inquire into during these last few weeks before the Election takes place.

This Election is bound to be of historic importance, as it marks the end of that movement for the reform of the franchise, which was started with such excitement and trepidation by the Whigs in 1832. The years 1867, 1884, 1918, and 1928 are so many steps the nation has taken with a slow but unhesitating stride along a road as inevitable as any in her history. ‘We have opened a door which can never again be closed,’ moaned the young Tory, Newman, proving himself a much wiser prophet than the introducer of the bill himself, Lord John Russell, nicknamed ‘Finality Jack,’ because of his belief that the reform of 1832 was to be final.

A quotation from the fearless and original thought of Baron Friedrich von Hugel will be our justification with those who may consider our praise of St. Thomas Aquinas unjustly superlative. He writes : . this Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul so apparently derivative and abstractive, is more complete and balanced and penetrates to the specific genus of Christianity more deeply than Saints Paul and Augustine, with all their directness and intensity. .... No one has put this point better than Professor Troeltsch : “The decisive point here is the conception peculiar to the Middle Ages of what is Christian as supernatural.”’

Whilst I hesitate to give my master, St. Thomas, the praise of this latest panegyrist, I feel that his words will be a clue to my attempt to deal with St. Thomas and Law. Indeed, the names mentioned in the quotation are more akin to the subject of this paper than, perhaps, the writer thought. In the life of St. Paul the idea of Law had played almost the major part. The seeming opposition between Law and faith, or works and faith, had, for a moment, led him into opposition with a section of the Church; and even with St. Peter. Augustine, too, like St. Paul, had come to an intellectual and practical rejection of Manichean Dualism by the master-vision of a creative Law which was, at the same time, one, good, and all-powerful; indeed so powerful in its goodness as to be able to turn evil to good.

The arresting phrase occurs in one of the rich crop of paragraphs called up by the recent return of Italian recognition of the Temporal Power. The pre-1870 Papal Railway, the old Papal Coach, the States of the Church Navy, and of course the famous Foreign Legions of the little Roman Army, each has served as a convenient peg on which to hang some sort of an article. Wonderfully interesting many of them have been. Only if we get some real facts down in black and white, they may prove scarcely less interesting.

Let us begin, then, with’ the Papal Army of to-day. First comes the famous Swiss Guard. Only it hardly concerns us English. For nobody but a Swiss may join it, and incidentally no Swiss may outside his own Army join anything else. It is his Government’s solitary exception to its Foreign Enlistment Act. Next comes the Noble Guard, the Corps to which Pope Pius IX was in his youth refused admission through a bodily weakness. With the exception of the war years, enlistment has always been rigorously confined to the Roman aristocracy, and our only thought for it need be that next to our own Life Guards at Whitehall it provided until recently the world’s last remaining instance of a mounted guard. There used to be five— at Petrograd, Potsdam, Paris, the Vatican, and Whitehall. To-day, our pageant of a guard over a Palace which is not there stands magnificently solitary in its class. Next in the Papal Army comes the Palatine Guard of Honour, a force of volunteers, whose only function is a parade order on occasions of great ceremony, and last of all we have the Pontifical Gendarmerie, really the Vatican Police.

Including the Editors, some fifty-six writers have contributed to this bulky volume. Their object is thus stated : ‘Though the historical and archaeological importance of the books is immense, it is the spiritual use of them which is their proper use, and it is principally to this spiritual use of the Bible that we intend our Commentary to minister.’

The commentary itself is, in general, brief and to the point. But the prime feature of the work lies in the various Prefaces, beginning with Dr. Gore’s opening chapter on The Bible in the Church. Needless to say that in the space of a brief review we can but single out certain points for consideration, and we shall confine ourselves to the Old Testament.

First of all let us take at random some of the pronouncements formulated in these pages : ‘Chronicles is very bad evidence for the truth of what happened in the reign of David, but it is excellent evidence for the opinions held in priestly circles at the beginning of the third century b.c.’ (p. 19). Again, Chronicles is described by Wellhausen—and his words are endorsed in the Commentary—as a transparent mutilation of the original narratives as preserved for us in the Books of Samuel.’ And the Commentary adds: ‘He (the chronicler) gained his objective at the cost of historic truth, and Nemesis followed on his success. Certainly we do not find here the gift of inspiration at its highest,’ but, ‘in spite of his lack of the sense of historical veracity (he), must be recognised as really inspired to write’ (p. 275).