‘For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness.’ We see the meaning of the Sacrament of Penance most fully if we see it against the background of the world-struggle between good and evil. The essence of sin is pride, the isolation of the self; the harmony of creation is split into warring fragments; there is no redress until created spirit, responsible for the material world, can emerge from its isolation and return to its Source. ‘The whole of creation is in travail even until now.’ So the Redemption is given us; that man-in-nature may be made whole again by restored oneness with God—a restoration wrought by the Cross and Resurrection and made accessible day by day in the world through the power of the Church. It is for that restoration of the divine order in the world that we pray when we pray for the coming of the Kingdom; but the coming is postponed, the power of the Church to heal and make holy is curtailed, by the persisting presence and power of evil. Nor can we think simply of a struggle between the members (visible or invisible) of the Church, and the world; it is waged by the Church, but it is also waged within the Church. And as there is a communion of saints, so there is a solidarity of sin; and the Church’s power as a whole is curtailed and its victory impeded by the sins of its sinful members.

One of the cases of spiritual direction, which most frequently arises in the increasingly strenuous life of our age, is that of scrupulosity. The nervous tension, caused by the irritating atmosphere of great cities, is obviously conducive to psycho-neurotic troubles; and, if a rigorist educative influence saddles a hypersensitive temperament afflicted by these troubles, with the result that religion is misconceived as a repressive legalism, the effect will almost inevitably be a false conscience perhaps for ever paralysed by scruples. Whenever it makes its appearance and for the same reasons, this disease either suddenly breaks out in a violent crisis or gradually spreads in a slow, consuming progression. Much has been written about this malady : descriptions of the disorder, descriptions of the supernatural trial, the attitude to be taken towards the scrupulous by confessor and director, psychotherapeutic treatments or others in obstinate and disconcerting cases. It would seem that nothing has been overlooked and that the subject is therefore exhausted. One is tempted to conclude : the whole question has been settled once and for all. Nevertheless the scrupulous remain. It is in the West among Latins that scrupulosity is found in its endemic state, whereas it is unknown among Eastern Catholics and Orthodox . . .’

On his first page Mr. Williams tells us what he has undertaken to study in this book. It is a good statement and may be quoted at length. ‘Beatrice was, in her degree an image of nobility, of virtue, of the Redeemed Life, and in some sense of Almighty God himself. But she also remained Beatrice right to the end . . . . Just as there is no point in Dante’s thought at which the image of Beatrice in his mind was supposed to exclude the actual objective Beatrice, so there is no point at which the objective Beatrice is to exclude the Power which is expressed through her. But as the mental knowledge or image of her is the only way by which she herself can be known, so she ... is (for Dante) the only way by which that other Power can be known—since, in fact, it was known so. The maxim of his study, as regards the final Power, was : ‘This also is Thou, neither is this Thou.’

I say ‘the only way,’ but only to modify it. There were .... many other shapes—of people and places, of philosophies and poems. All these had their own identities. . . . But in his poetry Dante determined to relate them all to the Beatrician figure, and he brought that figure as near as he could to the final image, so far as he could express it, of Almighty God. It is, we all agree, one of the marks of his poetic genius. But it is something else also. It is the greatest expression in European literature of the way of approach of the soul to its ordained end through the affirmation of the validity of all those images, beginning with the image of a girl.’

During the industrial depression of the early Thirties a certain man faced, through no fault of his own, bankruptcy. One of his acquaintances, until then not a particularly close friend, wrote to him saying : ‘Count upon my assistance to the full extent of my bank-balance.’

Until 1937 Miss Dorothy Sayers was known to the English-speaking world as one of the most brilliant of its writers of detective stories, that new form of the novel which will excite the interest of future literary commentators. They were extremely interesting novels as well as most ingenious detective problems that Miss Sayers wrote. The mysteries were really absorbing, the clues were fair game, the characterisation was realistic and covered a very wide range of human types, while the literature of the hemispheres was laid in tribute to add piquancy to the plot. A deeper strain was also present. Like the great majority of detective-stories, those by Miss Sayers were strongly moralistic; they proclaimed the necessity of a moral order and depicted in friendly terms the activities of those who maintain it. Clouds of Witness showed the devastating despair induced by a grande passion; The Documents in the Case was a fearful indictment of adultery; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club revealed the appalling effects upon the soul of great scientific intelligence which does not bow down before the Creator of that which science investigates; Murder must Advertise was concerned with the drug traffic; Busman’s Honeymoon revealed the sordid effects of avarice, Strong Poison and Unnatural Death the corruption of the human character by sheer selfishness. The moral effect was the stronger because no one could be aware that it was being inculcated as they pursued the fascinating course of the detective story.