By this time we are all aware of the Communist ‘peril’ and ‘menace.’ But is it so clear who is imperilled? what is menaced? The fearsomeness of the unknown attends the very words ‘peril’ and ‘menace we feel that danger lurks unseen, that a hidden hand has sinister designs upon our pockets. Or alternately, the hidden hand is disbursing large sums of money sent from Moscow, much in the same manner as ‘the man in the moon,’ or a similar mysterious agent appeared at parliamentary elections to corrupt the enlightened but very limited electorate in the good old days of Eatanswill.

If we do not lie awake at nights pondering how the ‘peril’ can be averted and the ‘menace’ overthrown, it is from no lack of honest endeavour. We must be scared, it seems, if we are to realise what the Communists are after. We are to be scared fix:and after that told precisely where the danger lies. ‘wants to make your flesh creep,’ said the Fat Boy to old Mrs. Wardle in the arbour before he indicated the enormities of Miss Rachel. So we are to be thoroughly frightened by suggestions of secret conspiracy and dark plot, and then we shall be ready to go any lengths in the suppression of Communist propaganda and the imprisonment of Communists. The feeling that a plot exists is sufficient to create the vision of plotters, busy and all around us waiting the signal to commence their foul and bloody work. (Catholics of all people know what it means to be the victims of panic. In the atmosphere of fog and suspicion, how many of our Catholic martyrs were done to death!)

The long, almost life-long, friendship between us will dear this letter from the charge of impertinence. At the outset of our friendship we recognised that though we did not see eye to eye in matters of revealed truth, yet no statement of what either of us regarded as true could endanger our friendship.

It was a very friendly gesture of yours to send me the manifesto which your wing of the Anglo-Catholic Movement has drawn up. Your name does not appear amongst those that have officially given the manifesto their signature. But I know that among the many who will champion the manifesto none will outrun your whole-heartedness.

The Centenary of the Anglo-Catholic, or Tractarian, Movement begets almost a whirlwind of thought. Were it kept, as it will not be kept, by an absolutely united body of believers it would make an old Catholic like myself recall the dramatic story of a movement which, after an almost contemptible beginning in an Oxford common-room (like so many other lost and forgotten causes), went on to give the Catholic Church two cardinals, many bishops and priests, and a flock of lay converts perhaps unparalleled in the history of West or East. Amidst the regrets we still feel that Froude, Keble, Pusey were not given to us, yet we thank God for Newman, Manning, Ward, Wilberforce and a host of others. But our mingled thoughts of thanksgiving and'regret are not as simple as a unanimous Centenary might arouse. Your manifesto has further complicated our emotions. Let me approach this complication by an authentic incident. Some years ago a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, a devoted Anglo-Catholic, consulted me about his duty to his conscience.

Catholics to-day are left in no doubt of the importance which the Church attaches to the kind of music she considers suitable for use in her liturgy. Since the year 1903, when Pius X issued his Motu Proprio, the principles governing legislation in this art have been made accessible to all. But in that encyclical a reference is made to other arts besides music and it is stated, ‘The Church has always recognized and favoured the progress of the arts, admitting to the service of worship everything good and beautiful discovered by genius in the course of ages—always, however, with due regard to the liturgical laws.’ Among these things ‘good and beautiful’ the Church has made use of the Art of Colour at all times, and has, moreover, in various places explained her principles and reasons for so doing. References to these principles are scattered among the canonical books, and occur in the decrees of the Congregation of Sacred Rites. They may be difficult to find when they are wanted, but the general principle of using colour as part of the splendour of the liturgy is too well known and accepted to need emphasis. It has always taken its part in the ceremonial, as one instrument in an orchestra, and the gap in the general harmony would be obvious, if it were omitted. Cardinal Schuster, the present Archbishop ofi Milan, dwells on this accumulated harmony when describing the Introit for Whit-Sunday.

In January 1274 St. Thomas Aquinas set out from Naples, where he had been teaching since October 1272, to attend the second Council of Lyons. He was under fifty years of age, and though he was extremely sensitive to physical pain, there is no evidence that his health was bad. He had been working as hard as ever during 1273, when he published, among other works, his commentaries on Romans, First Corinthians, and Aristotle’s De Generatione and De Cœlo. Moreover his commentaries on the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo and on the Decalogue are the notes of his sermons preached in the vernacular during the Lent of 1273. Hence there is very little to suggest that he was in failing health, and at all events, he was well enough to undertake, on foot and in winter, the long journey from Naples to Lyons. He got no further than Fossanuova, some seventy miles from Naples, where he was taken suddenly ill, and died on March 7th.

The Islands of Malta and Gozo are situated midway between Europe and Africa. Scientists contend that they are but the remains of a natural bridge which, in the oldest pre-historical times, united the two continents. To-day, these Islands are about fifty miles from Sicily and one hundred and eighty miles from the nearest point of Africa. They occupy almost the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, the theatre, up to 1492 when America was discovered, of all that written history records of past civilizations which grew and flourished round its shores. This has exercised a predominant influence on the Maltese Islands, which changed destiny and fortune with the rise of each new power holding sway in the Mediterranean Sea: Malta, since the remotest times, has always belonged to the strongest naval Power.

Archaeological remains on the Island speak of a civilization much older than that of the Phoenicians. These people knew Malta as a place of shelter, and confined themselves to its shores. But it is difficult to trace the race to which the aborigines belonged. All the theories on the subject are mere guess-work. A clue, however, of importance is to be found in the teeth of the so-called Neanderthal Man discovered during excavations at Ghar Dalam, and constituting a scientific basis to the much credited theory that Malta once formed a pillar of a bridge between Europe and Africa.

The appearance of a new book from M. Bergson’s pen is always an event; and the publication, early last year, of his Les deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religionis quite an exceptional event, since it forms, in a sense, the culmination of this philosopher’s thought. His conclusions are in a line with the tendencies of his earlier work—in the course of it he himself frequently refers to l’Evolution Créatrice —but no one could have foretold the definitely Christian and movingly devout note which is so frequently struck in it whenever M. Bergson quits his complicated and protracted disquisitions on social morality in agreement with Durckheim and his school.

There can be no room for doubt: M. Bergson, when he writes of the experiences and the ideals of mystics and saints, writes and feels as a mystic and a saint. The saints whose doctrine and example he has studied so closely have responded by winning for him a special, if occasional, gift of mystical connaturalty and kinship. It is in contrast with this genuine and moving mystic note that the Durckheimian disquisitions seem such a burden on the soaring élan of M. Bergson’s spirit.

It is a relief to turn from the apocalyptic literature, so prevalent to-day, to a book whose purpose is to indicate the elements which make for reconstruction and order in one of the basic activities of human life. Its author, the retiring President of the Headmasters’ Conference, is the head of a great school in one of the most ancient and traditional cities of this country. We need not, therefore, be on our guard against a fanatic of modernity for its own sake; and, in fact, the most striking quality of his book is the breadth and sanity of its outlook, a deep appreciation of the great things of the past with a live awareness of what is vital and sincere in our own time. ‘The affectation of despising the old masters is not less dangerous than the opposite error of looking back on art as something embedded in a lost culture, like a fly in amber. Art is continuous, and genuine modernity is not a denial, but only a fresh application in new circumstances, of eternal principles bequeathed to us by the art of all ages .... The real lover of art finds no incompatibility between new and old. His exciting consciousness of his own age, as a creative renaissance, only whets his appetite for the best fruits of archaeological research and discovery.’ The book has a further merit. There are plenty of monographs dealing with the modern manifestations of this or that art, such as Mr. Casson’s works on sculpture and Mr. Roger Fry’s on painting. No one would question their value or their legitimacy, but by the very fact that they treat each subject in isolation they continue to uphold the illusion that art is something apart and remote from normal human life. But Mr. Barton succeeds in making us realise that, in the past, art was integrated in the whole social life of the community and that it must be so again if we are to achieve a true civilisation.

The coming Centenary of the Oxford Movement has revealed a deep cleavage betwen two sections of the Anglo-Catholic party. A realisation of the existence and extent of this cleavage makes it plain that the two sections as they crystallise and gain clearer definition will find themselves heading in opposite directions—the one for Rome, the other for Pan-Protestantism. This cleavage between the two sections lies in their respective views of the nature and authority of the Church of Christ. The section which lately made itself heard in the Manifesto of the Fifty stands by the traditional Anglo-Catholic doctrine of the nature and authority of the Church; a society (temporarily divided it is true) but essentially one and endowed with what has been nicknamed ‘oracular’ infallibility. The section of the party whose views find expression in Essays: Catholic and Critical has abandoned these traditional views and has evolved a new theory of the nature and authority of the Church, which is said to be consonant with New Testament teaching but which does not, apparently, lay claim to historical sanction in the period which lies between the Apostles’ days and our own. Mr. Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, in putting this theory forward, admits that ‘if (as is admitted) we are bound to assert that the Church must possess an actual unity, and if for the purposes of the discussion the Church can adequately be thought of as a society, the Roman conclusion is in the long run inevitable’ (Theology, March, 1928, ‘The Anglican Doctrine of the Church,’ p. 137).

We have listened for so long to sentimental words, to slushy tunes, and are so tired of them, that our range grows narrower and narrower, and finally is reduced to a mere handful of hymns which are sung because ‘everybody knows them.’ Surely this is the dead end of all hymn-singing! Whereas the real art is still alive and practised daily in the Liturgy of the Church, with glorious words and noble tunes. Why must our vernacular hymns fall to the other extreme? For, though vernacular hymn-singing is necessarily an extra-liturgical practice, yet there are many occasions when it can be exercised to the increase of devotion in the faithful, and when it supplies a need possibly more felt now than in the days when the Liturgy itself fulfilled that purpose.

A Daily Hymn Book aroused our expectation. It is a large book, planned on a generous scale, intended to provide hymns for most big feasts in the Church’s Calendar, and arranged according to the liturgical year. It is well and clearly printed, the organist’s copy is a handsome volume, the smaller copies have the advantage of including the tunes to each hymn, which, is a great improvement on the usual book of words. It is prefaced by the Cardinal Archbishop, and has a formidable array of names of authors, composers, and sources. This is the impression of its makeup, after a cursory glance.

The difficulty of dealing adequately with French painting as a whole is that the very use of the term ‘French painting’ implies a continuity, a unifying tradition, which among French painters is entirely absent. Appreciation of tradition alone suffices to explain why Sasseta was Sasseta or Greco Greco, but it is vain to ask Fragonard why Daumier was Daumier or to look in Watteau for the germ of Delacroix. In each separate case to find the original influence we have to go outside France, with Wat teau and Delacroix to Rubens, with Fragonard and Daumier to the atelier of Rembrandt. Though certain French painters group themselves together, Ingres and David and Prud’hon or Monet and Sisley and Berthe Morisot, we can look for a very long time without discovering a common denominator between any two such groups. There are French painters; there is no French painting. In French art more than in the art of any other country we are dealing with the individual as a single entity and not as part of a progressive chain and we therefore find ourselves, more frequently than elsewhere, coming up again and again against the personal, unheralded assertion of individuality that we call genius. Study of these inconsequent phenomena can necessarily only take the form of interpretative biography and not of the mere objective history certain writers have attempted to make of it.