Spirit of understatement, possess us now! This book is worthy of its subject both in size and texture; and complete with bibliography and index, is a bit of ‘orl right ‘as Chesterton’s hansom cabby said when he had driven a long way up a blind alley. The 574 pages are packed well with matter of almost all possible variety and charm, and he who reads it through will want it by him to read in and out of. Labour of love it must have been, for the gifted authoress hints at thousands upon thousands of pages (even of Hansard) carefully perused and sifted, with thousands of letters either judiciously condensed or quoted at length. Indeed no pains have been spared to make it another Boswell, a super-Boswell let us say.

For Johnson’s world was smaller if more impressive than the world of Chesterton, and it did not press so close around him, nor didi Johnson re-act so vigorously or so ubiquitously to every breeze that blew from the great deep. Whether one came from the provinces with the hayseed in one’s hair, or took tea with Chesterton in darkest Yorkshire, one was at a loss for nearly half a day to guess what were biting the big man at the hour of contact. For he had informations from sources unknown, tips from horses’ mouths over and above the mystery of Fleet Street, tips which made him more alive to current events than the whole Press, which after all is but the opium of the people. This serious side of his life is well and truly set forth with growing emphasis throughout the body of the book, and his tragic interest in the Marconi matter is juridically dealt with by the author’s barrister husband, Frank Sheed.

Mythology is replete with stories of the childlike wisdom which dares and does where the wise and prudent of this world quail and fail. Fr. Witcutt knows the value of mythology and has learned its lesson. His Catholic Thought and Modern Psychology is no profound and learned academic treatise. It is, on the contrary, a naive book; indeed a spritely book. Neither the depths of the unconscious nor the heights of theological and philosophical speculation hold any terrors for him. From one to the other he passes—we might almost say he gambols—with enviable ease and assurance, unintimidated by any excessive concern for the’ complexities of the problem he has set himself, or any inhibiting regard for pettifogging accuracy.

It would be a great mistake to neglect his book on that account. ‘Some,’ said Aristotle, ‘require exactness in everything, while others are annoyed by it. . . for there is something about exactness which seems to some people to be mean. . . .; hence one must be trained how to take each kind of argument.’ The job Fr. Witcutt has undertaken desperately needed doing. For it is a job which the pundits neither of ‘Catholic Thought ‘nor of ‘Modern Psychology ‘have hitherto attempted to do; a job which they still seem far from being ready to do. From among the Catholics, Dalbiez, it is true, after a magnificent restatement of Freud, and a less satisfying endeavour to free Freud’s psychology from Freud’s philosophy, has attempted a dubious mutual non-intervention pact between psychoanalysis and religion. Alters has modified Adler in a direction more acceptable to Catholics; at the expense, however, of abandoning depth-psychology altogether. There has been a good deal of unprincipled eclecticism. But at co-ordination and synthesis there has hitherto been little or no attempt.

Loisy died in 1940 and his devoted disciple, Miss Maud Petre, died in December', 1942. In the pages of this book she attempts to explain the Abba’s religious standpoint by copious citations from his writings, adding her own comments, verily those of a disciple. Just over forty years have elapsed since the publication of L'Evangile et l’Eglise took the ecclesiastical world by storm and, with its sequel Autour d’un petit livre, was condemned by the Holy See in 1903. Loisy declined to submit.

What a tragic story it is ! Nor is the telling of it by his devoted disciple less so. For while endeavouring to preserve her independence, she is plainly in full sympathy with the master’s main contentions. I have read her pages twice if not thrice, and—harsh though it may seem—the word ‘egoist,’ applicable to master and disciple alike, keeps recurring to the mind.

As Miss Petre herself says : ‘Loisy lived by mind rather than by heart, and mental agreement was, for him, essential to friendship.’ Hence the breach, first with Duchesne, then with von Hugel: ‘his Memoires testify to his sensitiveness and inability to endure contradiction patiently.’ Pius X, to whom Loisy had appealed, saw this clearly : ‘I have received a letter from Loisy; but while his appeal is addressed to my heart, his letter was not written from his own heart.’

Of all goods which can be privately owned, none is more conformable to the teaching of Rerum Novarum than the land, the plot of earth on which the family lives and from ihe fruits of which, wholly or in part, it draws its livelihood. . . Only the stability which has its roots in the land privately owned, makes the family tne most perfect and fertile living cell of society, causing as it does a coherent continuity between present and future.’—Pius XII., Whitsuntide, 1941.

For one whose training has been mainly historical, to review two books on the land might seem a misapplication of industry. But, as John Selden said, ‘most men’s learning is nothing but history duly taken up ‘; and it is their historical grasp of what agriculture has meant and must mean to civilization that Tenders Sir George Stapledon’s work and Mr. Rolf Gardiner’s important. England to whom agriculture has come to signify merely an industry with a snag in it—the least effective of all the many extant methods of exploiting humanity—must listen to such men or die. Their ‘history duly taken up ‘allies them to that of many papal pronouncements, which they—more than any English Catholics, except a handful of Distributists—have done their best to implement.

Sir George Stapledon, whose reclamation of grass-lands is world-famous, has found time to become one of the land’s foremost evangelists. He now annotates and enlarges on the agricultural programme of one of England’s most far-sighted statesmen. That Disraeli was never in a position to carry out the land policy he urged, was a national disaster which Disraeli and the New Age bewails and explains. The policy, however, is there to be reconstructed. And that is where Sir George Stapledon comes in.