By now we should be able to understand without being disturbed or disconcerted how deeply this process of ‘Allegorization’ is bound up with the flowering of the New Testament. We have now gone beyond the form to the essence of the Gospel message. After the explanations we have given, we need no longer fear to say it; the very concepts, the fundamental ideas in the preaching of Jesus and the Apostles are now revealed, not simply in their imaginative clothing but in their most intimate substructure, as allegorisations of ideas in the Old Testament. To prove this we will consider just three ideas, but they are the most central in the New Testament: that of the Kingdom, of the Messias, and of Sacrifice. On these three themes alone all Christian dogma could be reconstructed.

Where do they come from? How do they arise? It is unnecessary to point out the place assigned to the Kingdom in the preaching of our Lord as given in the Synoptics; that preaching is the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’ and nothing else. But where does the idea itself come from? One can assign it a double origin; on the one hand the old eschatological concept (going back to the origins of the religion of Israel) of the ‘Day’ when ‘all will be changed’, when God will intervene in the affairs of this world as an all-powerful judge and will re-establish all things in conformity with his will. And on the other hand the ‘mother-idea’ from which the expression ‘people of God’ arises.

Paul Harris presents a new and very vivid approach to religious painting. He does not see the life of our Lord in the conventional way and his pictures are powerful in their originality. He has the gift of catching real light in paint and does not merely paint in lighter or darker shades. His style was greatly influenced by several years spent with the army in Iraq—many of his figures are brown ar.d move with Eastern grace.

In his picture entitled Adam and Eve there is no angel with a flaming sword : Adam and Eve are driving themselves out of the paradise which their false choice has destroyed. Helplessly they stumble out of their realm, but behind them in the landscape there is no vagueness. It is clear that chaos lias broken out. Xo longer is there an underhung principle of inviolable order, and the hills and trees are frightened. A horse rears and neighs in terror. Yet Adam and Eve still hope they are only dreaming.

The Holy Family is shown to us in a most delightful and unorthodox family group. Our Lady, wearing a brilliantly green frock, is hanging up washing in the garden. The child Jesus, playing at her feet, holds out a flower to her. Saint Joseph, in labourer’s clothes, just stands and watches, resting on a spade and looking very solid and protective

When Vespers are over, the afternoon sun and the keen air are themselves an invitation to walk. Today it shall be one of the other six hills of Rome that lie to the north of our convent on the Aventine. As I pass along the road which curves gently down the hillside I see the Palatine; and the heavy ruins of the imperial palaces catch the late sunshine, giving their brickwork a mellowing of gold, in contrast with the dark pines that group themselves along its low hilltop. Away to the right the Alban Hills still carry a covering of snow; and the wind that blows from them has a bite in its breath. The Circus Maximus lies below; and on its far side a tram jolts noisily on its iron track, where formerly the chariots drawn by their racing horses sped along the course beneath the watching eyes of Virgil:

Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,
Addunt in spatia, et frustra retinacula tendens
Fertur equis auriga, neque audit currus habenas.

A Few weeks ago I heard an Austrian historian—a thinker and a practising Catholic—describe Austria as ‘perhaps the most corrupt country in Europe’. Similar judgments are made by Englishmen in Austria on the strength of the Black Market and the power of the cigarette as a means of getting things done. But in the mouth of an Austrian it has a very different value and significance. Not only does it embody the mood of searching self-criticism which is prevalent among thinking Catholics in Austria; it also recognizes and points to a sickness in the Austrian nation far deeper-seated than the Black Market—which will, here as elsewhere, disappear only when there is a sufficiency of food and cigarettes, but which is relatively a superficial ill. Objective love and inside knowledge are the pre-requisites of a true diagnosis, and these are hard to come by for a foreigner, who may be fascinated or repelled by irrelevant details—the peasant's Grüss Gott, or the incurable unpunctuality of Austrians in keeping appointments. This article is therefore not a statement of personal opinion but a synthesis of the views of one or two Austrian Catholics, whose interpretation seems to fit the facts as they now-appear and in whom self-criticism and an earnest truth-seeking guarantee a certain degree of objectivity.

That Austria was physically incapacitated by the collapse and dismemberment of the old Austrian empire is generally known, though Englishmen are apt to underrate the effects both of economic distress and of the psychological shock of becoming, suddenly, a small nation in turning the minds of Austrians towards union with Germany as a cure for their ills.

I once knew a charming lady, somewhat top heavy with titles, who had a delicious assurance that all things she desired were hers by the right of desiring. As we walked down Bond Street she would glide through shop doors, ordering whatever took her fancy. Because of the titles the goods were sent without question. Much later she would be astonished and dismayed by following bills. With cries of distress she would rally those friends to her side whose cognomens were less rare but whose view of life included the inevitability of payment.

In an increasingly pagan world, it is a truism to say that Catholics must become more Catholic or they will have to compromise their faith to an extent which will prove fatal. The truly Catholic life must express wholeness of dedication to Jesus Christ and an integration of all activities. One aspect of the chronic lack of wholeness in living seems to me to stand out above the rest at the present time and to be of great importance. I refer to man’s dependence on the fruits and hence the well-being of the earth, which have largely ceased to interest the modem educated man except from a scientific and mechanical point of view.

More than enough has already been written on the disintegration of our times, but right action can only emerge from knowledge and understanding, natural and supernatural. First, then, I am going to try and put the problem, as I see it, in its true context. In the book of Genesis we read that man was born in a garden to dress and keep it. Before he fell, man did not have to work by the sweat of his brow, but he did have to keep a garden in as good a condition as he found it. In practice he would have perhaps to keep the divisions between different kinds of plants and to maintain an orderly arrangement in the garden. For, first of all, the garden of Eden was a perfect creation, and not the finest system of husbandry in the world we know can show a garden to rival this paradise of pleasure.

Monsignor Knox has put us under a new debt by publishing these notes which have already appeared in the pages of The Tablet. Those who read them there will remember how they are marked by that wide erudition and careful thought which we expect of him. As for those who have not seen them, perhaps it is as well to repeat the warning of the author's preface, namely, that some purchasers of the book may be in for a disappointment: ‘the over-worked parish priest who must needs compose his Sunday sermon in a few minutes snatched from the confessional ... a harassed curate, desperately turning over the pages of this book at ten minutes to eleven in the hope of extracting a pulpit message from it’. These notes are not meant for them; they, he says, are quite well catered for by the numerous devotional commentaries that already exist. Here he wishes to concentrate on the well-known difficulties of the Sunday epistles and gospels. He dreams optimistically of a Catholic family arguing hotly across the luncheon table about the meaning of the epistle and gospel they have heard from the pulpit that morning, and eventually deciding to ‘see what Knox has to say about it’.

The Jeunesse Maritime Chrétienne is a mass movement to reconquer the maritime world for Christ. It was at the Sea Apastolate Congress at Boulogne-sur-Mer, held in September 1929, that the first suggestion of forming a maritime section of the Jocistes was made by Père Lebret, O.P. This Dominican, who must be given the credit for launching the J.M.G., was formerly a lieutenant in the French navy. In collaboration with the Abbé G. Havard of Saint-Malo he drew up provisional rules. Cardinal Charost, Archbishop of Rennes, gave them a cordial blessing, and the new oeuvre was established in his diocese. The first group of Young Christian Seafarers to be formed was on the Ile-de-Sein, a small island off Finisterre, mostly inhabited by fisher folk. In January 1930 the first issue of Jeunesse Maritime was published. For the past seventeen years this monthly magazine has been the official mouthpiece of the J.M.C. During the next few months other groups were set up in many maritime parishes of Brittany, Normandy, the Côtes-de-Nord, and elsewhere in France. The movement spread rapidly. A large body of members of the J.M.C. took part in the French National Pilgrimage at Lourdes in August 1930.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style’. As usual Swift cuts through the jungle of theory and finds the fact. It would be interesting to know whether the ‘Young Clergyman’ to whom he wrote benefited by the definition. Certainly clerical English is one of the most chronic of occupational diseases; the fear that, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, the intellect may be ‘improperly exposed’ leads to the swaddling bands of rhetoric and the safe generalisation. Philosophers often fare little better; and the scholarship of yesterday lies mouldering in a hundred libraries, too often unread because it is unreadable.

‘Style’ is confined by the critics to the work of the conscious artist, for whom words are tools to be chosen, sharpened, used. The scholar, understandably contemptuous of the self-important claims of the professional writer, addresses himself to those who want to learn. And learning is never easy. Yet the business of communication has its grace; and a Locke, a Hume, a Macaulay, a Newman survive in a double immortality. Or, more strictly, in them the idea and its expression are matched.

Stilus brevis, grata facundia, celsa, clara, firma sententia. One does not look for literary judgments in a breviary responsory. But this liturgical praise of St Thomas as a master of languages sums up, with something of St Thomas’s own gracious economy of speech, that union of thought and its expression which it should be any writer’s aim to reach. The identification of style with the decorative tricks of a Pater or a George Moore has confused an issue which is simple.

At first sight St Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas stand in contrast. St Dominic lived the vigorous outdoor life of an apostle, while St Thomas spent his days in the lecture rooms of university cities. St Dominic has left behind him a splendid record of achievement, while St Thomas has contributed a mountain of manuscript. They seem opposed to each other as the great ruler to the noted scholar, as the practical apostle to the contemplative, so that one might be inclined to say that these two men could never have understood one another.

In fact, however, these two saints were not only of one mind but they stand towards each other in the relation of father and son.

The evidence of St Thomas’s mind and character is contained in his writings, which amply cover the latter half of his life. The evidence in the case of St Dominic is more difficult to assess, but two circumstances make the task easier, for during the last twenty years of his life St Dominic was occupied with two main works, both surpassingly difficult. They were the conversion of the Albigenses, from 1203 to 1215, and the founding of his Order, from 1215 to 1221. The greatness of these tasks leaves no doubt that all the wisdom and energy of St Dominic were devoted to their accomplishment.

As in the lecture room, so in writing. Sir Edmund Whittaker's presentation of his material is made attractive by a certain elegance. It is apt to fill his hearers and readers with at least a temporary sense that new realms of thought have been rendered thoroughly intelligible to them. His Donellan Lectures (1946) were no exception, if we may judge by this book which holds the substance of them. But elegance is the least important quality of an enquiry so serious in its import as to be concerned with the capability of man’s reason to demonstrate that God exists. Hereafter we shall give evidence for what we can only call the scientific levity with which this grave subject is here treated. Let us first express our immense disappointment that the author should handle with such evident lack of understanding, not to say lack of knowledge of what is being talked about, matters that do not pertain to his own science. This is particularly regrettable on the part of one who is so hot against the misdemeanours of philosophers and theologians in their approach to technicalities of physics in which they may be without expert competence. He specifies, grounds of serious complaint against the Aristotelians of the seventeenth century. Today it clearly appears that there are equally serious ones on the other side.

It is deplorable that the prestige of great attainments should be lent to 140 pages of misunderstanding that results in continual verbal equivocation. The ‘analogy’ here defined and depreciated is not the analogy of the metaphysician and of the Five Ways.

A Recent contributor to Orate Fratreg h&s written of Paris that there ‘at present the Dominican world seems to be in its flower’ (H;A.R., April 21, 1946), and the undoubted truth of this makes it difficult to give a whole picture of the Dominican scene, so diverse and powerful are the black and white apostles. They have rightly succeeded to Bl. Jordan and St Thomas Aquinas who first graced the Parisian Priory with their vigorous learning, culture and piety. Now however there are several Dominican centres in the same city, each with its special work.

At the very end of May, 1940, Paris was a highway for refugees. Most of the shops were closed. Cars and lorries of all descriptions and sizes were moving always in a southerly or westerly direction mattresses tied to the roof and carrying every type of small household goods and furnishing. The southerly stations were jammed with refugees struggling for their trains. The Germans were only forty miles away. But at 222 Fauburg de St Honor all was peace, and Dominican life continued normally. The brethren were served with an excellent dinner in the refectory, and the brother server collected the surplus bread at the end of the meal for the poor who would be always with them, German invasion or no. At recreation they spoke of their brethren at the front, serving as ordinary soldiers. Vespers was recited with dignity and tranquillity . . . then they were apparently smothered by the German blanket.