On entering St Peter’s the eye of the visitor is almost immediately caught and held by the great canopy sheltering the papal altar which, according to an ancient tradition, stands over the burial place of St Peter. The arresting feature of the canopy is the shape of the columns which stand like gigantic old-fashioned sticks of barley sugar in the heart of Christendom. This canopy, executed in bronze and standing on the immense piers necessary to carry its great weight, was made in the sixteenth century by Bernini on the instructions of Pope Urban VIII, and it is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable features of a remarkable church.

The recent excavations under St Peter’s have thrown much light on the tradition that the papal altar marks the place where St Peter was buried, and they have illumined much that has hitherto been obscure. The archaeological evidence resulting from the excavations does not, it is true, provide conclusive proof of the authenticity of the tradition, but it is entirely consistent with it. It is certain, however, that from very early times it was the firm belief of the Church that the apostle was buried on the traditional site. This site was in a pagan cemetery adjoining the road which ran near the Circus of Gaius and Nero; it is this cemetery which has now been partly excavated.

The character of Iago in Shakespeare’s play, Othello, has greatly puzzled critics over die past century, and much controversy has centred around the motivation behind his hatred of Cassio and Othello. The intensity of his emotion and the fiendishness of his actions seem to many critics completely disproportionate to the causes of resentment which Iago declares to be his motives. This puzzlement is, at least, partly caused by failure to recognize and appreciate the nature of sin in the Christian sense of the word. Critics would cease to wonder at the extent of Iago’s moral depravity if they were willing to take seriously those Christian teachings on personal sin and its destructive effects on human nature which still formed a living part of western man’s intellectual equipment in the fifteenth century. Shakespeare’s dramatic analysis of the effects of sin on Macbeth afford one, though not the only, example of how well he understood them. His delineation of Iago is another. In many ways, indeed, Iago constitutes an excellent illustration in dramatic form of St Thomas’ teachings on sin, as well as those on the special sins of pride and envy and on the Devil.

As so many critics have insisted, the specific instance of wounded pride which Iago alleges as the source of his bitterness certainly does not of itself suffice to explain the vicious extremes to which Iago’s malevolence finally carried him. As St Thomas teaches, however, the elements in the immediate occasion of any sin seldom account in themselves for all the evil which ultimately will flow from the sin.

The first exhibition of William Blake’s paintings was held in 1809, just 148 years ago, in the house where he was born, 28 Broad Street, Golden Square. (The building can still be visited in Soho and contains a shop-sign business.) His brother James Blake, who had taken over their father’s hosiers’ trade, lent the first floor of the house for the exhibition which had several famous visitors. Among these was the poet Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, and the Boswell of the age, Henry Crabb Robinson. It is interesting to remember this first humble showing at a time when the great galleries of the nation are vying with one another to present William Blake bi-centenary exhibitions. To celebrate the birth of this amazing poet and painter on November 28, 1757, the Tate Gallery has arranged an especially lavish display of its Blake Treasures. The Print Room of the British Museum has shown not only its Blake collection but examples of the work of Blake’s contemporaries and followers. The Fitzwilham Museum at Cambridge, which possesses beautiful examples of Blake’s illuminated books as well as many paintings, has also been holding an exhibition. Up in Manchester the Whitworth Art Gallery has shown its Blakes together with those belonging to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the Victoria and Albert has arranged a special exhibition where newly acquired paintings as well as drawings and engravings which have long been housed there were shown.

Edmund Burke died in 1797, when Rosmini was born. Between their two lives fell the great blow of the French Revolution, striking fire—a fire of fury—from the aged Burke’s mind and then echoing on behind all Rosmini’s political thought. Burke died fighting the Revolution as an unmitigated evil. Rosmini, living through the half century that followed the great upheaval, could neither simply accept nor simply denounce it; his task, as he saw it, was to contribute to the construction of a new order such as the new age required and was confusedly clamouring for. Burke, though an Irishman, was a Protestant; and though too great a man to be a mere politician, he was on the whole a Whig and a strong upholder of the English political system set up by the Whig aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth century. Rosmini, a Catholic and an Italian, could feel no such respect for the pre-revolutionary world. For him that world meant, above all, the Austrian Empire of which he was a subject by birth; the Empire’s Erastianism offended him as a Catholic, and its hold over divided Italy offended him as a patriot. If the Revolution had done nothing else it had punished the old Catholic states for oppressing the Church of which they professed themselves the defenders. To Rosmini, as to many Catholics of his generation, the open hostility of the Revolution seemed hardly more dangerous than a return to the cold suspicious patronage of the eighteenth-century governments. Freedom, they thought, even with poverty and persecution, was better than such patronizing protection.

Catholics are so accustomed to be shocked or disillusioned by popular books on social science, that they may well be tempted to give these new Pelicans a wide berth. This would be a mistake, for both are well-written, pleasantly informative, and contain much encouragement for those who do not despair of welding Catholic principles info the British way of life. In Peter Archer’s symposium one will find a keen recognition of the importance of stable family life, a warm acceptance of the need for voluntary effort to supplement state action and a thoroughly wholesome attitude to officials. They should be supported and assisted in the performance of their duties, one gathers, but firmly protected by a wide-awake proletariat from any temptation to dictatorship.

Social Welfare and the Citizen makes no pretext of giving a complete picture of the modem Welfare State. Those topics have been selected for discussion which prove to be ‘the most constant source of practical difficulty to the citizen’. Several of the essays are entirely factual, those for example which deal with Income Tax, National Insurance, Landlord and Tenant, Public Health, Property and Town Planning, Law and the Motorist. No comment is required except a word of praise for their clarity and accuracy. But most of the contributors have made some effort to show the historic background of the service they are describing and to indicate in what ways it needs reform. In an excellent chapter on National Assistance Mr R. E. Prentice reminds us that the old Poor Law of 1601 established a ‘public responsibility for the relief of distress’, impeccable in principle, but discharged over the centuries ‘with a strange mixture of charity and harshness’. A curious feature of the relief of the destitute in this country has been the movement away from local to centralized administration in the interests of humanity. The old Boards of Guardians based on the parishes were notoriously the best-hated institutions

Seventy-Seven years separate the publication of Daisy Miller, by Henry James, from that of The Quiet American, by Graham Greene. With Daisy Miller James made the closest approach in his lifetime to the kind of popular acclaim now enjoyed by Greene; the novel is one of his simplest, and the workings of its author’s mind are revealed in skeletal clarity. The transformation in the significance of America and in the writing of novels which has appeared during that time make it startling that the two books should share something of a common attitude to Americans as symbols. The changes of the intervening three-quarters of a century have naturally had their effect on this symbolic use; the position of America in the world has changed, and the value of the symbol has correspondingly altered from that presented by James. Nevertheless there is a similarity, and it seems that Americans abroad can still provide material for an imaginative examination of society and human motives.

James’s ambivalent attitude to his native country is, of course, widely demonstrated throughout his novels. Always he finds it difficult to reconcile his admiration for the forthrightness, vigour and pragmatism of a young country, with a feeling of its inferiority before the majestical sweep of European history and the society with which he sees that history so intimately twined. The arts and politics of Europe are superb monuments of humanity, but at the same time there is in them a subtle threat, a danger that their greatness dominates the life of the present and cows it into submission to a dead past. Into this world enter the young Americans, Roderick Hudson, Christopher Newman, Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer. Their conflicts with the subtleties and intrigues of Europe form the substance of the novels in which they appear.

It is eight years since Miss Sayers brought out her ‘Penguin’ version of the Inferno, to the surprise of some readers of her other thrillers. Yet it need not have surprised anyone that she was interested in Dante and perfectly capable of writing competent footnotes to the Comedy. The long Introduction to her Hell was, however, a remarkable manifesto in praise of Dante and in justification of her own rendering of his verse—at once a declaration of love and a statement of method. But the most remarkable thing was the translation itself, a real tour deforce—five thousand lines rhyming in an intricate pattern, the terza rima, which I should have thought an extraordinarily difficult one to handle in English, though Miss Sayers herself speaks of the task with noticeable sans gêne. It had been attempted before, notably by Binyon for the whole Comedy and by Professor Bickcrsteth for the Paradiso; both commendable efforts, especially the latter. Then came Miss Sayers’s attempt; and then, a little later, the quiet voice of Mr Eliot was heard, off-stage, to observe that it would be better not to try to reproduce in English, with its less copious and ‘in a way more emphatic’ rhyming words, the ‘light effect’ of the more easily rhyming Italian. Mr Eliot did not refer, in the lecture from which I quote, tc Miss Sayers; he was talking, with characteristic modesty, about his own Dantean pastiche in Little Gidding; but his judgment is relevant, of course, to any rhyming English version of Dante. Meanwhile Miss Sayers, undeterred and unwearied, forged ahead with hers. Hes Purgatory appeared in 1955; and though for the moment, I believe, she has turned aside to deal with the trifling matter of the Chanson and Roland, no power on earth, we may be sure, will prevent her from crowning her labours, in due course, with a Paradise.

It was said that Mr Jones had never seen the sea and that he believed the earth to be flat. I never knew his geographical views at first hand, and I would scarcely have dared to discover. For he was a formidable man, occasional of speech and always infallible. He spent his seventy years in one place, nearly all in one house indeed (apart from the irrelevant years of childhood, which in Mr Jones you could hardly believe had ever happened). He began as hall-boy in The Court in 1890, or thereabouts, with a wasp waistcoat and a proper respect for the protocol of place in a household of thirty servants. He lived to see much change, and when he died in 1952 the family he had served so long had moved to a much smaller house, The Court had become a school, and there were even council houses in the village.

But Mr Jones was more than a family retainer who had lived on into a world he could never really understand. He was fashioned, certainly, by the circumstances of time and place: the old General was the law and prophets for him, and there could be no countryside to match the gentle borderland, with the menacing mountains beyond. Yet he gave you a wonderful sense of the complete man, for whom change and decay could never seriously disturb the given order of things.

Fifty years ago the extraordinary J. K. Huysmans wrote his Crowds of Lourdes. Huysmans has been described as ‘un ecrivain precis, subtil, et tourmenté’ and certainly his study of Lourdes reveals these characteristics. Though one may disagree entirely, his devastating comments on religious art and architecture in this city of our Lady are refreshing and provocative. His observant eye misses nothing. The most critical visitor to Lourdes could not rival his invective about the commercial by-products of the shrine. And that, after all, is what the apologist for Lourdes has to face.

Huysmans’s book can be taken as a half-century mark in the history of the Lourdes shrine. He wrote it after he had become a militant convert to Catholicism. Surprisingly, though it is probably now neglected, the book is not out of date in essentials. Mrs Ruth Cranston’s The Mystery of Lourdes (Evans; 18s.) might well be taken to mark the approaching centenary of the apparitions, 1958. It eclipses the Huysmans book and, one might even venture to say, all the English books on Lourdes. It is a remarkable book to have come from the pen of a Protestant bishop’s daughter, herself a Protestant. Huysmans, after his conversion and quite against his own inclinations, came to Lourdes to investigate it for himself. A specialized interest in faith healing drew Mrs Cranston to the place where so many miracles of healing take place. ‘The three years since I began the study of this wonderful place, and its great cures of soul and body’, she writes, ‘have been among the richest of my life.’ Huysmans, who detested crowds, went to Lourdes reluctantly but he, too, like so many others, was captured by its spirit.

Huysmans describes the Lourdes of about 1900; Mrs Cranston describes the Lourdes of today. She has the advantage of superb photographs to supplement her descriptions; Huysmans has the advantage of that style ‘precis, subtil et tourment?’. He suffers aesthetic agonies because of, as it seems to him, hideous religious art. Mrs Cranston is untouched by this, as probably even the most sensitive pilgrim is, in face of the overwhelming faith and suffering nobly borne.

This book gives one the deepest kind of delight. It is intensely moving spiritually and morally. Too often the word of God, which in the Scriptures moves us so compellingly, seems to lose all its power when clothed in theological language. The book that can present theological truths so that they move the spirit to love and follow God with spontaneous joy is a rare exception: among such works in English I remember the books of Dom Anscar Vonier. Many attempts make shipwreck at the start by relying on a pious emotionalism foreign to the theological truth itself. Here, however, in Father de Lubac’s Sur les Chemins de Dieu, theology moves the soul by its own power, by the presence of God’s word within it. Fr de Lubac succeeds in the task he explicitly set himself: to help men to find God, not merely to indicate to them that there is a God to find. He convinces the reader experimentally of a difference between proving God’s existence and revealing God as present and essential in our own Eves. He succeeds in showing that God is not just a need of the human mind, but my need.

This is what Fr de Lubac would most want to hear, I think, from someone who has read his book: and he would be prepared, I am sure, to enter into discussion about difficulties and infelicities of expression with anybody sincerely concerned to enhance the books power to lead souls to God. Behind the rather unmoving nature of what follows, there lurks such a concern.

It is not easy for someone who is not a professional anthropologist to read a work of social anthropology. The difficulty is of a quite special kind: it is not merely the difficulty someone who is not a botanist may find in reading a study of plant morphology, or someone who is not a theologian in reading a discussion of the instrumental causality of the sacraments. The difficulty is the problem of human relevance. These people about whom the anthropologist is writing are human beings: the detail of their activities should be humanly intelligible; and yet, on the one hand these activities in their detail are often meaningless and sometimcs disgusting, and on the other, without a sympathetic grasp of the detail the whole work of interpretation and synthesis offered by the anthropologist would become meaningless in its turn. And the anthropologist has nothing to refer to but the information he himself gives us in his book: he has usually no imaginative literature, for instance, no common body of experience to which to appeal.

Inflation has been one of the most serious and persistent of our post-war economic problems. Few people however take it seriously, for despite die repeated balance of payments crises it has produced, the threatened disaster has not overtaken us. Many indeed attribute the maintenance of full employment to the same forces that have produced inflation. They recognize that inflation may have incidental evils, but in their fear of unemployment they hesitate to adopt certain kinds of measures that may be necessary for the control of inflationary forces.

Inflation raises both economic and moral problems. It is the economic aspects that must be studied first, for without an understanding of how inflation comes about it is impossible to consider the moral problems associated with the process; nor can questions of social justice be discussed without a knowledge of the effects of inflation.

Inflation is a situation in which there is a general rise in prices as a result of an excessive demand for goods and services. When the demand for any commodity increases (or the supply of it is restricted) there is a tendency for the price to rise. When the overall demand for goods increases and the supply remains unchanged there is a general rise in prices. This idea is not so readily understood as the rise in price when the demand for some one commodity increases. The demand for one commodity may increase because people buy more of it and less of other things. How can the general demand increase? All incomes are rewards for making a contribution to production, either by working, supplying capital, accepting the risks of industry, or hiring out land. Every penny received by firms producing goods is distributed in wages, rent, and interest, or retained as profits.