I suppose that most of us have been reading of late, and reading with keen enjoyment, the excellent translation of M. Maritain’s Three Reformers, which Messrs. Sheed and Ward have published to our common debt. For my part, I have read the book twice already, and I hope to read it again; for good literature resembles fine wine, which no man of sense gulps down in a hurry as does a barbarian, but lingers over lovingly, sipping it contentedly whilst he distinguishes its different merits. I have also read some of the reviews which the remarkable treatise spoken of has occasioned in the press; and it is on one of these—namely, that which appeared recently in The Times Literary Supplement—that the following observations are based. The critique I mention is on the whole a very just one. The writer of it seems well qualified for his task; but there is one remark of his which seems to me highly debatable.
Speaking of Luther, he says : ‘He separates faith and reason (which M. Maritain shows that Luther feared and detested), God and man. Imbued with the spirit of Church discipline and authority, in which he had been trained, he produced the immediate effect of an autocratic Erastianism throughout Germany, and was thus one of the ancestors of political nationalism.’
