The cinema hoardings proclaim, if not so insistently now as a few years ago, the advertising value of the words sin and sinner. The devil is not regarded as a bore—at least by his nodding acquaintances. Vice is thought interesting, and virtue dull. Perhaps it is the fault of the novelists whose villains are more likeable than their heroes; perhaps because the notion of immorality is restricted now to the more exciting forms; perhaps because some of our vices have the reputation of virtue. These are the deadly vices, the deadly-dull. Virtues gone flat. Or, as St. Thomas says, the vice that looks like virtue; false prudence, for instance, and religiosity, and deadness to sense.

Anyhow, there it is, sin is definitely news. You remember how people flocked to the Albert Hall to hear The New Sin expounded. Only to be mocked. Similarly, the title and opening of a recent book on Buchmanism rouse the same attention. ‘It comes to grips with an unlovely subject,’ we are promised. ‘And’—the superb assurance—‘solves its riddle.’ But only to disappoint. (Pouf! call those sins, said the Borgia courtier squaring his shoulders, now if you really want, etc., etc.). Perhaps it is a back-handed compliment, but the Catholic literature of conversion is decidedly more thrilling, and does more than skate on the conventions. François Mauriac or Julien Green will point the contrast.

Making allowance for the fact that vice is often unprintable, and noticing the Buchmanite recognition of the pervasiveness of sin, this book still leaves the impression that the sins that matter are the indulgences That Spell Inefficiency.

In less than eighteen months Japan has lost two premiers, one from each of the two major political parties, to assassins’ bullets; a cabinet minister of high rank has perished in the same way; so has a leading industrialist. Baron Wawatsuki, ex-premier and leader of the Minseito, has had an attempt made on his life, other prominent men have been threatened. The victims, it will be noticed, are not confined to one political complexion, or to any one department of life. One might almost be excused for believing some malignant spirit to have suddenly seized on the country, but, demoniacal possession being nowadays hardly a tenable political theory, some other explanation must be sought for these crimes. It is not sufficient to put them down to the peculiar obliquity of mental vision which makes the Japanese condone assassination if patriotic motives are alleged in excuse. Political murder has not been uncommon in Japan; there have been cases before where misguided individuals have felt that their country’s good demanded the removal of a particular person, but they were the isolated acts of solitary fanatics. Here there is a series; an organized body, the ‘Blood Brotherhood,’ has been at work. We must, therefore, look deeper, and examine the unrest and ferment of which these acts are a manifestation.

Japan to-day is in a state of flux, largely as a result of the sudden impact of Western ideas on a society that was essentially static. Seventy years ago she was a feudal state, her society was one of fixed ranks and gradations, her economy was mainly agricultural, industry was still in the handicraft stage, the population was stationary.

The works attributed to Albert the Great make a very long and imposing list. Some of his authentic writings have never yet been; printed. His printed works fill twenty-one folio volumes in the 1651 Lyons edition; thirty-eight quarto volumes in the Paris edition of 1890. They include amongst the theological works, scriptural commentaries, sermons, a commentary on the Sentences and on the semi-mystical works of the Pseudo-Dionysius. But his scientific and philosophical writings represent his greatest achievement. When he began his career as a teacher, the works of Aristotle were still suspect in the ecclesiastical world, for they were as yet only known through the translations and commentaries of Arabs who had interpolated and coloured them with neoplatonism, Mahommedanism, and other oriental admixtures. Moreover, the parts best known (excepting the Organon with which, thanks to Boethius, the West had always been in some degree familiar) were the Physics, which were read in the first instance by laymen interested in Arabian medicine, alchemy, and astronomy.

It was on a day in early March of this year, with a cloudless blue sky overhead, that I stepped carefully off the muddy track on to the little strip of ‘sown field’ —with the blades of wheat, brilliantly green, just showing above ground—which separated me from Luke Copse Cemetery. This tiny spot, ‘for ever England,’ lies just over the old German lines that for so long lay, an impassable barrier, between Hébuterne and Serre.

I had come up that morning by car from Amiens. We had bowled along the great road to Albert in smooth security. The driver—who had done this kind of work often before—began by being vastly communicative. I must see the old G.H.Q. at Querieu Château; but it had meant little to me during the war years, and meant less than ever to me now. Then there was the bold notice painted in English on a barn wall, Dangerous Corner; that, too, I must note. Reminiscences of 1870 began to brim over his practised lips; a cemetery on the left, a monument on the right. But I was dull to respond; memories were marshalling themselves anew, stirring out of their long slumbers, awakening at contact with the familiar slopes of Picardy : that road there, on the left, it recalls a march —its destination long since forgotten, not even now to be recalled—but, somehow, clear as crystal, is the memory of that moving column, and myself a tiny part of it.

In his study of the Dark Ages, Mr. Dawson has done a difficult thing with entire success. What is nearly as interesting is the apparently effortless way in which he has achieved his end. Instead of as a formless waste of barbarism and decay, such as is often presented by the merely secular historian, the Dark Ages are viewed as the essentially formative period of European history, when the foundations were being slowly and painfully laid. Though superficially the period lacks the attractions of what are usually considered the great epochs of history, yet the age that saw the laying of great foundations of European culture has an interest that is all its own. Foundation-stones, if less showy, are more necessary than flying buttresses.

The political existence of Europe depends on the Roman Empire; it has little, if any, geographical warrant. A society of city states, the inheritors of the Hellenistic culture, was welded together by the military dictatorship of the Roman tradition. It is no mere figure of speech to call Caesar and Augustus the founders of the European polity, for the barbarians, though possessed of valuable cultural traditions, were of themselves incapable of producing a higher civilisation. It was Rome with her genius for constructive and sustained toil which was to bring this to pass. Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.

With the recognition of Mianchukuo as an independent state by Japan, matters in the Far East have taken a definite turn. The rest of the world have now to decide what stand they are going to take. China is indefatigable in protest and complaint, but ‘mark now,’ said Prince Henry to Falstaff, ‘and see how a plain tale shall put you down.’ It is in this spirit that the Japanese assessor to the League of Nations Commission has gone about his task. By the process of dispassionately piling known fact on known fact he has presented the world with a case which is unanswerable. China is revealed in all her incompetence, and the justice of Japan’s actions and claims made clear.

In the past ten years there have been two hundred and forty-five outrages committed on foreigners. Thirty-nine persons have been murdered, over one hundred and fifty abducted, of whom the fate is still uncertain. For some the bandit-communists, whom the so-called Government is unable to put down, are responsible. A large proportion, however, can be directly attributed to the anti-foreign spirit which has been deliberately fostered by the authorities ever since the Kuomintang obtained control. Hatred of the foreigner is one of the lessons regularly taught in the schools. It is done mainly through text-books teaching the ‘Three Principles’ of Dr. Sun Yat Sen—a compulsory subject in all schools under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government.

He witness of The New Scholasticism, a quarterly review and the organ of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, to a vigorous Thomist movement in the United States, is confirmed by a book recently published, Contemporary Philosophy and Thomistic Principles, in which Thomism is presented as a complete and authentic philosophy, not a sort of philosophical parasite on a religion of authority; and as a philosophy able to meet present problems and complete the solutions advanced by modern thinkers. It lays the ghost, evoked by Mr. Wyndham Lewis in Time and the Western Man, of a Thomism incurably conservative, forever the old against the new, anti-modern in a stupid historical manner. The page-references to Aquinas, Thomas, steadily grow in the index to names in books of science and philosophy. His name comes readily to the journalist’s pen and the mouth of that public which reads the review pages of the more serious dailies, and a lady over the tea-pot can quite easily remark, ‘Of course, Mr. So-and-so, you know, is a tomist.’

Dr. Bandas begins with a particularly firm and downright piece of writing on Fundamental Principles (Chapter I). The foundation of Thomism on Being is clearly indicated, as well as the transcendental value and immunity from empirical criticism of the principles immediately deriving from Being—identity and contradiction, substance, sufficient reason, causality.

His Holiness Pope Pius XI, proclaiming Albertus Magnus a Saint and a Doctor of the Church, said of him, that he knew everything that was to be known. And indeed his outstanding characteristic was the universality of his learning. In his writings he covered the whole field of knowledge, and he was as great in philosophy and theology as in meteorology, astronomy, geography, mineralogy, chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, physiology, and in the other natural sciences. It is, therefore, not surprising that on account of the eminence and universality of his learning he was known among his contemporaries, as he has been known ever since, as the Doctor Universalis, and as Magnus, ‘ the Great.’

His complete works were printed for the first time in 1651 at Lyons, in twenty-one volumes in folio, and again at Paris in 1890-98, in thirty-eight volumes in quarto. Besides these, many authentic writings are still in manuscript in the libraries and archives of various cities of Europe. Scholars consider that, if published, they would fill at least ten folio volumes.

But it is impossible to appreciate the imposing personality of the Doctor Universalis without having a thorough knowledge of his writings, and that is an exceedingly difficult task without a sure guidance, as all those who are acquainted with mediaeval studies well know. At the moment this difficulty is the greater owing to the lack of a critical edition of his works, and to the fact that some of those published are either dubious or clearly spurious.

Man is a vegetable, but something more; and so it would be a mistake to try to write his life in terms only of the gropings of a plant for nourishment. He is an animal, but something more; and so his activity cannot always be explained as an instinctive response to a particular situation and a search for sensuous satisfaction. His vegetable and animal functions may fill almost all his time and occupy the foreground of his attention. But it is the flickering moment of deliberation and the lurking moment of reason that chiefly engage our notice in any discussion of a specially human problem of conduct.

Such as contraception. Even so, the problem may be considered from various angles—medical, psychological, economic, political, historical, artistic. But ultimately the scientific discussion resolves itself into a question of philosophy. Anybody who has dipped into the literature of the subject will recall how quickly and how constantly the idea of right or wrong crops up. Most people, I suppose, in the face of a personal problem of conduct, apply the test of principles that attempt some sort of approximation to the fundamental nature and decencies of things. Other considerations have their place, but the last word on contraception belongs to that science which deals with human affairs at this depth.

This science is called ethics. Unfortunately, the word has come to suggest an arbitrary collection of prohibitions and grudging permissions, some rather stupid to our brave new world of scientific humanism, all rather galling.

Owen Glyn DWR has been neglected to a remarkable extent by English historians. The reason is perhaps not far to seek. He belonged to the great army of unsuccessful men; and history has never been kind to failures. He survived in the memory of Englishmen as a character in a Shakesperian play. In so far as he entered at all into serious history, they were content to put him down as an irascible but unpractical Celt, a picturesque bandit, the main object of whose existence was to kill Saxons.

His fate at the hands of his countrymen was little better. Paradoxically enough the battle of Bosworth, which enabled a Welsh king to ride into London at the head of a largely Welsh army, did Wales little but harm. The gentry came to court and became Anglicised : the Reformation which destroyed the monasteries—the cultural centres of the country—completed the process. The patriots were usually papists, and either fled abroad or perished on the gallows. The Act of 1535 avowedly aimed at the extirpation of the Welsh language : and the unpleasant figure of the anglicised Welshman began to appear. In 1567 Dr. Griffith Roberts, the Chaplain of St. Charles Borromeo, and a prominent exile, satirized the type in the preface to his Grammar : ‘their Welsh is Englishfied, and their English, God knows, is too Welshy.’ Morus Kyffin, a fervent defender of the Reformation, wrote in 1595 of a ‘clerical person’ who ‘said that it was not right to allow any Welsh books to be printed.

In England we find the summer useful as an excuse for jokes about the wintry weather, but it may be safely assumed that there is some sort of difference between winter and summer: otherwise, how should we get strawberries and cream in July and not even want them in January? Summer may be regarded as beyond a joke sometimes, but it is also more than a joke if but strawberries and cream be the happy memory it conjures up into renewed pleasure. To some people it means more even than this; maybe tramping over the green hills or loitering in sun-splashed woods. To others the summer is most pleasantly companioned by the sea, but the ways in which they respond to its briny flavour form the gravamen of these curious observations which follow.

Perhaps you remember one of Robert Browning’s lyrical ruminations that tells how he swam out a long way from the seashore on a sunny day. He was peacefully floating on his back when he saw a flittering white butterfly above him in the sunlight. The poem makes a pretty picture, but to any swimmer it appeals more than any picture. For there is a whole world of exhilarating contacts belonging to those whose love of the sea is not confined to an admiration of its appearance, or an appreciation of the salubrious properties of ozone. Therefore, swimmers in general must be distinguished from that other big group of sea-lovers, whose pleasure is rather in ‘those water-trampling ships which made me glow,’ to quote the English Laureate, who seems to owe something to Wordsworth’s ‘trampling waves.’

Albert the Great is chiefly entitled to fame as having been for seven years the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, and to the end of his life the devoted admirer of his pupil and staunch defender of his doctrine.

To say this is not to belittle Albert personally; it is to place him very high indeed in the hierarchy of great men.

The excellences by which St. Thomas was most distinguished were not mere reproductions of the greatness that was his master’s; they were either peculiar to St. Thomas himself, or possibly, in some points at least, derived from other masters who influenced St. Thomas before he first came under Albert’s notice. Albert’s principal title to greatness is the detachment with which he enabled Thomas to develop seeds of greatness independent of anything he had to give, and to advance to heights that he himself could never reach.

I had never before fallen so easily and pleasantly into conversation with anyone; it was as though we had for many years enjoyed an unexacting friendship. For though I was fully aware that she was a stranger to me, there seemed to be between us no barriers of the mind; and this, despite the fact that I was suddenly in a place that I did not know, without even the vaguest memory to tell me how I had come there. I remember marvelling at the beauty of the scene, and wondering if its mild and charming aspect had cast a spell upon me. For we were quite at ease. We stood on a broad stone terrace, balustraded and open to the sky, stretching back to the gardens and pavilions of a palace. Beneath our feet, below steep, flower-covered slopes and rolling fields, the whole world seemed to lie within the possibilities of vision; and now the plains, now the far-distant mountains, now the dark stretches of the forest revealed themselves beneath a tender floating haze that was as fresh as morning, yet as restful and contented as the twilight.

She stood looking down over the fields, leaning a little forward, one finely-shaped hand resting lightly on the balustrade. Her graciousness was elusive, yet not remote, her friendliness apparent without effort. Perfectly attuned to her surroundings, assured and happy and free from arrogance, she gave me sympathy and welcome without questioning, and I accepted it. Still unaware of what had happened to me, I stood on a garden terrace high above the world and talked of the places and the people that I loved with one who loved them too.

We hear much of the ideal of European unity, and much more of the difficulties lying in the Way of its realisation. But for a satisfactory definition of this unity we ask in vain. The trend of public and private comment is largely negative—let us avoid war at all costs. It may be of some use to consider the problem from a strictly Thomist standpoint and to discover whether it can be solved in the light of Thomist principles.

All conflict is ultimately metaphysical and every war a battle of philosophies. Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes, by teaching that reality is reducible mathematically, have made the unity of number identical with that of being. Unfortunate man not so reducible, has become ‘res cogitans’ cut off from reality, thinking intuitively, and the body, as Maritain observes, an instrument not of perception, but of conquest. Intellect is shut up in the brain, and body goes forth to organise matter and subdue the Universe. This situation is further complicated, on the one hand, by Kant’s doctrines of unknowable reality and the supremacy of the moral consciousness, and, on the other, by Hobbesian and nineteenth century evolutionary materialism. Small wonder the heirs of such thought find themselves clamouring for a European unity they cannot define but for which they are ever more or less consciously striving.

The Convocations of Canterbury and York having confirmed the terms of the agreement concluded at Bonn on July 2nd, 1931, by the representatives of the Church of England and of the ‘Old Catholics,’ intercommunion has been established between the State Church of this country and a religious body which, however unimportant and numerically insignificant, possesses, nevertheless, a valid Hierarchy and true Sacraments. The terms of this agreement, ratified also by the ‘Old Catholic’ Bishops on September 7th, 1931, are expressed in three paragraphs :

(1). Each communion recognises the catholicity and independence of the other, and maintains its own.

(2). Each communion agrees to admit members of the other communion to participate in the Sacraments.

(3). Intercommunion does not require from either communion the acceptance of all doctrinal opinion, devotion or liturgical practices characteristic of the other, but implies that each believes the other to hold all the essentials of the Christian faith.

Once his emotions under control, Park unfolded the map. He looked for the place where he supposed himself to be; and at the point found a red dot. It was Svillig’s doing; for here and there were translations into Latin, in his handwriting, of the unintelligle words engraved. The country in which the dot appeared was called Regio principis Ednse. Kottatil, on both sides of the Severn estuary, was marked: urbs nostra. London was in the Hertfordshire direction and called Ito. The whole of Devon and Cornwall was forest; and, so far as the map showed—for a word crossed it firmly in heavy characters which Svillig had translated conclusa—quite uninhabited. The whole, saving these explanations, was one bewilderment of straight lines, ragged forms and unknown signs.

Park stared at it all sadly : but brightened when he saw in the minute script, somewhere about Lincolnshire, the words Villa gracilis indicating a small property.

As he folded the map Cuan came in and he asked him the time. The man pointed to a horizontal scale on which an indicator was moving clock-wise to the right. The bar had six great divisions, which equalled together a third of the solar day. When the indicator reached its course, it ran back with a distinctive murmur, not to zero, but to the first of the strokes representing the smallest sub-division (for it took just the time of one ‘second’ to run). The result was that, when the indicator stood midway on the scale, the time was (in our horology) noon, eight in the evening, or four in the morning. At the moment it wanted about a division to noon.

Plato has long since taken his place in company with Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes, and other Olympians of literature among authors who are more talked about than read. It may be true that none but a scholar in the exact and classical sense is in a position to appreciate to the full the beauty of Plato’s style and the clarity of his thought, but those of us, and they tend to become an ever-increasing number, who can only read him in translation should not be deterred by that consideration. Plato’s nearness to the present age is remarkable. Though Athens of the fifth century B.C. bears little enough resemblance to London of the early twentieth century, there is this broad comparison to be drawn between, them: each looks to the future with hope out of a time of distress and the uncertainty that accompanies change; each feels itself to be politically bankrupt and puts little confidence in its accredited leaders; each feels that the trouble arises, not so much from the institutions in vogue as from the weakness, folly and incompetence inherent in human nature. It is for these reasons that Plato has much of value to say not merely to the poet and the philosopher in all ages, but also to the men and women immersed in practical affairs.

To-day we are apt to feel impatient of doctrinaire dreamers who draw up systems of government that look well on paper. The. very word ‘utopian’ has come to bear a meaning that is suspect, if not downright sinister.

Some fourteen years after Boswell’s Life of Johnson was given to the world there appeared a small collection of Letters addressed to Dr. Johnson which had found no place in the great Biography. These were contained in a slim volume published in London in 1805 and bearing the title Original Letters to Dr. Johnson by Miss Hill Boothby. The little work has never once been re-printed, although some few extracts from it are to be met with in the notes to Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Johnson's Letters, and it has occasionally been referred to by other commentators. A copy of this now exceedingly rare book lies before us as we write, and suggests to us to set down something about one of the most singular of Dr. Johnson’s many friendships.

When Johnson was a very young man, poverty-stricken and unknown, he paid the first of many visits to his friend, the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. There, we are told, ‘the daughters of some of the Derbyshire squires showed their good taste and good sense by desiring the company of the young genius, poor and unpolished as he was.’ Or, as Miss Seward, the ‘Swan of Lichfield,’ most appalling of poetesses, and a life-long enemy of Johnson, preferred in her acid and waspish way to put it, ‘They probably amused themselves with the uncouth adorations of the learned though dirty stripling, whose mean appearance was overlooked, because of the genius and knowledge that blazed through him, albeit with umbered flames owing to his spleen and melancholy.’

Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience,’ announced the disconcerting Bacon, but I think there is more to be said for travel than that. ‘The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases,’ declares Hazlitt in the most charming of his essays. For him travel was a journeying into solitude—none of your collective hiking for him.’ For once let me have a truce with impertinence,’ he says. ‘Give me the dear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before.’ And in the same essay : ‘I cannot talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing by fits and starts. “Let me have a companion of my way,” says Sterne, “were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.” It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment .... I am for the synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical.’ There is no need to deny the sympathy that Sterne’s beautiful sentence invokes, even though in principle Hazlitt may command our assent. At the heart of the essayist’s rather forcibly expressed preference is a pleasure in the continuous addition of impressions in tranquillity; his notion of a journey is a solitary pilgrimage to the very bosom of a peaceful countryside; he is the dreaming watcher of sunset skies who resents unnecessary talk.