With the completion of the third volume of his massive history, Father Philip Hughes brings the story of the Reformation in England to an end, though it is an end only in the sense that the Elizabethan settlement had reached, at the death of the queen, a certain stability in its development. The first duty of a reviewer must surely be to congratulate Father Hughes on a great achievement. He has covered the whole general ground in closely-studied detail, exploring all the printed sources with patient and accurate industry. Yet, immense as is the mass of fact he makes use of to elucidate events and the factors controlling them, we are never allowed to feel that the vital issues are obscured rather than illuminated; they stand out in his narrative with invariable clarity. The disciplined learning of his treatment of the complex evidence will make his book, for a long time to come, a classical exposition of the Catholic point of view in Reformation history. The writing is distinguished by a deep and sometimes passionate conviction, yet it is conspicuously fair; this is acknowledged by scholars who do not share Father Hughes’ presuppositions. ‘An historian’s book for historians’, it has been called by one such scholar, ‘a work of real value to all who wish to study the English Reformation at an advanced level.’

The truth of the saying omnia abeunt in theologiam is specially observable in Reformation history. The greatest of the non-Catholic historians of the period, as Father Hughes sometimes shows, can be at a disadvantage in appreciating to the full the influence of theological presuppositions upon thought and action on both sides.

There are many unresolved questions about the relations of the natural sciences to Aristotelean-Thomist philosophy, and the accurate placing of science on the map of intellectual activities is one of the most important objectives of our time. The prestige of science is still so high that the relative neglect of it by Thomists is unfortunate, and a positive approach is of great value. The American Dominicans have therefore done wisely as well as boldly in setting up a permanent institution where scientists and philosophers can meet and collaborate, with a permanent staff most of whom have been trained in one of the natural sciences as well as in the Thomist tradition. This institution is called the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science and is situated in a suburb of Chicago. Its leaders hope that, by bringing men engaged in specialized research into contact with a homogeneous intellectual tradition, they will be able to help scientists towards a synthesis that they feel to be necessary for the health of science itself as well as for modem culture generally. Clearly this venture could be of the greatest importance.

The present volume is a report of an ambitious five-week meeting held in 1952, at which a varied group of experts in philosophy, logic and the natural sciences considered the relations between modem science and the Aristotelean tradition. Physics, chemistry, biology and psychology were allotted a week each, and the final week was devoted to an attempt at synthesis.

There is a very real sense in which everything that is is sacred. We say, or at least said, that life is sacred; motherhood is sacred, and so on. Far be it from me to deprecate this usage. For does not the root evil of our time, the secularization of life, he precisely in atrophy of the religious sense? It was this very tendency of the historical process which caused voices to be raised amid the wilderness of nineteenth-century industrialism, reaffirming the holiness not only of God’s creation but also of the works of man.

Holy: holiness: here we have le mot juste. We say God is holy. The word is inadequate but not erroneous. It would never occur to us to say God is sacred: not only would that be erroneous, it would be absurd. Sacred to what? This question alone is enough to make it clear that whereas the concept of holiness is absolute, that of the sacred is relative. It might be said that holy is predicated of God and of his gifts to us, sacred of our gifts to him.

Whatever is sacred is holy, but not all that is holy is sacred, save in the very diluted sense of meriting our respect. Be it clear from the outset that in these pages the word is not used in this its most generic meaning but in the truest and most positive sense by which sacred signifies set apart by man for the worship of God.

At first sight there is something arid about a creed. But a Christian ignores the creed at his peril. It is fatally easy to drift along in a tide of emotional devotion, and precisely because our devotion is not disciplined by the rule of faith, to become stranded on the sands of sentiment. No individual has sufficient balance or insight to receive the full content of revelation, and each individual tends to inject some personal bias into his formulation of the faith; the tendency is to interpret in terms of our own psychological structure and interests. This is seen even in the great Saints and Doctors of the Chinch, but they, since they are holy, accept the correction of their bias from the Church, and receive, within the Church, a life that complements their insufficiency. This is even more markedly the case when the individual is living on his religious emotions, on unregulated devotional responses, which, since they lack the defining and purifying influence of the creeds, very easily degenerate into mere superstition. No doubt faith can co-exist with superstition; but the thorns grow very fast, and can soon choke the good seed. It is a good rule which says that the more strongly the emotions are stirred, the more urgently credal definition is required. This is not to say that emotion, feeling and devotion do not play their part in religion. Of course they do, for Christ claims the whole person, and human feeling is used by the Holy Spirit as a way in to the furthest places of the soul.