The deserter from a cause, good or otherwise, is viewed, and quite rightly, with suspicion. The assumption is that he must have some axe to grind, some grudge to settle. In this case neither is true. These comments are simply the saner reflection of one of those people ‘who cannot be fooled all the time.’ They apply only to the First Century Christian Fellowship, alias The. ‘Oxford’ Group Movement, alias ‘ Buchmanism,’ alias ‘The Groups,’ and do not in any way refer to those quiet, dignified meetings of individual churches, particularly Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City, whose staff, though holding a different viewpoint from mine, have placed me deeply in their debt by their unending kindness, affection and hospitality.

Before writing this article, the writer attended a Buchman meeting and publicly announced this intention.

A few weeks ago three sandwich-men, wandering aimlessly up and down the Cornmarket in Oxford, announced to the world, in red letters a foot high, ‘The Truth about Buchmanism.’ The Buch-manite scowled, the public laughed, which is the proper attitude for the public to take, particularly that part of it which is not interested in reviving an already dying evangelism.

Let us introduce this subject with a quotation from the Church Times.

That was ten years ago. This year the Bishops have met again and this time the question of Marriage and the use of Contraceptives found a definite place in the Agenda. Their findings are now familiar. For after saying that:

Clear as a picture the play stood out. Its divine and human pathos cut the September air. The immense crowd was hushed. It was strange, this stillness and awe in so vast and modern a throng. The reason was not far to seek. For, from the first solemn moment when the Greek chorus was seen slowly taking possession of the stage, and the grave and gentle figure of Anton Lang stood forward as Coryphaeus to address the audience priestlike, there was one all-pervading impression. It might not mean the same to all, yet it was a play which concerned those present. Not merely a great human drama, fit as those of Shakespeare or Greek or German to evoke the Catharsis and lose the rapt soul in a sea of beauty and wonder. Such plays are valued for their power, not for their essence, nor for any fact they pre-suppose. Here, all knew that something was portrayed which claimed the undying gratitude and the deepest reverence of each man and woman.

Impressions, no doubt, were of the vaguest. We would not care to answer for the number of those in the audience whose beliefs exactly coincided with those of the actors. Yet, though the logical conclusion and the gift of Faith might be lacking, there were, at least, many Pilates—(Pilate as he is portrayed in this play, lovable before, pitiable after his great weakness)— many who felt that here they had to do with One who was more than other men, One for whom the vague word ‘divine’ had been waiting through the dawn of history, to alight in the fulness of time upon this Elect of men.

The inclusion of a monograph on St. Thomas in the ‘Leaders of Philosophy’ series is significant of the growing strength of the Thomist revival. Even in England, later than in the rest of Europe, St. Thomas is now coming to be considered as taking rank among the philosophers who have mainly influenced western thought; with Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant. Father Knox’s Lady Denham, with her ‘Sir Thomas who?’ after the game of ghosts, is a type already growing uncommon.

Perhaps there is no one in this country better qualified than Father D’Arcy to give an acceptable statement of St. Thomas’s thought. A high and dry Thomist can cut an awkward figure in modern philosophical society. Father D’Arcy is never that; his manner is always tactful, indeed at times even deprecatory. He is inclined to present a Thomist certitude almost hat in hand, as when he says that the problem of the One and the Many receives ‘an attempted explanation in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. By an employment of his fundamental distinctions and what he calls analogy he tries to find a via media’ (p. 109). Still, a wedge cannot be driven in thick end first, and it is possible that Thomists in the past have not been sufficiently ingratiating. And there cart be little doubt that Father D’Arcy has also entered well into the spirit of his subject, and has written a book profitable even to the practised Thomist; something better than a list of theses strung together and described from outside; a synthesis showing a real insight into St. Thomas’s thought and the meaning of the principles of act and potency, of analogy, and of knowledge.

‘Plato’s Britannia,’ by Douglas Woodruff, is one of the flowers of the Belloc movement, varying as a flower should, from its common factors. Belloc’s humour is vast, Rabelaisian, abrupt, and his irony is sometimes fierce to the point of self-destruction, but this book is a well-sustained display of pawky fun, almost Caledonian at times, and no intrusion of the bludgeon mars or neutralises the anatomising rapier. The noise is, to our slow ear, sufficiently like the noise of Jowett’s Plato to polish the genial jest. The English find it hard to be patient with the Irish, who return the compliment with interest, but here is an Englishman who sees all sides of what is wrong with the English, sees them steadily, too, and never departs from the serenity of the good physician who seeks above all to cure the patient.

It is an easy book to read rapidly, and yet he who reads too rapidly will miss a great deal, from the ‘Foreword by Peter, Bishop of Philepompus,’ to the promise, more or less veiled, at the end, that the Scots are to have a turn from Plato.’ I have known Mr. Woodruff since his schooldays. I taught him then and have prayed for him ever since ‘(he is not past praying for, then)’ and am frankly amazed at the amount of truth the book contains. (He always was a little liar.) ‘for whatever tincture of the cardinal and other virtues (I am writing in the country, far from books, and have not the complete list by me),’ etc. etc.