So much has been written about the effect of Gerard Hopkins’ vocation on his poetry that it may seem tedious to say anything more. Yet when the sum of things said has established a first-class misunderstanding, it is tantalising, if not requisite, to attempt a reconciliation.

Assuming, then, that Jesuits are provided with a mould in which each after his own fashion may mould himself (please note italics for subsequent reference), that mould being the Spiritual Exercises, and assuming further that the poet could not change his character without in some way changing his poetry, a double question arises, making room for two misunderstandings. First, as to the importance of the change—was it an inside transformation or merely an outside limitation? Secondly, as to its quality—was it for better or worse not only in Hopkins but in the general development of poetic expression?

The answer to both, which avoids alike religious enthusiasm and anti-religious dyspepsia, is that the Exercises were circumstances which channelled the poet's working just as other sets of circumstances, poverty, blindness, war, etc., have done to other poets, so that their importance though considerable is not strictly poetic; they make the critical occasions but are not the intimate origin of poetic thought. Their qualitative effect therefore is indifferent; not bad, because helping perhaps that chastity of mind and spare tautness of diction so much admired to-day; but hardly good because of repressions, etc. So: indifferent. If not tile Jesuit training, some other thread would have assisted results poetically equivalent however widely different in other respects. This answer is balanced, and likely to prove the acceptable one.

“Equal Justice Under Law,” is the inscription carved on the pediment of the new United States Supreme Court building. Recently erected, this legal temple in white marble stands majestically on a hill near the national Capitol, a fixed reminder that the judiciary is a co-ordinate branch of the government.

For the past seventy-five years the sessions of the court were held in the small chamber that once housed the United States Senate. Its walls seemed to whisper memories and great names of the past. Here Webster, Clay, Calhoun and other famous statesmen before the Civil War battled with the nation's problems. Around the curved wall are busts of former Chief Justices. It is, no doubt, with a feeling of regret and a spirit of estrangement that the court has moved into its new quarters with its huge Sienna columns, ornate ceiling, heavy crimson hangings, and bas-reliefs.

The nine gowned men who sit on the bench of the highest judicial tribunal in the nation are not spectacular: no aura of Olympus surrounds them. Each has a deep appreciation of the dignity and responsibility of his office: and all, despite an external austerity and necessary aloofness, are very human. Their appointment, which is for life, is made by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. They can be removed only by impeachment. During their tenure of office they cannot occupy any other position. All interests, no matter how profitable, which might possibly influence their judgment are severed. No justice sits in a case with which he has been previously connected as counsel, or in which he has any direct personal interest.

Our Western world is said to be looking for a religion: what is more certain is the pretty general feeling that life is an affair of surfaces, most of them monotonous, the others painful either for themselves or because their beauty is already flecked with decay; and following this feeling the desire for something to which our present experience is only penultimate. In this sense perhaps many would adopt the title of a recent book, God is my Adventure, an account in the best manner of religious journalism of some personalities outside the official religions who are supposed to have penetrated beyond the obvious into the background of life.

“It has added much,” confesses Dr. Hensley Henson, “to my too slight knowledge of the remarkable essays in spiritual exploration, which are certainly not the least impressive indication of the profound religious dislocation of our time.” Dislocation, the word is just; the figures in the book bear witness to it: emotion must disavow thought, or the other way round; the peaks of experience must spurn the lower ranges of life from which they rise; the individual is isolated from his social environment and historical antecedents: man is no longer catholic but peculiar; working in a tunnel not living in the universe.

Yet as sin is the choice of good out of place, so error is the pursuit of truth out of place, and Mr. Landau is alert to discover the value of the various messages. Sometimes he has to try hard, but never is he contemptuous; his criticism though keen is humble. Religious types are of many kinds, and not all his subjects are so intellectually impressive as Ouspensky or Steiner.

The word “milieu” is one of those expressive French words which, to a large extent, defies translation into English. In the present connection it might be rendered, though inadequately, as the sphere of life, the atmosphere, the surroundings or the environment in which the individual Catholic habitually finds himself. If he is an apostle of Catholic Action it must be largely in this milieu, in these surroundings, that he exercises his apostolate. Hence the word “milieu” is of supreme importance to the proper understanding of Catholic Action, as the actual sphere of life is to the exercise of the apostolate.

For Catholic Action is essentially conditioned by the circumstances of our natural human lives. It is indeed precisely because the priest cannot enter into certain circles and so supernaturalize the lives of those who frequent them that the Pope appeals to the laity to take up this task and continue amongst their own friends and working companions the apostolate of the hierarchy. “In order to bring back to Christ these whole classes of men who have denied Him, we must gather and train from amongst their very ranks auxiliary soldiers of the Church . . . the first and immediate apostles of the working-men must themselves be workingmen, while the apostles of the industrial and commercial world should themselves be employers and merchants.” The apostolate must be exercised, according to the Pope, in the circles of our every-day life. It is only natural. Rightly or wrongly there are class-differences and the life and interests of one class are different from those of another. In our democratic country it is easier than elsewhere to move from one class to another and to find oneself accepted in a class higher than that into which one was born, but it is quite impossible to enter into one sphere of life and exert an influence there while remaining to a great extent in another.

Some three years ago, in articles and editorial obiter dicta Blackfriars commented upon the menace of Anti-Communism. It was something of a dissentient note; to Catholics who read, as well as buy, our Catholic weeklies, at least a little unfamiliar. To some indeed the slogan “Anti-Communism is not enough” was positively scandalous. Was there ever a surer title to Election than to be the first to detect heresy in the Left, or the loudest to clamour about the latest iniquity at Moscow?

There was applause, too, from enlightened quarters where it was not believed that to be a Communist you must first be a monster, where people were awake enough to realize that the U.S.S.R. (terrorist bureaucracy that it may be) is not exclusively representative of every evil under the sun. Since then, we have heard at least three Catholics (who go to Mass every Sunday) laugh about the portentous assurance of a tract-writer that the Sinister Thing modern art is, even too, a manifestation of the Bolshevist Leviathan.

Inevitably, however, the Anti's continue to talk most and be the most heard: Anti-Communist, Anti-Anglican, anti-what not. Theirs is a simple school: negative polemic, the disgruntled gibe, the well-worn cliché, the worn-out reference, the same inescapable, infallible authorities, the stock specialists (of whom the most eminent are rarely acquainted with their specialities, first-hand. How many, for instance, of our critics of Russia have been to Russia?). Whence we may be excused for registering relief that Professor Macmurray (the distinguished author of Interpreting the Universe, Freedom in the Modern World, etc.) is one of those who see in Communism by no means unmixed evil— since evil of itself cannot stand—still less, inspire.

The Zampognari have come down from their homes in the Abruzzi mountains and day in, day out, the sound of their pipes remind us that Christmas is coming. The soft wailing tunes of the reed and skin pipes are faithful descendants of those the shepherds played in the country round Nazareth on the first Birthday, and few are the houses in Naples where the players are not invited to enter and play the song that tells us of what took place on that “still and holy night.”

It is difficult for those who come from Northern homes to dissociate Christmas from snow and ice, blazing firesides and red-berried holly. Here, the brilliant sun in a sapphire sky is surely more truly reminiscent of the first Christmas Day.

All the world over, alas, old traditions and old legends are vanishing, and Naples is no exception to this rule; one by one the old customs are being swallowed up by modem matter-of-fact life. The few that remain, however, are quaint and interesting, and a stroll round the city on the days immediately preceding the Festival is well worth while, especially after dusk. The dim lit churches are crowded with men, women and children paying a visit to the “Crib” which is to be found in every church, all thoughtfully and lovingly designed, and in some cases brought to a perfection of detail and realism. Little children are lifted in their mother's arms to kiss the tiny waxen feet of the Christ Child, veiled—often with scattered rose petals or some priceless filmy lace—until midnight, when, at the opening words of the Mass, the veil is removed and the candles or tiny electric lights which illuminate the Manger and the figures of Our Lady and St. Joseph, are lighted. The broad incline of Santa Brigida still has its wonderful fish stalls and great tubs of eels, from which, occasionally, an occupant will escape and slither rapidly across the pavement, to the embarrassment of pedestrians.

The influence of psychological factors in the genesis of both mental and physical ill-health is to-day a generally accepted fact, although opinions differ widely concerning the nature and medical significance of these factors. The general notion that the mind is of more importance in health than was admitted by the materialism of the previous century, it must be admitted, is in a great measure due to the work of Dr. Sigmund Freud in the special field of the psycho-neuroses.

With this change of outlook there has come a demand for the psychological instruction of medical students and practitioners, for as Dr. E. B. Strauss remarks “it is undoubtedly a fact that the average student of medicine leaves his medical school with scanty understanding of the mental side of his future patients.”

The question therefore arises as to the form such instruction should take, and its place in the curriculum of medical studies. These two questions are closely connected. Considering the line taken by Dr. Kretschmer in this'text-book, some preliminary training in the elementary details of clinical psychiatry is required, and this is suggested by the author himself. Were it however feasible, some preliminary grounding in general psychology might with advantage precede special medical studies, concurrently, let us say, with biology.