He lays up treasure, and knows not for whom he gathers it. Folly and vanity ! Blessed is the man whose hope is the Lord, who has not cast his eyes on vanities and on lying follies (Ps. xxxix, 5). ‘Wild talk, ‘you think (I speak to one who has a hankering for treasure himself); ‘such words are nothing but old wives’ tales.’ You are a careful, sensible man; every day you devise new means of money-making—from business, from farming, perhaps from pleading and legal practice, perhaps from soldiering; and there is usury besides. You are shrewd; you use every art you know to add coin to coin and to enclose your gainings in jealous secrecy. Robbing others, you are anxious not to be robbed yourself; you fear to suffer the wrong you do, though your suffering does not amend your doing. But of course, with you there is no suffering; you are a cautious man, and as good at keeping as at getting; you know where to place your wealth, with whom to trust it, how none of your gathering need be lost. Well, I ask you in your shrewdness and carefulness : Granted your gathering and storing are proof against any loss, tell me for whom you store your treasure. There are other evils that go with this vanity of your covetousness; these I leave; I neither stress them nor tax you with them. The one point I make, the one question I put, is that brought up by the reading of the psalm. Granted, you gather and lay up treasure.

It is the last hour before Ash Wednesday. Only a little while ago I said the Office of Compline, and the calm of prayer is still upon me. The day has been heavy with many duties, but I was glad to bear them. There is so little we can suffer for him who suffered so willingly for us. The fire on my left is burning steadily. It will have to last the whole night, for we are fire-watching, my companion and I, and it is my turn to wake. She is sleeping peacefully, this dear young girl, and her gentle breathing is a solace to me.

I have been thinking of many things to-night, my friend, and>my heart is very full. Here I am fire-watching, waiting for one of my people to come and bring destruction upon-your people, to ruin their homes, mutilate their limbs, even to kill them. The first time was in an air-raid I was lying-flat on my back in a strange bed and the aeroplanes were droning overhead. I knew they had come for a fell purpose, and I thought of the untold thousands who were threatened by a similar danger both here and in Germany. As I opened my heart to their sufferings I could believe for a moment it were possible to embrace both countries with an equal love. For one night at least in the face of that deadly menace, I seemed to bear the agony of both, and there was neither friend nor foe, only a communion of suffering under a mighty cross.

The experience of Rimbaud was too drastic to serve as an object-lesson. In spite of him and Une Saison en Enfer the same error went on—an error of aim or direction, a false deflection of energy; and this despite the fiercest and most vaunted efforts to see more deeply into poetic consciousness. But now there was to be no fullstop; now the journey, it was presumed, was to go on and on to the world’s end and beyond ; down a track that led nowhere, in a train that could not move. And this, in a way, can be done : in a sort of dream, thanks to a sort of magic.

Because it tries to make use of poetry to fulfil man’s desires and his search for knowledge and his hunger for the absolute, surrealism, has for us a special historical importance.

Remember the remark of Marcel Raymond—to which I have already referred—’ to declare the game not yet over, that all might still be saved from the wreck, was the essential message of surrealism.’ But in fact the surrealists too fell victims to poetic knowledge. At first they were above all concerned to rediscover what Raissa Maritain, in the first of the essays in this book, calls ‘That river in the mind underlying all our ordinary activities, that deep, authentic indefinable reality, perceived by the soul from time to time when she opens herself to the unknown and is revivified thereby.’ And I doubt not they did enjoy some moments of high ecstasy (in the natural order) when the soul ‘bathes once more in the spring of her being, is refreshed and strengthened,’ by the poetic experience. No need to refuse them this much good fortune.

We may now turn to some particular problems in which we feel more at home. In the fourth chapter we are given a lucid account of the events that led up to the Edict of Milan, but it raises one regret that Professor H. Grégoire of Brussels has not yet published his work on Constantine the Great, which was announced a few years ago. But there is a study published by the same author about 1930 in a Belgian review not widely known (information can be found in the Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique), where regarding Constantine’s policy he expresses views that alter in many ways the whole aspect of the problem and which Church historians would do well to study carefully.

The explanation of how the emperor came to the decision of convoking an Oecumenical Council makes plausible reading, but the author has evidently missed my study on the authority of the State in the Oecumenical Councils in the translation which apeared in 1934 in the ‘Christian East.’ There he would have found indications that would have facilitated his own researches and helped him to get a better understanding of the whole problem of Constantine, the Council of Nicea, the presidency of the Council and the squaring of historical facts with the theological conclusions on the papal primacy. Constantine simply borrowed the conciliar procedure from the proceedings of the senatorial sittings. Just as the Emperor presided in person or by deputy over the sessions of the Senate, led the debates and appointed their subjects, so he acted at the Councils, which were run like an ecclesiastical senate; but as the Emperor took ‘no part in the senatorial voting, so he abstained from voting with the bishops and he abode by their decisions.

I do not mean that Truth shifts. I mean that as men stretch out their hands to grasp her, she seems to them to withdraw herself : even as the fairy glow on the distant hills recedes as we draw near. Men are bashful of the truth and are eluded because of the coyness of their grasp-Moreover the truth is expected to shift; and that position which is static is suspected of some falsity, since at some time or other truth must have shifted thence on her travels. Thus von Martin complains in his book, Sociology of the Renaissance.

‘The centre of gravity of mediaeval society was the land, was the soil. . . Mediaeval society was founded upon a static order of Estates, sanctioned by the Church. Everyone was assigned to his place by nature, i.e. by God himself, and any attempt to break away from it was a revolt against the divine order. Everyone was confined within strictly defined limits, which were imposed and enforced by the ruling Estates, the clergy. . . The King himself was bound to rule according to definite laws: he had to carry out his reciprocal obligations towards his vassals ; he had to treat the Church according to the principles of justitia.’

There is a certain notion of the Middle Ages which even the most ‘Protestant’ historian of our day has dismissed with contempt. It is based upon a purely imaginative estimate; it relies upon that selective principle which inevitably distinguishes the polemist from the historian. Above all, by its nervous distrust of the objective it must be classified as a subjectivism of the first order.

This is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, for to write, as does Mr. Bronowski, about William Blake without reference to his religious and visionary experiences is to leave out almost Blake himself. This is a pity, for the book is freshly written and far more readable than the works of many would be interpreters of the writer of the Prophetic Books.

Of late years a host of writers have arisen who are, as Mr. Bronowski states, more interested in the mysticism than in the mystic, Blake. He himself goes to the other extreme, and while having a real feeling for the man, Blake, attempts to explain away his visionary writings by stating that these were written in cypher to avoid censorship. The prophetic Books are accounts of things seen in vision. They are concerned with the nature and destiny of the human soul. They mark a sharp departure, an entirely different set of problems, from , those of the unfinished French Revolution of which Mr. Bronowski regards them as a continuation. By 1797 Blake had finished with Pitt and politics. He saw the evils of his day as symptoms of spiritual dry-rot and not as economic problems. Had they been written in the most straightforward language he would have had nothing to fear from the keenest censorship. Incidentally, we consider that in view of the shortness of the book, undue space and importance is given to the abortive trial for sedition of 1804.