Peter F. Anson, in his article “Modern Catholic Architecture in Scotland” (The Dublin Review, April, 1937), and in his book “The Catholic Church in Modern Scotland”, published in the same year by Burns, Oates & Washbourne, Ltd., has supplied with characteristic clarity and completeness an account of the heritage of ecclesiastical architecture and art upon which the Catholic artist of Scotland has to build. And, as he observes in the closing paragraph of his article, it is not a very inspiring retrospect. For all that, it will one day have—already begins to have—a distinct archaeological value, not unlike that of those early Christian Sarcophagi executed in the late Roman manner. For this nineteenth century art had likewise been designed in a style borrowed from the past, and was executed in a technique long since rendered alien to its origins by adaptation to the servile requirements of the neo-classical style: our good Scottish Freestones, for example, polished to look like marble or stucco, by masons for whom “blind” uncomprehending precision was the best guarantee of a job. Such a combination of archaistic design, largely the work of aliens, and of debased technique, could only give Birth, at best, to quaintness. We look upon these buildings, nevertheless, with gratitude and affection and venerate them as landmarks in the heroic task of bringing back the Faith to our country. Also, they provide a wealth of object lessons in “how not to do it”!

Some months before the outbreak of the war, an American Jesuit published an educational study of considerable importance, which has been almost entirely neglected in England. It is time that this work was more widely known, for it is a book for Catholics today and especially for all who teach in Catholic schools. It is the product of first-class Catholic historical scholarship, and is a fine example of a proper use of history. The author ends the book with an induction, from the wealth of historical facts which he presents, as to what are the essential factors in any education provided by the Society of Jesus and describes how these factors can be applied to schools today, particularly in the United States.

This work is remarkable for its dissimilarity to the productions of most secular scholarship and to most secular sociology today. In the first place it leads on, from a specialized and detailed historical research concerned with the foundations of the first Jesuit Colleges and the influences and historical processes leading to the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, to a broad outline of Jesuit practice up to the present day, instead of confining itself to a particular department of knowledge or history supposedly self-sufficient. In the second place the educational policy which is suggested by the final chapter is based on detailed practical experience, and long-founded tradition and depends on a Christian philosophy of life, specifically scholastic philosophy: thus it advises for present-day problems without allowing the solution to be dictated by and produced within the very causes of the problems themselves.