We purpose (1) to set down a few passages from the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with Biblical Criticism ; and (2) to give a short commentary on them.

What is to be said of Westminster Cathedral? Is it a great building? Is it more than a big building? The almost universal verdict is in the affirmative. It is not petty. It is a work of genius.

Now, genius has been defined as the will and ability to “put the first thing first,” and certainly Bentley did so at Westminster. Whatever others may have said, Bentley did not say : the first thing is to make a big Byzantine Church. The first thing he did was to envisage a great building suitable for Christian worship, and, again putting the first thing first, he did not say it shall rival Beauvais in height or Rheims in sculpture ; he said : this great Christian Church shall be built of massive piers of brick spanned by vaults of concrete—these are the available materials, and I am not crying for the moon of medieval delight. He did not use such words, nor could he have used them. He was an old-fashioned English architect and was not aware of the social problem. He even dreamed of a building covered with a veneer of marble and mosaic ! But though that was his dream, and even partly his achievement, he saw his church as a great building first and only second as a much adorned one.

This is obvious from the accomplished thing and is admitted even by those people who still, in this pagan age, hanker after pointed arches and pinnacles.

If there is anything pleasant in life, it is doing what we aren’t meant to do. If there is anything pleasant in criticism, it is finding out what we aren’t meant to find out. It is the method by which we treat as significant what the author did not mean to be significant, by which we single out as essential what the author regarded as incidental. Thus, if one brings out a book on turnips, the modern scholar tries to discover from it whether the author was on good terms with his wife ; if a poet writes on buttercups, every word he says may be used as evidence against him at an inquest of his views on a future existence. On this fascinating principle we delight to extort economic evidence from Aristophanes, because Aristophanes knew nothing of economics ; we try to extract cryptograms from Shakespeare, because we are inwardly certain that Shakespeare never put them there ; we sift and winnow the Gospel of S. Luke, in order to produce a Synoptic problem, because S. Luke, poor man, never knew the Synoptic problem to exist.

There is, however, a special fascination in applying this method to Sherlock Holmes, because it is in a sense Holmes’s own method. “It has long been an axiom of mine,” he says, “that the little things are infinitely the most important.” It might be the motto of his life’s work. And it is (is it not?), as the clergymen say, by the little things, the apparently unimportant things, that we judge of a man’s character.

The Song of Deborah is, then, commonly judged —and on good grounds—to be contemporary with the event which it celebrates. At moments of intense feeling, poetry not too burdened by rules, far from being an artificial, is, on the contrary, a most natural form of expression ; certainly at such times it comes readily to the lips of spontaneous peoples such as the Semites. As the occasion, so is the form ; David’s grief, for example, over the death of Saul and Jonathan produces his poetical lament as given in 2 Samuel 1. 19 ff. A most interesting parallel to the occasion and form of the Song of Deborah is provided by an incident which occurred only some thirty years ago at Madaba, a village a few miles east of the Dead Sea. The Arab tribe of the ‘Azeizât which had settled at Madaba was attacked by another Arab tribe, the Beni Sakher. The ‘Azeizât had hardly succeeded in repelling the attack before their women had composed odes to honour those who had braved, and to stigmatize those who had shirked, the perils of the fight.

It is something of that kind that we have here. It is not an epic poem depicting the exploits of bygone heroes, nor simply a song of thanksgiving for some former striking divine intervention. The poet praises and blames, blesses and curses, and he does so because the objects of his blessings and of his cursings are there before him acting on him ; he sings because he must.

A few years ago, to speak of the progress of the Royal Academy would have been a contradiction in terms ; but a perusal of this year’s exhibition shows that the apparently impossible has happened. As I had not visited the Academy for six or seven years, the improvement was probably more apparent to me than it would have been to those who consider a regular attendance to be part of their duty as Englishmen. The stirring to life of this stagnant institution is partly due to the enlightenment of its members ; but to a greater extent to a series of accidents.

The chief sign of grace in the Hanging Committee is shown in a definite attempt to exhibit pictures so that they may be seen ; and to limit the number of exhibits to that end. The old way was to stop hanging only when the last inch of wall-space had been covered. Let us hope that the Committee will carry this practice of selection a step further in the future. Before the war the average number of exhibits exceeded 2000 ; this year there are 1477, of which a number cannot be seen properly, and a larger number no one wishes to see. The Augean stables are only very partially cleansed. The exhibition might with advantage be considerably reduced if more good work were not sent in. Rather should the good pictures be spread thinner, than that space should be filled for the amusement of that type of vulgar mind which delights in drunken monks and mawkish sentimentality.

It would be interesting if statistics could be obtained showing the relative number of people who attend concerts and of those who visit exhibitions of painting, sculpture, etc. I am always amazed at the fewness of the latter, except in the case of the Royal Academy, when I am equally amazed at their number.

We cannot measure the enjoyment received from music and the graphic arts, but there is an element of adventure in most exhibitions which is almost entirely lacking in a concert. The concert can vary little from its published programme ; in an exhibition every work may be a surprise. I will take the April exhibition at the Leicester Galleries as an example.

The advertisements announced only that there would be work by Mr. Mark Fisher, R.A., and Miss E. Fortescue-Brickdale, R.W.S. No hint was given as to what the third room would contain nor as to what bronzes, etc., would fill up the odd comers. These unannounced items were a most varied collection of drawings, paintings and sculpture, ranging from Gainsborough to Epstein. The works shown in the window were alone worth a pilgrimage. I will mention a few of the exhibits as they occur to my memory.