My text is one of those which we are accustomed to carry in our heads without remembering the occasion upon which the utterance was made, and, partly for that reason, to hesitate about the precise meaning we should attach to it. It comes, actually, at the end of that great chapter, his thirteenth, in which St. Matthew has collected for us seven of our Lord’s parables, six of which, if not all seven, deal with the growth of his kingdom, the Church; the Sower, the cockle among the wheat, the mustard seed, the leaven the hidden treasure, the merchant seeking pearls, the net cast into the sea. And four are particularly concerned to point out to our Lord’s hearers that his kingdom was not, as some of them imagined, to be a clean sweep of all that went before it, a complete break-away from all human experience. It was not to be a millennium, in which all sin and suffering would have disappeared ; those who were partakers of it would not be all perfect souls, already confirmed in goodness and destined for eternal life. No, the new kingdom or ecclesia of Christ was to be in some ways like the old ecclesia, the old congregation of the Jews. There would still be tares among the wheat, worthless fish among the catch, side by side with the others.

He witness of The New Scholasticism, a quarterly review and the organ of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, to a vigorous Thomist movement in the United States, is confirmed by a book recently published, Contemporary Philosophy and Thomistic Principles, in which Thomism is presented as a complete and authentic philosophy, not a sort of philosophical parasite on a religion of authority; and as a philosophy able to meet present problems and complete the solutions advanced by modern thinkers. It lays the ghost, evoked by Mr. Wyndham Lewis in Time and the Western Man, of a Thomism incurably conservative, forever the old against the new, anti-modern in a stupid historical manner. The page-references to Aquinas, Thomas, steadily grow in the index to names in books of science and philosophy. His name comes readily to the journalist’s pen and the mouth of that public which reads the review pages of the more serious dailies, and a lady over the tea-pot can quite easily remark, ‘Of course, Mr. So-and-so, you know, is a tomist.’

Dr. Bandas begins with a particularly firm and downright piece of writing on Fundamental Principles (Chapter I). The foundation of Thomism on Being is clearly indicated, as well as the transcendental value and immunity from empirical criticism of the principles immediately deriving from Being—identity and contradiction, substance, sufficient reason, causality.

Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience,’ announced the disconcerting Bacon, but I think there is more to be said for travel than that. ‘The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases,’ declares Hazlitt in the most charming of his essays. For him travel was a journeying into solitude—none of your collective hiking for him.’ For once let me have a truce with impertinence,’ he says. ‘Give me the dear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before.’ And in the same essay : ‘I cannot talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing by fits and starts. “Let me have a companion of my way,” says Sterne, “were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.” It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment .... I am for the synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical.’ There is no need to deny the sympathy that Sterne’s beautiful sentence invokes, even though in principle Hazlitt may command our assent. At the heart of the essayist’s rather forcibly expressed preference is a pleasure in the continuous addition of impressions in tranquillity; his notion of a journey is a solitary pilgrimage to the very bosom of a peaceful countryside; he is the dreaming watcher of sunset skies who resents unnecessary talk.

Few people now read Vathek, and Redding’s Memoirs of William Beckford are probably read even less often. Indeed the book is not easy reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it ‘prolix,’ and someone recently said that it was the worst biography he knew. With the advent of other biographies of Beckford it may cease to be even useful. Yet the patient reader is not wholly unrewarded. There are passages in it that he would be sorry to have missed, even though the feelings they arouse are not precisely those intended by the author. Thus in a long and reverential account of Beckford’s travels we mark with pleasure that he left Bologna, ‘renowned for sausages and lap-dogs,’ ‘as an earthquake had just before put the land and people much out of humour.’

But it is when the Church is concerned, and especially monasticism, that Redding is most interesting. Catholic worship always fascinated Beckford, and its lasting effect on his mind will appear from later extracts. He was at the Grande Chartreuse when he was nineteen. He stayed there three days, read the works of St. Bruno, and wrote with some enthusiasm of the place. Indeed he left some exceedingly poor lines in the album of the monastery, ‘the larger portion being those of the tutor, Dr. Lettice, the pupil being, perhaps, not at the moment duly inspired.’ These favourable impressions never wholly faded, but other experiences were not so happy. In 1780 he made another tour, and in the Low Countries ‘he was active, and visited all the public buildings, and lions in the churches, such as the statuary and pictures.

It is March, and an uneasy armistice rules in Shanghai. Now that the dust and heat of the conflict have subsided, passions and prejudices run a little less high, and the demands of the actual moment are less insistent and exclusive, there is time to look back on the events of the past five weeks; to attempt to arrive at a considered judgment on the rights and wrongs of the situation; to ask whether the chorus of condemnation with which Japan’s actions have been greeted in certain quarters is justified, if the disapproval, tacit or otherwise, which the West seems to have chosen to exhibit, is fair.

The first thing to be remembered is that the provocation suffered by Japan was considerable, far greater in fact than appears to be realised except by those who were witnesses of it. Not only was there the boycott with all its attendant illegalities of confiscation and intimidation, there was also the constant outpouring of a rancorous anti-Japanese propaganda of the most hostile and insulting character, which was condoned, if it was not actually inspired, by the Government; and there were the constant outrages and indignities suffered by Japanese residents. To secure redress by the ordinary methods of diplomatic intercourse was impossible. Protests were unavailing, for the Government, even if willing to control its subjects, was unable to do so. Moreover, with the overthrow of Chiang Kai Shek’s administration there was only a very shadowy government to protest to and negotiate with. Nor was China’s past record such as to inspire trust.