Hagiography

St. Benedict Emerges
St. Benedict. By Dom Justin McCann. (Sheed and Ward, 7s. 6d.)
Reviewed by Mgr. ALBAN GOODIE), S.J., Archbishop of Hicrapolis Of all the saints whose biographies have been lost to us there is none we would more willingly discover than that of St. Benedict of Russia. His influence has been written on the history of European civilisation second to that of no one that has ever lived; and yet the man himself has been characteristically hidden from us, so that it is only, or almost only, from his works that we may know him.
Dom Justin McCann, in his wonderfully painstaking study, has recognised this fact and has built up his portrait of St. Benedict accordingly. He has refused to be guided by the later legends that have gathered about his name, showing us that the only sources on which we can rely are the Dialogues of St. Gregory and the Rule of the Saint.
With these in hand he has studied the historical background, the conditions of the times in which St. Benedict lived, the places where we know he made his abode, Russia, Rome. Subiaco, Monte Cassino, the state monasticism when St. Benedict came to it. Then he has studied the Rule, its text, its contents, and the life it develops, looking all the time for the lessons which its author must have learnt from personal experience.
* * * * In the course of this study he has a special chapter on what is known as " the second vow," that is, the meaning of conversatio mono?! as St. Benedict understood it; this chapter alone will make the book valuable to students of monasticism.
Another section, dealing with prayer, and with the active-contemplative life, is equally important; it seems to us that the Benedictini ideal could scarcely be better visualised than from this angle. Hence, as it were, through that body which is the Benedictini Order we arc led to form a picture of its founder; a picture of one who was too humble to know his own greatness, too selfdisciplined to be influenced by failure or success, too utterly sincere to mind what became of himself, too lost in God from the morning to the night of each day to need other medium of prayer, too great a lover of the peace of God not, to long and labour for the same in every soul that was willing to learn from him.
In Franco's Spain, by Francis McCullagh (Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 12s. 6d.) " During the last forty years I have taken part in many revolutions and wars . . . but now I am leaving the game . . . because I am frightened by the sort of thing into which revolution and war are developing," writes veteran war correspondent MoCullagh in his Spanish war book which was serialised in part in the Catholic Herald.