Father Brown With a Bomb

The Barbarian Within, Walter J. Ong, S. J. Macmillan, $5.00

Father Walter Ong is a distressingly learned, disarmingly quiet little man, who glides about the intellectual scene—unobtrusive-as Chesterton’s Father Brown—planting bombs. Those who know him quake with fear when he comes near their opinions, and accuse him of recklessness with our intellectual heritage. But when the debris is cleared, one usually finds that he has blasted rotten accretions away, and left the pristine fabric standing.