Books in Brief

A Spiritual Aeneid, by Ronald Knox (Sheed & Ward, $3.00). Mgr. Knox was another of those souls—like Newman and Péguy, Graham Greene and, in her way, Simone Weil—who have been coming to the Church from the outside since the mid-nineteenth century to serve her earthly history with public persuasiveness as well as private devotion. Converted from Anglicanism at twenty-nine, he published this Apologia the next year, in 1918. Many years later, he added a preface in which he gracefully deplores the inadequacy of his book and at the same time affirms that his conversion has been “the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted.” It is in this same preface that he also makes a . statement which seems to me the core of his temperament—sage, subtle, self-reckoning, unpresuming— though it may also be the sort of attitude which only a convert, or a potential one, could find pertinent: “Faith is a gift, and may be withdrawn; when people whom I know lose (or seem to lose) the faith, I remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, went I.”

R. PHELPS

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A Spiritual Aeneid, by Ronald Knox (Sheed & Ward, $3.00). Mgr. Knox was another of those souls—like Newman and Péguy, Graham Greene and, in her way, Simone Weil—who have been coming to the Church from the outside since the mid-nineteenth century to serve her earthly history with public persuasiveness as well as private devotion. Converted from Anglicanism at twenty-nine, he published this Apologia the next year, in 1918. Many years later, he added a preface in which he gracefully deplores the inadequacy of his book and at the same time affirms that his conversion has been “the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted.” It is in this same preface that he also makes a . statement which seems to me the core of his temperament—sage, subtle, self-reckoning, unpresuming— though it may also be the sort of attitude which only a convert, or a potential one, could find pertinent: “Faith is a gift, and may be withdrawn; when people whom I know lose (or seem to lose) the faith, I remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, went I.”

R. PHELPS