SAINT AND MARTYR

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22111, 5 June 1937, Page 17

SAINT AND MARTYR

A Portrait of Thomas More. By Algernon Cecil. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 443 pp. (16/- net.) As everyone knows, Sir Thomas More has recently been “raised to the altar” by the Pope. No Englishman, not even John Fisher, has a better title to the name “saint" than More. A considerable number of biographies of him have been published in the last few years; and among these Mr Cecil’s will hold a high place. It is written with knowledge and charm as well as with enthusiasm for the subject. He tell: us that he has long believed tha' “in the crisis of the Reformation More and Erasmus were right and Luther and Calvin Nevertheless his object, he adds, is not to plead a case but to put a point ot view. Some readers will find here a distinction which is often blurred in the course of the book. Mr Cecil ir a Roman Catholic and quite rightly, even as an author, he cannot forget that fact. His zeal occasionally carries him too far, as for example when he calls the Eucharist the central mystery of the Christian religion. Surely this is not theologically correct; that title should be reserved for the Holy Trinity. On the other hand, when Mr Cecil gives us his account of Luther’s teaching and personality, he writes urbanely and judicially like the true Humanist he is. His account of More’s career is little other than an outline in which he hangs his very interesting reflections on the relations of Church and State, on toleration, on communism and the social and political condition of mankind now and then. As for More himself, Mr Cecil finds no other Englishman with his full measure of personality, who wore “the saint’s gay vesture with the martyr’s crown.”