Revamped with effect from October 1964 as New Blackfriars, this journal first appeared in April 1920. We claimed then not to be ‘new’ but only The Catholic Review, ‘revived and renamed’: a quarterly that ran for several years but had to give up during the War. In 1919 Fr Bede Jarrett (1881-1934), then Prior Provincial, bought it for £40, on behalf of the English Dominican Province.

Bernard Delany (1890-1959) was appointed Editor of the projected journal. He had just come from two years as an army chaplain (1917-19). As he recalled, Fr Bede wanted a review which ‘was not to be learned or theological, nor of a specifically ecclesiastical character’ (see Bernard Delany, ‘The Beginnings of “Blackfriars”’, Blackfriars 34 (1953): 308-319).

The first issues were planned over lunches at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath. Besides Delany and Jarrett himself the editorial board consisted of Joseph Clayton and Stanley Morison, along with two other Dominicans, Fr Vincent McNabb and Fr Luke Walker.

Stanley Morison (1889-1967) was to become the most distinguished British scholar of typography. At this stage, barely thirty years of age, he was working for small presses in London. He became adviser to Cambridge University Press in 1925, designed Gollancz’s famous ‘yellow jackets’, completely restyled The Times, and created the Times New Roman type-family which remains widely in use.

Northrop Frye’s views, both on the Bible and on other works of literature, are strongly influenced by the writings of William Blake. When the University of Toronto Press published a collection of Frye’s writings on religion, it was thus very fitting that William Blake’s picture of God answering Job out of the whirlwind should be used as a frontispiece to the book. In the spirit of Blake, Frye treats the Bible as a sovereign means for the expansion of human consciousness and imagination, and I believe that this is one very useful way of looking at it. But the question between Frye and most traditional Christians is, whether it also contains, however implicitly, a message about what is so, what philosophers might call propositional content. Frye seems to hold that such propositional content as there is in traditional Christianity may be abandoned, indeed is much better abandoned.

It appears to me that Frye is a thinker of genius rather than mere talent. Quite apart from the brilliance of his work on other parts or aspects of literature, few other writers, if any, have thrown as much light as he on the way in which the Bible ‘works’ on the human mind, as an imaginative structure of narrative and imagery. But however much Christians may stand to learn from Frye’s understanding of the Bible, his views are by no means compatible with any form of orthodox Christianity. What are the outstanding differences, and what are the reasons for them?

These passages from the conciliar and post-conciliar documents of Vatican II make emphatically clear the Church’s tradition of prayer at the beginning and ending of the day, and connect this tradition with dawn, the rising light of the new day, and dusk, the waning light of the evening. In the Church’s tradition of prayer, these two Hours are given a Christological significance: Lauds recalls the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and Vespers commemorates his death and burial. This paper looks at the biological as well as the liturgical rhythms involved in praying at dawn and dusk, and invokes a sacramental understanding of time, which was common throughout earlier ages, but has been lost in more recent times. It then examines the custom of prayer at dawn and dusk in other religious traditions besides Christianity and collates all this evidence to ask if there is any justification for arguing that human beings are biologically programmed for such activity.