6 JULY 1929, Page 24

• IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] .

the course of his article on "The Spirit of Catholic Devotion," appearing in the Spectator of May 4, the Rev. Martin D'Arcy says that no religious writer save a Catholic could have written the Anima Christi, with its petition, " Hide me within thy wounds."

Evidently Father D'Arcy was not aware that Williams of Pantycelyn, the Welsh eighteenth century hymnologist, expresses precisely the same thought in almost identical language. His hymns are replete with similar metaphors, but the source of this Calvinistic Methodist's ideas about the Passion of Our Lord was Moravian, not C,atholic.—I am