Continent isolated
Sir: The role of the advocatus diaboli is unenviable as he is predestined to lose every lawsuit and eventually to witness the canonisation of the target of his prosecution.
However, Sir Denis Brogan (7 July) might have prepared his brief with greater care. For instance, Cervantes seems to have been unaware of the twentieth century Spanish spelling reform and had his hero's name printed Quixote, which, of course, we accepted. Nor can we persuade ourselves that books printed in the Quechua language have exerted any impact on the mind of man, as the vast majority of Quechua speakers (at most five million men, women and children) are illiterate. The Conciliengeschichte by Cardinal Hefele (not Heffele) is an invaluable sourcebook—and entirely unknown outside the seminars of church history.
The Dominican Denifle's massive attack on Luther (1904) was almost immediately softened down by the Jesuit Grisar (1911); both biographies are now museum pieces of the old unhappy days of venomous religious controversy. As regards 'the badness of the American entries,' our American friends and advisers, to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude, may perhaps be forgiven for believing that the Cambridge Professor of Political Science is not the only expert in the field of American studies.
P. H. Muir
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