Mr. Allen Tate is a religious determinist, and apart from his intellectual honesty (he constantly makes a point of giving his own case away), a very astute one. If the reader [of The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays] is a little jaded with the taste of dogmatic tabasco sauce on modern literature, he will have no relief here…. Mr. Tate continually refers to his prejudices, and the modern liberal's attempt to escape from prejudice is nailed into its coffin with three resounding whacks: it is private, mantic, and willful. Normally, a prejudice in the mind is a major premise which is mostly submerged, like an iceberg. Mr. Tate's explicit prejudice is more like a loadstone mountain or a siren's island and is for a view of man which coordinates and limits the faculties of intellect and feeling. Such a view he finds in Catholic Christianity, particularly in...