Captive Flames

By Ronald Knox The main theme of the twenty-one panegyrics collected in Captive Flames, as Ronald Knox writes in his Dedication to Arnold Lunn, is “something which does not alter with our shifting perspectives, does not grow old. The saints do not belong to a period.… They are fixed stars, not subject to any law of impermanence.” Illustrating this dauntless fixity of the Communion of Saints and their meritorious example to earthly wayfarers are sermons on the following “selected saints and Christian heroes”: Cecilia, George, and Gregory the Great; Edward the Confessor and Anselm; Dominic, Edmund of Abingdon, and Albert the Great; Roger Bacon and Henry VI; Joan of Arc, Thomas More, and Ignatius Loyola; Philip Neri and Charles Borromeo; the English, Oxford, and Derby Martyrs; Bernadette, Thérèse, and Francis of Assisi; and G. K. Chesterton. If a star were confined into a tomb,Her captive flames must needs burn there;But when the hand that locked her up gives room, She’ll shine through a