, Faith in a Hard Ground. Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Afairs, vol. , Imprint Academic, Exeter 2008, pp. xxvi + 273. is a collection of twenty-ive papers, ifteen of which are published here for the irst time. Most of the others appeared only in journals or in books not bear- ing Anscombe’s name. It is the second such collection to come out since her death in 2001, thanks again to the diligent labors of her son-in-law Luke Gormally in col- laboration with her daughter Mary Geach. (The other volume is Human Life, Action and Ethics, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Afairs, vol. , Imprint Academic, Exeter, 2005.) Evidently a large body of Anscombe’s writings is still waiting to see the light, and it is certainly to be hoped that they will carry on the work. As in the previous volume, both the selection and the arrangement of the essays is topical rather than chronological. Some of the manuscripts carry no date ; the dated pieces extend from 1957 to 1992. Of those that Anscombe never brought to publica- tion, some were delivered as lectures, while others were never presented publicly in any form. One naturally wonders why. If she judged them unit, then the standards that she set for herself were severe indeed. In any case, there is a good deal here that can shed light on things she did publish. The topics are quite various : faith and belief (believing someone, as opposed to believing in someone) ; prophecy and miracles ; “paganism, superstition and philoso- phy” ; hatred of God ; attachment to things ; the immortality of the soul ; the early embryo ; transubstantiation ; general moral matters (authority in morals, good faith, sin, moral education) ; contraception, chastity and natural family planning (4 papers) ; lying (and the spirit in which two theologians treat it) ; nuclear weapons ; simony ; usury ; and to close the volume, an essay “On Wisdom.” The intended audiences also vary widely. Anyone familiar with Anscombe’s writ- ing will expect, and ind, some tough going, but the pieces aimed at non-philosophers are surprisingly readable (and no less philosophical). For instance, many parents and educators could beneit greatly from “The Moral Environment of the Child.” The essays on contraception, chastity and natural family planning deserve to be read by all educated Catholics. What ties it all together is that in one way or another each essay brings out some- thing about how philosophy and Catholicism interacted in Anscombe’s thought. The volume’s aptly chosen title echoes a line from Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse. (“But Mark was come of the glittering towns / Where hot white details show, / Where men can number and expound, / And his faith grew in a hard ground / Of doubt and reason and falsehood found, / Where no faith else could grow.”) In the poem, the hard ground is classical pagan thought, in whose setting the only faith that could survive and grow was Christianity. The analogy with Anscombe’s situation is