History's a snap it's judging today that's tricky.

The glory of used-book shops is the unpredictability of their stock. Sometimes it's an intriguing title that. makes me reach for this book instead of that one. I once heard two publishers seriously argue about which colour covers were most likely to make people pick up their books. But neither title nor colour drew me last month to pull down a 66-year-old volume of 33 pages with no title printed on its solid black spine. "Glimpses of England and Germany, 1936" was written by the Very Reverend Kirk B. O'Ferrall, then Dean at the Episcopalian Cathedral of St. Paul's in Detroit, Michigan.

In light of the constant and patently unfair posthumous sniping one sees aimed at Pope Pius XII for failing to do enough to save the European Jews in World War 11--and wide reading has convinced me he was cognizant of the peril, did everything he could to minimize it, but will always be judged harshly by absolutists who would be satisfied with nothing less than total prevention of the Holocaust--I was interested to see how this representative of another Christian denomination would fare when it came to apprehending the danger and speaking against it.

Redolent of a lost world of ink pots, blotters and penmanship, O'Ferrall's book was meticulously typed up on an old Remington typewriter (probably by his secretary), then copies were printed on a Gestetner and bound between green cardboard covers with a strip of black tape around the spine. With a flourish of his fountain pen, O'Ferrall signed each title page above a note explaining this was the fourth "annual book" growing out of Sunday afternoon talks about his travels abroad each summer. It sounds like a wonderfully comfy and well-ordered life.

St. Paul's still stands at 4800 Woodward Avenue, and has its own website, but nowhere was I able to dig up any biographical material on O'Ferrall.

Apparently a pretty big deal in his day, he was invited to deliver a homily at the big St. Paul's in London, England during his 1936 trip and seemed to have no trouble getting introduced to clerical and political bigwigs wherever he went, including the chancellor of Germany, Adolph (as he spells it) Hitler.

Much about Hitler troubled him deeply, including the dictator's violence and loudly trumpeted hatreds and prejudices against all non-Aryans. Even while O'Ferrall sees that unless he is stopped, Hitler will bring on "such a world war as we have never seen on the face of the earth," he can't quite help gushing about his brush with greatness as Hitler passes him in a hallway and climbs into a waiting Mercedes; commenting on "der Fuehrer's vitality," "the magnetic glow in his eyes," and his "gentle smile for all" that "seemed genuine and sincere.

O'Ferrall had a deep love for Germany and had been there many times before. Just four years earlier he had seen firsthand the degradation and destitution of the late Weimar Republic when, saddled with unpayable reparation bills from the First World War and a catastrophically devalued currency, Germans literally had to load up their wheelbarrows with cash to conduct the simplest transactions for scarce staples of existence. Even as he feared where Nazism was leading, he was glad to see Germany getting back on its feet.

For the most part, O'Ferrall takes great pains to present a balanced picture, yet slips badly--seeming to lose the human generosity of his faith, the soundness of his judgements, and even the customary grace of his prose--when writing about the Jews. "The Jew was a pariah, an outcast. He was a wandering Internationalist. Over the face of many lands for centuries, fighting, coming back, he has come in many countries into financial prominence as he has in Germany, arousing a slumbering hatred that, when Hitler came in, broke loose in all its fury. Now dying as a citizenry, treated as pariahs.

"No physical persecution now! I have that on very good authority, not since the earliest days, but a deep sense of shame and made to feel their inferiority."

What makes me cringe in reading such a passage, and what gives this small book such a dark fascination, are the echoes it sets off of conversations I'm hearing in every quarter today as the world tenses up in anticipation of another possible war in Iraq. Who among us isn't in the dark to some degree as we try to figure out the impossibly complicated and constantly shifting scenarios that loom on every side? In our resentment, fear, prejudice and ignorance, I hear people lashing out in harsh, dehumanizing terms at (in alphabetical order) Americans, Jews, and Muslims.

Nearly seven decades later, it's dead easy to sit in judgement of Reverend O'Ferrall, as so many writers sit in judgement of Pope Pius XII. If only we could see half so clearly our own bigotry and unfairness today!

Herman Goodden writes from London, ON. His column appears every other month.