him who offends that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.' This principle enables him to dispose of the German, the Pacifist and the Materialist in a satisfactory manner. The argument proceeds on the lines familiar to the reader. Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Bernard Bosanquet, and A. C. Bradley are most frequently cited, but Green, Mazzini, Browning, William Wallace and Gilbert Murray join them, and the Psalmist is often and aptly quoted, though always with an implied interpretation no Hebrew could accept.

To Sir Henry Jones' Religion is inspired morality, and the strengthening sense of constant victory at the heart of every passing defeat.' He agrees with Plato that the function par excellence of the State is to teach the good.' Coming at the end to the practical political problems of the hour he advises that the worker be given the responsibility as soon as possible.' 'Moreover, the instances which the history of mankind furnishes of generous conceptions introduced too soon, and too good to be practical, are very few; but the dangers of delay are written on every page.'

III. CHRISTIAN THINKING IN AMERICA AFTER THE WAR.

1. Is the World growing better? BY JAMES H. SNOWDEN, D.D., LL.D.

2. Freedom and Advance. By the Rev. OSCAR L. JOSEPH.

3. The New Opportunity of the Church. By ROBERT E. SPEER. 4. The Church and its American Opportunity. Edited by CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY.

5. The Social Gospel and the New Era. By JOHN MARSHALL BARKER, PH.D.

6. Why we fail as Christians. By ROBERT HUNTER.

THE War has produced in America as in this country a new interest in Religion and, at the same time, an acute consciousness that all is not well with the Churches. And we note that with our transatlantic cousins, as with ourselves, there is—as indeed we should expect would be the case-a great insistence on the social aspect of the Gospel and the Churches' failure to recognize this effectively. Where perhaps Americans differ from Englishmen in their attitude towards the problems raised by the recog

nition of the comparative failure of the Christian Churches to produce a really Christian society is in the greater ease with which they seem able to take optimistic views of the future. This we fancy is due rather to an American characteristic in the mentality of the authors whose books we are considering, than to any special difference in the situation presented by the Christian Churches in regard to the nation in America and in England respectively.

This optimism is especially marked in Dr. Snowden. Probably we should have few reformers had we no optimists; but a too facile optimism may defeat its own object, and we find it difficult to accept wholesale and without modification all Dr. Snowden's contentions; and we would recommend readers of Is the World growing better? to peruse Dr. Inge's Romanes Lecture on The Idea of Progress. Dr. Snowden, though he is at pains to shew that the world makes material, intellectual, ethical, social and religious progress, omits to deal with the subject of aesthetic progress. The omission is comprehensible in a special pleader.

'Jesus himself,' says Dr. Snowden,1 was a jubilant optimist'; and he is not the first person who has pointed out the optimism of the Gospel. But the phrase ' jubilant optimist' suggests to us someone other than the Christ of the Synoptists or of St. John, and the tendency to regard Christianity as a very cheerful religion is sometimes maintained at the cost of ignoring its sterner aspects, the strait gate and the narrow way, the renunciation of home, family and riches, the daily bearing of the cross. The optimism with which Dr. Snowden concludes that the world war is giving us a better world is an instance of a somewhat over-easy satisfaction. And when he maintains that it was impossible for the Kaiser and his hosts to win the War . . . on account of God,' and that its outcome in the utter downfall of Germany and the severe terms of peace satisfies the sense of justice of humanity, and upholds the integrity of the universe and strengthens faith in Providence,' 2 we feel that this view is no advance on that of the Hebrew chroniclers of Israel's wars. Again when Dr. Snowden says that human beings on the whole are better fed and housed and clothed, and life is more decent, comfortable and beautiful than formerly,3 we wonder whether, when we contrast the work and the life of the craftsman of earlier centuries with that of the mass of

1 P. 63.

2 P. 85.

3 P. 102.

artisans to-day, the gain in the beauty and comfort of life, even, let us say, in its decency, exists. Dr. Snowden proceeds to say that after all it is wrong to make pleasure or happiness the standard by which all things are measured; that is true, but then it ceases to be a reason for optimism that we progress in material wealth and inventiveness.

Dr. Snowden admits and it is a very damaging admission for an optimist-that the most serious objection to an optimistic view of the world that is brought forward is that 'amidst all this external progress human nature has not changed and is essentially no better or different to-day as compared with what it was thousands of years ago.' But Dr. Snowden takes comfort in the fact that no one can doubt that the human nature of Abraham Lincoln was fundamentally and immeasurably better than that of Nero'; but such comfort is shortlived, for one need only remind oneself of Marcus Aurelius, and the greatest admirers of Abraham Lincoln will scarcely say his human nature was superior to that of the great Stoic.

Dr. Snowden sums up his reasoning in the great utterance of St. Paul: We know that all things work together for good to them that love God,' and that indeed is the Christian's ground of optimism, of hope and serenity. But it does not necessarily imply progress, or that the world indubitably grows better. The victory of faith must often be over facts which do not yield easily to an optimistic view of the world's general progress. He certainly was not an optimist in the ordinary sense of the term, but a very true Christian who wrote

Blind unbelief is sure to err,

And scan His works in vain :
God is His own Interpreter,
And He will make it plain.'

Mr. Joseph is less confidently convinced that the world is growing more Christian, while he feels with very many that restatement and new efforts and fresh vitality are essential if this is to be so. He lays stress rather on the social than on the individualistic aspect of the Gospel. In Chapter xi. Expansion of Christianity,' he says:

The

'It is encouraging to know that we are learning to interpret the threefold task of the Church-to teach. to preach, and to heal-not from the individualistic, but from the social standpoint,"

1 P. 104

In The New

and he goes on to speak of foreign missions. Opportunity of the Church Mr. Speer devotes the last chapter (Chapter V.) to the subject of 'The War Aims and Foreign Missions':

'One of the most significant things of the day is to see how the great ideals and purposes of the missionary enterprize that have been the commonplaces of some men's lives, have been gathered up as a great moral discovery, and made the legitimate moral aims of the nation in the great conflict in which we have been engaged. . . . The need for achieving the things we fought for is here to-day all over the world. The missionary effort is the honest effort to achieve them.'

With the views expressed by these two American writers, one may compare the interesting remarks in the very ably summarized account of various witnesses by Dr. Cairns, called The Army and Religion, on the keen interest which the subject of Foreign Missions aroused in the men at the Front. Doubtless the new contact with other races and other lands into which the war has brought so many, and the fact that here is a new and definite idea of what Christianity can do, accounts for this. Mr. Speer points out how much Christian Missions have done in humanizing and elevating social and industrial relations in colonial enterprise; and to this we may any day get witness from British officials in India and the Dominions. Is it possible that proof may come from this quarter of the possibility of Christianizing industrial relations at home? Has the Church indeed a new opportunity of great scope here?

There is much that is sound and sensible in Mr. Joseph's book, especially perhaps we should note the chapter on The Bible' and that on The Work of Christ.' But we think that in his protest against any narrowness which he feels would limit the universal nature of the Truth, Mr. Joseph is inclined to ignore the fact that truth, because universal, is not therefore indefinite, and to undervalue the heroic struggle of the human intelligence to define its faith in creeds, while his lack of sympathy with certain expressions of the religious spirit makes him blind to the aspects of truth which they represent. For instance, we would protest against the statement that celibacy, whether Christian or non-Christian, has not illustrated the joys of home-life nor discharged the obligations to society.'1 What about St. Paul? Would Mr. Joseph maintain that he did not do the latter?

1 P. 133.

Mr. Joseph emphasizes more than once that to understand religion, one must know it from within:

• The true expert in religion is the saint and not the theologian, as such.'. . . He who would know the worth and majesty of religion must have an experimental knowledge of the realities of the religious life and a spirit of reverence for all religion.' '

Would Mr. Joseph really consider that the man or woman who recognizes a call to celibacy is not an expert in religion, and is false to God or society?

There is a curious misprint on p. 102. Maria Theresa must mean Saint Theresa; and we think Mr. Joseph would have done better to quote others and use inverted commas much less often.

The Church and its American Opportunity consists of papers on various topics (with one exception there are three on each subject) read last year at the Church Congress in New York, and they represent somewhat different points of view on the same topics. Probably some of these papers were meant to be rather suggestions to provoke discussion than considered judgements, and some statements are open to easy criticism and retort. For instance, Mr. William Austin Smith begins 'by way of preface and definition' by saying that he dissents from the popular conviction that war stimulates religion, and that if he believed that, he would not support a League of Nations to deprive people of so ready a means of grace; but his own paper seems to shew he really means what everyone would agree with, namely, not that war may not stimulate religion, but that war in itself is an evil, and that of course a war undertaken to stimulate religion could not achieve its object.

3

Mr. Smith has by the way a very loose way of using the word definition. It is not easy to see what he has 'defined' here, but when he says a little later that an article in the New Republic entitled Will Christianity tolerate the Churches?' contained a rather clever definition and a suggestion, and that the definition was that Christianity and the Church are not coterminous,' we are quite at a loss to know what has been defined. But there are some suggestive remarks in these three papers on the Effect of the War on Religion.'

The two papers entitled 'Shall we retain the Old Testament in the Lectionary and the Sunday School?' are both interesting, and the second, by Mr. W. L. Caswell, is bold in its frank decision

1 P. 99.

2 P. 205.

3 P.

P. 4.