in fact be indistinguishable from that of the Roman Catholic Church. The process of transformation is progressing rapidly. The Federation of Catholic Priests,' as we have already stated, claims to have a membership of over 1,200 priests,' and that is no negligible proportion of the working clergy. The enthusiasm of the Anglo-Catholic missioners is assisted by the astuteness of the party organisers. It appears that a determined effort is being made to capture the self-governing machinery set up by the Enabling Act, for the admirable disclaimers of partisanship with which the National Assembly opened its career deceived nobody. Arrangements have been made for controlling the Diocesan Conferences and Parochial Church Councils. Diocesan Committees and agents in the parishes are being everywhere appointed, and the confident hope is expressed that a majority may be secured in the next National Assembly. The Secretary of the English Church Union is almost cynically candid : "If we are to do our part in the winning of the Church and nation to God and His Christ in the Catholic way, then we must proceed upon our task by all the legitimate and constitutional means which lie ready to hand. We must use whatever opportunities are given to us, and soand so only can we hope to attain our goal. There is nothing in all this of which we need to be ashamed; nothing for which we need to apologise. At present we are no more than a minority-a small party tolerated in the Church, and in some quarters perhaps hardly tolerated. But we live for a great future and with a high hope-not content with the successes of to-day, but inspired to constant service and sacrifice by the brilliant promise of to-morrow.' When we remember that wherever the Anglo-Catholic clergy are at work a generation is growing up which from early childhood has been shaped by the confessional, that by the preposterous provision of the Enabling Act every boy or girl on reaching the age of eighteen is qualified to become a parochial elector, and that these younger and irresponsible persons are in every parish those whose attendance in meetings can be most easily secured, and whose votes can be most certainly controlled, we need no elaborate argument to convince us that there is nothing extravagant or improbable in Mr. Arnold Pinchard's confident hope that the 'small party' which he represents may succeed in dominating the National Church. Is the nation being fairly treated by the Church? If, indeed, Anglo-Catholicism expressed the deliberate decisions of the Church of England, the fact should be declared by the proper authority, so that the State might be free to determine its own policy. Are the people of England really willing to authorise and assist the type of Christianity which the Anglo-Catholics are substituting for that of the English Prayer Book? The AngloCatholics themselves are fully awake to the value of the opportunities which the National Establishment secures to the English clergyman. The National Church alone has the 'freedom of access everywhere,' said one of the Oxford priests, 'the command of attention, the hold on the affections of our people which give the opportunity for the appeal of God to be effectively made." The use of the parish church is much; the control of the parish school may be even more :— 'I need only mention the enormous importance of using to the utmost the magnificent opportunities which are open to us still in the welcome given to our visits in every house, and our right of teaching religion every morning in our school.'+ It is one thing to maintain provided schools' in which the children shall be taught the religion of the Established Church. It is quite another thing to have those schools used for teaching the religion of the Anglo-Catholics. The English people might reasonably approve the first, and reject the last. ་ The self-respect of the Church of England is at stake. Widely inclusive as it is, and ought to be, even its generous toleration must have some recognised limit. The Church of England may be tolerant,' wrote Bishop Creighton in 1899, 'but it must 'be something.' No Church can live without some distinctive principles, or without insisting that those principles shall be respected by its own officers. A National Church must, for many reasons alike of history and of policy, be patient of much variety of opinion and habit in matters indifferent; but it, as little as any other Church, can tolerate divergence in essentials. A comprehensive Church is not a Church with no platform of its own, but a Church with a platform which is comprehensive. Since the official standards of the * Vide Report, 177. Church of England are being categorically contradicted, and even formally repudiated, by the Anglo-Catholic movement, the question must needs be asked: What does the Church of England stand for in Christendom? That question must be addressed to the Church itself, since nothing short of the Church itself can properly answer it. In the process of revising the Book of Common Prayer,' the Anglican standard of doctrine and practice,' the answer ought to be made. In these circumstances what course ought loyal English Churchmen to pursue? Should they resist the revision of the Prayer Book, and acquiesce in a prolongation of the existing anarchy? That would be to play into the hands of those who find in the existing anarchy their opportunity of unhindered propagandism. It is necessary to emphasise this, for there is apparent risk that Prayer Book revision may be defeated by a grotesque alliance of Protestants and Anglo-Catholics. We submit that the policy recommended in 1906 by the Royal Commissioners should be accepted, and the revision of the Prayer Book linked with such a reform of the legal system as would make it possible for the bishops to enforce obedience to the revised rubrics. The restoration of discipline within the Church of England can only be undertaken with any reasonable prospect of success when every legitimate objection to the existing system has been candidly considered, and the system, revised and reformed by the Church itself, has received the sanction of Parliament. Then the question of loyalty to the Church of England will have been cleared of all confusing side issues, and clerical disobedience will be universally admitted to be the sufficient evidence of clerical disloyalty. The Church of England will at length emerge from the self-stultifying contradictions which at present confuse and even neutralise its corporate influence, and will again as in the past bring into the life of Christendom a witness which is deliberate, distinctive, and self-consistent. To such a Church it might yet be given to unify the Christianity of the English people, and to serve as the spiritual organ of the English State. HERBERT DUNELM: AMERICA'S PART IN THE TREATY OF Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement. By RAY STANNARD BAKER. William Heinemann. 1923. MR R. Baker's book has a special historical value in making public for the first time secret documents of the Paris Conference, and particularly the minutes of the Council of Ten' and of the later Council of Four- The Big Four' as they came to be known in the Americanised jargon of the Peace Conference. The material comprises innumerable notes, memoranda and aidemémoires of President Wilson himself, all of which, in his own words to Mr. Baker, he ‘plunked into a trunk in Paris and did 'not have time or physical energy even to sort or arrange.' And now Mr. Baker has plunked' them before the public. He has sifted them to the extent of arranging them in chapters; but the book is certainly more valuable than readable. The author has applied to his work none of the art of the historian. His information is classified neither chronologically nor topically. Any single question has to be studied in every part of his 1,500 pages; and the reader is bewildered when he peruses the successive chapters by being made to fly backwards and forwards in time over the seven months between December 4, 1918, when President Wilson sailed from America, and June 28, 1919, when he signed the Treaty at Versailles. There are endless repetitions; and yet many important subjects are omitted. The author was the head of Mr. Wilson's Press Bureau in Paris, and was deputed by the ex-President to undertake the apologia which he himself intended to write, but which physical paralysis made impossible. It is therefore frankly the work of a partisan, of an almost blind admirer of his hero. The book has the stuff from which history is made; but it is not history. It lacks discrimination; it lacks for all its bulk-completeness; and its looseness of style and sententious aphorisms continually provoke the reader to irritation. We come now,' Mr. Baker writes at the beginning of his fourth chapter, 'to the most 'illuminating of all the exhibits of the old diplomacy-the group 9966 9966 'of "secret treaties,' arrangements," conversations" by which the old Turkish Empire was to be carved up between the Allied 'Nations'-and the chapter illuminates nothing more clearly than the author's lack of understanding of this particular branch of his subject. After ten chapters devoted almost entirely to the proceedings in Paris he begins his eleventh with the remark: The Peace 'Conference in many of its aspects was only a political meeting upon a vast stage.' Opaque indeed must he conceive the density of his readers to be! And yet he subjects their intelligence to such ordeals as the frequent use of rare expressions with which the most educated might be excused for being unfamiliar. It is easy,' he exclaims on page 36, 'to excoriate 'this American ignorance '--and he employs the same unusual and inappropriate word on page 196. In another passage he writes: We had our own hard-working printing plant, handling 'the considerable printing necessities of the Commission . . . And again:Thus history appropriately stages her great events. 'It was in Colonel House's office at the Crillon that this meeting ' of the nations to make a new world constitution was held. You 'went up quickly in an elevator-and there you were.' Mr. Baker's journalistic training, which enjoins meretricious vivacity and estimates effect higher than perspective, leads him on to many irrelevant and trite reflections. On the other hand some of his word-pictures are arresting and convey his meaning well enough; as when, in describing the discussion by the victorious countries of the allocation of the ex-German colonies, he records that 'a 'little later, when she discovered what was going on, Portugal ' also lifted up a piping treble, but no one paid any attention.' President Wilson might with advantage have delegated the writing of his defence to one of his compatriots who could compose that brilliant English which we associate with the names of Emerson and Owen Wister, and with despatch-writers like the late Mr. John Hay, or many of Mr. Wilson's own subordinates, whose memoranda are quoted in these pages. But Wilson was never happy in the presentation of his case; and we are bound to admit that the very artlessness with which Mr. Baker lays his material before us gives his book a peculiar value. He has not moulded it according to his fancy; we may deplore his ineptitude in the arts of selection and compression; but he is entitled to our |