In this very full and trustworthy account by an Anglican clergyman of the notable doings of a group of Church of England men in the nineteenth century two things, in especial, are of interest to Catholics to-day : (i) The movement called Christian Socialist. (2) The self-governing workshop.

(1) It was at the time of the first stirrings of the Second Spring in England—a time when Protestant “society” felt its very foundations shaken by the conversion of Newman and by “Roman aggression,” and believed all law and order about to be overturned by revolutionary Chartists—that the Christian Socialists, whose antecedents may be traced to Carlyle, Coleridge, and Southey, came to the front. Shocked at the horrors perpetrated on men, women, and children by triumphant and unrestrained capitalism, at the sweating, the insanitary dwellings of the poor, at the widespread misery in a land where vast riches were conspicuous, the Christian Socialists, of whom F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and J. M. Ludlow were the chiefs, declared that the social question must not be left to freethinkers for its solution, and that the Christian people of God must take their part against “the unsocial Christians and the unchristian socialists.” The word Socialism has always been used loosely in this country, and the inability to agree upon a common and exact definition has provoked a vast amount of irrelevant controversy.