Our Western world is said to be looking for a religion: what is more certain is the pretty general feeling that life is an affair of surfaces, most of them monotonous, the others painful either for themselves or because their beauty is already flecked with decay; and following this feeling the desire for something to which our present experience is only penultimate. In this sense perhaps many would adopt the title of a recent book, God is my Adventure, an account in the best manner of religious journalism of some personalities outside the official religions who are supposed to have penetrated beyond the obvious into the background of life.

“It has added much,” confesses Dr. Hensley Henson, “to my too slight knowledge of the remarkable essays in spiritual exploration, which are certainly not the least impressive indication of the profound religious dislocation of our time.” Dislocation, the word is just; the figures in the book bear witness to it: emotion must disavow thought, or the other way round; the peaks of experience must spurn the lower ranges of life from which they rise; the individual is isolated from his social environment and historical antecedents: man is no longer catholic but peculiar; working in a tunnel not living in the universe.

Yet as sin is the choice of good out of place, so error is the pursuit of truth out of place, and Mr. Landau is alert to discover the value of the various messages. Sometimes he has to try hard, but never is he contemptuous; his criticism though keen is humble. Religious types are of many kinds, and not all his subjects are so intellectually impressive as Ouspensky or Steiner.