We may imitate the method of our master St. Thomas by setting down the opinion from which we differ. Dean Rashdall of Carlisle has given us a full and perhaps final expression of that opinion in his paper read at the Cambridge Conference of Modern Churchmen under the title “Christ as Logos and Son of God.” He writes :

“Jesus did not claim divinity for Himself. He may have called Himself, or more probably allowed Himself to be called, the Messiah or Son of God. But never in any critically well-attested sayings is there anything which suggests that His conscious relation to God was other than that of a man towards God. . . . The speeches of the Fourth Gospel where they go beyond the Synoptic conception cannot be regarded as history, valuable as they may be for theology. The doctrine of our Lord’s divinity must be taken to express the Church’s conception of what Jesus is or should be to His followers and to the world, not His own theory about Himself.

“Note 2. . . .If we accept the Synoptic discourses as substantially correct (though not, of course, in every detail, for there are considerable discrepancies between them), it is impossible to regard the Johannine discourses as equally accurate reports ; and even in this Gospel few sentences (when taken apart from the Preface, which does not pretend to represent the words of Jesus, and other comments of the Evangelist) imply actual Godhead in the sense of post-Nicene theology. . . . The claim to be the Son of God does not necessarily imply Godhead” (The Modern Churchman, Sept., pp. 278, 279)

What is wrong with modern marriage? A somewhat interesting correspondence upon this question appeared during the summer in a London morning paper, and hundreds of people took part in it, eager to give an answer in the light of their own experiences. It was obviously a popular, and certainly a timely, subject for discussion : popular, since almost every conceivable and inconceivable school of thought (or what passes for thought) was represented in that curious series of letters. It was, too, a timely subject, since something must be very wrong with modern marriage when so many thousands of men and women are hastening to the divorce courts to get their marriages dissolved. Still, it was not, nor was it intended to be, a serious or a useful discussion ; its headlines were meant to provide something catchy and piquant for the holiday-making public, and if they prevented the newspaper sales from going all to pieces during the dead season, the correspondence amply fulfilled its purpose.

Yet the whole matter of modern marriage is far more serious than those light-hearted inquisitors killing time by the summer sea suppose. Marriage is no longer the grave, deliberate, and stable settlement it used to be, and, outside the Catholic Church, there are few marriages to-day in which, from the first, divorce is not contemplated as a possible eventuality. Divorce has, in fact, now assumed the proportions of a scandal and of a portent unique in the annals of Christianity. True, it has been a commonplace in America for many years, but nothing American ever seems to surprise us over much : we look upon her as a young and irresponsible country, and it is the acknowledged privilege of youth and irresponsibility to shock its elders with impunity.

Among the “metaphysical poets” of the seventeenth century Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan form a group apart. They were writers of purely devotional poetry in an age when licentious love-poems and “epithalamiums”— what Dr. Johnson styled “amorous ditties”—were the prevailing fashion. They were united by the . immense spiritual debt which, as they both acknowledge, Crashaw and Vaughan owed to “holy Herbert.” And their chief poems were written within the space of twenty years, for Herbert wrote “The Temple” in 1632 ; Crashaw, “Steps to the Temple” in 1648 ; and Vaughan, “Silex Scintillans” in 1654.

Johnson’s use of the word “metaphysical” in his Essay on Cowley is a curious instance of how a quite inappropriate epithet may fairly describe a certain peculiarity of poetic style. For, although it has no relation whatever to any philosophical matter in the poetry, it is by no means difficult to see what was in the great critic’s mind. An appearance of profundity of thought produced by cryptic language was what he noted, and he used the word “metaphysical” in much the same way as some modern writers use the word “mystical,” without regard to its exact connotation, as a general term for that which is not easily understood because its meaning does not lie upon the surface. Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan were thus, to a certain extent, “metaphysical” poets, like Cowley and Donne. Herbert, indeed, explains, and partly justifies, his use of this form in the poem strangely entitled “Jordan”

Long ago, in the days of St. Louis, there lived in the city of Paris a rich pastrycook. He had not always been rich ; in fact, he began in a very small way indeed as one of those itinerant rissole-sellers who go about at night with a large basket covered with a white napkin, selling rissoles and wafer-cakes to the poor scholars of the University. The scholars used to lead most of the pastrycooks no end of a dance, stealing their baskets and eating the rissoles and hanging the empty baskets up as trophies under their windows. But this pastrycook, whose name was Master Otelinus, did not lose his basket twice, but kept his eyes open and stuck to business and rose very high indeed in what was only too appropriately termed in those days (as, indeed, it should be in our own) the mystery of a pastrycook.

In due time he built a handsome shop in The Great Street not far from the Sorbonne, and here he stood at his open window—whose bottom shutters let down into the street made a fine counter, while the top ones were hooked back for an awning—and sold pies of all sorts and sizes from morning till night. Pies stuffed with pork and eels and wild-fowl and eggs—sometimes good eggs and sometimes bad, sanis et quandoque itn-mundis—and very peppery cheese custard. And his servants paraded the city—for he no longer went out himself—cheating his old enemies, the students, over black and white prunes and cherries and unripe apples and such-like small gear.

Few if any regions in the world can rival in romance the classical Campagna. Not the least of the evils of the Pagan Renaissance was the disastrous attempt to separate what the Church had joined together—poetry and faith, romance and philosophy. The Christian Renaissance acted far otherwise. There is no real break between Dante and Tasso, Giotto and the Della Robbias, or Donatello ; the same Catholic sap nourished these varying tendrils of the same vine.

A true romantic work is also classical, and the classics have far more of the romantic than is commonly admitted, and the most classical of landscapes may well challenge a primacy of romance.

We may admit at the outset, with Digby, that much of Italian scenery is in itself greatly inferior to northern

We take into account the disparaging words that even Ruskin himself once used of the Roman Campagna.

The Silesian Angel, or the Cherubic Wanderer. Under these quaint titles is hidden and forgotten the personal name of one of the most significant, and in manner most original of the seventeenth-century mystics. About the time that a Welsh doctor—the Silurist, Henry Vaughan— published a volume of devotional poetry, of which the thought and feeling are steeped in mysticism, the expression of quaintest beauty, a German doctor newly converted from Lutheranism to the Church, John Scheffler, also published a volume of poetry, more directly mystical in substance and whose style, though of another manner, possesses equal charm and quaintness. In the old-world herb garden of seventeenth-century mystical literature with the rosemary of “Silex Scintillans” we may gather the thyme of the Cherubinischer Wandersman. This latter work consists not of poems but of rhymed couplets, in all 1675, divided into six books. Each couplet (occasionally there are quatrains and two or three longer pieces) sums up with a concision, which rivals the Latin collect, a maxim of mystical theology, of Catholic dogma viewed from the mystical standpoint, or some ascetical rule preparatory to mystical experience. Certainly the doctrine is not original. But we can hardly look for substantial originality in the description of man’s experience of eternal truth. Nor even is the standpoint original. Every utterance can be paralleled from previous mystical writers, either of the German-Flemish or the later Spanish school. Indeed the writer is eager to insist on this in his preface. But the teachings gathered from books explain and confirm the content of a living personal experience. The poet relates what his own eyes have seen of the Word of Life.