On every wrapper of every volume, Everyman’s Library engages itself to supply its readers, for a few pounds, with a whole bookshelf of the immortals; and for a comparatively small expenditure to make a man intellectually rich for life. This promise is strangely fulfilled in two of its latest volumes—752 and 753. They are thus described on the title-page :

They are immortal in the same sense that a mutilated mummy is immortal. They will make their readers intellectually rich for life by obliging them to incur the comparatively small expenditure necessary for the purchase of James Gairdner’s edition of the Paston Letters. For there alone, and not here at all, can the average reader hope to form any adequate notion of what the Paston Letters are, and what is their title to immortal fame.

At first sight it appears that, except for a quotation from the Catalogue of the British Museum, Mrs. Archer-Hind ignores James Gairdner and his work altogether. But on closer inspection this proves to be too charitable a supposition. Mrs. Archer-Hind has used Gairdner’s work, but she has misread it superficially and clumsily, and ineptly travestied it.

To justify this very serious charge, I must set down here much that is common knowledge amongst all to whom the Paston Letters are more than a name. I do so as nearly as possible in Gairdner’s own words.

The little church of St. Peter the Apostle at Edinburgh, which has been so richly blessed in many ways, has lately been adorned with two windows, the work of Morris and Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams. These windows dazzle not only the eye, but the understanding; for it is difficult to believe what is here so evident, that modern artists have vindicated skill and courage even in competition with the great glass which is among the highest achievements of man. Mr. Meredith Williams has been good enough to put his signature to some remarks on the early glass which he and his gifted wife have specially and deeply studied, and the hopes there are of emulating what has been done in the past.

The windows are small, namely, seven feet or so in height. They are situated in the Chapel of the Madonna and back the north. The chapel has the choir chamber above it, and is separated from the church by an arcade of two arches opposite the windows. If this description is clear, it is evident that the jewel lights have an unparalleled position; and that ‘the eyes of a panther in the dark’ are severely outclassed by them.

The subject of the work is loaded as full as it can carry. The borders contain a multitude of emblematical matters; angels, the summit of creation next to the Immaculate Herself, are justly in much evidence; that Jerusalem which is above, and is our mother, appears as a Gothic town in the upper parts; instruments of the sacred Passion are figured,

We imagine that few besides those specially interested in the fate of Christianity in the East paid much attention to a tiny paragraph which appeared among the obiter dicta of the newspapers some weeks ago. The news was not considered worthy of prominence; even an important Catholic paper placed it at the foot of the column. Those who discovered the paragraph learned that two Christians had been murdered at Smyrna and a Catholic priest stoned; that was all.

But in the days when European Christendom was still a reality such items of news have stirred up whole countries, and have gone far towards the promotion of a new crusade. Times and sentiments have changed. Perhaps some excuse may be found for our apathy in the fact that the events of the past ten years have so accustomed us to the thought of death, murder and the massacre of thousands, that the slaughter of two individuals even on account of their Christian faith can hardly be expected to stir up interest, not to speak of indignation. Besides, did not this happen in Asia Minor? And how can we be expected to be moved with righteous indignation over two wretched Asiatics, when we have watched the slow massacre of a Christian people, the Armenians, in the same country?

Further, the general ignorance of the course of events in Asia Minor during the past three years conceals from our minds the tragedy that lies behind this announcement of the massacre of those two fellow-Christians of ours.

Humanitarianism, in its modern form began with Auguste Comte ninety years ago, and has, since then, been ably expounded by such positivists as Stuart Mill, Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall, as well as by James Cotter Morison and H. G. Wells. But man’s worship of Man—for Humanitarianism is nothing else—is as old almost as history. Only its name has changed. To-day, however, possibly more than in any other age, the revivifying of this error is a terrible menace, rapidly taking root and spreading like some noxious weed in our very midst.

Amongst those who have become acutely conscious of this danger and who have set themselves to expose and resist it, Father Dudley has wielded his pen to good effect in the cause of Christianity and human happiness. In a recent work (from the excellence of which even the dreadful colour chosen for the cover must not be allowed to detract) he has exposed the worthlessness and folly of this pretended road to happiness. As Mr. Chesterton says so justly, in his Introduction, this ‘book is concerned with a highly practical and even topical point in the controversies of the day.’

‘Positivistic Humanitarianism’ is a big title for a petty system. It clings to sense knowledge to the detriment and exclusion of intelligence. Nothing must be believed which does not come under the direct dominion of the senses. The logical conclusion of such a doctrine—it is the one glimmer of logic—is the exclusion of God. And, since man must have something to adore, it offers him himself as a deity.