A Resurrection of Relics is the title of a “Modern Churchman’s defence in a recent charge of heresy” urged against the Rev. H. D. A. Major, principal of a Church of England Theological College at Oxford, and Editor of The Modern Churchman. Presented by a brother clergyman to his bishop on a charge of heresy on account of a statement publicly made “that the form which the doctrine of the resurrection assumes in his mind is the survival of death by a personality which has shed its physical integument for ever,” Mr. Major has brought out a pamphlet in which he reiterates this statement and endeavours to defend his position.

He has been brought to hold what he does, he tells us, not merely “because of the intrinsic improbability” of the doctrine from which he dissents, “nor because of the scientific difficulties to which it was open.” He has been led to reject the doctrine “because it has become clear that Jesus Christ did not teach it.” With the Apostles it is otherwise, and “it may well be that the teaching of St. Paul is different.” But, if so, so much the worse for St. Paul. Like the Salvation Army lass when confronted with St. Paul’s teaching on women’s speaking in church, he has his answer ready. “Ah ! but that, you see, is just where I don’t agree with Paul.” There is only a single passage of Our Lord’s teaching to appeal to, so he tells us, for “the resurrection teaching of the Fourth Gospel is not easy to interpret” and may therefore, apparently, be left unexamined. The one passage which is decisive, in Mr. Major’s view, is the answer of Our Lord to the Sadducees, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

A wholly new influence over books written on school-life began with Compton Mackenzie and Sinister Street. Previously to that there had indeed been school stories, an endless procession of them, including such masterpieces as Tom Brown's Schooldays and others that like Eric sought to appeal frankly to that innate sentimentalism that lies uncomfortably across the conscience of every English boy. These, however, had culminated in The Hill, The Harrovians, and The Bending of the Twig, which are the three finest probably of that older school of Romanticism, throwing its touching veil of fights, friendship, and laughter over the hardened formalities and dreary littlenesses of normal school-life. These represent, then, the final effort of a style of writing which had become obsolete when dealing with “Olympians,” but was still employed in the happy efforts of grown men to recapture the spirit of boyhood, its inner sanctities and outer brutalities, its sorrows, its heartiness, its monotony, its intrigues as baffling, and to master and pupil as entrancing as the political games that interest and exhaust the diplomats of a larger world.

Then came the first volume of Sinister Street. This must be too well known to all readers of Blackfriars to require much treatment here : but its importance is hardly to be calculated. It opened the eyes of boys to the fascinating study of self-analysis : for it differed in two respects from previous ventures, in that first, it was written by one who had hardly left school, and secondly, it was a very detailed description of the changing attitude of a boy’s mind, its unfolding to good and evil, and thus it interested the reader, as often as not a boy-reader, in watching the changing attitude of his own mind.

In the year that Charles the First came to the throne, Richard Crashaw was a lad of thirteen at the Charterhouse School. He had lost his mother in his infancy, and his father—the Rev. William Crashaw, a learned theologian, eloquent preacher, indifferent poet and bitter anti-Catholic— had recently died, leaving him with slender resources, but endowed with uncommon abilities and a rare gift for making friends.

He went to Cambridge in 1631 ; was admitted to Pembroke College ; gained a pensionership, having, as he afterwards wrote to a friend, spent all his patrimony in buying books ; and graduated in 1634 when he was twenty-one. In the same year he published a book of Scripture Epigrams in Latin, memorable for the one immortal line, “Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit,” upon which the skill of many translators, including William Hayley, has been exercised.

To draw a true portrait of Richard Crashaw he must be presented in this University setting. For he was, pre-eminently, in modern phrase, a “‘Varsity man.” The advantage of life at the older universities, it has often been said, has always been found to lie as much in the friendships that common studies foster as in the studies themselves. Crashaw enjoyed both to the full. Clearly, he was a student, and lived austere, laborious days, for he became proficient in the classics, as well as in Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish, besides in acquiring some skill in music and art. And the finest minds at the University were his friends. Of these latter we learn something from the numerous elegies he composed, according to the custom of the day.

We like the method the author of A Catholic History of Great Britain has proposed to herself of emphasizing, that is to say, “leading ideas” rather than “unimportant facts,” it is the only method for treating history on so compressed a scale. But we confess to some disappointment at the result. Perhaps we expected too much. The test of a general survey consists of its presentment of Constitutional and Social development and of Foreign Relations. Here the one strikes us, more particularly in the earlier part, as wanting in clearness of outline—it is crammed with small detail—and the other as lacking the essential elements of connection and continuity.

The Saxon ceorl, for example, described as a farmer, an agriculturist (p. 20), serves as a key to Anglo-Saxon society if his position as occupying the lowest rank of free landowner, midway between the noble class on the one hand and the slave class on the other, is clearly brought out. To trace the effect of growing feudalization on the status of the ceorlish man in the age immediately preceding the Conquest, and his subsequent identification with the unfree villein of Post-Conquest days following the introduction of the fully organized Feudal System into England by the Conqueror, is to grasp the successive stages through which Englishmen passed from an order where the middle-class man, in the person of the ceorl, was free, but had below him a slave class to a society where he himself had become debased and had lost his independence, but the community at large rested no longer on a substructure of slavery. The Saxon theow had gained where the Saxon ceorl had lost, and progress was justified of her children in the dying institution of slavery.

Once upon a time there was a noble knight who led a very merry and graceless life, but at the same time never missed a sermon if he could help it. Of course people jeered at him and said he had better give up sermons if he could not behave himself more suitably. But the knight answered with becoming seriousness, “I trust in time I shall give up my evil ways ; and now although it is true that I do not do all the good I hear about, I am learning what is right against the time when I turn to honest manners in real earnest.”

Well this was an odd way of going to work, and not one I should recommend to anyone I know. But true it is that Heaven notices the little good we do and makes much of it, even though the greater part of our life is evil. The noble knight did mend his ways in time ; and not only gave up his sins, but left the world and all his possessions (which were very great) and became a monk.

Now it happened that at the monastery where he dwelt, getting holier and holier every day, there were six old donkeys which were really past work and no use to anyone at all. The abbot wanted to get rid of them ; and hearing that the noble knight was very well versed in the affairs of the world, he sent him to the fair, accompanied by a lay-brother, to sell the six old donkeys and bring back young ones. This task was by no means to the taste of the noble knight; however, he was a noble monk now, he remembered, and his nobility consisted in obedience ; so off he went.

Nationality as an isolating force is new in the world, an artificial, after-Christian growth, dating from the break-up of Christendom at the so-called Reformation in the sixteenth century. Mutual hostility between races—as opposed to conflicts between a prince and his followers of one State, and a prince of another State and his followers—is not new, but a relapse into fore-Christian barbarism, when the cult of local deities, little knowledge of each other, and total inexperience of political union, led men to regard differences of race as natural and insurmountable barriers, when to be a stranger, a man of another race and creed, was—as it has since become—to be necessarily an enemy, so that the same word—hostis—once did for both. This idea of war between races as natural— , says Plato in Book I of his Laws—was gradually checked politically by the rise of the Roman Empire and the permanence of the Imperial idea, and, on the religious side, by Christianity with its doctrine of the unity of God and of the unity of man made to His Image and equal before Him. Thus with the of Plato we may contrast St. Paul’s ‘.There is neither Jew nor Greek : there is neither bond nor free. . . . For you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. iii. 28).”

Is this a wholly wild and quite untrue presentation of history? Such measure of truth as it may be found to contain will perhaps emerge as we proceed with our enquiry.