Mr. G. K. CHESTERTON, in what is really a brilliant essay on the part played by the Church in the history of England, has an illuminating illustration of the influence of Christianity on slavery. He points out that the Church did not agitate for abolition by legislation, but created an atmosphere in which slavery simply could not exist. As for the slave, an interesting process resulted. He had been the stick of his master, to be used for any purpose and broken at will, but under this influence he was first rooted in the ground and became a serf, and then threw out branches upward and roots downward and became a citizen.

That atmosphere has taken some time to dissipate. When, in the sixteenth century, the spiritual concept of one Empire under the tutelage of one Church broke down, there emerged from the resulting confusion National States which have increasingly tended to repudiate all direct concern for religion. In the new political entities, the spiritual functions of the Church were first strictly limited but officially recognized ; they have increasingly come to be regarded, however, as in no wise within the sphere of politics. The Catholic Church has long since predicted the result. In our own day we are beginning to see it.

Few more saddening confessions of religious change have ever been made than those of Renan, in his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de feunesse. The emotional appeal of his forsaken Faith was never silenced, although he came to regard its foundations as unsound. He felt cut off from those social acts of worship which mean so much to most of us.

“Quellien,” says he, speaking of a young friend— “Quellien a tres bien compris ce qui fera toujours defaut a mon Eglise, c’est I’enfant de choeur. Ma vie est comme une messe sur laquelle pèse un sort, un éternel Introibo ad altare Dei, et personne pour répondre : Ad Deum quil aetificat juventutem meam. Ma messe n’aura pas de servant. Faute de mieux, je me la repondrai a moi-même; mais ce n’est pas la même chose.”

It can never be the same thing to a nature naturally religious, exiling itself from a Community with worldwide activities, and sustaining its life by practices in force during centuries. Leaving the great Family of Faith he paid the penalty entailed.

He goes to the Eucharist to find an illustration of his companionlessness. He cries—but catches no response. He intones the prayer ; but that prayer has been emptied of the meaning which alone can call forth the swift reply of an answering love.

There is probably no name better known in the realm of psychology than Dr. McDougall’s, and that he should have deserted Oxford and England for Harvard and America will be a matter of continual regret to all who know him and have had the pleasure of listening to his lectures. The fact that his book on Social Psychology should have reached its fifteenth edition in twelve years is eloquent testimony at once to the growing popularity of the subject and to the skill and erudition of the author. Dr. McDougall has rendered us more than one service of inestimable moment. He has put an end at once to the crude materialism which would explain mind in terms of body, and to the atomic associationism which would reduce it to a conglomeration of simple ideas. Whether his arguments prove that the human soul is the evolutionary product of animal mind is open to question, but they at any rate prove that there is a human soul—which is something to be thankful for in days such as ours. They also show clearly that, whether all mental functions are developments of instinct or not, they at any rate play a much more important part in human life than is commonly supposed.

It would be interesting if statistics could be obtained showing the relative number of people who attend concerts and of those who visit exhibitions of painting, sculpture, etc. I am always amazed at the fewness of the latter, except in the case of the Royal Academy, when I am equally amazed at their number.

We cannot measure the enjoyment received from music and the graphic arts, but there is an element of adventure in most exhibitions which is almost entirely lacking in a concert. The concert can vary little from its published programme ; in an exhibition every work may be a surprise. I will take the April exhibition at the Leicester Galleries as an example.

The advertisements announced only that there would be work by Mr. Mark Fisher, R.A., and Miss E. Fortescue-Brickdale, R.W.S. No hint was given as to what the third room would contain nor as to what bronzes, etc., would fill up the odd comers. These unannounced items were a most varied collection of drawings, paintings and sculpture, ranging from Gainsborough to Epstein. The works shown in the window were alone worth a pilgrimage. I will mention a few of the exhibits as they occur to my memory.

If we attempt to realize with any distinctness the life of the Middle Ages in this country, we are at first baffled by the fact that, while our fundamental human nature, with its passions and weakness, its heroism and its aspirations, remains much the same throughout recorded time, the material framework and the habits of society, the knowledge of nature and the philosophy of belief and conduct, all of which influence our judgment and colour the language in which we express it, have changed enormously. We find it very difficult to grasp the real reasons why men created the institutions under which they lived and clung to them when they seemed to have decayed, to understand why their point of view was so different from our own, or, indeed, to realize at all that the people, who dressed and lodged and bought and sold, and at times acted so differently from ourselves, were men and women like ourselves and, generally, at least, as practical and as keen-witted as we are.

Indeed, the modern English people, ultimately as a result of that orgy of destructive licence which is called the Reformation, and immediately as a mental effect of the unstable and irrational social conditions which have grown out of that revolt, seems to have lost all sense of historic time, as (and, perhaps, because) it has lost most of its popular traditions. To the average modem Englishman fifty years back is ancient history, while five hundred years ago, if he attempts to think of such a distant period at all, is a dim period in which queer, primitive people acted in queer ways from sheer ignorance and barbarism.

Changing somewhat the meaning, we may apply to Père Lagrange what St. Paul says of himself: “To the Greeks and to the Barbarians I am a debtor.” In his work Le Sens du Christianisme d'après l'Exégèse Allemande now translated into English under the title The Meaning of Christianity according to Luther and his Followers in Germany, he is concerned to show how the effort to create a distinctively German religion, which should be imposed upon the rest of the world by the ascendancy of the German peoples and of their culture, was doomed to failure ; but at the same time he does not forget to discharge a simple debt of justice.

Rome, the heiress of the ancient civilization and the teacher of the Christian faith, he reminds us in his Preface, educated the German barbarians; and Germany brought new forces to Rome. In the great body of Christendom, Germany represented a distinct civilization—distinct, indeed, but one which was not isolated. Even after Luther, Germany, for a long time, seemed as careful to maintain her place in the concert of European nations as she was to show independence of Rome. Even when, at the end of the eighteenth century, she made up her mind to keep more to herself, she yet sheltered her own renaissance under the genius of Shakespeare, and Goethe urged her to draw from Greek sources a sense of proportion and of form, to borrow from the French Theatre its nobility and its beauty.

The dividends drawn yearly or half-yearly provide incomes for a very considerable number of people, and many by this provision are relieved from the necessity of earning a livelihood. Sometimes these dividends provide incomes for people quite incapable of earning a living for themselves. In other cases they supplement the incomes of hard-working professional men and women.

The incomes from dividends, when sufficiently large, are an assurance to their possessors that the material needs of this life shall be satisfied: that is, that money will be duly forthcoming to pay for necessary food, clothes, and house-room. It may even happen that the income from dividends alone will provide not only the bare necessities of life, but allow us to gratify the desire for pleasant comforts and joyful luxuries, without working.

Small wonder is it then that so great an attention is paid to this matter of dividends.

A fine book, but a still finer play. That, I think, . will be the final judgment of those who know both intimately.

For drama—if it be real drama—does, after all, reveal what the printed word does not. It gets home to the heart in a lightning flash. At the play, the audience is tense and concentrated in a moment of great emotion. There is no likelihood of such interruption as disturbs us, more often than not, by some fantastic freak of nature, when we near the climax of a book. We are gripped, hypnotized almost, by the actor’s art. The actual intonation of the spoken word, the dumb appeal of stricken human figures, only a few feet distant, move us more nearly than the vision of suffering evoked but for the few out of mere letterpress. Theatrical effects are broader, cruder, made by a terser medium. When poignant, as in the case of The Garden of Allah, they are unforgettable.

Napoleon once said the love of country was the first virtue of civilized man. Opinions differ as to the desirability, one may say the “virtuousness,” of some virtues, but in all ages the patriot has been one whom men have delighted to honour.

Yet though all agree that “Patriotism” is a great good, the word itself is travestied almost as frequently as other great words, e.g. “Mysticism,” “Rights,” etc. etc.

One conception there is, beautiful, poetical, and partially true ; it is the more emotional love of country, one may say of the material country, its hills and glens, plains and streams, and along with these go its traditions, all for which it stands. Men look up to their land as something which possesses them, to which they owe fealty, the land of their fathers, the cradle of their race, the beloved spot of Mother Earth round which clings all that mysterious something which makes “home.” It is an intense absorbing love which passes into a kind of worship, which produces the national literature of a country ; it is the sentiment with which the Frenchman speaks of “La France,” the Italian of “Italia,” the Irishman of “Erin,” the Scot of “Bonnie Scotland,” and the Englishman, too, of his “Motherland” (though he can call it “Blighty” and looks upon it rather as a cherished and priceless possession than as a goddess with the right to command his all). A certain proportion of such affection must exist in all Patriotism, but the thing itself is more than this.

Within the last year two, at least, valuable books have appeared on the spiritual life— Abbot Butler’s Benedictine Monachism and Mr. Watkin’s Philosophy of Mysticism. The first of these has been so much noticed that I need not stay over it, save to remark on its sweet reasonableness on the question of mortification and austerities. Herein the Abbot contrasts with Mr. Watkin, who explains and defends with enthusiasm the path of utter detachment up Carmel. This difference, at first sight merely one of emphasis, does, I think, depend ultimately on divergent philosophies, and therefore raises several problems. Does, for instance, a philosophy of mysticism or sanctity require one definite way to God, and is that way necessarily one of ruthless austerity and detachment?

That this question is worth asking is proved by the fact that nowadays there is a desire to portray saints as gracious and lovable persons—not after the manner of the Oratorian lives, which even in the fifties were ill received—but as intensely human and aided to love of their fellowmen by a passionate love of God. A good example is the life of Soeur Thérèse. On the other hand, no amount of explanation can disguise the severity of a St. Gerard Majella, a Père Ginhac or a Father Doyle. The life of the fatter is especially interesting because his biographer quite clearly loves the human element in Father Doyle, but is too sincere to hide the extremes which his asceticism adopted, extremes which might have come straight out of the pages of Surius and are somewhat at variance with the ideal cherished by Abbot Butler.