The Liberty of Difference

WHEN Hugh Benson, son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, went out of the Church of England into the Church of Rome, he carried with him the uninterrupted friendship of his friends. They disapproved of his proceedings, but they let him go without dispute, even without complaint. He liked to tell the story of an Anglican bishop who considerately accounted for a like change in one of his clergy by reminding his brethren that ‘they must not forget the serious fall their poor friend had had from his bicycle not long before, which had undoubtedly gravely affected his mental powers.’ His own experience, however, gave him little material for even such mild controversial anecdote as this. The Provost of Eton spoke for his friends when he sent him his affectionate benediction; and his mother spoke for his family when she said, ‘If Hugh’s father, when he was here on earth, would have always liked him to follow his conscience, how much more in Paradise.’

Nothing is more interesting in Mr. A. C. Benson’s memoir of his brother ¹ than this cordial recognition of the liberty of difference.

The book is frank and intimate to such a degree that a sensitive reader has an uncomfortable feeling that he ought not to be reading it; as if a casual week-end visitor were made the recipient of the most sacred confidences of a household. It is such a record as might be passed about in manuscript among near relatives and very close friends. We perceive, with an uneasy sense of intrusion, that we are included in this inner circle on no other condition than the payment of a dollar and a half to a bookseller. This, however, is Mr. Benson’s affair, not ours. If he is graciously willing to invite such remote persons as ourselves into these domestic privileges, we may accept the invitation, with wonder but with gratitude. And being thus made, for the moment, a member of the family of a young man whose one dramatic act was to leave the Church in which his father had been Primate and go into the Church of Rome, we may profitably note how quietly and without noise of contending voices this interesting step was taken. His people seem to have regarded his departure as the beginning of a journey into a strange country, which they themselves, indeed, had no desire to visit, but which would probably enrich his life with new and delightful experiences. Thereafter he was more interesting to them than he had ever been before. They liked to have him photographed with them in family groups, wearing the clothes which indicated the difference of his position.

It is true that the fact of difference is the condition of all progress, but this hospitable recognition of it is a distinctly modern manner of behavior. From the beginning of time men have insisted on their right to differ from their neighbors, but their neighbors, in all lands and ages, have resented the difference and have resisted it.

Thus André Lagarde begins his Latin Church in the Middle Ages² with this statement of the situation: ‘In the middle of the fifth century the Western Church occupied a position without precedent in the Roman Empire. It ruled the emperor and gave him his orders. They were orders directed especially to the extermination of all religious rivals. It required the emperor to suppress the worship of idols, and he closed the pagan temples: sometimes he even authorized their destruction. The Church wished to be rid of dissenting sects, and the emperor forbade heretical meetings. Paganism, being driven from the towns, sought refuge in the country. Heresy went into hiding: the Church was victorious.’ After a series of monographs on such themes as Sacraments and Devotions, the Monastic Life, the Pontifical Elections, the Pontifical State, the Pontifical Exchequer, and the Political and Religious Advance of the Papacy, the book ends with chapters on the heresies by which the right to differ in doctrine and in polity was gradually vindicated. Against these heresies the Latin Church brought the weapons of condemnation and excommunication, and proceeded to extremes of persecution.

If there was any warmth of human nature in the men who devised and directed this machinery, any sense of the vastness of truth and of the possibility that they might be ignorant of any part of it, such weakness does not appear in the pages of this book. The author’s monographic method takes the plot out of the story of the Middle Ages, and gives us in the place of it a series of analyzed situations in which the heroes and the villains of the play are not breathing men but labeled figures, ecclesiastics, schoolmen, and heretics. It is like the channel of a California river in summer, where furrowed sand and heaps of rounded stone show the effects of the swing and swirl of a swift current, but in which at present there is no water. The eager life of the Middle Ages, with its light and color, its spirit of adventure, its fierce hatreds and fierce loves, and its manifold complications and contradictions, does not appear. Instead of what Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor calls ‘ the mediæval mind,’ we have here the mediæval body anatomically articulated. So much the clearer, however, is the fact that the supreme contention of that exceedingly interesting period was between authority and the liberty of difference. The outstanding fact in mediæval life was the Church, whose consistent purpose was to bring all minds and wills into obedience. At the heart of every heresy the significant error was not so much a disagreement with the truth as a disagreement with the Church.

Accordingly, Dr. Schaff, writing an admirable biography of John Huss, after Five Hundred Years,³ publishes at the same time a translation of Huss’s treatise on The Church,⁴ The point at issue in Huss’s case was the divine right of the Church to suppress the liberty of difference. Huss was burned, not for his ideas concerning the Scriptures or the Sacraments, but for his persistent claim to have the right to have ideas at all. They told Huss at the Council of Constance that ‘ if the Council should tell him that he had but one eye, he was bound to agree that it was so.’ To this suggestion Huss replied that ‘if the whole world told him that he had but one eye, yet he could not, so long as he had reason, say so without violence to his conscience.’ There was the whole matter in two sentences. In vain did Huss claim to speak the mind of the saints and of the Scriptures. It was plain that he did not speak the mind of the contemporary Church, and that fact made him a heretic, regardless of all saints and scriptures.

The Council of Constance was dealing, not so much with a problem in religion as with a problem in discipline. To persons in authority, discipline is essential to efficiency. It is easy for those who are out of office to criticize the administration of discipline. John Milton, for example, deprecated the censorship of the Presbyterians. ‘Under the fantastic terrors of sect and schism,’ he said, ‘we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we should rather rejoice at.’ But to the Presbyterians, precariously walking in the midst of perils, the ‘terrors of sect and schism’ were anything but ‘fantastic.’ They threatened the efficiency and even the existence of that godly authority which they had with such difficulty gained. ‘Truth,’ said Milton, ‘is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression they sicken into a muddy pool of Conformity and Tradition,’ But Mr. Glover, in his discriminating essay on Milton in Poets and Puritans,⁵ notes that the Rev. Thomas Tompkyns, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom, as censor, the duty fell of licensing the publication of Paradise Lost, was the author of a pamphlet on The Inconveniences of Toleration. There spoke the honestly perplexed official.

Many of the independent and freespoken thinkers who appear in the unfailingly fair pages of Principal Selbie’s English Sects⁶ learned by experience that toleration was a much more complicated matter than they had at first imagined. Coming themselves into places of responsibility, and being in their turn asked to grant the liberty of difference, they refused. When the Presbyterians and Congregationalists came to deal with the Quakers and Baptists, they found themselves constrained to follow the policy for which they had so reviled the Anglicans.

This was in part the result of the annoying manner in which the dissidents manifested their dissent. The sight and sound of them was offensive. The Presbyterians and the Congregationalists resented the obtrusive and obstinate difference of the Baptists and the Quakers as the people of Fitchburg in the eighteen-thirties resented Joseph Palmer’s beard. He was the only bearded man in that part of the country, and was persecuted for it. When he resisted the attack of several neighbors who proposed to shave him, he was put in jail on a charge of unprovoked assault. ‘He far outstayed his sentence,’ said his son in an interview which Miss Sears quotes in Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, ‘ because he had to pay for all his food, drink, and coal for heating, and he considered they cheated him, so he refused to go. The sheriff and jailer, tired of having him there, begged him to leave. Even his mother wrote to him “ not to be so set.” But nothing could move him. He said that they had put him in there and they would have to take him out, as he would not walk out. They finally carried him out in his chair and placed it on the sidewalk.’ The neighbors were irritated, not only by Joseph Palmer’s beard but by his general attitude of mind. He was ‘so set.’ He rejoiced not only in the liberty, but in the splendid impudence, of difference. It was the spirit which some of his Puritan ancestors had manifested in religion. But even the community at Fruitlands, which Joseph Palmer found congenial, disciplined poor Miss Page, ‘who was summarily dismissed for having eaten fish.’

The more serious part, however, of the assertion of authority against the vagaries of difference proceeds from a natural association of discipline with efficiency. Thus Mr. Walter Lippmann in The Stakes of Diplomacy remarks that ‘there are few free-thinkers in well-drilled armies, and they are likely to be shot.’ Professor Lake, whose book The Stewardship of Faith⁷ is not only a stimulating contribution to modern theology, but is of itself an excellent illustration of the liberty of difference, says that in the early church men changed their minds with perfect freedom. ‘In that generation the way of life was the constant sacrifice of identity of expression in order to preserve the unity of experience under changed surroundings. The Church did not triumph because it preserved its theology, its ethics, or its institutions unchanged, but because it changed them all, and changed them rapidly, in order that they might express more adequately and more fully the spiritual life which remained the same, though the forms with which it was clothed were altering with extraordinary rapidity.’ The statement takes away the breath of conservative churchmen who believe that the fathers were as conservative as themselves. But even accepting it as a true description, they are able to reply that this interesting experiment failed. It failed, like the communism of the saints at Jerusalem, because with all its swift sensitiveness to changes in the surrounding life it left out of account some of the permanent qualities of human nature. So many heretics and schismatics took prompt advantage of the situation, and brought theology, ethics, and institutions into such confusion, that the exercise of discipline became imperative. That formulation of truth which found expression in the creed, and that organization of life which found expression in the Church, were the inevitable consequences of a liberty of difference which had fallen into anarchy.

‘In intellectual life,’ says Dr. Lake, ‘we are always engaged in dispute, because in the attempt to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge and logical thought our efforts are always a mixture of failure and success. . . . The necessary condition for intellectual improvement in any society is the permission to discuss, and the recognition of the principle that the less cannot judge the greater. The intellectual sterility of a great part of modern Christianity is largely because free discussion has been rendered impossible by the system of settling theological disputes by discipline instead of argument, by an appeal to past opinion instead of to logic or evidence, and by authority of ecclesiastical officers whose devotion to their own duties has rendered it impossible for them to be in the forefront of scholarship, so that they are often disposed to ignore or misunderstand problems which students have raised.’

It depends on the idea of the Church — whether it is regarded as an organization or as an influence, whether the emphasis of interest is on the institution or on the individual. The conflict between these two ideas is as ancient as religion. It was fought out in the Old Testament between the priest and the prophet. It is the everlasting contention which makes the pages of Church history so depressing and encouraging. It enters into all life, and has its place in the affairs of nations as well as in the affairs of churches. It makes the difference, not only between Protestant and Catholic, and between Dissenter and Churchman, but between Whig and Tory, between the progressives and the conservatives: on one side the claim of authority, on the other the claim of liberty; on one side discipline, on the other difference.

Dr.McGiffert in The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas⁸ and Dr. Coffin in Some Christian Convictions⁹ indicate some of the influences which are steadily enlarging the liberty of difference.

First, Romanticism, says Dr. Coffin, emphasizing the presence of God within the world, resident in all life; then Humanitarianism, maintaining that God is as good as Jesus Christ, and thereby forsaking a great number of inherited errors in ethics; after that, Physical Science, showing the unity of all life, and thus bringing in a larger view of God; Biblical Criticism, introducing the doctrine of progressive revelation, and giving us an historical rather than a speculative conception of Christ; Psychology, declaring the normal character of religious experience; Comparative Religion, taking a new attitude toward the missionary problem, and sending Christians into foreign lands, not to destroy but to fulfill; finally, the Social Movement, demanding a social reinterpretation of many of the Church’s doctrines. The effect of these influences is to increase the company of those who belong with Sir Harry Vane ‘to the sect called “ Seekers,” as being satisfied with no form of opinion yet extant, but waiting for future discoveries.’ Dr. Coffin, preaching in the colleges, finds many members of this sect, and addresses them in the chapters of his book on such subjects as Religion, the Church, the Bible, God, Christ, the Cross, and the Life Everlasting. He shows how a wide liberty of difference and a hospitable acceptance of new ideas may be consistent with all that was essential in the old faith.

Like conclusions are reached by Dr. McGiffert after a similar review of modern influences. In his first fifty pages, where Pietism and the Enlightenment, Natural Science and the Critical Philosophy are considered, the axe is laid at the root of the tree, and the whole growth of Christian belief, both branch and stem, seems about to be cut down for burning. But in the two hundred pages which follow, nothing falls but dead wood. Religion is emancipated, speculation is reborn, faith is rehabilitated; Agnosticism, Evolution, Immanence, lead to chapters on Ethical Theism, the Character of God, and Religious Authority.

‘Authority everywhere,’ says Dr. McGiffert, ‘has ceased to be as it once was, absolute, infallible, despotic, and legal, and has become relative, provisional, and fallible.’ The old idea of authority as an external force, which came over into Protestantism out of the Middle Ages, and was transformed with little change from the Church to the Bible, found its most effective opponent in Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher appealed to experience. Religion, he said, is rooted in the feelings. ‘No one is bound by traditional principles and formulas, by external standards and rules. As a religious man he has in his own consciousness the ultimate court from which is no appeal.’

The Bible and the creeds ‘are not authoritative codes, intended to bind the minds and consciences of men. They are simply records of religious experiences enjoyed in other days by other men, many of them great religious geniuses, and particularly by Jesus Christ, the greatest of them all, and the one by whom the consciousness of God has been mediated to us.’ Dr. McGiffert says that ‘the most important step in the emancipation of modern Protestants from the bondage of external authority ’ was taken when the fact was recognized that ‘the Bible and Christianity are not identical, and that the severest criticism of the latter does not affect the former. It has made it possible for Christians to look without dismay upon Biblical criticism, and to engage in it themselves, without abandoning Christianity or denying its divine origin or saving power.’

Nothing, for example, can be more free from the trammels of conventional opinion than the work of two American scholars who, within the past year, have published books on the Old Testament. If Dr. Peters has anything to say about the Religion of the Hebrews¹⁰ which he has not said in print in these pages, or if Professor Badé is keeping anything back for fear of censure, from his Old Testament in the Light of Today,¹¹ the reader is unable to detect the appearance of any such prudent hesitation. The men who founded the American Bible Society a century ago this year would have held up their hands in passionate protest against these books, which now come quietly from the press and get no advertisement from the outcries of the orthodox.

Dr. Badé’s book is ‘a study in moral development.’ ‘Two views of the Old Testament,’ he says, ‘still contend for mastery among the adherents of Christianity. The one regards it as a sort of talisman, miraculously given and divinely authoritative on the subject of God, religion, and morals, in every part. The other regards it as a growth, in which the moral sanctions of each stage of development were succeeded and displaced by the next higher one.’ Dr. Badé makes it immediately plain that the second of these views has his acceptance. The religion of the Old Testament, he says, is that of a people passing from the life of nomads of the desert to the life of tillers of the soil, and bringing with them all the ignorances and superstitions which inhere naturally in that transition. Not one of the Ten Commandments but was in its original meaning far below our present moral level. The first Commandment recognizes the existence of other gods; the third means that prayer is ineffective without the bringing of an offering—‘Thou shalt not cry aloud the name of Jahveh thy God, when thou bringest naught’; the prohibition of murder did not include blood-revenge, or the beating of slaves till they died, or the savagery of ‘holy’ wars; the law against adultery forbade a violation of property rights, and had no reference to purity of life. No end of confusion, and contradiction, and hindrance of ideals has come from the endeavor to bring forward the Old Testament as it stands into our modern standards of behavior. The true procedure is indicated in Dr. Badé’s phrase, ‘the cancellations of development.’ On goes the race in religion as in civilization, leaving behind it the imperfections of the past as the growing man leaves the limitations of his early youth. The Old Testament is available for our present religious use only by a free process of cancellation.

Dr. Peters handles his materials with the same freedom. Professor Badé’s book is a monograph on a single aspect of the Old Testament, but Dr. Peters discusses the whole subject. He deals with the Lord and the People, the Primitive Religion of the Hebrews, the Religion of Moses, the Religion of Canaan and its Influence on the Hebrews, and on through Ritual and Prophecy, and Reformation and Exile and Return, to the Synagogue and the Scribes. It is a patient and careful and unfailingly interesting account of a religious experience in which, very gradually, superstition is transformed into reasonable faith, and the ethical standards of barbarians are superseded by the ideals of increasing civilization. Nothing can be further from the idea of the Old Testament as being all on one spiritual plane. It is, like Palestine itself, a land of valleys and hills.

The same point of view, with a presentation of the results of the best scholarship in the least compass, appears in Professor Moore’s Literature of the Old Testament; and a like work is done by Professor Bacon in his Making of the New Testament. These two little books belong to the department of religion and philosophy in the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge.¹² One may rely on most of the volumes of this series for accurate accounts of contemporary research and opinion. Dr. Bury’s History of Freedom of Thought declines from this high level of excellence in its angry refusal to allow the liberty of difference to the orthodox. They must conform to the heretics, and do it quick, on pain of being pronounced narrow-minded. But this is only the ‘narrowness of breadth.’ The book illustrates one of the reasons for the reluctance of the conservatives, who object to the radicals, not only for the freedom of their thought, but for the insufferable freedom of their manners. Dr. Moore’s book on the Old Testament and Dr. Bacon’s on the New illustrate, on the other hand, the fine courtesy of good scholarship. These brief, inexpensive, and attractive volumes tell the untechnical reader all that he needs to know concerning the dates, authorship, and general significance of the Bible books. To them may be added Mr. Hunting’s Story of our Bible,¹³ popularly written, bound in purple, and illustrated from the Ladies’ Home Journal. Teachers in Sunday schools will find here not only the main facts of modern research, but picturesque descriptions of places and peoples, and a useful accompaniment of appropriate moral reflections.

Mr. Hunting says that one of the hardest problems which the compilers of the Pentateuch faced was ‘how to counteract the influence of the stories about the gods, which the Hebrews had learned from the Babylonians and Canaanites. They might perhaps have denounced them; but that would only have increased the curiosity of the people about them. Fortunately the wisest men in those early days followed a better plan. They retold these stories in their own way. Disregarding those things which were false and base, they were on the alert for illustrations of sublime truths. We have the results of their work in the great stories of the book of Genesis.’ The men who were leading the religious thought of Judaism during the two or three centuries before Christ encountered a different difficulty, which they met in a similar way. Their difficulty arose from the endeavor of the conservative brethren to give the last word in religion to ‘ the Law.' ‘It came to be an accepted dogma,’ says Dr. Charles in his Religious Development between the Old and New Testaments, ‘that the Law was the complete and final word of God, and so valid for all eternity.’ But men were entering into new experiences and out of them were drawing new conclusions; Jews were comparing ideas with Greeks; the knowledge of truth was steadily increasing, after its fashion, regardless of dogmas. No authority could actually stop difference. What, then, could the messengers of difference do? What they did was, get behind the barrier of the Law by writing under the name of patriarchs, as Noah, Enoch, and Moses, and, in the sanction of these accepted fathers, interpret the conventional symbols so as to bring them into accord with the actually existing religious situation. They brought new meanings into the Hebrew Bible, as their predecessors did into the Babylonian myths.

‘Every conception was undergoing development or reinterpretation. Whole histories centre round such conceptions as Soul, Spirit, Sheol, Paradise, the Messianic Kingdom, the Messiah, the Resurrection. Where the spiritual life was active, no religious conception could remain unaltered. If it belonged characteristically to an earlier period of development, it had to be either discarded or transformed. If it was capable of growth, it grew; otherwise it proved a stumbling-block to the faithful and an obstacle to spiritual progress.’ And Dr. Charles continues, ‘No church which makes this right of reinterpretation impossible can continue to be a spiritual leader of mankind. Spiritual and intellectual growth without it is impossible, and so far as the leaders of a Church succeed in making such growth impossible, so far they succeed in limiting its membership to the mere traditionalist, the reactionary and the obscurantist, in short, to the intellectual and moral minors of the race.’

These problems of adaptation whose solution appears at the beginning and the end of the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Genesis and in the book of Daniel, must be solved to-day by foreign missionaries. In the place of the myths of Babylon they have the legends of Buddhism and of other religions, and they are hampered in their turn by the necessity, as they think, of carrying with them an Old Testament whose primitive theology and ethics scandalize the gentle people of such lands as India and China. What shall they do with the ideas of God that they find in other creeds? What with those in their own creed which arose out of occidental experiences in which Orientals have had no share — such, for example, as took their shape from the conditions of the Roman Empire?

As a matter of fact, they exercise the liberty of difference. They have abandoned the doctrine that difference deserves damnation. Professor Pratt, in his altogether admirable book, India and its Faiths,¹⁴ says that, although the Christian Literature Society at Colombo ‘is still situated on “Dam Street,” this fact has lost its old significance.’ The time is past when the missionary endeavored to change black Africans into Scotch Presbyterians, and to impose upon his converts ‘not only the Christian teaching but the theology and the ecclesiastical ideas which had grown up in Europe to meet the needs of European thought and conditions.’ Mrs. Creighton, whose little book on Missions ought to be in the hands of every mission-study class, says that the missionary recognizes the fact that heathen people, too, ‘have their contribution to bring, and that the fullness of the Christian message will not be realized until the great nations of the East and even the Animist peoples of Africa and the Pacific have enriched it with their religious ideas and their way of holding and exhibiting the truth. Through his converts his own faith is strengthened, and his own conception of Christian truth enlarged.’ ‘The missionary of our time,’ says Dr. Slattery in The Light Within,¹⁵ ‘assumes and frankly teaches that the Christianity of one nation must differ from the Christianity of another nation. There is a sacred inheritance through which the Holy Spirit has spoken, and that inheritance must be respected, not from any mere sense of tact and good manners, but from awe-inspiring dread lest a man sent to teach the truth be found to speak even against God in one of his self-revealing processes. Ancestor-worship in China, for example, is no longer condemned, but is purified and enlarged in the ancient Christian doctrine of the Communion of Saints.’

The missionaries, as they appear in Mrs. Creighton’s book, and in the larger History of Christian Missions¹⁶ by the editorial secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, are open-minded, sympathetic, and constructive workers, pioneers and civilizers, patient and successful. ‘ In the beginning of the third century of our era,’ says Dr. Robinson, ‘ Dion Cassius, referring to the inhabitants of Great Britain, described them as an “ idle, indolent, thievish, lying set of scoundrels.” As a result of Christian teaching extending over fifty generations, the proportion of the inhabitants of Great Britain to whom these epithets can be justly applied has perceptibly decreased. The epithets used by Dion Cassius are often applied to some of the peoples amongst whom Christian missionaries are now working; but before we institute any comparison between these peoples and ourselves, to the detriment of the former, or to the disparagement of missionary efforts, we need to ascertain whether the progress which has been achieved within recent years does not compare favorably with that which occurred in our own land during any equal period of time.’ It is significant that, as Dr. Robinson reports, contributions to missions have more than doubled since 1901, and the number of missionaries from Protestant societies has increased from 62,000 to 129,000.

Considering what the West might learn from the different customs and ideas of the East, Professor Pratt finds the most important lesson in the value of the soul. An Indian creed would say, ‘I believe in the soul. I believe in its endless progress as it takes its way through changing forms, in worlds that rise and pass. I believe that the material world, with all it has of luxury and wealth, and with it the human body itself, are but means in the education and refinement of the soul, and that whenever they stand in the way of the soul’s progress they must be denounced and despised. And I believe that the human soul may enter into, or is already and forever in, immediate communion with the divine.’ Mr. Pratt says, ‘A friend of mine in Calcutta has a servant and a clerk. The servant spends every spare hour of his twentyfour worshiping at the shrine of Kali; and the clerk — a man still under forty — is saving his money so that in a year or two he may leave his family well provided and wander forth as a sannyasi to spend the rest of his days in meditation. To us Westerners this seems incomprehensible, and doubtless it is extreme. But it is not merely its extreme form that seems to us so strange. The very notion of contemplation has become to us both unintelligible and unendurable. We say we have no time for contemplation — we have too much to do to spend our minutes in that fashion: but this is an evasion. The truth is that we do not know how to meditate, and are afraid to learn.... I doubt whether there is one man in fifty of us who would be willing to be alone and quiet and awake and without a book for ten minutes.’ And he quotes Rabindranath Tagore: ‘You Americans have no leisure, or if you have, you know not how to use it. In the rush of your lives you do not stop to consider where you are rushing to or what it is all for. The result is that you have lost your vision of the Eternal.’

This vision shines in a little group of spiritual books¹⁷ written by men and women who have entered in their own way into these regions of peace. They feel it necessary to defend themselves against the charge of being unnaturally and unsympathetically peaceful in these times of strife. But they do not apologize. Practical Mysticism, says Miss Underhill, ‘means nothing if the attitude and the discipline which it recommends be adapted to fair weather alone. . . . On the contrary, if the experiences on which it is based have indeed the transcendent value for humanity which Mystics claim for them — if they reveal to us a world of higher truth and greater reality than the world of concrete happenings in which we seem to be immersed — then that value is increased rather than lessened when confronted by the overwhelming disharmonies and sufferings of the present time.’ ‘Now that this terrible war is waging,’ says Mr. Hepher in The Fellowship of Silence, ‘and Europe is filled with horror and confusion, and the world is ringing with the echoes of the noise and tumult of battle, is there not the greater need of centres of still silence, radiating hope and strength in a world of strife?’ ‘At the present hour,’ says Miss Sears, ‘many persons are prophesying that when the war in Europe is finally over there will follow, out of man’s sense of his own weakness and his great need, a revival of religion. What we want to be sure of is that this revival . . . shall be a reawakening of a religious spirit that is truly spiritual, that is, profoundly ethical.’ Toward which her book, The Drama of the Spiritual Life, is a contribution.

These writings deal with conditions which are deeper than all differences, and in which the differences themselves are held in friendly relations by the recognition of essential unities. The Fellowship of Silence is an account of joint meetings of Churchmen and Quakers for the enrichment of the spiritual life. These meetings have been instructive revelations to men who have believed that sacraments and an apostolically descended ministry were essential to the spiritual life. ‘When men taught that those Christians who did not enjoy the advantages of the ministrations of a sixteenth-century bishop were in sin and were no part of the Church at all, God proved the opposite through a line of saints and heroes. And in regard to Creeds and Sacraments God has also taught us that men can enjoy singular gifts of the Holy Ghost while honestly foregoing the regular means of grace, so long as they cling to Christ and bring forth the fruits of well-doing.’