Welsh Journals

the Editor of the Spectator. Nor can they complain that these are the words of a bigoted ecclesiastic. It is not bigotry, but mere common-sense which asserts, that, where a man is free to join or leave any society, he is not free to belong to it while violating all its rules and being disloyal to its spirit. Yet a page or two earlier the author seems to be sighing for Churches without any credal basis." This is surely impossible. Every society must have some permanent meaning and end. Its creed is but the statement of that. Even Positivism rests on a very definite creed (1) that God is unknowable, (2) that Humanity is one and is worth working for. The latter is denied by Nietzsche and his followers. Any religious or ethical society, whatever it says, rests on certain unconscious presuppositions, of which the ethics of Nietzsche are the denial. Nietzsche has performed this great service,-that he has made people under- stand that morality in the ordinary sense is a faith that it is no more self evident than religious faith and that it is bound up with Christian ideas. Make your ethical creed as you like and there will always be some convinced and educated persons who will reject it. Therefore, I say that it is nonsense to talk of Churches without a credal basis; although the fact is undoubted, as Mr. Williams says, that many people think they can have such Churches. One further merit belongs to this book-the final chapter on Christianity and Social Ideals. This is as temperate as it is sympathetic. Firstly the author avoids the mistake of trying to find any direct social and economic theories in the Scriptures, he laments the connection of the Established Church with one party and the Free Church with another, and in no way desires to see Christianity identified with the Labour party. "The Churches should not be converted into societies for the support of political parties they are suffering too much already from party allegiance, the Church of England from her allegiance to the Conservative Party, and the Free Churches from their allegiance to the Liberal Party. It would be greatly unfortunate if the Church became allied with the Labour Party. The Church should be sufficiently free from all parties in the State to give a moral and spiritual lead when occasion demands, even against the party with which it finds most in common. The Church does not exist to promote definite schemes of reform as a corporate body it stands for what is larger than any schemes, what is indeed eternal. But its fellowship and its teachings should rouse the conscience even on particular questions, with- out rousing partisan animosity regarding debated schemes, and it should thus send the people away from its services eager for the best schemes they can find." We have seldom known a better statement of the case than in these words or a more moving, yet at the same time temperate plea for Christian interest. Christianity is not social reform; but justice, brotherhood, and the interests of the spiritual life, demand social reform; therefore Christianity must supply the dynamic for it, or it is justly con- demned." That is the real heart of the question. One further rebuke is well administered to the cold contempt with which expensive dignitaries treat all sympathy for oppression. The Dean of St. Paul's warns us that there is real danger of an acute secular- isation of Christianity, when the pulpit pays more attention to social reform than to preaching the gospel." The Dean's gospel, by the way, consists in pouring scorn on those who preach cheap forgiveness, by being washed in the blood of the Lamb." This is the faith which converts; doubt- less in the Dean's view, conversion is vulgar. Mr. Williams goes on to meet the malicious gibe of the stalled parson. The real danger in which Christi- anity stands at present is that of the self-stultification of the Churches through stigmatising as secular those efforts for human betterment which should be the natural and inevitable outcome of the religious life. What the Churches are really suffering from is not the emphasis they lay on social reform, but the neglect of an emphasis that would cultivate specifically the reforming conscience." That is admirable. And we could wish that all Christians, High and Low, Liberal and Traditional, Free Church and Established, would pay to it one half the attention which it deserves. We must not be understood to agree with the main thesis of liberal theology," but we thank Mr Rhondda Williams for presenting it to us in a more attractive light than any we have yet seen. J. N. Figgis. The Architecture of Humanism." (A Study in the History of Taste.) By Geoffrey Scott. Constable & Co., 7/6 net. Pp. 272. The primary object of this very remarkable book is to defend Renaissance architecture from the continued attacks which, since the revival of Gothic a century or so ago, it has continually endured at the hands of modern criticism. Mr. Scott divides modern criticism into four principal classes-the romantic, the mechanical, the ethical, and the biological. The first school (which has of course