Welsh Journals

words, the very principles that keep Christians apart may need revision. For practical purposes the authority of the Church must await re-union, and re-union must await the clearer delimitation of truth. Truth, then, is the first thing of all." After showing that the principles which determine the nature of the authority of Scripture can also be applied to that of the Church, Canon Streeter proceeds to illustrate this in the case of the Apostles' and the Nicene creeds. No statement in these creeds is either unimportant or untrue," yet at the same time any statement may require re-interpretation in order to convey to us the same essential meaning which it was originally intended to convey. For any attempt to express truth is necessarily relative to the whole background of the thought of the age in which the attempt is made." Re-interpretation and restatement of the spiritual facts and values of Christianity is a task from which there seems no escape. And to fulfil this task the divided sections of the Church must draw closer together for co-operation in good works and for discussion of Christian belief. The third essay is a reply to the Bishop of Zanzi- bar's question What does the Ecclesia Anglicana stand for ? Mr. Streeter, as a devoted member of the English Church, is in no doubt as to what she should stand for. As the true via media between Rome and Geneva, as distinguished from the Roman and the Puritan types, the qualities charac- teristic of the best and most typical of the Anglican leaders are sanity, charity and the love of truth. The English Church, our author contends, stands not for a political compromise, but rather for a type of Christian spirit- an ideal consistent with intellectual liberty and a wide and progressive culture "-in one word, its conspicuous feature is comprehensiveness. In his final (and longest) essay Canon Streeter gives us, in the light of history and of certain modern tendencies, a careful examination of the conception of the One Church. Space forbids us giving more than the three headings of his treatment, viz. (I) From Unity to Disruption (2) The Preliminaries of Re-union; and (3) The Problem of Inter- communion. This study is of special value in view of the issues raised by the Kikyu controversy; and it would be hard to find within the brief compass of some 75 pp. a better example of the charitable spirit in which such a controversial subject should be dealt with. Appearances." By G. Lowes Dickinson. London J. M. Dent & Sons, pp. 234. 4s. 6d. net. In this volume Mi. Dickinson has collected together a number of sketches written for the Manchester Guardian during a recent tour in the East, on which he was launched by his election to a Kahn Fellowship, and some older sketches of the United States, dating from 1909. Though the author is evidently a little uneasy at the acerbity of the American sketches, the impulse which led him to add them to his book was a happy one. For the idea which animates him throughout his travels is the ancient and absorbing one of the contrast cf East and West, and just os he finds in India the purest quintessence of the East, so it is America which shews him more nakedly the characteristics of that antagonistic ideal, which, in spite of the bitterness of his criticism, he admits to be the ideal of his choice. All through we find him measuring the life of the spirit with its reserve and passivity against the ambition and energy of the life of action. In India the spirit is supreme, and conscious though he is of the inconsistency, one might almost say the impudence, of Western rule, he does not seem to resent its invasion nearly so much as he does the Westernizing of China and Japan, where the spirit less strong than in India has left humanity free to build up through long centuries an exquisite culture, radiant with human laughter and dim with human tears. Oddly enough, it is in China that he finds the closest kinship with Europe and his plea for a better understanding of Chinese character and Chinese aims is one which the West would do well to take to heart. Yet both in China and Japan he finds something which he misses in England and the States, and something too, which he (and we too, surely) regards as the one thing that can justify human history, a definite and national spiritual life. The spirit of India appals him in China he admires in Japan he is enchanted, but in the West the spell has vanished, with the evanescence of feudalism. Yet Mr. Dickinson is too true an idealist to believe that this spell has gone from us tor ever. Some of the wisest and most cheering pages of his book are those in which he expounds his belief that com- mercialism is the infancy not the maturity of a civilization, that we are still in the revolutionary stage, and shall only emerge from it when something like a stable order has arisen, and men can begin to feel that their institutions correspond sufficiently with their inner life to enable them to devote them- selves with a free mind to reflecting their civilization in art. We have written only of the ideas which inspire Mr. Dickinson's sketches, but to speak only of this aspect of his work would be to give a false impression. Mr. Dickinson is an accomplished writer, with a sense of humour and a keen appreciation of beauty, and those who are privileged to follow him round the world in this volume of impressions get the full value of his rare gifts and rare humanity.