SOME THEOLOGICAL BOOKS.
Thoughts on Religion at the Front. By Neville S. Talbot.
(Macmillan and Co. 2s. net..)—We could wish that every minister of religion would spend a florin in the purchase of this little book. It contains barely a hundred pages of large type, but every page is full of matter ; and we venture to think that its quiet perusal would set up a process of thought which might produce more permanent effect in rekindling a spirit of true religion in the land than the earnest, but necessarily conventional, efforts to do so which have marked the recent National Mission. For Mr. Talbot has a rare gift of insight and an unusual candour ; and his study of the religion of the British soldier, officer and private, has given him an idea of tho strength and weakness of British religion generally ; from which he proceeds to argue back to the defects in popular religious teaching, and forward to the possibility, and indeed the urgent necessity, of mending matters by putting first things first. We shall not spoil the effect of Mr. Talbot's vigorous and often racy paragraphs by making any summary analysis' of his views. One quotation will suffice to show that he has some- thing clear and important to say :- " There has been in this war a wonderful display of the heroism of men. But their thoughts about God and religion are, for the most part, at a level below the highest in themselves. They have come to themselves in giving themselves away. But they think that religion is most concerned with self-saving. They tend to recognise most easily the signs of God's favour in this or that instance of safety or escape. This means that they do not think of God in terms of Christ, but that they think of Him as outside the trouble and pain and cost of life, and in the immunity of heaven. They do not think of Him as involved in the risks and agonies of the world. Though they do not formulate it to themselves, the glories of human nature go beyond anything they know of the divine. For them God is less wonderful than men.
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