" THE IMPATIENCE OF A PARSON"
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
see that Mr. Adderley is dissatisfied with my notice of Mr. Sheppard's book. May -I write a few words in reply ? In the first place, the " twenty lines " I gave to it were due to exigencies of space. No one admires Mr. Sheppard's work more than myself. But that had nothing to do with his book. Mr. Adderley writes as though Thad treated that book "with a passing smile," and accounted for " its exaggerations by re- ferring to his sad illness." There is no hint of a "smile" and no reference to " illness " or " exaggerations" in my notice.
Mr. Adderley says that we ought " to listen very attentively to his prophecy, for it is nothing less." The point is that-Mr. Sheppard is not prophesying; but laying down concrete and tabulated proposals for the next Lambeth Conference. Mr. Adderley agrees with me that -these " proposals are revolu- tionary rather than reforming." The remarkable thing about his letter is that he does not note, as I do, how Mr. Sheppard leaves intellectual difficulties on one side, and that I actually wrote that " for his ideals ' he could have appealed to the original- Anglicanism of Hooker :and Cosin, of Overton and Hall, of Bacon and Clarendon." That the period of Angli- canism referred -to may he outof favour with Many modern Anglicans does not dispose of the fact that my notice of Mr. Sheppard's " ideas " was largely sympathetic:-
The proposals themselves were on So large and revolutionary a scale that to deal with them adequately would have neces- sitated a review and revision of the entire polity of the Church of England, and involved a wide controversy. I said that Mr. Sheppard " makes a real appeal." Is it not best to let that appeal work its own way ?—I am, Sir, &c., YOUR REVIEWER.
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