27 AUGUST 1948, Page 28

Tins extremely useful volume, first published in 1912, has been

revised and reset for the present (third) edition. There are many new contributors and many new subjects have been added, notably biographies of eminent Churchmen who have died in the last thirty years and discussions of such questions as the Prayer Book Revision of 1927-8 and the Church of South India. The excellence of the Bishop of Hereford's " William Temple " suggests the desir- ability of reconsidering some of the earlier articles, for the " Frederick Temple " which appears over the once well-known initials G. W. E. R. is on a definitely lower level • and the light shed on Temple's Archbishopric by such works as the Bishop of Chichester's Randall Davidson makes some reassessment both possible and neces- sary. A lengthy article on " Poetry in the English Church " is now brought down as far as T. S. Eliot, and laymen like Samuel Johnson, John Evelyn and Gladstone are dealt with on varying scales. The volume stands up well to random tests, though Universities (which are embedded in an article on Education) would seem to deserve a separate treatmtnt, and while there may somewhere be an adequate article on what (in casual references) is variously referred to as the National Congress and the Church Congress, fairly exhaustive ex- ploration has failed to reveal it ; nor has search for something on the Enabling Act been more successful. The volume, it may be added, is admirably printed and unworthily bound.