TInforegone Conclusions. By Lady Gordon. (Hodder and Stoughton. 6s.)—These essays,
twenty-seven in number, are reprinted from the Ladies' Field. They appear, of course, with the inevitable disadvantage, as far as the reviewer is concerned, that what was meant to be taken in doses, so to speak, has to be swallowed in a lump. We ought to have been able to read them at the rate of one a week, but circumstances forbid. They are lively and humorous; it is not perhaps always quite clear when Lady Gordon is ironical and when she is serious. So in "Fancy Religions" it is not plain what she really means. Manifestly she thinks little of the "New Theology,—"it is but a worn-out creed of the eighteenth century " ; but she is equally contemptuous of the parson who "drones along on the well-worn lines in defence
of all the doctrines trembling on the latest theological earth- quake." "Hang doctrine !" she seems disposed to say, if only it became a lady's lips. She quotes the lines-
" So many gods, so many creeds.
So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs "—
and goes on: "Nothing, surely, could be simpler, nothing better sum up the whole essence of Christianity." Very good; but it is necessary to say that this "art of being kind" does not come by Nature—Nature is anything but kind—and that Christianity is the best way of teaching it that the world has ever seen. Lady Gordon has much that is good to say about various social follies and fancies. Readable she always is, and, not unfrequently, instructive.
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