MR. WILLIAM ARCHER.
[To the Edit& of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—In the several obituary notices of William Archer which have appeared in your own and other journals, all of which deal with his distinctive place as a dramatic critic, no reference is made to his work in other fields, to which he attached higher importance. The public ignorance 89 to this is probably explicable in the fact that his contributions were printed in journals of which the public has little heed— the monthly Literary Guide and the Annual of the Rationalist Press Association, both of which are organs of that Association, For a long series of years William Archer has been a doughty, uncompromising champion of Rationalism, challeng- ing every creed and dogma regarded (nowadays, in some still orthodox circles, less regarded) as fundamentals of the Christian faith. Incisive and exhaustive as are all his writings on the subject, they are tempered with a charity and sympathy which they can best manifest who have mastered the nature of the foe against whom they are contesting. All that he wrote was the more effective because expletive never usurped the place of argument. He acted on Lord Morley's dictum :
We will not attack you ; we shall explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity ; from being the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle to a chapter in a book." A great sociologist, a hater of war, William Archer was urgent of such reforms in systems of education as a chief agent in lifting man to a nobler plane. Under the title Let Youth but Know, he published in 1905, under the noin de plume "Kappa," an admirable, little- recognized outline of the direction on which education should run. This done, the rest of his writings dealt solely with theology and ethics. Upon this he said, If we lose our hold on reason, we inevitably lose our hold on conduct." Among his more characteristic writings are a candid and rather caustic review of some of Dean Inge's Outspoken Essays, notably his " Confessio Fidei " ; a demolition of the hybrid product which Mr. H. G. Wells evolved in his God the Invisible King ; and an acute analysis of " Modernism " in the Literary Guide of last November, wherein he showed that "Christianity is visibly and rapidly breaking-up from within."
His death is the passing away of a noble soul ; of one that has "borne to right and light its witness high."—I am,
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