C URRENT LITERATURE.
AN ESSAY TOWARD FAITH.
An Essay Toward Faith. By Wilford L. Robbins, D.D., Dean of the Cathedral of All Saints, Albany, New York. (Longmans and Co. 3s.)—We can hardly speak too highly of this modest, unpretend- ing little book. Small in bulk, it is charged with spiritual meaning, and its style is as excellent as its thought. It is, in effect, an effort to show to the faithless that the attitude of faith in the unseen perfect Good is reasonable and wise, and to brace up those " fearful saints " whose spiritual courage is faint and low. The book is not ratiocinative, it is rather the outcome of an intense conviction, and is written as one man would speak to his friend. When we say that it is not a piece of Rationalism, we must not be understood as suggesting that it is merely emo- tional. Indeed, one of the best passages in the book warns us against mere emotional thrills, which, as the author says, may as easily be produced by a glass of champagne as by dwelling on some mystical text or some religious rite. Here is an admirable passage from the chapter on spiritual pride :—" The essence of Pharisaism does not consist in broad phylacteries or prayers at the corners of the streets. It lies rather in a low standard fairly well fulfilled, in a generally-diffused sense of satisfaction which forbids progress by crushing the motive-power at its source. Faith is never rendered restless by glimpses of unreached heights of holiness. Past achievement is as though it were not in view of the boundless horizon which stretches
before. Easygoing contentment and the heavenly vision are of necessity incompatible and mutually exclusive." This aspect of the spiritual life is well followed up by the chapter on "The Ease-loving Heart," which compels one to ask of oneself
some searching root questions. The love of spiritual ease, the taking one's ease in Zion, is so natural, so acceptable to the mind, that we are continually sliding back from the rugged path of achievement. We must examine our hearts, as good Bishop Wilson said and yet, as Dean Robbins, with great wisdom, urges, we must never be the victims of morbid self- analysis. Indeed, it is the excellent balancing of this work which is so attractive. It is seldom that a writer is found in such dead earnest, and who yet is not carried away into asceti- cism or fanaticism. One of the problematical chapters is that on the difficult subject of the proper attitude of the man of faith toward what Christ and his Apostles called " the world." We are inclined to think that the meaning of the New Testa- ment goes somewhat farther than Dean Robbins states. The word used both by Christ and by St. Paul and St. John to express "the world" is not only " aionos," but "kosmos," as if the very globe itself and the institutions that spring from physical life were, in a way, to be as far as possible ignored by men of faith. But the author makes a good point when he says that it is "the cares of the world" as well as the " deceitfulness of riches " which were declared by Christ to war against the souL Probably the apostolic injunction to "use the world as not abusing it, knowing that the fashion of this world (kosmos) passeth away," is the true attitude. It would be difficult to find a wiser help to the inner life than this suggestive little work.
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