PAINTED WINDOWS.* THE " Gentleman with a Duster " has

this time rather missed his mark. He has his former power of holdist our attention and an undiminished skill in inventing a telling phrase, but the alleged failure of the Churches to make an impression upon the country is not a convenient subject for his methods. When

he discoursed upon the moral slackness of public life and upon the flippancy of human fashion, his congregation sat under him devoutly enough because he could not really go wrong. He might-set up almost impossible ideals—but that is for the public good.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a Heaven for ?

A Savonarola may exaggerate, but he does not lead wrongly merey because he runs far ahead. It is another matter, however, when an author tries to trace to their source the causes of ecclesiastical failure. With all the desire in the world to agree with the " Gentleman " we are unable to understand exactly what he wants. His conclusions are vague.

In several parts of the book he gives his approval to the idea of comprehensiveness in the Church. He hates heresy- hunting, and sees that every earnest and truth-seeking man, whatever his views, may help somebody. And yet he criticises with various degrees of sternness nearly all the religious leaders about whom he writes because they do not come up to his ideal—and what that ideal is we are not quite sure. Why ask for variety and then condemn nearly all forms of it Y Surely if our principal clergy all satisfied the same ideal the variety of doctrine and method in the Church, which is one of the merits

• Painted Windows : a Study in Religious Personality. By a Gentleman with a Hester. London ; Mills and Boon. [61. net.]

and adornments of an all-embracing National Church, would instantly disappear.

The author writes about Bishop Gore, 1.41^an Inge, Father Knox, Dr. L. P. Jacks, Bishop Hensley Henson, Miss Maude

Boyden, Canon E. W. Barnes, General Bramwell Booth, Dr.

W. E. Orchard, Bishop Temple, Dr. W. B. Selbie and the Arch- bishop of Canterbury. His literary way is that of an " inter- viewer " with a random touch of genius. He does not scruple to describe the personal appearance of his subjects. To him

it is quite fair game to turn rapidly from an arched eyebrow or a flat nose to the mystery of holiness. His book is thus a study of religion conducted through an examination of per- sonality.

In effect, he attributes to Bishop Gore a marked change from the Modernism of his earlier years to an ascetic traditionalism

which is tending towards exclusiveness and the desire to search out heretics. He thinks that the Anglo-Catholics writhe under Bishop Gore's leadership, but know very well that they cannot afford to dispense with him. Bishop Gore is to him an example of Coleridge's warning that " He who begins by loving Chris- tianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity."

" Dr. Gore, in my judgment, has achieved strength at the centre of his being only at the terrible cost of cutting off, or at any rate of maiming, his own natural temperament. Marked out by nature for the life of mysticism, he has entered maimed and halt into the life of the controversialist. With the richest of spiritual gifts, which demand quiet and profound peace for their development, he has thrown himself into the arena of theological disputation, where force of intellect rather than beauty of character is the first requirement of victory. Instead of drawing all men to the sweet reasonableness of the Christian life, he has floundered in the obscurities of a sect and hidden his light under the bushel of a mouldering solecism—' the tradition of Western Catholicism.' It is a tragedy. Posterity, I think, will regretfully number him among bigots."

The author highly praises Dean Inge, and from the point of view of laymen who care very much whether they are helped or hindered intellectually by the quality of Church teaching, we are sure that the "Gentleman" is right to say that Dr. Inge has immense influence. Unlike the Bishop Gore of the author's portraiture Dean Inge sets the Truth above Christianity. He comes to the same general conclusion in the end, no doubt, but the method of approach is quite different and vastly more helpful to the ordinary layman.

" No man is freer from bigotry or intolerance, though not many can hate falsity and lies more earnestly. The Church of England, he tells me, should be a national church, a church expressing the highest reach of English temperament, with room for all shades of thought. He quotes Dfillinger, No church is so national, so deeply rooted in popular affection, so bound up with the institutions and manners of the country, or so power- ful in its influences on national character.' But this was written in 1872. Dr. Inge says now, ' The English Church represents, on the religious side, the convictions, tastes, and prejudices of the English gentleman, that truly national ideal of character. ... A love of order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what a seventeenth century divine called " the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid slutterny of fanatic conventicles." ' Uniformity, he tells me, is not to be desired."

The author, while allowing that Dean Inge is in a considerable sense a Modernist, remarks that he is even more a mystic. He expresses the strong opinion that there is no greater mind than that of Dr. Inge in the Church of England, and he is disposed

to think that there is no greater mind in the nation. The chapter upon. Father Ronald Knox is, perhaps, the least satis- factory in the book. No real person, we fancy, could have quite such startling discrepancies of mental make-up as the

author discovers in Father Knox—exceptionally brilliant in wit, humour and scholarship, but unsatisfying to the point of childishness in theology. As we say, we cannot easily believe in this picture. The " Gentleman," with his love of high lights and dark obscurities, is probably in this case the victim of his method.

One would have expected the author to be pleased with Bishop Hensley Henson, but oddly enough he is not. He describes the manner in which the Bishop intellectualises everything :-

" One might almost say that he has intellectualised the Sermon on the Mount, dissected the Prodigal Son as a study in psychology, and taken the heart out of the Fourth Gospel" Here is what the " Gentleman " says about Modernism :— " There are three types of modernists. There is, first of all, the Liberal. who regards Christianity as a form of Platonism resting on the idea of absolute values. This is dangerous ground : something more is required. Than there is the evan- gelical modernist, who accepts almost everything in the Higher Criticism, but holds to Christ as an incarnation of the Divine purpose, an incarnation, if you will, of God, all we can know of God limited by His human body, as God we must suppose is not limited, but still God. And, finally, there is the Catholic modernist, who believes in a Church, who makes the sacraments his centre of religion, and exalts Christianity to the head of all the mystery religions which have played a part in the evolution of the human race. This is not likely to be the prevailing type of modernism. It looks as if the main body of modern opinion is moving in the direction followed by the second of these schools —the evangelical."

There appears to be a contradiction in the chapter on the Bishop of Manchester, who, if he has not changed his opinions, cannot very well be becoming, as the author thinks he is, more Anglo-Catholic.