Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of York for twenty years and
now promoted to the See of Canterbury, is a man of abounding energy. In his curacy at Leeds, as Vicar of St.
Mary's, Oxford, as Vicar Portsea, as Bishop of Stepney, and finally as -Archbishop 'of York; he seems to have never rested. Always he has mixed with every sort and kind of person, whether- it was among the dockers ,of East London or the dons of Oxford. And yet he was in no way a seeker after popularity. In the early days of the "War, when anti- Germanism was at its height, he made a speech before two thousand men in which he deplored " the gross and vulgar abuse- which had been heaped upon the Emperor personally," and remarked that he himself had knelt with the Kaiser at the Table of the Lord; He did everything he could to prevent the enlistment of clergymen. They might be chaplains, but he considered that they had no right to give up their "life- long spiritual service " to go out and fight as ordinary soldiers. Since the time when he gave up his legal career and broke away from -Presbyterianism to become a priest of the Chard) of England he has always been out for ' one thing above all others—the spiritualizatiOn of the Church: He has tried to make Christianity a living force,- and to bring it into every institution of which he has been part. Mr. Charles Herbert's book, Twenty Years as Archbishop of York (Gardner, Dalton, 2s. 6d.), in spite of an over-emphatic style and rather-unctuous phrases, punctuated by far too many exclamation marks, does give a very vivid picture of the man on whom rests the future of the Church of England.
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