POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS
National Resurrection. By Eustace Dudley, B.A. Oxon. (Longmans. 4s. net.) LIFE is a strange, complex business for all of us, and nothing brings this fact home to one more than the reading of books by those who tell us how to live it. Mr. Maxwell writes some two hundred and forty pages bidding us hope more, love more, make allowance for other people more, and, generally, intensify our existence. He has produced a very readable book with many suggestive sidelights and observations on
existence.
Mr. Dudley studies the question from a theological and national point of view. He begins his argument with the England of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, which he pictures to us as a golden age of national happiness and prosperity, largely due to the unbroken influence of Catholicism. He then proceeds to analyse the Reformation period and to argue that Britain's empire-building and her nineteenth century era of commercialism " strangely compounded of Mammon, religion and philosophy " were the outcome of the theology of Luther and Calvin. The materialism which we see round as is the inevitable result, he considers, of individualism and the resultant extremes of wealth and poverty, which may be ultimately traced to the Reformation doctrines.
Mr. Maxwell, on the other hand (like " the Gentleman with a Duster," who comes in for sharp criticism at Mr. Dudley's hands) considers that there are elements of goodness and kindli- ness in human nature which can be tamed to use in the moral evolution of the world—that to see the good is to do the
good. Mr. Dudley certainly does not appear to have this confidence in human nature, and ridicules the idea of telling us to be good for the sake of the general good. This, he thinks, " may be etiquette for the elite, but not for the average man." Definite theological sanctions are wanted, he says, to compel
this average man towards decency. His remedy for all the 'ills pf modem life is Popery, to put it bluntly. On the whole he strikes us as doing much less than justice to Reforma- tion ideas and ideals. We cannot take so gloomy a view of progress as to think that the remedy of our troubles is to be found in a return to the political and religious ideals of the Middle Ages.
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