ANGLICANISM
The Approach to Christianity. By E. G. Selwyn, B.D.:
AMONG the younger clergy, none seems more active than Mr.; Gordon Selwyn, and it is he who had ImOst to do with preparing both Essays Catholic and Critical and the book on Reserva- tion which gives an abstract of the Conference held at Farnham Castle last October. Each of these books is an attempt to make a...enity out of the work of different men, but neither has really reahhed to the effectiveness of Mr. Selwyn's own new bobk, The Approach to Christianity. That book, philosophical, theological, critical, scholarly, shows the force and carefulness of Mr. Sehvyris mina, and it is his aim to.give a view of Christianity that, being modern, thoughtful and yet orthodox, will duly balance the religious and the traditional and the result i of recent- study. This, he thinks, is the peculiar function of the Church of England, and indeed many divergent types find iii Anglicanism the field for their own development ; many divergent types insist that what they are is just what the Church of England ought to be. What then does Mr. Selwyn want ? His influence is certainly becoming powerful : as the editor of Theology he presents from month to month a point. of view that appeals to a great mintber of clerical intellectuals. He wants to combine the traditional loyalty to the Church and to the old dogmas with a living experience of religion through riten and forms, and to sift and sharpen this orthodox religion by examining every- thing to do with it from the point_ of modern learning, modern philosophy and science. He is in fact convinced that science and learning, far from weakening the position of the Church, reveal the strength of it and- endorse its claims. When he speaks therefore of the Reservation of the Sacrament, he endorses the claims of those whose religious experience finds in the opportunities provided by this observance an oppor- tunity to commune with spiritual reality more immediately. The old ideas, -suggested by the words" magic " and "fetish," were after all largely igtiorance, and it is an anachronism to accuse a Catholic Saint M idolatry because he finds God where most Englishmen find Him ha. That the temper of the Farnham Conference, and though, like all bodies that have something to conserve, the Church of England will not change her ways without full reflection, it is evident that the in- fluential and scholarly -theologians who met at Farnham have given Reservation, at least mentally, a tolerance that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. The situation is summed tip by Canon Quick : he says that the Roman Catholic 'doctrine, which means a Presence which is real because it is spiritual, is, when properly understood, not much different from that of "the Church of England. Canon Quick's contention that the formulas of the sixteenth century are an insufficient guide to -the situation in the twentieth -underlies the thoughtful collection Mr. Selwyn has made in Essays Catholic and Critical: The Very fact that the book is weakened by the number of its authors adds an intrinsic strength to their work. Divided for the most part between• Oxford and Cambridge, they show that a number of thorough scholars are devoting their ability to the service of orthodoxy, and like The Approoch to Christianity that the case for mod- ernism, which the higher critics claimed at one time to have established, has not, so far, availed against the combination of reason and philosophy with learning which the scholars who relish the name of " Catholic " are still able to bring against it.
But, if the essays are scholarly and thorough, they arc not written in a style which will commend them to the general reader. There is seldom a passage of eloquence, and for the general reader Mr. Force Stead's charming essay, The Shadow of Mount Cannel, will, like Religio Medici, win its way when .the treatises of the theologian are relegated to that small society which prefers the jargon of the specialist to the writing which has the perfection of an art. "Beautiful words are indeed the very light of the mind said a great Greek critic, and, in all fine writing, "The word is one with that it tells of." The Bishop of Manchester recalled that phrase from Emerson at Farnham, and it reminds us how all beauties, all realities are expressed by sOme sensible phenomenon which is not merely a symbol
but is also actually indentified with what it signifies. That fact is central to allknowledge of religion awl all presentments of it.
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