FAITH OR FEAR 1° Fry]; writers have made " an
appeal to the Church of England," pub. Hsiang together in one volume under the title of Faith or Fear Y They are all members of the National Church, all greatly alarmed for her welfare and distressed at the desertion of her services, but not all in agreement as to the things which belong to her peace. Three of them aro clergymen and two laymen. Mr. Donald Hankey, one of the Latter, is well known to our readers as the author of A Student in Arms.
The nine chapters which he contributes are headed "The Church and the Man." In order to tell his readers what in his belief the ordinary man wants of a Church, he is obliged to describe what ho himself wants, and to do so he must talk about himself and his experience, spiritual and secular, and thus risk the charge of egotism. The reader is likely, however, to be too much enthralled by the narrative to bring this charge, and will probably have to confess himself more interested in the man than in his recommendations to the Church.
Like most men of to-day who think deeply and continuously about religion, Mr. Hankey went through a period of scepticism, and found himself, when not much over twenty, " in a distant tropical colony," an officer in the British Army, "on the brink of materialistic determinism." He had boon brought up under strong religions influence, but it seemed to him that the only honest thing for him to do was to abandon all pretence of religion. Suddenly a change came over his mental attitude. " I had," he tolls us, " an experience which revealed to me once for all that it was impossible for me to deny the reality of the human soul."
He does not tell us what the experience was, only that " from that day I was a theist." Ho is not inclined to exaggerate, in the opinion of the present writer he is inclined to minimize, the gulf fixed between theism and atheism. " A mere abstract belief that God exists is not of much practical use to anyone," he continues, and, as if in answer to his longing for some more inspiring creed, " ono day this sentence flashed across my mind : If you would know Christ, behold He is at work in His visa. yard.' " He took the word " vineyard " to mean " poorer England," and resigned his commission " with a view to becoming a slum parson."
Mr. Mulkey is a man to whom spiritual adventures are granted. He is never "disobedient to the heavenly vision," never sets his career against his chance of enlightenment. This " sentence " coming to him from the outside caused him without hesitation to begin over again. Had the same experience come to a religious soldier of the Middle Ages, or of Cromwell's' New Model, he would have told it differently.
Ono of the Hebrew prophets would have said to him : " The word of the Lord came to me saying : Arise, go to Landon.' " Spiritual experience is probably the same from age to age. Our author began to read for Orders at Oxford, " funkod " thorn, and, still a layman, went to work in a London Mission. Here among boys and men he laboured for years, with an interval of some months which he spent in Australia, travelling thither in the steerage of a German liner. "There I slept in a part of the hold which was fitted up to accommodate more than two hundred men. The men who slept above and below and round me were mostly Welsh miners, and in the following five weeks I learnt a good deal about human nature in the rough." The outbreak of the war found him back in the Mission. He enlisted, spent nine months in England and throe at the front as a private soldier, began his articles for the Spectator in hospital, and now holds a com- mission once more.
Though our author did not take Orders, he not only never gave up his religious faith, but year by year his religious assurance increased and he became a devoted Churchman—though very critical of the Church. His case against Anglicanism in, however, social rather than doctrinal. He
• Faith or ,Pear r An Appeal to the Church of England. By Donald Mulkey c• A Student In Arms "), William Scott Palmer, Harold Anson, F. Lewis and Marini H. S. Matthews (Editor). London: Manuel= and Co. 134.10nrinTi
arraigns the Church for her long subservience to the upper class, her neglect of the masses and acquieaocnoe in dull respectability. He sympathizes with those who kick against the tests imposed upon the would-be parson and the declaration of faith demanded from persona who desire to be baptized in "riper years." He cannot, however, see how the practical• difficulties of alteration are to be overcome, since it is impossible to allow the zealots of one side a free hand without allowing it also to the zealots of the other. The man who says " I suppose I must equivocate a little to obtain so great a fellowship," seems to him to be quite within his right, and he concludes that " it is really almost necessary that the Chureh should bo something of a compromise, and somewhat behind the times." He deprecates strongly the alternative of religious separation. Indeed, we gather that schism is in his eyes a sin. " No, brethren, the life of Christ is in His body the Church, for all its infidelity. We cannot make Him a new body, other than that which He has chosen, for His Spirit will not dwell therein." All the same, this soldier, with his strong fear of mutiny, demands liberty under diseipHne. Full advantage is to be taken of the essential elasticity of a Church whose Articles are Articles of peace, and inside the Church movements may arise—one has, he obviously thinks, already arisen—which may bring back the people to the fold. But if any movement or brotherhood is to succeed, its aim must be, he is convinced, to make itself unnecessary. " Its ultimate object must be its own disappearance." Thus will it be saved from what ho thinks the Nemesis of separatism.
As our readers will have guessed, Mr. Hankey does not base the faith that is in him upon argument. He has no reasoned theory to offer. He is a frank pragmatist. " You can't believe in God ? " he repeats scorn- fully after an imaginary interlocutor. " Why, man, the very fact that you can't make a decent fist of life without this belief in God, this rational basis of optimism, is surely a sufficient proof of its truth !" To all those who call in question the fundamental doctrines of Christianity he replies : "Assume these propositions true, and if in doing so you find a new happiness and peace yours, the balance of probability is in their favour." Mr. Hankey is a man of faith and of action, not of words .—although in a very true sense he is a man of letters.
Next to the paper which we have been discussing, that by .the Rev. C. IL S. Matthews interests us most in the present volume. He criticizes the Church with more bitterness than does " A Student in Arms." He would like to see it disestablished, and, so far as we can gather, he would like to see all its tests radically altered. He regrets deeply that candidates for Orders must spend weary hours in trying to get round the Articles. At present, while Bishops rejoice that the Church is wide enough to include High and Low Church clergymen, it is too narrow for the laity. " Behind Father A. and Mr. B. is the whole bench of Bishops thanking God for the comprehensiveness of a Church which includes both Father A. and Mr. B. . . . and somehow leaves the vast mass of the people of the country, including thousands of men and women full of zeal for truth, for righteousness, and for charity, outside its doors ! " The Church must change very much if she is to last, he says, and the reader cannot but suspect him of believing that she is doomed. But if he is depressed as a Churchman, he is entirely optimistio as a Christian. Men go to Church less and lose, but there is no corre- sponding falling off in the interest they feel in religion. The hunger for faith is keen, was never keener, he is certain. He has had much experience of working men both here and in the Colonies, and his recent acquaintance with soldiers does but confirm his belief. We are not sure exactly what he wants the Church to do. He is a Modernist and a Sacramentarian, but he frankly declares that, while he feels the Sacra- ments necessary to his own spiritual life, many men keep in full spiritual health without them.
The worst—or is it the best ?—of such a book as Faith or Fear Y is that, while it is a book with a common purpose, it is not the purpose, but the individual aspirations and experience of the various writers, which hold the attention of the reader.
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