Ad Item : Thoughts for Critical Times in the Church.
By H. Hensley Henson, B.D. (Wells Gardner, Dalton, and Co.)— We have not always found ourselves in agreement with Mr. Henson, nor, indeed, can we assent to all that he says in this volume. But his general contentions we heartily accept. The folly and scandal of elevating matters of ritual into essential truths, the necessity of recognising the results of Biblical criticism, the strength of the Anglican position as against Papal pretensions, with the consequent warning against faithless or cowardly Anglicans who would compromise it, these are among the subjects with which Mr. Henson deals in these discourses (delivered in the University Church of Oxford, Westminster Abbey, St. Mary's Hospital, Ilford, and elsewhere). To discuss them in detail would take us again over many controversies of the day, and we must be content with a general cuailhendativu of
the book to our readers. Mr. Henson knows his own mind, and expresses himself with vigour. Courage and sterling common- sense are conspicuous in his utterances. Here is one of them :- " The Jew in the nineteenth century rehearses the miserable fortune of the Huguenot in the seventeenth [? the eighteenth]. The architects of infamy are the same, and once more Christ has to find His champions outside His own camp. A Zola now (as a Voltaire then) stands forth and undertakes the challenge. Continually the ecclesiastical conscience lags behind the general sense of right, and the Lord's battles are won by unrecognised warriors."
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