Bunyan in cc Mowbray Street"
Pilgrim's Progress in the World To-day. By the Rev. H. F. B. Mackay. (Philip Allan. 38. 6d.)
THE Vicar of the celebrated church to which he refers as " St. Margaret's, Mowbray Street," possesses a sense of character and a talent for vivid and unconventional exposition which give him a place of his own among writers on religious themes. The subject of his new book provides an admirable opportunity for the exercise of these gifts. In a series of short chapters—originally sermons—he takes Mr. and Mrs. Christian, of Clump End, Middlesex, and their four boys through the stages of that arduous spiritual journey which begins for Mr. Christian when he abruptly realizes the futility of his own life, and his family thinks that " he must have got a touch of the sun playing golf." Keeping close to Bunyan's itinerary, and incidentally disclosing himself as a close and sympathetic student of that immortal text, Father Mackay demonstrates how exact is its agreement, both with the classic doctrines of Christian asceticism and with the psychology of the spiritual life. He gives us a great religious classic seen " through the temperament " of an experienced director of souls : and though some may feel that the mighty Puritan is rather tightly buttoned into• his Anglo-Catholic clothes, on the whole his new suit (or should we say vest- ment ?) becomes him remarkably well.
Crossing the rather "uninspiring suburban landscape of Clump End, with its nice' red brick church, St. Uriel's, its comfortable villas and its links, we are shown the varied spiritual landscape of Bunyan's dream, and the narrdw path of stone " straight as a rule can make it," that runs up and down hill- towards a hidden end. The great vicissitudes of the pilgrimage are still there to brace and test the soul. The Hill Difficulty is always long (" a large part of the life of every priest _with a cure of souls is spent sitting on a stone near the top of the Hill Difficulty encouraging pilgrims ") ; the descent into the Valley of Humiliation is always steep: But the journey has its own peculiarities when performed from Clump End " %%Mat lithe Slough of-Deispend'at 'Crumi) End ? I am afraid there is no doubt it is St. Uriel's . . somehow the very smell of St.. Uriel's, -which is a _mixture of_pitchpine, the heating apparatus, and old copies of Hymns Ancient and Modern, seems -to empty Christiana of any desire to make any spiritual effort."
So, too, the fellow-pilgrims encountered on the way have not changed their nature, though they have assumed twentieth-
century dress. Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Who recommends Higher Thought and Ethical Self-Culture to Christian, and Pliable, who wants to take hiin .to a nice Catholic service and lend him " The Ritual ReasOn Why," are still fulfilling their appointed parts ; and when we come to Vanity Fair, " Regent Street and Piccadilly are all that Banyan could desire." So the story takes the modern pilgrim through the ups and downs of experience and growth—the House Beautiful, Doubting - Castle, By-path Meadoiv and the
Delectable Mountains-to the edge of the rushing river which is ever the same. : There the party from Clump End got
safely over, and all the trumpets sounded on the other side.
EVELYN UNDERHILL.
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