5 FEBRUARY 1921, Page 3

If we accept Paley's rather hard and external view, which

was no doubt appropriate to the controversies of his time, we must admit with the writer in the CanOridge Review that the Evidences are an admirable example of an attempt to prove an important thesis by argument. That being so, it was a pity that the examiners never required candidates to get the real value out of Paley. Any candidate could satisfy the test who had read Paley in Ghosts and Abstracts. These were books which often reduced the perfect consistency and amplitude of Paley's argumentation to a rehearsal of facts. And the facts were sometimes committed to memory with the help of appalling doggerel, most of it, however, not quite grotesque enough to be amusing.