• THE SPIRIT OF RUSSIA.* PRESIDENT MASARYR'S elaborate work on

Russian history, literature, and philosophy, which was published in Germany in 1913, well deserved to be translated into English. It is not an easy book to read, for the terminology used by Continental philosophers is wilfully obscure, and it must have presented many awkward problems to the patient translators, who have done their part well. Their adoption of the Czech transliteration of Russian names will annoy many readers, but it is a minor blemish on a painstaking piece of work. We can afford to take a little trouble in understanding the views on Russia which are hold by the ablest non-Russian Slay. Incidentally it may be observed that the record of the Czecho-Slovaks in this war should impose caution on those who generalize wildly about races. There could be no greater contrast between two different races than there is between the Slays of Bohemia and the Slays of Great Russia. The Bohemians have conducted their revolution in an orderly and practical fashion. When the moment had come for Austro-German rule to disappear, the Czechs took over the administration of their country as a going concern, elected their Parliament, made a Constitution, chose Dr. Masaryk as President, and presented Europe with the welcome spectacle of an old nation born anew in the Czecho-Slovak Republic. It is painful to compare with this the unregulated frenzy of revolutionary Russia, where order of a kind gave place to chaos, where every one talked and none could organize a new working system. We may of course make many excuses for Russia, but the fact remains that the innate political capacity and the sense of discipline which the Czecho-Slovaks have displayed are not manifested among their Eastern kinsmen. President Masaryk's study of Russia is more sympathetic than that of a Western European, but it is assuredly not biassed by any Pan-Slav sentiment, because the author instinctively feels that, for historic reasons, Russians and Czechs are very unlike.

We cannot do more than indicate summarily the nature of this encyclopaedic work, which begins with an historical sketch, and goes on to trace the course of Russian philosophy, politics, and religion. The author devotes much attention to the development of Pan-Slavism, and to Ilerzen, Bs.kunin, Chemyshevsky, and the Marxists, whose most advanced disciple, Lenin, is now making Russia pay in blood and tears for his political experiments. Bolshevism was only a theory when President Masaryk wrote in 1913, and no one dreamed that any people would be mad enough to let it be put to the test of practice. The author also studies very thoroughly the official theologians like Pobyedonostaheff and the mystical Solovyeff, the Anarchists led by Prince Kropotkin, and the Liberals, concluding with some valuable chapters on the religious position in Russia. He holds that German philosophy has been the disturbing factor in Russian thought. He pictures Russia as peacefully asleep in a thirdcentury atmosphere, lulled by the Orthodox Church with its

rigid Byzantinism. Suddenly she was roused by the influence of Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbaeh to find herself in the nineteenth century, bereft of her traditional belief in Church and Tsar. The sudden transition was too much for an ill-governed and ill. educated people, and the general unsettlement has expressed itself in what seems to the West a kind of homicidal mania. President Masaryk will not accept the facile suggestion that it is the special characteristic of the Russian to rush from an exaggerated passivity to an equally excessive activity, and that Russia, as Byelinsky said, can do in five years what the West took fifty years to do. Nature does not move by leaps and bounds, not even in Russia.

The author is very contemptuous in his treatment of Liberalism,

which implies for him not merely the special party creed of Mr. Asquith's followers, but the Constitutional doctrine common to the great parties in Great Britain and America. The truth is that Continental Liberalism, except for a time in France, has always been a sickly growth—an exotic which did not bear transplantation—and it has little in common with the historic Liberalism of our own country. The sharp antithesis which President Masaryk sees between Liberalism and religion is not at all evident to us, and his sweeping assertion that "the masses are now lost to Liberalism" is most profoundly untrate of Great Britain or America. We lay stress on this remark because it

illustrates the great difference existing between British and Continental politics. Many people fondly suppose that one country is very much like another, and that our political system, resting on the traditions and the practical experience of Centuries, can be imitated with instant success in, say, Poland or Bohemia, or even in Russia or India. That is not so. President Masaryles study of Russian problems unconsciously illuminates the political attitude of Central Europe as well as of Eastern Europe, and makes us realize not only the impossibility of "internationalism," but also the length and complexity of the historic process through which these countries have to pass. 'Autocracy, the Roman Catholic Church, economic conditions, German philosophy, have all moulded these peoples into ways that are alien from ours. We can learn to understand them and they can learn to understand us, but it is just as well not to begin by underrating or ignoring the differences between the peoples of Europe, who have now to try to work together in a League of Nations.

SPORTSMEN PARSONS IN PEACE AND WAR.* Tuts is not a book for Bishops. Neither should we recommend it as a suitable manual of information to such Nonconformists as desire to be instructed concerning the Anglican clergy of the immediate past. Many of the Sportsmen Parsons" the accounts of whose doings amuse the reader certainly mistook their vocation. The writer allows this, though her sympathies are plainly with them, and not with the Bishops whose remonstrances they disregarded. Once only does she let the Bishop have the better of it, and in that case his snub was too witty to be set aside. "Is it true your Lordship objects to my hunting ? " asked a parson complained of for Nimrodian idleness. "Not at all," said the Bishop, "not at all ! Who could have said such a thing ? What I object to is your ever doing anything else !"

Amongst the early Victorian squarsons who spent their time in "hunting and being cheery" Jack Russell of course stands pre-eminent. A friend of "Lords and Ladies, horse-dealers, gypsies, rat-catchers, old people, young children," he yet had his detractors. Some even among his humbler parishioners objected to his sporting proclivities. He was, however, "fairly smart with the gloves," and he and his critics used literally to fight out their differences, a practice which did not detract from his popularity. He was, we are told, "a courtier," and a very generous as well as a very extravagant man. Moreover, he was a wit, and wit covers a multitude of negligences and ignorances. He used to describe a grey horse which carried him well for many years as " speechless in one eye."

The Rev. George Hustler, M.P.H., was much such another sportsman in Holy Orders. He lived, however, rather later, and apparently the race of sporting parsons, though they seem to belong to the past, is yet alive. The following paragraph refers to a West Countryman :

"There is no keener sportman in the West Country than Mr. Milne, who hunts six days a week, and is much sought after as a judge at puppy-shows. He hunts in pink, which is not a common practice with parsons ; he also acts as his own huntsman, and during the hunting season wears pink in the evening. He says whatever he does he tries to dress the part. On Sundays always a tall hat and black coat, even in his remote little village. He has hunted the Cattistock for seventeen years ; before that he was Master of the North Bucks Harriers ; before that again, the Trinity Beagles at Cambridge, so he has had considerable experience."

These parsons who seem to us in these days to need so much excuse were without doubt liked by their parishioners. Perhaps such men as Charles Kingsley threw a glamour over their less gifted and less pious contemporaries. Our authoress boldly declares that they were far better liked than the present-day parson, against whom she brings some quite unreasonable accusations. He is not, she maintains, a social " asset " in a neighbourhood; he is not companionable ; not, in fact, a man of the world. Ought he to be ? It is a very difficult question. The truth is that nowadays the laity do not know what they do want. They speak slightingly very often of the clergy ; but what type of man would they like to see in their country or their London parishes ? The critics of the clergy all shout together and all say something different. If the laity only knew their own minds, they would stand a better chance of having their requirements fulfilled. As it is, some men wish that their parish priest should once more resemble a "country gentleman," and others blame him beoaufse he does not resemble a University don. Some would like to see a oelibate priest at the head of the parish, and others oompare their olergyman, to his disadvantage, with the beet type of married Nonconformist minister, while the most eaptious will approve no one but a saint—a man entirely given up to good works, eager for self-sacrifice, full of that grace which makes worldly polish appear a poor thing. There is at present no consensus of opinion. Everybody of every sort can, however, unite in extolling the courage and devotion of those Army chaplains who went with the soldiers into the trenches, and suffered anti risked their lives and died with them. Only a proportion of the clergy who volunteered for the front were heroes ; that goes without saying ; but the deeds of some among those few as chronicled here must make every reader proud of Englishmen in Orders, be they Anglicans or Roman Catholics or Free Churchmen. The picture here given of Father Finn, "the first Army chaplain of any denomination to fall in the war," is touching and charming, and his short address to his men when they were going to almost certain death can hardly be read with dry eyes. Of another priest an Irish Guardsman writes :—

" I saw him just before he died. Shrapnel and bullets were being showered upon us in all directions. Hundreds of our lads dropped. Father Gwynn was quite calm. He seemed to be all over the place, trying to give the last Sacrament to the dying. Once I thought he was buried alive, for a shell exploded within e, few yards of where he was, and the next moment I saw nothing but a heap of earth. The plight of the wounded concealed beneath was most harrowing. Out of the ground came cries of Father, Father ' from those who were in their death-agonies. Then as if by a miracle Father Gwynn was seen fighting his way through the earth. Ile must have been seriously injured., but he went on blessing the wounded and hearing their confessions. The last I saw of him he was kneeling beside a German soldier. I believe he was killed immediately after this act of priestly charity to a fallen opponent."

"Chaplain Mackenzie of the Salvation Army" can show almost as fine a record; and for a simple story of duty done, unconscious unselfishness, and true humanity, it would be difficult to better the letters of the Rev. Rupert Inglis, here quoted at some length.

It is strange what different types of good men the Anglican Church and the various Free Churches attract to their pastorates. A quotation from an officer's letter gives a singularly vivid sketch of the modern Puritan :—

"There is a perfect example of the sort of man I mean in the battalion called —, a company commander now, and incongruously enough rather a special pal of mine, although his idea of bliss is to produce most miserable hymn tunes and dirges on a tin whistle every evening. He used to be a Nonconformist minister, but is now a tremendously keen soldier whom no horrors can sicken and no fatigue daunt. He is really one of those splendid fellows one can admire wholeheartedly. His name appeared in the lists of those decorated for conspicuous bravery some time ago, and people think him rather a lucky dog, but I doubt if there are many men who suffer more in this war. Sometimes when things are sleek he crawls into my dug-out and lets himself go. You can see all the mental agony this austere Nonconformist suffers. It is literally true to say that the sheer wickedness of it all makes him miserable and desperate. It is for him a holy war, and he is straining every nerve in the personal effort to win what he hopes may be universal peace for humanity. Meanwhile his life is far from a happy one. Even the questionable wit of camps is hateful to him. It WaS men like this that Cromwell had the wit to see would carry him anywhere—and they did."

Why, by the way, do such men as these come under the heading of Sportsmen Parsons"? We suppose Mrs. Stuart Menzies allows herself to use the word in two senses.

We cannot conclude this nett's° without making an allusion to the exceedingly romantic career of the Rev. W. Benton. His whole life was an adventure. He ran away from home, he ran away from school, he fell in love, he lost his money, he disappeared, he enlisted, he deserted, and turned up again after a longish space of time upon Robben Island, where among the lepers he underwent the experience known as conversion. After giving himself up to the military authorities, he was permitted to leave the Army and enter the Church. When war broke out he went to the war as a chaplain, but the desire to do actual fighting was upon him, and he asked leave to take a combatant commission. The ecclesiastical authorities consented, without approval, and he was at once made "Brigade Sniping Officer." Meanwhile his somewhat emotional form of religion remained with him in its full fervour. "In the trenches he would kneel down, whether muddy or dry, and say his prayers out loud." Truly there is material here for a wonderful portrait of a certain sort of Churchman militant—a portrait ,to arrest the instant attention even of those who, like the present writer, find the particular type by no means wholly attractive.