problems a wealth of suggestion vainly sought for in far more pretentious volumes.

Père Laberthonnière-we trust our readers know his valuable essay, "Théorie de l'Éducation l'Éducation" (in English, The Ideal Teacher; Cathedral Library Association)-has been prominently before the world for a considerable time past as one of the foremost thinkers and writers in a movement daily growing in significance. They call this movement by all sorts of names-"method of immanence"; "new apologetic"; "Catholic Kantism," as well as by other titles less obscure and more vituperative. Like most other movements it suffers now in its beginning from the hasty and indiscriminating comments of over-zealous friends and foes. Yet it appears to be winning new adherents and wider recognition as initial misunderstandings are gradually being cleared away. To our author, more perhaps than to any other, is due the merit of focussing attention upon the central and essential points of the position that the progressive people need to defend.

The questions at issue concern both the study of Catholicism as a personal religion, and the method to be adopted in propagating Catholic truth. truth. The controversy began with a thesis which M. Blondel defended at the Sorbonne in 1893, and which concerned the role of reason in Christian faith. Around that thesis has circled a decade of literary praise and blame. Some harsh things have been written and some clever retorts made. Suffice it here to note that among M. Blondel's more or less efficient and more or less pronounced allies have been numbered M. Fonsegrive, of La Quinzaine; M. l'Abbé Mano, and M. l'Abbé Denis, of the Annales de philosophie Chrétienne; while among his critics, more or less direct and more or less violent, have been R. P. Schwalm, the Dominican; M. l'Abbé Gayraud, deputy of the French Chamber; R. P. Bachelet, S.J., and R. P. Fontaine, S.J., of Protestant Infiltration fame. Without going into the merits of the general controversy, or of the side-issues that have asserted themselves. repeatedly, it may be considered safe to say that the reader. who welcomes vigorous, independent thinking, and personal initiative in action, and a religion that is live, broad, deep, uncompromisingly human, and unmistakably divine, will peruse these essays with no little joy and profit.

What will he learn in them? These among other things:

That Catholicism denies no right of reason, but accepts and enlarges upon all that reason has attained. That there is no conflict between reason and faith, but only between the license born of egoism and the despotism sprung of superstition. That Catholicism is not a bundle of formulas, but a life to be lived; and that not miracles, prophecies, and definitions make religion, but rather God dwelling in the soul. That it is good for people to think and study religious truth in order that their lives may conform with more and more fidelity to the divine exemplar. That we shall defend Catholicism most effectively and spread it most successfully if we bring men to look upon it not as a mere established fact of history, but rather as the one only adequate fulfilment of the want that each human being feels within his soul.

These and other things will the reader find exposed in a telling fashion, and with us he will thank and congratulate the author of these essays, waiting meanwhile most impatiently for more.

6. We have not the slightest hard feeling toward Mr. Loran D. Osborn, and in perusing his book * we felt no temptation to animosity; but we must set it down as our deliberate conviction that he stands in need of a long course of training in clear and logical thinking, and in the oldfashioned ethics of controversy which reckon it to a man's discredit if he censures what he has not mastered, and holds up to ridicule what he has never studied at first hand. In the course of his book Mr. Osborn maintains these propositions: 1. Early Christianity was ruined, and the Gospel obscured, by being transferred from a living personal faith to a formulated creed. 2. Yet formulated creeds are necessary. 3. Theology has obscured Christ. 4. Yet Christ cannot be preached without theology. 5. Origen, Augustine, and the Catholic Church generally have given us set creeds, and are therefore the destroyers of Gospel-Christianity. 6. Yet it is permitted to Mr. Loran D. Osborn to devote a very large part of his book to the presentation of a "re-stated Gospel-Christianity" in terms of creed and dogma. 7. The Gospel is permanent and cannot change. 8. Yet theology, which is the Gospel expressed, must perpetually change. 9. "One searches the Scriptures in vain.

The Recovery and Restatement of the Gospel. By Loran David Osborn, Ph.D. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

for such church dogmas as those of the Trinity, the Person of Christ and the atonement" (page 172). 10. "Jesus is the mediator of eternal life" (p. 197); "Christ is the full revelation of God's ethical life and the divine Saviour of men" (page 204); "In a real sense Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God. This is the truth contended for in the old Christological creeds, and is the priceless heritage bequeathed by them to

When the new Christological formulations are made, they must not be permitted to rob us of it" (page 204).

These contentions, when thrown together, represent about as much loose thinking and inconsequent argument as we can imagine one book to contain. Mr. Osborn should have given us an analytical study of the proper province of dogma, critical reasons why one set of dogmas are insufficient or false and another set tenable and true, a statement of New Testament doctrines, and a philosophical discussion of the divine and the human, the changeable and the fixed elements in the Christian religion. All this was demanded by the nature of the task he placed before himself, the task, namely, of re-stating a lost and corrupted Gospel-Christianity.

Yet of all this work there is scarcely a respectable trace. Mr. Osborn impresses us as a man who has caught at Harnack's conclusions as to the real nature of uncontaminated Christianity, and in a most uncritical fashion has followed and applied them. Doctrinal statements de-personalize religion by turning the mind to a philosophical scheme and away from vital faith, and by making the first object of belief a written formula instead of the realities of the world unseen. So says Mr. Osborn, following we know not how many of modern doctors, who strangely seem to think it a compensation for the less clear and definite doctrine, if they also pitch overboard every clear and definite idea about anything religious. Throughout this entire book it is thrust upon the reader that the moment a man's mind wishes to see his belief as an object of intellectual assent, his heart must cease to feel it as the object of living faith. Nothing can be more false and mischievous. Mr. Osborn's native good sense tells him that it is false and mischievous, for he tries after all to plead for theology and dogma himself. Lack of clearness, lack of method, lack of critical training, stand out big and ugly from nearly every page of this book, we are sorry to be obliged to say.

And as to criticisms and censures passed by our author on matters which he has not even attempted to inform himself upon, we need only mention his declarations that at the beginning of the sixteenth century the Bible was almost an unknown book; that the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 introduced the dogmas of Baptism, the Holy Eucharist and Penance; and the preposterous statement that the church considers the laity to possess only natural morality, while those who take the three vows have supernatural morality. No one who loves exact scholarship can think highly of a book like this, however one respects the good intentions of its author. We trust that when Mr. Osborn writes his next volume it will be after some years of deep and patient study, and that he will refuse to put it into print so long as there is a vague idea in it, or a feeble argument, or a misrepresentation of the other side of the question.

*

7. Not many will remain unmoved as they read the biography of the Reverend Robert Radclyffe Dolling, clergyman of the Church of England and social worker of international renown. His story is the story of a man deeply impressed with the sense of religion's worth in daily life and strongly moved to bring every one of his fellow-beings under the beneficent influence of the grace of Christ. To his mind healthy human living and personal love for our Saviour were the two supreme gifts of God to this world, and each moment of his existence, every action and every thought of his, seem to have been aimed at the wider diffusion of these among men. The intellectual problems of religion weighed very lightly upon him and he felt but little interest in doctrine or discipline that did not bear upon the practical issues of conduct. This was his failing-that he did not seek to know how Christian truth could be logically defended. His extraordinary love for men was the chain that held him fast to creed and ritual; and his keen instinct for practical affairs the motive for working so uniformly along Catholic lines.

Father Dolling's personality was truly an exceptional one; for he possessed a magnetism that, to judge by results, was literally irresistible. A Harrow boy and a Cambridge undergraduate, he failed to make his mark as a student at either

* The Life of Father Dolling. By Charles E. Osborne. London: Edwin Arnold.

of these institutions; but once engaged in active work—even in the work of an Irish land agent-he gained and held the affections of those he met to an extent that must be considered as most phenomenal. Before his ordination, as a helper at the Postmen's League, and later as incumbent of a mission in a Portsmouth slum, and still again as vicar of St. Saviour's, a station in the lowest quarter of the East End of London, he proved beyond question that he was one who loved his fellow-men to an extent unusual even among the best type of Christian. Aided by his two devoted sisters, he succeeded by dint of prodigious effort, added to real genius, in saving countless numbers of boys and girls, of men and women, from physical, moral, and religious ruin.

But the story is too long and too great to be outlined here. Read the biography so sincerely written by his friend and fellow worker, Father Osborne. Note the letter from his fast friend, Rev. George Tyrrell, S.J., and the earnest tribute from Cardinal-Archbishop Logue. Weigh the whole wonderful narrative well, and then marvel that the Church of England should harass and hamper, instead of helping him, and that the Church Catholic should have remained hidden from one so ardently and honestly desirous to adopt as his own every great power making for human betterment. His manly and deeply religious disposition, his laborious days, his magnificent though humanly unrewarded successes, his unwearying self-consecration, his pathetic and premature death-these must impress, and edify, and impel to higher living every reader that can lay claim to a human heart. As the book is closed one longs for the day when such men as this, wherever found, shall strive more triumphantly in the perfecting of humanity through being held together in the bond of unity which Christ would have to encompass all who labor in his name. Such a consummation will be furthered, perhaps, by the present biography, and the more so because of the sympathetic, outspoken, unassuming, and generally agreeable tone of the writer who presents it to the public.

8. Any book on Biblical subjects is sufficiently recommended if its title-page bears the name of Père Lagrange.* The distinguished Dominican who presides over the school of La Méthode Historique surtout à propos de l'Ancien Testament. Par le P. Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P. Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre.

VOL. LXXVIII.-17