mattered to him was that whether he lived or died, he should live or die in the Faith of Christ, as authoritatively declared by the Catholic Church.

THE

'HE present is no time for counting, for marking time, for waiting to see how things are going to turn out in the world. The duty of the Church is to stand clearly and definitely for the Faith whole and unimpaired as summed up in the Creeds. Spiritual Preparedness is vitally important. Back of all the war of nations lies a greater, more protracted and deadlier war, the conflict between God and Satan. The cunning, the determination, the greed for power, the unscrupulousness as to methods, the cruelty, the lying, the treachery and the deceit, the loss of high sense of honor,- all these are characteristics of Satan's warfare against the Almighty, as we have the history of the fallen archangel set forth in Holy Scripture. The ideals for which Christian nations are contending are the ideals and facts of truth as revealed in and by Jesus Christ and taught throughout the Christian centuries by the Holy Ghost in the Catholic Church, of mercy and pity and justice as essentials in the Being and Nature of God and exhibited in His providential dealings with mankind; the brotherhood of man, not primarily due to common membership in the human race, but because of the essential change introduced in that race when God took flesh of Mary Ever-Virgin, and raised that Flesh to the state of freedom from the domination of sin and death in the Resurrection, and in that Flesh ascended to the state of glorious reigning in heaven, while not leaving His Body the Church but continuing to abide in that Church.

E

VERY article of the Catholic Creeds has been set at naught in modern times in a thousand different ways. This has been done by kingdoms and individuals, by classes and groups in society, by the scholar in the pride of his learning apart from the source of true knowledge, by the Bishop in his condoning of false, heretical, destructive teaching, by the Priest who disre

gards his ordination vows, by the baptized and confirmed who refuse the authority of the Church and do what each one in his own eyes considers to be right. And now the crisis which is in a considerable measure the outcome of spiritual deadness before the war is upon us in the war and will come with an increase of danger with the after-the-war situation. Metaphorically, surgeons, political, social, legislative, ethical, are leaning over the Church to dissect and probe and cut in an endeavor apparently inevitable to remedy the disease which they have been diagnosing. They would like to soothe the Church into a slumber while they work. They bid it count numbers, wealth, respectability, popularity, outward signs of visible success - and so sink into a lethargy from which it may never, they think, awaken, or only to find the operation over and something lost from its essential constitution. The analogy fails, but the lesson can be read. The Church must not count but reiterate with strong, clear utterance the Faith once for all delivered to the Saints. For all practical purposes the Church lives only if it lives in that Faith, and works in its application to the minutest as well as the greatest affairs of life here and life hereafter.

Is the Church alive to the demand for spiritual preparedness?

When we say "the Church " we mean the Church of the Catholic Creeds, not any one-sided presentation of that Church. We do not mean protestantism. If ever the latter stood convicted of failure in vital Christianity it is at the present moment. Where protestantism is popular it is because it administers opiates and bids men count - that is, to do irrelevant, colorless things. Where protestantism is discredited the explanation is that when men and nations in deadly peril asked for real positive gifts, absolution, sacramental grace, truths to live and to die by, it had nothing to give. And exactly as the Catholic Church, any or every section, Eastern or Western, Latin or Anglo-Saxon, has allowed the intrusion of any species of protestantism (and none are quite free), the popularity or the impotence is exposed and the essential, inherent strength is

hidden from the sight of those who are looking not for anodynes to lull into immediate though temporary relief, but the "saving health among all nations."

W

E are trying to lead up to a point. The world of nations is soon (please God) to be engaged in endeavors to safeguard itself against tricks of diplomacy, words that can be played with fast and loose, treaties that are only subterfuges, half-truths (the devil's most subtle weapon). Armies that have been under iron discipline, men who have endured continuous and terrible privations, officers who have been under authority, all will sooner or later return to life at home. They will have learned to appreciate -many of them - discipline, authority, self-control and abstemiousness. If they find a Church that corresponds in these particulars they will recognize it as a power, a safe-guard, a strong tower of help.

What if they find the Church otherwise? What respect will they have for a Church where an officer high in prominence declares he does not believe Jesus to be God, and another in his discharge of the responsible teaching office as a Priest, quibbling with the technical terms of religion, asserts that while he believes the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection himself, he does not think it necessary for others so to believe? To believe is not the synonym for opinion.

The great prayer for the Church in the Eucharist emphasizes the duty of Bishops and other Ministers" that they may both by their life and doctrine set forth thy true and lively Word and rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments." The inferences are clear. The Church is a teaching Church. How many know and can state clearly to others why they are Churchmen and not Baptists or Methodists, or Jews or Unitarians? The Church is a Sacramental Church. That means a great deal more than a haphazard, once-a-month-if-you-feel-like-it, or Easter-and no-other-time-of-the-year practice of communions, or even the rare and, outside of large cities, almost unknown daily Eucharist. The Sacraments in the Church's life are meant to stand out in as marked a way for everyone as the soldier's roll-call and drills.

The Church is a democratic body. There are no class distinctions. Rented pews and parish Churches on swell avenues with "chapels" a block or two away for the non-aristocratic element are neither Christian nor Catholic.

The Church is a refuge and hospital for sinners. Protection and medicines are afforded to supply the strength needed by the "weakness of our mortal nature" and for the healing of the diseases of the soul. That function of the Church must not be denied nor concealed. There must be distinctly set forth the Gospel truth that sin is wide-spread in society and is the disease that is dragging down the world. The duty of the clergy requires them to act as physicians of souls, though they are not by virtue of their ordination good money-raisers, skillful organizers and great and original, with the strong possibility of being heretical thinkers.

The time is at hand for spiritual preparedness and for us to be true to the Church of our allegiance, not to an adaptation or a travesty thereof. Are we to continue to allow our opportunnity to be lost through our parochialism, enslavement to popular opinion, adulation of successful business methods, fear of man so that we dare not speak out and say that pride and ambition and extravagant living and doubtfully honest business methods. as well as condoned financial maxims and practices are evil? No, we are learning our lesson. German protestantism has worked out before our eyes some of its responsibility for the present war. Protestantized Germanism-a militarism whereby the world seeks to conquer and enslave the Church is the correlative aim of a powerful few today who "profess and call themselves Christian." It must not be attained.

Holy intention is to the actions of a man that which the soul is to the body, or form to its matter, or the root to the tree, or the sun to the world, or the fountain to a river, or the base to the pillar: for without these the body is a dead trunk, the matter is sluggish, the tree is a block, the world is darkness, the river is quickly dry, the pillar rushes into flatness and ruin; and the action is sinful, or unprofitable, or vain.

-Jeremy Taylor.

BOOK REVIEWS

Basic Ideas in Religion, or Apologetic Theism. By Richard W. Micou, D.D. late Professor of Theology and Apologetics at the Theological Seminary in Virginia. Edited by Paul Micou, M.A. B. D. 473 pp. with Notes and Appendices. New York City: The Association Press, 1916.

The 470 odd pages of this book contain the substance of the courses on a most important department of theology given by a gifted teacher, the late Dr. Micou, whose untimely death in 1912 caused widespread sorrow. A succession of students, who had profited by his instruction, will welcome this memorial of their former Master who, from its pages, though "dead yet speaketh." But the book should make more than this personal appeal. Every clergyman would find the study of it most helpful to him in the task which is his as set for the defense of the Gospel." If the average clergyman of our Church was well grounded in the subjects so ably handled by Dr. Micou, and more particularly filled with the spirit which breathes from his every page, it would do much to abate the not infrequent criticism of much of the preaching in our Churches; there certainly would be fewer sermonettes by preacherettes."

Apologetics is, of course, no new thing. It is as old as the Gospel. The aggressive nature of Christianity has always laid it open to attack. The Christian preacher is obliged constantly to defend it against misrepresentation and denial. But each age has its own apologetic. It is the duty of the preacher of to-day to be familiar with that which belongs to his day. An apologia which once was valuable may (as so many have) become antiquated and useless. To be effective, the Christian Apologist must combine with his sure grasp upon his own position an equally definite and sympathetic knowledge of that of his opponent. He must be in accord with the " ruling ideas of his age," he must employ the methods, follow the spirit and speak the language of his day. Nowhere is " zeal without knowledge "more fatal than here. The demand to-day is for "a reasoning together" rather than a bald appeal to authority be it Church or Bible. Any other sort may style itself an apologia, but it will be taken for what it really is, "an apology," vox praeterea nil.

Basic Ideas in Religion may be said to measure fairly up to the standard of what such a book should be. In it we have the matured thought of a genuine apologist. Dr. Micou was a scholar. He had early gained distinction in the Classics and Philosophy. He was very widely