sunshine of Gallipoli, or through the cold mists of the North Sea, we saw the vision, lacking which the people perish. Some, indeed, there are who do not recognise the privilege and its obligation, nor see in war anything but shreds of human flesh rotting upon barbs of rusty wire. Of such things they make little songs, saying that never again will they witness them, no matter what ills may arise from their fixed purpose to suffer no further discomfort as long as they live. They write books. . . complaining of their disillusion and crying aloud their great discovery that war hurts. Such are not true soldiers, and we may well believe that they will never take up the sword again, except it be against their own fellow-countrymen. For, as I have observed, many who find hatred of war a useful stepping-stone to the fulfilment of their political ambitions are apt to keep a soft place in their hearts for the cutting of throats in civil strife. Peace hath her holocausts no less renowned than war; and he who boasts his love of all mankind too often still contrives to hate his brother to the death' (pp. 6, 7).

I make no excuse for quoting this fine passage at length.

'Service does really engender love of those whom we serve, and to love one's neighbour as oneself does really open out a knowledge of the absolute truth. . . . And the soldier can bear witness that his experience has resolved such doubts as possessed him before he undertook that entire self-abandonment in service which his calling requires. . . . This is that Religion of the Soldier concerning which it is my purpose to write' (p. 11).

This Religion of Service and Sacrifice and Silence Mr Hopkinson unfolds with a sincerity and dignity which compel respect.

A pioneer has little use for old forms. Mr Hopkinson thinks they are outworn and useless; indeed, they provoke him to impatience. There is too little bread among the stones which the Churches give us, too much crying of "Lord! Lord!"; too great a certainty that the purpose of God is an open book, and that all who can say "shibboleth" are of the elect' (p. 19). The War brought in a new revelation of a religion of service and sacrifice (but is not this the old Christianity, which we have lost sight of?), and 'the present pessimism has been brought about, as I believe, by the backwardness of soldiers to tell what

war has taught' (p. 20). Mr Hopkinson is at war with the conventional forms of religion, and appears to dislike all forms as conventional. Yet he who thinks differently may reply that in religious criticism it is easy to confound dogma with doctrine, and that for a principle or a rite to have survived such cataclysms of human experience as the foundation of Christianity, the Crusades, the Moslem invasion of Europe, the Reformation, as well as wars and revolutions which had for their object the promulgation or the suppression of religion, it must have its roots not merely in antiquity but in truth itself. Nay, even if such have no deeper origin than the human need for symbol and expression, the very fact of their survival from the ages when men were wise in faith until this day, when we are merely clever in criticism, is proof of a need common to humanity. We are reluctant to touch on certain passages in Mr Hopkinson's book, because we disagree with their motive. He maintains that he is 'the mouthpiece of many of his generation' in holding that 'one good man or woman is more than all the creeds and institutions.' He desires to 'set down, as truly as he may, what is the meaning of God to men of the present day,' who find 'it more easy to believe that man once became God than that God once became man.' The 'attack is a general one upon the whole position held by traditionalists, who declare their belief that God once became man.' 'To the graven image which they (the Churches) call God we definitely refuse worship. We will have naught to do with a God against whom we may justly level that awful reproach:

"For all the sin wherewith the Face of Man

Is blackened, Man's forgiveness give-and take!"' The force of the latter argument, as an argument, is shaken when we read presently that 'our naughty lives are such, not because we use neither charms nor incantations, but because of our own deliberate naughtiness. By practising virtue they are become virtuous. By practising wickedness we become wicked.' We do not propose to argue about it and about' with the author, because the essence of religion is inarguable. But we would suggest that no form or image under which God is discernible is valueless or wholly wrong, and that while certain of Vol. 251.-No. 497.

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this generation may doubtless hold the conception of a God definable within the limits of a spatial dimension,' a fairly wide experience assures one that many find steadfastness and assurance in their conception of a most Personal God, a realised Figure, an Entity, apprehended clearly through the mists of argument with which man's face is blackened. We wholly agree with Mr. Hopkinson's condemnation of the vanity and hindrance of religious controversy; by such no one is freed, and often men fight over details for the sake of the fight rather than for its actual importance. If we were less eager to split hairs, we might be more zealous in keeping the Law; besides, it is better to love your neighbour in his way, but most of us insist on loving him in ours, the logical outcome of all which has been the Inquisition, the thumbscrew, and the rack.

We are reluctant to touch on Mr Hopkinson's comments on the Holy Eucharist, which is for all Church people the sublime act of their faith. Even if to some the Sacrament is only an outward and visible sign (but of what?) there are also many of the war-generation who have grasped the verity through the symbol. Familiarity with the symbolical rites and services of foreign Churches induces the conviction that a large section of mankind still requires to be taught by picture and by allegory. Nature itself is symbolical, and through the things seen by the eyes of the body the sight and instincts of the soul are opened to apprehension of things unseen. As Moses said long ago, 'The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those which are revealed belong unto us': and Blake-'There exist in the Eternal World the permanent realities of everything we see reflected in this vegetable world of matter,' for the world of the imagination is the world of Eternity.' Doubtless all religious forms are the outcome of the travail, the need, the experience, the slow, slow upward trend of the human soul through uncounted ages: Christ came not to destroy but to fulfil. The earlier creeds in which Mr Hopkinson justly finds much of truth and beauty foreshadowed a higher state of spiritual evolution. As he himself says, none 'can doubt that the conceptions of God proper to various stages of intellectual evolution must be as varied as those stages.

If this be not so, then God has changed, which is impossible' (p. 47). Symbols, forms, rites, are in themselves divisions, or at least marks of divisions between men, but they are also necessary concomitants to human existence. Just as we have to bear national, tribal, or family names, to live in numbered houses in named streets of towns in definite provinces, for the sake of order and convenience, so must we be content to belong to certain definite religious organisations, as much for the sake of others as for our own. (Mr Hopkinson calls these 'convenient distinctions.') Perhaps if we regard submission to these distinctions' as partly a service to others we shall discover in them a dignity and harmony not otherwise discernible; even as the soldier accepts discipline in forms petty and often tyrannous, and so ennobles his calling. But, Mr Hopkinson says,

For us there is but one sacrament, one magic necessary unto salvation, namely that a man should love his neighbour as himself. And be it understood that an essential part of the practice of those who believe this must be to look with charity and respect upon the worship of others. For my part, I gladly offer incense on the altar of any man's idol, if thus I may avoid offence and even confirm him in a faith wherein I have no share' (p. 27).

From such practice' we dissent with vigour. To offer incense to any idol out of politeness to the idolator would confirm no one in his faith, for the motive falls far short of the bigness of charity and the action would be empty of meaning. Mr Hopkinson's conception of essentials, as opposed to mere forms, is as big as it should be.

'That men should be courageous in the face of danger, loyal to the community wherein they hold themselves but insignificant units, ready to obey commands given for the furtherance of the common weal, courteous to those who are poorer and weaker than themselves-in short, that they fear God and honour the King-all these are matters of no small moment. . . . Any Oriental obscurities which Mithraism may have brought into the Churches are fully counterbalanced by the code of loyalty and chivalry of which it can claim to be the begetter. Moreover, it solved for the soldier the hard problem raised by the command that a man shall turn his

other cheek to the smiter. For the adherents showed that such an instruction could be obeyed to the full, yet that no man need turn his own cheek to him who smote some other person. The soldier confesses that he is bound to forgive unto seventy times seven times the brother who has offended him, but can see no reason why he should forgive even once the brother whose trespass against others is unrequited. Herein, as I believe, we find the whole justification of war. For by wounds received in battle the offence against others is converted into an offence against the soldier himself, and that which was without pardon becomes that for which forgiveness must be freely granted. This is the message of Mithras, filling a man's mind with happiness when his mangled body lies bleeding on the clay of Flanders. Such an one has laid his gift by the altar, and is reconciled to his brother. Wounded for the iniquity of others and bruised for their transgressions, he achieves a measure of unity with the god not to be attained so surely by any other means. Therefore, they would do but an ill-service to mankind if those should have their desire who would deprive the world of war. For it cannot profit a man to say that he forgives an injury done to others. . . . It is only if the offence be against himself that he is able to pardon the offender. Nor when a man grinds the faces of the poor can he be forgiven by any save the poor, or those who have turned the injury against themselves by selling all that they have in order to relieve the victims of his oppression. And these are things to be learnt most thoroughly in the hard school of war' (pp. 29-31).

To trace all religion and all charity to a Mithraic or Orphic origin leads one backward and not forward in the quest for truth, and in all this Mr Hopkinson seems to us to be beset by thoughts really too big for elucidation and expression. In the attempt to express such matters faith, the inexpressible, is lost sight of; for faith is faith as well as practice, nor can there be practice unless there be faith. Our very admiration for his book makes us wish that he had not attempted to express the inexpressible. But criticism is an ungracious art and we gladly drop it, for a review should be a signpost, pointing readers to the book itself. And for all the rest we have nothing but praise in fullest measure.

Mr Hopkinson exposes the futility and insincerity of the doctrine that the State should support the individuals who compose it. L'État c'est moi' positively expresses