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biographer says, all her decisions were directed by her dream of an ideal Church; all things judged in its light. Her triumphant bringing back of the Pope (Gregory XI.) from Avignon to Rome was the short-sighted action of a visionary, bearing faction and misery in its train; while her wonderful sway over Gregory and his stormy successor, Urban VI., both of whom depended on the counsels of this unlettered girl, was the personal sway of a woman; and she was quite unable to effect her one desire, the reform of the Church. When Urban summoned her to his side in Rome, she came, against her will, broken in body, suffering, yet undaunted-only to see what she most dreaded, the beginning of the great schism and the setting up of an antiPope; only to die on her plank-bed, with the knowledge that her life's aims were defeated. "In the holy memory" was the form of signature adopted by

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two of her loving followers, when they wrote to each other years after her death.

Should we be thankful to live when we do? Not the least interesting part of Mr. Coulton's "From St. Francis to Dante" is its conclusion. He pits the faith of the Middle Ages against the faith of to-day, and his verdict is in favor of to-day. "Imagination staggers," he says, "at the moral gulf that yawns between that age and ours." He dwells upon the false idealization of the early centuries which has long prevailed; he sums up the speedy degeneration of the Friars the growth of the fatal fallacy that faith consists in outward manifestations. We at least know that faith is only concerned with "the inward workings of the heart." And so, he ends, we need not be pessimists. We are nearer to the Christian spirit than medieval people-priests or lay

men.

THE SUBURBANS.

Lord Randolph Churchill ended his political career because he had "forgotten Goschen." The Progressive Party experienced its first defeat in London because it had forgotten the Middle Classes. It recognized, indeed, and estimated not unfairly, the strength of the rich, the Professional Classes, and the bourgeoisie. These three classes are prominent factors in the modern European polity. But it had forgotten the dimensions and latent power of that enormous suburban people which are practically the product of the past half-century, and have so greatly increased, even within the last decade. They are the creations not of the industrial, but of the commercial and business activities of London. They form a homogeneous civilization-detached, self-centred, unostentatious

covering the hills along the northern and southern boundaries of the City, and spreading their conquests over the quiet fields beyond. They are the peculiar product of England and America; and their opinions and ideals are worthy of careful study. It is a life of Security; a life of Sedentary occupation; a life of Respectability; and these three qualities give the key to its special characteristics. It is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men's accounts, writing other men's letters. Its male population is sucked into the City at daybreak, and scattered again as darkness falls. Here are the miles and miles of the little red houses in the little silent streets, in number defying imagination, each with its pleasant

drawing-room, its bow window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title -"Acacia Villa," or "Camperdown Lodge"-attesting unconquered human aspiration. There are many little interests beyond the working hours: here a little green house filled with chrysanthemums, there a tiny grass patch with bordering flowers; there a chickenhouse, here a tennis lawn. The women, with their own domestic servants, now so difficult to get, and so exacting when found, find time hang rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to shopping centres in the West End, and pious sociabilities, and the occasional theatre, and the interests of home. The children are jolly, wellfed, intelligent English children; full of curiosity, at least in the earlier years. Some of them have real gifts of intellect and artistic skill, receiving in the suburban secondary schools the best education which the world is giving to-day. You may see the whole suburbs in August transported to the more genteel of the Southern wateringplaces; the father, perhaps, a little bored; the mother perplexed with the difficulty of cramped lodgings and extortionate prices. But the children are in a magic world, crowding the seashore, full of the elements of delight and happy laughter.

The rich despise the Working People; the Middle Classes fear them. Fear, stimulated by every artifice of a clever campaign, is the strong motive power behind this present uprising. In feverish hordes, the suburbs have swarmed to the polling booth to vote against a truculent Proletariat. The Middle Class elector has become irritated and indignant against working-class legislation. He is tired of the plaint of the unemployed and the insistent crying of the poor. The spectacle of a Labor Party triumphant in the House of Commons, with a majority of members of Parliament apparently obedient

to the demands of its leader, and even a House of Lords afraid of it, fills him with profound disgust. The vision of a Keir Hardie in the cartoons-with red tie and defiant beard and cloth cap. and fierce, unquenched thirst for Middle Class property-has become an image of Labor Triumphant, which haunts his waking hours. He has difficulty with the plumber; his wife is harassed by the indifference or insolence of the domestic servant. From a blend of these two he has constructed in imagination the image of Democracy -a loud-voiced, independent, arrogant figure, with a thirst for drink and imperfect standards of decency, and a determination to be supported at someone else's expense. Every day, swung

high upon embankments or buried deep in tubes underground, he hurries through the region where the creature lives. He gazes darkly from his pleasant hill villa upon the huge and smoky area of tumbled tenements which stretches at his feet. He is dimly distrustful of the forces fermenting in this uncouth laboratory. Every day he anticipates the boiling over of the cauldron. He would never be surprised to find the crowd behind the red flag, surging up his little pleasant pathways, tearing down the railings, trampling the little garden; the "letting in of the jungle" upon the little patch of fertile ground which has been redeemed from the wilderness. And, whatever the future, the present he finds sufficiently intolerable. The people on the hill are heavily taxed (as he thinks) in order that the people of the plain may enjoy good education, cheap trams, parks and playgrounds; even (as in the frantic vision of one newspaper) that they may be taught Socialism in Sunday-schools with parodies of remembered hymns. And the taxes thus extorted-this, perhaps, is the heart of the complaintare all going to make his own life

harder, to make life more difficult for his children. The man of forty has already sounding in his ears the noise of the clamor of the coming generations. And these coming generations, who are going to push him roughly out of his occupation, and bring his little castle in ruins to the ground, are being provided with an equipment for the struggle out of the funds which he himself is compelled to supply. He is paying for his own children's start in life, and he is having extorted from him the price of providing other people's children with as good a start in life, or a better. He has had enough of it. He is turning in desperation to any kind of protection held out to him. His ideals are all towards the top of the scale. He is proud when he is identifying his interests with those of Kensington, and indignant when his interests are identified with those of Poplar. He possesses in full those Progressive desires which are said to be the secret of advance. He wants a little more than he can afford, and is almost always living beyond his income. He has been harassed with debts and monetary complications; and the demands of rent and the rate collector excite in him a kind of impotent fury. In that fury he has turned round suddenly and struck down the party in power, glad to vote against the working man, whom he fears; and for a change, which he hopes may lighten his present burden; and against a Socialism which he cannot understand. The sudden uprising of these populous and hitherto indifferent streets has swept the Progressive Party into disaster. The general effect is that of being suddenly butted by a sheep.

It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban London. It is full of family affection, of cheerfulness, of an almost unlimited patience. Its full meaning to-day and the courses of its future still remain obThe Nation.

scure. Is this to be the type of all civilization when the whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil, and progress finds its grave in an unrural suburb? Or is the old shaggy and untamed earth of ours going to shake itself suddenly once again and bring the whole edifice tumbling to the ground? It has no clear reason of its own worth, or its own universe, or the scheme of the life of the world. It is losing its old religions. It still builds churches and chapels of a twentieth century Gothic architecture: St. Aloysius, reputed to be dangerously "High," because its curates wear colored scarves; the Baptist Chapel, where the minister maintains the old doctrines of hell and heaven, and wrestles with the sinner for his immortal soul; the Congregational Church, where the minister is abreast with modern culture, and proclaims an easier gospel, and faintly trusts the larger hope. But the whole apparatus of worship seems archaic and unreal to those who have never seen the shaking of the solid ground beneath their feet, or the wonder and terror of its central tires. There are possibilities of havoc in this ordered and comfortable society which cannot lightly be put by. The old lights have fallen from the sky, and existence has become too complex and crowded for the influences of wide space reaching to a far horizon. Summer and winter pass over these little lamplit streets, to-day the lilac and syringa, to-morrow the scattered autumn leaves, in an experience of tranquillity and repose. But with the ear to the ground there is audible the noise of stranger echoes in the labyrinthine ways which stretch beyond the boundaries of these pleasant places, full of restlessness and disappointment, and fierce longing, with a note of menace in it; not without foreboding to those who desire, in the security of the suburbs, an unending end of the world.

THE CHRIST OF EXPERIENCE.

A volume of religious and social essays has lately been published by the Rev. William T. Herridge, D.D., minister of St. Andrew's Church, Ottawa ("The Orbit of Life"; Fleming H. Revell Company, 2s. 6d. net). The book abounds in common-sense, and is full at the same time of religious and ethical suggestion. The most modern reader could not say that Dr. Herridge was behind the time; but, unlike so many men of wide sympathy and wide contemporary reading, he has managed to steer clear of that fog-belt of religious and moral confusion wherein so many writers of to-day lose their way. "Right and wrong," he is sure, "are not to be heaped together in indiscriminate confusion." There is, he maintains, "a right way of being 'worldly," and those honorable successes which are truly worth having depend upon "a well-trained and athletic resolution." These three sentences give, we think, a key to the secular side of the book. It is with the religious side that we propose to deal in the present article.

In an interesting paper upon the Resurrection, which he calls "an Easter study," the following passage occurs: "Christ views resurrection not as a mere physical process, but rather as a moral achievement, and His own Resurrection is the most unique and memorable instance of it. If any one proposes to make a successful assault upon the belief of Christendom, he must not be content simply to storm the outposts of historical testimony, nor maintain a guerilla warfare of scientific nescience. He must attack the very citadel and stronghold which is Christ's own character." Dr. Herridge speaks profoundly, and cannot but set his readers thinking. No denial of the possibility of miracle, however dog

matic, even though it bore the imprimatur of an accredited spokesman representing the conclusions of a Council composed of the most renowned scientists of Europe, can explain away this sentence of Christ: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."

The first generation of Christians plainly put absolute faith in these words, and all through the ages there have never been wanting men and women of every denomination who have witnessed to their truth. Some of these have made a great mark in the world, have been the true "world-shapers"; but for the most part they have been very ordinary people. The declarations of these latter upon the subject would fill many books, and perhaps if they were written, and the educated people of to-day were condemned to read them, they should cry out with St. Paul that "not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called"; but no experience can be put aside as without importance because it is common, and consequently witnessed to by persons without literary judgment, power of clear expression, or that concomitance of small perceptions too fine for analysis which we call "taste." Nor is their evidence impaired by the fact that the experience they enjoy seems sometimes altogether to obsess them. They believe it, in contradiction to the whole tone of our Lord's teaching, to be the most important part of the Christian revelation, and they deny the Christianity of all those who can boast of no such consolation. The matter has nothing to do with the resurrection of the flesh. The men who first believed and repeated the promise were agreed that even though they had known Christ "after the flesh," whether before

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or after His resurrection, they now knew Him-in that sense-no more. The benefit promised was spiritual; the benefit alleged to have been received was spiritual also.

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St. Paul's experience of this divine companionship is typical. When he was tried for his life, he tells us, "no man stood with me. Nothwithstanding the Lord stood with me." What did he mean? He clearly does not allude to another incident like that on the road to Damascus. No vision and no supernatural occurrence is even hinted at. He does not suggest that his answers at the time of his examination were prompted by Christ. does not say that he saw Him. He makes an assertion, which he takes it for granted his readers will understand, to the effect that the fearful mental and moral strain through which he had lately gone was made bearable, in spite of the desertion of his friends, by the presence of Christ. When we consider these things, we do, as Dr. Herridge says, storm the outposts of historical testimony to no purpose. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that since the storming of these outposts, since the breaking of swords between materialists and spiritualists, a generation of Christians has arisen among whom such experiences as Paul described are rare. Most of us. especially if we belong to those who have to think for their living, have small hope of ever receiving any such divinely authoritative confirmation of our faith. It is impossible, in considering the matter of the spiritual resurrection of our Lord, to shirk this fact. "If one does not take the trouble to exercise that noble rationality which searches into the depths of things, though he may have no innate viciousness, the mere slumber of thought is sure to degrade him." Dr. Herridge's condemnation of the man who can think and will not is perhaps too

sweeping. Yet it is in the main just. It is useless to deceive ourselves by words. To do so is to remain upon the surface of things. When we talk of the support men derive from a high ideal, we do not mean what Paul meant. There can be no doubt that men are upheld in moments of storm and stress by dwelling on an ideal. But St. Paul was always an idealist,a man with hopes and aims outside the region ruled by reason. He had ideals long before he became a Christian. Yet he certainly thought his experience was new. Again, there can be no doubt that an ideal pointed by a splendid recollection may concentrate itself into something which, in the vague language of poetry, might be alluded to as a person. But the passage in which St. Paul's words occur is not poetry at all; it is a plain record of sad facts. His work has not been succeeding, his friends have left him, his converts have turned away, nothing is left but the hope of better things after death. He is in no exultant mood. He draws no word-picture to impress upon his friends the glorious atmosphere of a higher ideal than the world' before knew, for the sake of which it is conceivable such a one as Paul might have worked and agonized "in jeopardy every hour," though he himself asserts that he would not have done it. Again, the book we have imagined which might be written by simple people would contain, we suppose, very little poetry indeed,-prosaic, sometimes perhaps sordid, accounts of illnesses, deaths, perplexities, anxieties, which the writers were convinced they did not witness or endure alone.

Those who stand where they can see the signs of the times must often feel themselves strangers in the midst of a new heaven and a new earth, and it is impossible but that sometimes they should be seized with dread lest in the passing away of the old cer

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