There are not a few circles in our day in which social progress and religious faith are regarded as being in at least a semi-unfriendly relation. The leaders in the cause of the industrial classes indeed, like the Social Democrats and the Syndicalists, often thoroughly denounce religion. Workers for general social amelioration are frequently indifferent to religious faith. Great masses of people are convinced that religion does not help toward social progress and so regard it as at best a dead weight upon society. On the other hand, when churches or religious groups become vigorously active for social progress, the alarm is sure to be raised that their religion is becoming “mere social ethics.” When social topics are considered in the pulpit or at the mid-week service, the fear is expressed that real religion is being crowded out. When religious leaders throw themselves into social causes, they are suspected of having lost faith in “spiritual” forces. Not infrequently we hear people say that they are “tired of the social uplift”; though it is barely more than a decade since there arose any wide-spread interest in our country in social questions.

“We shall read today in the Book of Experience.” These words of Bernard of Clairvaux serve well as an adequate preface to the six short novels by “Mark Rutherford,” which constitute an important contribution to the intimate religious literature of the last century. For, although cast in the form of fiction, these narratives clearly belong to that comparatively small class of inevitable and significant works which are best described as “confessional.” Indeed, neither the form of the books, nor the shelter sought behind his now familiar pseudonym, served long to conceal the identity of the author, or to divert attention from the autobiographical aspects of his works.

The Church is a divine institution, just as all legitimate organizations, like the State, the university, the political party, or the private club, are divine institutions. This is the outcome of any thoroughgoing acceptance of the Protestant position of the essentially divine character of all life, the priesthood of all believers, and the rejection of local divine places. Any special claim the Church can make must be based not on its essential character but upon its purpose and aim, and its special efficiency in pursuit of some end. That some ends in life are higher than others goes without saying. The end of a private club is legitimate and praise-worthy, but it is not in the judgment of thoughtful men on the same level of importance for life as a university. It is true that any scale of importance is finally based upon judgments of value which are in the last analysis extra-rational. The end aimed at by all churches, and among them we must include synagogues, cathedrals, and the lecture-halls of the Ethical Culture Society, is the mediation to men of the unseen and eternal values of religion and ethics. And each particular church bases its claim for recognition upon its assertion that it is attempting to mediate the truest and highest of these values in the most efficient way it knows. We thus see that the Church or churches represent the community, or rather parts of the community, organized for a particular purpose. The older distincrtion between a visible and invisible church should have lost all meaning for a consistent Protestantism, because it was fundamentally based on the false assumption that our relationships with God depended upon the mediation of the church, and that outside of the church there was no salvation. Hence to account for certain obvious facts, an invisible church had to be postulated. The logic of Protestantism makes any such assumption needless. Our relationships to God and salvation are not in the keeping of any church.

The decade just passed has witnessed an unusual activity in the production of books about Martin Luther. This activity has been greatly stimulated by the re-introduction of a method of controversy which reasonable men had been hoping was forever silenced. Until about a generation ago there had been two obvious and hopelessly opposed ways of approach to the subject of Luther's character and work. From the one side he was presented as an angel of light; from the other as the type of a depraved and malicious spirit, moved to activity not through any desire to improve the condition of his people but because, being the malignant thing he was, he could not act otherwise. It need hardly be said to the readers of this Review that both of these views of Luther are essentially false. They are perfectly intelligible, one equally with the other. They are the natural precipitation of the bitter controversies that gathered about him in his life, and continued long after his death to complicate the political and economic struggles out of which the new Europe of our day was born. In the light of our modern historical method, both views appear crude and unscientific. They represent a way of looking at historical characters and historical events to which we are apt to apply the crushing word “old-fashioned.” And in fact it did seem, up to a very few years ago, that these primitive judgments, which classified men into good and bad, angels and fiends, had become a thing of the past.

The construction and working of ecclesiastical machinery has always been allowed to be the special function of High Churchmen of every description. For there are High Churchmen not only in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in America, but in every church. The division of churchmen into High, Low, and Broad is founded on the different attitudes of the human mind—legal, emotional, intellectual. All Christians reverence the Church, the Bible, and the conscience. But in presence of a problem one man will ask what is the teaching of the Church? Another will turn to consider what the Bible has to say about it. A third will endeavor to trace it to its basis in the necessities of thought and life. Religion is, for the High Churchman, devotion to an institution; for the Low Churchman, to a person; for the Broad Churchman, to abstract truth. Such sturdy guardians of the different important ways by which the soul approaches God are fortunately found in every church. And so the man who stands pre-eminently for the special tenets of the fathers, whether Calvin, Wesley, Swedenborg, or Channing, is as truly a High Churchman as he whose fathers are Ante- or Post-Nicene. And if the faith is regarded as having been delivered to the saints once and for all, the construction of machinery for its preservation will be not only the duty but the delight of the loyal ecclesiast.

In these volumes, Mrs. Rhys Davids has added to the debt which all students of Buddhist literature are under to herself and her husband. The two volumes of Psalms are canonical, while the Compendium of Philosophy is an interesting and esteemed epitome of that third section of the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma, about which the sects differed so much.