Leading Articles ix the Reviews. 



489 



BISHOP GORE ON THE THREE ELEMENTS OF 

 RELIGION. 



I.\ the October Church Quarterly Bishop Cloro 

 reviews von Hazel's " Mystical Element of Religion 

 as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her 

 Friends." The Bishop endorses von Hugel's analysis 

 of the three main elements of religion. The religion 

 of childhood is institutional, the religion of youth 

 must be intcllertual, the religion of full age is the 

 religion of spiritual experience, or mysticism. These 

 three elements, says the Bishop, are straining apart 

 in various forms in different parts of the world. In 

 the Roman (Communion of to-day the strain is chiefly 

 felt in relation to the demand of the contemporary 

 intellect. Rome has not merely condemned Loisy: — 



It has U5etl llie opportiinily of the extreme .ind destructive 

 Iterances of one man or a very few men, with what looks like 

 almost Satanic, if short -siijhled, ingenuity, to overwhelm in a 

 common condemnation all really free and reasonable criticism 

 applied to sacred subjects, and to produce something approaching 

 :in intellectual reign of terror. 



Protestantism, on the other hand, appears increas- 

 ingly incapable of building or maintaining a religious 

 >ocial order. Of the Anglican Communion, the 

 Bishop says : — 



At our best, there is no truer ,ind deeper harmony of the 

 corporate or institutional and traditional element in religion 

 with the freedom of intellectual developmetit and personal 

 -piritual life than is to be found among ui. But the limes are 

 vi;ry anxio\i^. 



THE EFFECT OF FRENCH DISESTABLISHMENT. 



Both frierfds and foes of Disestablishment in this 

 country should read with interest the article by 

 Georges Goyau in the Ox/vrd and Cambridge Revie7i' 

 for October on the evangelisation of Paris since the 

 reparation between Church and State. One naturally 

 \pects a wail over the awful havoc wrought by the 

 (joliation of the Church. On the contrary, the 

 writer declares : — 



The separation of Church and Stale marked the beginning of 



period of new \italily for the diocese. The Church of Pari*, 



maintained solely by the generosity of its adherents, has for the 



i^t six years shown itself more enterprising, creative, and 



ii-torious than it had been even under the Concordat, when it 



had the power of the State to support it. 



Spontaneous centres of .social service and of worship 

 are springing up in ditTcrcnt parts of Paris, "Church 

 steeples are rising everywhere." The laity are active. 

 The desire is expresseti that each parish should have 

 its active lay committee. There are at present sixty- 

 seven parishes with lay committees, and out of these 

 forty are doing serious work : — 



.Among the rc-ults of their initiative are noted : The estab- 

 lishment of continuation classes ; the opening of workshops for 

 technical instruction ; the creation of working men's gardens; 

 research into practical means for the abolition of night work in 

 hokeries ; the posting, in hotels patronised by forcigm^rs, of 

 notices in dilfercnl languages explaining the principle^ of 

 nligious observance. 



But while the number of laymen taking part in thi* 

 work is increasing, the number of men offering for 

 priests is dinunishing. 



"REFORMERS" DESTROYING LIBRARIES. 



In tlie Church Quarterly A'ei-icic for October, 

 Canon N'aughan traces the history of \\'inchester 

 C'athedral Library from the Reformation to the 

 Commonwealth. It certainly passed through several 

 terrible ordeals. The writer says : — 



That at the Reformation the monastic libraries were, in manv 

 cxses, wantonly destroyed is abundantly proved bv overwhelm- 

 ing eviilence. Indeed, the wholesale dcstruciion of manuscripts 

 is one of the saddest and most heart-breaking features of the 

 English Reformation. " i'he English monks," says Thomas 

 Fuller, "were bookish of themselves, and much inclined to 

 hoard up monuments of learning"; and he goes on to tell us 

 how John Bale, "a man sufficiently averse from the least 

 shadow of popery, hating all monkery with a perfect hatred," 

 had left on record his experience as to the scandalous way in 

 which manuscripts were treated. They were put to every vile 

 and common use. Some were " sold to the grocers and soap- 

 scllers, and some were sent over sea to the bookbinders, not in 

 small number, but at times whole ships full." "I know a 

 merchant-man," says John Bale, " who shall be nameless, that 

 bought the contents of two noble libraries for forty shillings 

 price ; this stuff he hath occupied instead of gray paper, by the 

 space of more than these ten years ; and yet he hath store 

 enough for as many years to come." 



Even after the Library had been restored and 

 developed, a worse visitation came with the arrival 

 of the Parliamentary soldiers under Sir William 

 \\ aller in 1642. The soldiers violently broke open 

 the great western doors of the Cathedral and marched 

 in with colours flying, their drums beating, their 

 matches fired. They destroyed most of the beautiful 

 jMinted glass, seized upon the Communion plate. 

 Bibles, service books, rich hangings, pulpit vestments, 

 and broke up the niuninent house, tearing the 

 evidences of lands and cancelling the charter. Four 

 years later, under Oliver Cromwell, another pillage 

 took place even more calamitous thai> the previous 

 one. Charters were burned or thrown into the river, 

 " divers large parchments being made Kyles withall 

 to flic in the aire, and many other old books lost, to 

 the utter spoyling and destruction of the muniment 

 and chapter house." 



WHAT ARCHi€OLOGY HAS DONE. 

 Mr. a. L. Frothingham, in the iVorth American 

 Reiie^v for October, writing on " Where Archaeology 

 Comes In," gives this sumtnary of what the science 

 has done : — 



Since 1840 or 1850 a'rchxology has pr.aclically created for us 

 fuur thousand years of history : a new heaven as well .as a new 

 earth for the pre. Hellenic world. Kgypt, Babylonia, Assyria, 

 the Ilitlite?, have emerged from an almost Cimmerian darkness. 

 We can now decipher their writings, read their literature, 

 reconstruct their annals, religion, and life, while looking into 

 the faces of the men and women of their race. The Northern 

 races that entered so much later into the arena and yet were 

 even more intangible than these Kaslern nations are being un- 

 veiled by archa: ilogy : Goths, Scandinavians, Celts, Uauls, 

 Slavs, and Germans, from the mountains of ,\rmcnia and the 

 Caucasus to Brittany, arc being shown by their archaological 

 remains .as either half yielding to the influence of Greece aiul 

 Rome or maintaining their primitive integrity. Our science is 

 helped at times by literature, but often it is obliged to seek 

 unaided for an answer in these fields of the primitive and un- 

 developed races. 'I'his illustrates how much broader, as well 

 as nmrc faithful, it is than literature. 



