238 



The Review of Reviews. 



Lister 



and 



Fairbairn. 



the attention of His Majesty to the kind of play the 

 Censor of Plays placed on the stage. But it miscarried. 

 The memorial fell into the hands of men whose 

 zeal against the institution of the Censorship has 

 eaten them up. Instead of getting signatures to 

 the short and simple memorial to the Crown which 

 Mr. Archer suggested, they produced a column-long 

 rechauffe of the arguments against any censorship. 

 This immediately brought about the signing of a 

 counter-memorial. Between the two memorials 

 nothing will be done. Instead of concentrating upon 

 the one definite point on which, with the exception of 

 the Daily Mail, everyone was agreed, they raised the 

 old issue, with the same old result. The King ought 

 to go to see " Dear Old Charlie," and form his 

 judgment as to the fitness of its author to be the 

 keeper of his conscience as to the morals of the 

 stage. 



February has seen the removal by 

 death of two leading figures in the 

 not unconnected spheres of medi- 

 cine and theology. Lord Lister, 

 as the founder of antiseptic surgery, robbed the knife 

 of almost all its horrors. He made the cutting and 



carving of the 

 human body a 

 wonderfully safe 

 means of restor- 

 ing it to health. 

 Such marvels 

 have been 

 wrought by his 

 aid as to set men 

 dreaming of the 

 time when sur- 

 gery will be em- 

 ployed as readily 

 and as fearlessly 

 to remove inter- 

 nal excrescences 

 and superfluities 

 as wc now use 

 the art of the 

 barber and the 

 Kx-Principal of Mansfield College, Ox- manicurist to re- 

 ford ; one of the great Nonconformist rwlnndant 

 theologians of the Victorian age. '""^ '- 'Ctlunaant 



hair and nails. 

 Dr. Fairbairn was far and away the foremost con- 

 structive theologian of the non-sacerdotal section of 

 British Christendom. He brought the Free Churches 

 out of the shadow of Agnosticism and of a merely 



Pholosruplt iy] [Russell nth/ Sons. 



The late Rev. Dr. Fairbairn. 



literary religion. His glowing faith freed them from 

 the dread of free criticism, and bridged over the 

 chasm of negativism into which so many had fallen, 

 making the way easy from the positive belief of the 

 past to the positive faith of the future. He stripped 

 the science of comparative religion of its supposed 

 perils, and showed it to be an ally of the Gospel. 

 His most overt and obvious achievement was the 

 founding of Mansfield College at Oxford; his most 

 vital was the fusing of science and religion, of social 

 and personal evangelism in the lives of his followers. 

 The rapidity with which public 

 Crusade Against opinion is setting in the direction 

 Poverty. of freeing the richest country on 



this side of the globe from the 

 shame and pain of starving the poor is shown on 

 many sides and ifi the highest quarters. The Chan- 

 cellor of the Exchequer long ago proclaimed his 

 jehad against poverty. But he is Wx. Lloyd George : 

 and Englishmen make liberal discount for Welsh 

 enthusiasm. Only last week, however, the Prime 

 Minister, with all the authority of hrs position as 

 head of the Government, and with the utmost 

 emphasis, pledged himself to give effect to the 

 " tremendous principle " of " a reasonable minimum 

 wage " for all underground workers. Still, Mr. 

 Asquith may be said to have spoken under the dire 

 dread of a national paralysis. Perhaps most signifi- 

 cant of all, as a proof of the movement of the most 

 staid, cautious, and conservative elements in our 

 national life, was the deliverance of the Primate, 

 made in the course of his quadreonial Charge in 

 Canterbury Cathedral. T'he Archbishop said : — 



He was prepared quite deliberately to expftss his own belief 

 that, given a lillle time, say a couple of generations, for bring- 

 ing about the change, real [HAcri) of llie extreme sort, crushing, 

 degrading poverty, ought to 1 i-, and in a Christian land lijie 

 ours might be, practically abolished altogether. lie did not 

 believe that anything short of that would satisfy even elemen- 

 tarily the conditions of Christian brotherhood. D.tlerent 

 reformers' and guides would have their own wa)s of trying 

 to lead tlicm to that result. He could see no obvious and 

 simple road. IJul that there uas a road, and a Christian 

 road, he was sure. That it coirld be found, and that by 

 prayer and pains and perseverance it would be found, he 

 had no doubt at all. It w.as the task of workers in the Church 

 of God to foster the growth of such a spirit as would make these 

 results certain : to promote such a sense of responsible brother- 

 hood in the Church of Christ on earth that men should sec that 

 the solution, by whatever pathway reached, was im]ierativc and 

 inevitable. Be that their resolve and pr.ayer. Could they doubt 

 that it was the Will of tjod ? Could they doubt that it was the 

 duty of His Church on earth to set it forward ? 



When an Archbishop of Canterbury declares for the 

 abolition of poverty in a couple of generations, as an 

 elementary condition of Christian brotherhood, the 

 end of destitution cannot be very far otl". 



