Captain Francis McCullagh, author of an interesting book, A Prisoner with the Reds, has just given us another, The Bolshevik Persecution of Christianity It is a sincere book which will provide some future historian of Bolshevism with invaluable material. For the last six years a thick veil has hidden Russia from the eyes of the outward world, a veil behind which it was known that unspeakable outrages were committed. Captain McCullagh lifts this veil for us, at least so far as the Churches are concerned, his book dealing exclusively with the Communist persecution of Christianity, which can only be compared to the persecutions in the first centuries of the Christian era. Previous visits to Russia, knowledge of the people and their language have given the author a great advantage over those numerous excursionists to that unhappy country, whose ‘tours’ had been so skilfully organised that they saw only what their hosts intended them to see and brought home glowing accounts of the Marxian Eden. The Methodist Bishop, whose participation in the Congress of the Red Church Captain McCullagh describes, is an example of such innocent dupes.

It is to be regretted that the author has not moderated some of his judgments, and he is particularly severe when speaking of the Russian Church. It is too early to bring in a final verdict against this Church or her Patriarch. Many believe that the latter’s surrender was due not to cowardice, but to the desire of saving the Church; it is even thought that events have justified his policy and that the old Church is strengthening whilst the Red Church is on the wane.

The old, far-fetched notion of religion, which commended itself for so long to the rude intelligence of our ancestors, has fortunately given way, in our own time, to a more reasonable understanding of it. We find it difficult to think ourselves back into that complexion of mind, which conceived of religious truth as a body of philosophical statements and alleged historical facts; as, that grace was or was not indefectible, that it was Paul and not another who wrote to the Ephesians, and the like. Had such facts been demonstrable, is it not certain that in so many centuries of earnest controversy the common judgment of mankind must have resolved the question with ‘aye’ or ‘no’ long before this? And could it be credibly maintained that it might be a man’s duty to resign his benefice, forgo the comradeship of his friends, and find himself a new way of living, merely because he had revised his notions about certain doctrinal points, without abating anything of his general zeal for righteousness? The wonder is, assuredly, not that we should have come to think otherwise, but that so defective an apprehension of religious truth should have so long dominated the superstitious fancy of human kind.

In these latter days, men of emancipated intelligence have set before us a view of the whole question better accommodated to the enlightenment of our times. We are now assured that religion is nothing more or less than an attitude of the mind, or rather not of the mind only but of the whole being, towards it matters not what.

The present writer’s earliest recollections are of an old-fashioned square of solid, red-brick, Georgian houses, all long since ‘improved’ off the face of the earth. From the windows of his home, he could see on the front of an adjoining dwelling a stone tablet which bore the legend :

This Edmund Hector was a Lichfield man who practised in Birmingham as a surgeon from about the year 1731, and whose praises in graceful Latinity may yet be read on a monument in the church of St. Philip in that city. His sister was Dr. Johnson’s first love; Boswell saw her fifty years later,’ a clergyman’s widow, advanced in age, a genteel woman, very agreeable and well-bred.’ Hector had been the Doctor’s school-mate in the early Lichfield days, and almost all we know of that period of Johnson’s life we learn from the good surgeon’s reminiscences. He it is who has told us of Johnson’s predominance over the other boys, the submission and deference with which they treated him, how he would help his favourites in their lessons, how he seemed to learn by intuition, how he never forgot anything he either heard or read.

Poliziano alone of the Medicean Academy has lived into modern times for reasons with which he would not be wholly content; for though the first of the Classicists to use his genius on behalf of his own tongue, he regarded his editions of the Classics as more important, as, indeed, in themselves they were. Fortunately, like his patron and intimate Lorenzo, Poliziano was very modern, also he was a born poet, and his easy Greek and Latin made these languages live. His work was no mere imitation of Horace in verse or Livy in prose; he was so saturated in the classical learning and yet so wholly modern that he really embodied the spirit of antiquity in a living person, singularly unlike the higher and dryer scholars of his own and succeeding times. It is possible to have a vast erudition and yet to lack the spirit of the old world, and it is possible to miss the highest scholarship and yet to have a mind informed with antiquity. Poliziano was certainly not the greatest scholar of the Renaissance, but he was the most original and the most brilliant interpreter of the ancient to the modern world.

Erasmus, a far more profound scholar and thinker and human withal, regarded Poliziano’s scholarship as inaccurate; but his conscientiousness is apparent in his collating and editing of Justinian's Pandects from the Pisan MS., a gigantic undertaking, in which he never resorted to emendations unless the text seemed hopeless.

It is strange how the wheel of things turns and brings back the world to what it had left behind and thought to have outgrown as too primitive. But the child mind cannot be destroyed in man, and it will always return to those truths that are so simple because they are so profound.

Thus after several centuries we have again the Mystery Play—scenes taken from the World’s Great Drama—constructed on mediaeval traditions regardless of modern criticism and acted in the early spirit of Faith.

The latest edition in this revival of the Mediaeval Mystery is the Irish Nativity Play that took place every Saturday and Sunday during the month of December in the Town Hall, Dalkey, County Dublin. Written specially by Katherine Tynan, the play was acted by seventy children from the Killiney and Dalkey National Schools, under the clever management of Lady O’Connell. For three months they had studied, practised and lived in the atmosphere of the play, bringing into this Irish village something of the spirit of Oberammergau. For one month they acted the piece to audiences ever growing larger. Now the curtain has dropped, and the seventy little actors have gone into obscurity until next Christmastide, when they will again call the crowds to listen to the Mystery.

In this book is published the series of Lectures delivered by Sir W. H. Hadow on the Stevenson Foundation, in the University and City of Glasgow, 1922. The Lectures are remarkable for their extraordinary treatment of this important subject. If they seek to define Citizenship finally, or, at least, fully— if they aim at giving the average, intelligent citizen of to-day an understanding of his citizenship as something real and worth the having, something which is at once a complexity of rights and a complexity of duties—if their object is to give a clear practical instruction rather than to contribute to an academic controversy concerning civic values—then, most regretfully, they must be marked down as a failure. Indeed, these Lectures are wrongly entitled. They do not deal directly with Citizenship: they discuss Political Theory in its wider reaches. In the main, they present a restatement of the old problem of the Nature of the State; and, reduced to a subordinate part of this thesis, is the abstract relation of the member of the State to the State itself.

Citizenship can be viewed from at least two standpoints : one, a study in political speculation—interesting in its review of historic arguments and philosophic conclusions; two, a study in practical politics—a detailed consideration of the realities constituting the fact called citizenship which (let us remember) is possessed by more than twenty millions of the members of our State, which is used by them, and which to be used rightly must be understood in its practical values, immediate and ultimate, by each single possessor.

Variety is a great deal more than the spice of life : it is one of its necessary ingredients. We might conceive of, we might even—under certain pressing circumstances—eat a rice pudding without nutmeg; but who can conceive of a world without variety!

Picture to yourself, suggests a recent writer, an afternoon tea at which all the ladies were attired exactly alike. I think the guest unwittingly introduced to such a function would invent a swift excuse for exit. Imagine, then, a world in which all the trees rose at precisely the same angle, like telegraph poles; in which all the leaves were of uniform shape and colour; in which all the hills were like the hills in a child’s geography; in which the stars punctured heaven at painfully precise intervals; a world in which all men thought in the same way about the same things, and did the same things under the same circumstances at the same time. I think that, as we found a way of absenting ourselves from that hideous tea-party, we should also find a way (laws of gravitation notwithstanding) of slipping off the edge of this uninteresting planet.

Adramatic Critic, at whose feet the world sits every Sunday has lately announced the imminence of the great War Drama. The Napoleonic Wars waited for Hardy. Does this generation need a great war play to focus its war emotions, or to revive its war experiences? The best in this kind are but shadows : in our memories, in letters, in biographies we have reality. It is true that the unifying force may only be personal or egoistic, and that either of these may lack both greatness and permanence. But where the background is eternity, and the protagonist is man’s spirit, the interest can be neither petty nor ephemeral. There must be drama. The letters of Peter Dominic Dupouey were published last year by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise. The writer was a lapsed Catholic, who left the Church in the search of freedom and returned to it by natural reaction and the influence of a Catholic wife. The letters are addressed to her, and introduced by André Gide, a literary friend. In the Introduction, Gide quotes largely from Henri Ghéon, another friend, who is perhaps something over-literary and impressionable for English taste. But between them, they give the necessary background.

Dupouey had the advantage over many of us in that the war did not cut across either his profession or his values. As a naval lieutenant, he could only find it a test and a realisation. In the immediate event, he was dissatisfied with blockade and transport service in the Mediterranean, and, when opportunity offered, he volunteered for the Yser.