and with good prospects of becoming law. In Geneva the proposition comes from a Roman Catholic, who, of course, is opposed to Protestantism as the Establishment. In Neuenburg a social democrat is agitating the matter on the ground that a deficit in the budget is caused by the payment of funds toward the support of the church.

The Norwegian Church and Separation from Sweden. The church in Norway is, like the church everywhere, the object of much criticism. But during the discussions which finally led to the separation between Norway and Sweden the Norwegian clergy were so firmly loyal to Norwegian interests that the church gained much in public esteem.

The German Monistic League. When in 1892 Professor Haeckel wrote his Confession of Faith of an Investigator of Nature he probably little dreamed that he was starting a religious movement which was to have its congregations called after his name, and which would lead to the organization of a league to advance his monistic ideal. But such a league was in fact established on January 11, 1906, in Jena, with Professor Haeckel as president. Negatively the League renounces the idea of revealed truth having absolute authority, supernatural forces of all kinds in the natural world, and a heavenly future as the goal and completion of human existence. Positively the League holds that nature is unitary in the strictest sense, that nature must be explained from within itself, and that every event comes to pass according to eternal, unchangeable laws founded in the nature of things. The idea is to produce by education an ever greater number of sound, capable, rational, and noble personalities who, by well-planned effort, shall elevate the life of nation and state to ever higher stages of freedom and order, justice and mutual helpfulness. The League saw some difficulties in the way of organization, but proceeded in spite of them. They were: first, that organization with reference to so personal a thing as a view of the world is improper and may restrict freedom; second, that such organization may lead to a dogmatic attitude toward truth; and, third, that the experience of other organizations, such as the Ethical Culture Society, gave little hope of success.

Limits of Teaching in the Pulpit. A German professor has stated the matter recently as follows: Every minister recognizes that he can hold on to the old formulas or he would be obliged to forsake the church holding them. But as a preacher he has to do alone with matters of positive faith. Outside of the pulpit he has the same right of criticising old formulas as other men. He should never discuss critical matters in the pulpit unless some external necessity compels him thereto. The minister must not hold one thing in private and another in public; but he need not, for conscience's sake, tell all his theories concerning questions in dispute to everybody. In other words, his duties as minister must be fulfilled, and if he cannot do these he should conscientiously withdraw.

GLIMPSES OF REVIEWS AND MAGAZINES

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO, poet, dreamer, and idealist, has widened the basis and motive of Italian fiction, by presenting in the guise of romance in his novel, Il Santo, some of the religious questions which stir the best minds of Italy to-day. The discussion over it recalls the talk in England over the first appearance of John Inglesant or Robert Elsmere. The book is reviewed by Mrs. Virginia M. Crawford in The Fortnightly Review. Fogazzaro is frankly Christian, and his writings depict the ultimate triumph of the ideal aspirations of the soul over man's baser instincts. Though a Catholic in faith, that does not blind him to the evils from which the Roman Church is suffering. He sees in it much external observance and little interior piety, a great multiplication of petty devotions to saints and little cultivation of true prayer, which is a union and communion of the soul with God. His church does not teach men to think and act for themselves, but keeps them in intellectual and spiritual subjection. He deplores the indolence and avarice of certain prelates, and the lack of moral courage in others to oppose acknowledged evils, and the obstinate clinging to customs and notions which have lost significance and only clog the wheels of progress. He denounces the intriguing, the petty jealousies, and the personal ambitions which surround the Papal Court. He preaches toleration for individual variations of views, and insists that "those who love their brothers and believe themselves indifferent to or ignorant of God are nearer to the Kingdom than many who think they love God and have no charity for their neighbors." The four evil spirits which trouble the Papal Church are said to be the spirit of falsehood, the spirit of priestly domination, the spirit of avarice, and the spirit of inflexible rigidity and unprogressiveness. The central figure in Fogazzaro's novel is Benedetto, the saint who has purified himself from his sins by a life of prayer and of severe penances and of emaciating mortification of the flesh, enduring much toil and suffering. Some one has described sanctity as genius in religion, and Francis Thompson recently suggested that saints may be the only true men of genius. Benedetto is a pathetic spiritual figure, instinct with moral beauty, and lifted far above average humanity by his utter detachment from worldly things. Yet his transparent purity of heart, his self-forgetfulness, his love for the poor, do not differ in kind, but only in degree, from those of any really religious person. In this Roman novel there is no touch of spiritual arrogance in Benedetto's preaching; his addresses are on broad, evangelistic lines, simple and direct in language, inspired by tolerance and charity to all men, and urging the need of individual conversion and the futility of outward observance without the interior spirit. Il Santo is a book of high moral purpose and great literary charm, not only a book of faith but of noble and overflowing poetry, though written in prose. It appeals to the laity for a deeper sense of responsibility and a more serious purpose in life;

and to the clergy for a wider tolerance, a more ethical teaching, and more disinterestedness. Its author aims to promote a spiritual awakening in Italy, and especially in the Papal Church.- In the same number of The Fortnightly, Constance Elizabeth Maud tells of a visit with a friend to a model old French archbishop, whose benign, bountiful, beautiful life had won him the title of "Father of His People." His greeting was so gentle and friendly that his visitor's first thought was, “That smile on his face places him at once in the category of God's good gifts;" and next, Browning's words about the cardinal came to mind, "through such souls, God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light for us i' the dark to rise by." The archbishop showed his guests a statuette of Joan of Arc and said: "To me this little figure represents the true Jeanne, which so few of the countless pictures and statues succeed in doing—a young girl, very simple and unlearned, yet possessed of a wisdom which astounded the most wise, a dauntless courage, and a soul so white it dazzled as the sun at midday. In this little figure we see her advancing at the head of her troops, listening to the Voice, and following where it leads, heedless of all else." To the question whether he believed Joan heard an actual voice, he replied: "Without doubt. One must remember the soul has ears and eyes as well as the body, and of a finer quality and power. How else can the marvel be accounted for, that a peasant girl of seventeen years was, according to the testimony of the generals who fought under her command, the greatest military genius of her day, showing a perfect knowledge of tactics and strategy? Only when they refused to follow her counsel did the French troops experience failure." "But, alas! the Voice once failed her in the hour of her direst need," said the visitor; to which the Father of His People answered, "But it was not the hour of her nation's need, remember. Her mission was accomplished. Like her divine Master, she had to pass through her hour of darkness and seeming abandonment, but the sun was behind the cloud all the time, and the dark hour passed." The old archbishop showed his visitors his garden, and leading them to a clump of trees which shut inclosed a little green arbor, he said, “This is my concert-room. Here the birds sing always. Morning and evening and through the day some of them keep up the song of joy and praise, like the lights which burn always before the altar." Just then a thrush warbled a lovely solo overhead, and one of the visitors said, "I cannot imagine a happier lot than to be a bird in the archbishop's garden." "Ah, my daughter," answered the old man, "even here you would encounter the devil in the shape of a big black cat. This world is not a paradise for anyone, not even for the birds of my garden."How useless, inconsistent, and imbecile it is for us to scold men for resorting to injurious forms of diversion and places of amusement, when we provide nothing better, is put sharply to us in an article on Frontiersmen, which tells us that the men of the sea, coming ashore for a holiday, or discharged into the melancholy slums of big seaports often find the only real amusement visible within reach to be getting drunk. And one of them says this word for himself and his fellows: "After the great silence we want noise, after the loneliness we need company, after the tension we want to relax, after

the discomfort to be at ease for a while, after the restraint and confinement to break loose, and after the dullness to take life red-hot for a change -and the hot stuff is taken in a glass. Let only him who has suffered our hard life dare to judge us, for this is a matter of natural law, not of morals; inevitably the greater the restraint the more powerful the reac tion. One might as well take hair oil for a cough, as prayers and sermons for this malady. O, we know better than you can tell us, what a big price we pay for our fun; but in most places there is nothing else for us to do. No alternative to the bar-room is open to us. In places where getting drunk is not the only diversion the bottle has small patronage from our tribe. When a contingent of us was sent to attend the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and again, later, to share in King Edward's coronation celebration, being turned loose in London, they behaved like Sunday schools."Henry James, that long-anglicized American, returning for a time from his chosen exile in Britain, visited Philadelphia and let that fine old city take effect on him. Very interesting is his report of impressions received. Starting from New York the Pennsylvania Railroad seemed to him not to be as other railroads are. It beguiled him with a style and allure of its own, as something superior. He says, "The spell began to work on me at Twenty-third Street and on the constantly-adorable ferry." And when seated in the train in Jersey City it seemed as if it must in the end carry one to some ideal city. Arriving at Philadelphia he was struck with the houses, which seemed to wear their little marble steps and lintels and cornices and copings in the manner of nice white neckties and collars and cuffs and stockings. In the hospitalities of the place he had a sense of large friendliness, ordered charm, and perfect peace. The secret of serenity is possessed there as in no other city. That friendly community on the bland banks of the Delaware and the Schuylkill, Mr. James thinks, is more than any other town a society, settled, confirmed and complete. New York cannot be thought of as a society, and Chicago still less. Quoting the epigram that Boston is not a place but a state of mind, he says that Philadelphia isn't a place but a state of consanguinity, which is an absolute final condition. An atmosphere of infinite cousinship colors the scene and makes the predominant tone. "Having arrived at this felicitous social state Philadelphia has nothing in the world left to struggle for or to bristle against; whereas New York, and above all Chicago, are only, and most precariously, on the way to it, and indeed, having started too late, will probably never arrive. There are for them interferences and complications; they will yet know other conditions, but the beatitude I speak of-that of being, in the composed sense, a society-is lost to them forever. Philadelphia, without complications or interferences, enjoys it in particular through having begun to invoke it in time. And now she has nothing more to invoke; she has everything; her cadres are all full; her imagination is at peace. This, exactly again, is the reason of the bristling of the other places: the cadres of New York, Chicago, Boston, being as to a third of them empty and as to another third objectionably filled-with much consequent straining, reaching, heaving, both to attain and to eject. What makes a society is thus, more than anything else, the

number of organic social relations it represents; by which logic Philadelphia represents nothing but organic social relations. The degrees of consanguinity are the cadres; every one of them is full; it is a society in which every individual is as many times over cousin, uncle, aunt, niece, and so on through the list, as poor human nature is susceptible of being. These degrees are, when one reflects, the only really organic social relations, and when they are all there for everyone the scheme of security, in a community, has been worked out. Philadelphia, in other words, not only is a family, she must be a 'happy' one, and a probable proof that the happiness comes as a matter of course if the family but be large enough. Consanguinity provides the marks and features, the type and tone and ease, the common knowledge and the common consciousness, but number is required to make these things social. Number, accordingly, for her perfection, was what Philadelphia would have-it having been clear to me that she couldn't not be perfect. She must be, of all goodly villages, the very goodliest, probably, in the world; the very largest, and flattest, and smoothest, the most rounded and complete." Mr. James likes Philadelphia also because it is not so pushing, nor grasping, nor frantic. "It draws its breath with ease, never sounding the awful 'step lively!'" The large absence of the foreign element and the tenement-house life strikes him as one of the city's consummate blessings. His memory of the town is like that of "a vast firm chess-board, an immeasurable spread of little squares, covered all over by perfect Philadelphians." The prevailing temperate good taste seems to him like the original Quaker drab lightly touched with a modern flush, giving it something of the iridescence of the breast of a well-fed dove. He is enamored of the elegant simplicity of Independence Hall, particularly with the fine interior chambers, looking at which he indulges in this expression of his sense of the congruity of the noble building with the noble Declaration which made it famous: "One sees them immediately as good, delightfully good, on architectural and scenic lines, these large, high, wainscoted chambers, as good as any could thinkably have been at the time; embracing what was to be done in them with such a noble congruity (which in all the conditions they wellnigh might have been, as they were luckily no mere tent pitched for the purpose), that the historic imagination, reascending the centuries, almost catches them in the act of directly suggesting the celebrated coup. One fancies, under the high spring of the ceiling and before the great embrasured windowsashes of the principal room, some clever man of the period, after a long look round, taking the hint. 'What an admirable place for a Declaration of something! What could one here-what couldn't one really declare in a room like this?' And then after a moment: 'I say, why not our Independence?-capital thing always to declare, and before anyone gets in with anything tactless. You'll see that the fortune of the place will be made.' It really takes some such frivolous fancy as that to represent with proper extravagance the reflection irresistibly rising there, and that it yet would seem pedantic to express with solemnity: the sense, namely, of our beautiful escape in not having had to 'declare' in any way meanly, of our good fortune in having found the suitable building ready for the