Mr. Dutton Brock's "Studies," which first appeared in 1918 might almost be called meditations. He constantly gives to the reader the impression of thinking out his own positions as he writes. The dreamy, poetic style flows on like a reverie; and because of this meditative quality in him he expresses something which other living writers on religion seem to miss. He sees Christ and Christian experience as an artist, seeking beauty, significance, perfection—the penetration ct the whole universe by grace—and, like many noble and sincere religious thinkers, is so1e-what impatient of the more conventional point of view, the dull mechanical element in much orthodoxy.
This critical temper spoils the harmony of some. of his most im-"sensational." There is no dally-
Fressive and beautiful passages introducing a controversial note incompatible with the underlying spiritual motive of the whole. Thus he can say, quite worthily, "A determined e"ort has beea made to represent Christ as the first Anglican clergyman, and it has failed." And immediately afterwards, quite beautifully: '"Obrist, without rhetoric or strain, with ordinary words and with a music that steals unnoticed into them, can raise everything to poetry. It is bys natural speech, and he seems aot to know it himself."
Consistent with this view of Christ as the supreme artist revealing to the souls of his followers the spiritual quality of fe, is the conception of religion as the "'instinct that makes us value absolute values above all other values because they are absolute.. Wherever we are aware oz absolute value, o* a value that satisfies us utterly and one in which we forget ourselves there we hear the voice of God"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.