reflect upon the animus of some representatives
of the New Criticism with a severity I cannot
follow. Among both leaders and followers in
that school I reckon some much-respected friends,
of whose reverent and Christian aims I am
sure; and that fact is continually with me in
any expression of the profound anxiety with
which I view the tendency of the school.

But when I have said this, I am amply free, as
I am earnestly willing, to avow my mental and
spiritual sympathy with the great envoi of this
remarkable book.

What is the book? It is the free and (to use
the word in its best sense) popular presentation
of the results of an independent study of the New
Criticism, as actually put before us in representa-
tive works, done by a student entirely free from
professional bias, and trained in a severe school
of legal and judicial investigation to sift witnesses
and weigh evidence. It is an example of exactly
the sort of work which, in my opinion, the Church
needs in an eminent degree, and which is, I
fear, lamentably rare to-day--the careful study of
religious problems by laymen at once open-minded
and devout. In the best specimens of such study
there is often, to my thinking, a quite peculiar
value; a fresh and bracing air of thought all their

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