ligion, and the "voluntary" school system is, at any rate, in a precarious condition. The closer approximation

of the teachers' position to that of civil servants makes them more and more desirous of a non-committal attitude in the matter of religion. In the secondary school, the State gives no aid to religious education, and a position of affairs similar to that in the "provided" elementary schools seems to be developing. Furthermore, strong criticism has of late been directed against existing Sunday School conditionscriticism, in the main, of the type of instruction there prevalent.

It falls to the Church, therefore, to provide permanent, stable, and efficient religious education for all its children. Can this be continuously secured under a voluntary system as we know it? If not, would not a teaching community be by far the best present solution? The "habit" is not essential to life under rule. Such a community would be inexpensive to the Church (though this is not the reason for desiring it); it would be honest, non-commercial, highly skilled, and deeply religious. The clergy should welcome such aid to their parochial work, and the present painful lack of men in our Sunday Schools would be remedied. The Community of the Resurrection has, we believe, long desired to give a start to such a lay brotherhood for this purpose, but it is slow to begin. Is this not a need and a case in which the impetus might well come from official quarters? If the call went forth from Canterbury, York, and London for men with a vocation for teaching to come forward into a community, we think that the response would be immediate. Most of the existing communities for men began with priests who were them

"The whole point is fully developed by

Professor M. E. Sadler in "Teachers and the Religious Lesson." (Teachers' Guide Quarterly)

selves not unprepared to face the consequences of failure, but in this particular instance those who are perhaps conscious of a vocation for this purpose are hardly likely to be financially prepared to burn their boats in such an experiment. Official support, at the outset, would give just the required guarantee, as it were. St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651-1719) applied the proceeds of a lucrative canonry for this purpose when he initiated his community of Christian Brothers.

We would also urge that for such a new community life vows need not be regarded as indispensable. Vocation is a permanent religious sanction to a way of life. The particular way of life may change, as it does in the world, even for a religious. Life vows are not to be depreciated, but they are surely not the exclusive method of living under rule. The adaptability of the religious life has hitherto been one of its main strengths. It cannot be denied that modern conditions and opinions, on the whole, are inimical to life-contracts. Yet the desire to serve, the willingness to learn and to teach are surely not to be rejected because the subject will not pledge himself for life? Let us ask men to enlist under rule for a term, as well as for life. If the discipline lead them to life-consecration to that rule well. If it does not, then in any case the discipline would have been a valuable experience to the individual and his services of worth to the Church. By some such flexibility as this we should meet Father Tyrrell's criticism of this revival (made to the writer), that hitherto it has been too imitative and unoriginal.

The more systematic treatment of adolescent manhood is one of the thorny problems of social ethics and psychology. Young men and women in business and away from home, or in unsuitable homes, need help in many

ways. They need to see God in everything and vocation in the shop. They need the cultivation of other interests: Thought, Poetry, Music, and Art. They need a quiet, steady, and carefully adjusted discipline. They need access to an ever-ready counsellor, guide, and spiritual friend. Such a person would point out to them the worth of corporate communion in and with a religious body, would help them to a right knowledge of sexual obligations and relationships, would assist them in cases of conscience, and make provision for confession, if desired. Freak religions would cease to attract them, if this work were faced as it should be. Lonely lodgings breed lonely vice. Is only the Eugenics Society going to care for, and instruct, the fathers and mothers of to-morrow?

Three services a week are not sufficient, occasional tea is not sufficient, district visiting is not sufficient. These people need a home. In recent years many parishes have started clergy houses. In them parochial clergy (and others occasionally) get cultured society, variety of interests, stimulus and rest. May there not be laity houses, too?

We dream of central houses in our large towns where young men or women may reside, where a common rule, adjusted to meet modern and particular needs, shall be kept. There the lessons of co-operation and selfdiscipline would be learnt through the stimulus of a common life. Three, four, or five years of such discipline would do as much as any Eugenics Society to make good fathers and moth

ers.

Laity houses must be small. A huge central Y.M.C.A. building is neither a home nor a church. It is an office, and Christianity is not learnt in an office.

No: laity houses must be small. They must provide for all the healthy interests of life: they must each

possess a skilled spiritual director. Family prayers will there become a reality, worship a thing of worth. In these houses our men may learn to pray well and not badly; they may learn to view all life and work as vocation. Such houses require the aid, if not the general control, of organized communities under rule, and they could be extended not only for our adolescent manhood but also to that not inconsiderable body of celibate professional and working men and women who so painfully seek an objective in life. They too need direction. Is it not humiliating to reflect that though the rank and file of the clergy are either too overworked or too little qualified to give skilled direction in cases of conscience, yet Sunday journals "for the home" have their correspondence columns replete with cases and answers thereto? Is it well that a newspaper editor should give advice to unknown letter writers on subjects which by their nature demand individual treatment and personal knowledge? The fact, however, that these so-called "heart to heart" talks appear in such journals is evidence of a need. Until the training of the clergy is so lengthened that it can include the study of direction and a sane casuistry, this work can be extensively undertaken only by religious communities which by their nature, as we have shown, possess the necessary experience, organization, and equipment.

We would have religious communities, therefore, in the Church of England, extending their present work and if necessary adapting their constitution accordingly. Let them grapple with the specific problem of the religious education of our children in primary, secondary, and public schools; with the presentation of Christianity to the contemplative East; with social problems at home, particularly the care of our adolescent youth; with the general re

newal of vocation and the establishment of the decaying sanctions of conduct: but let them also consider whether there are not other fields for their tillage. The child, the beggar, the toiler, the outcast, the student, the sick do not exhaust the constituents of society. There are yet the Bohemians of every sort, men and women who seem amenable to no law but that of their art, subject to no rule but that of a wayward, fluctuating passion to sing, to paint, to carve. The Church has a claim on them; have they no claim upon the Church? Can it not be all things to all men?

In his wonderful essay on Shelley, Francis Thompson, himself a poet and a religious, bemoans the present divorce between Sanctity and Song.

"The separation," he says, "has been ill for poetry, it has not been well for religion." "Fathers of the Church," he cries, "pastors of the Church, pious laics of the Church, you are taking from its walls the panoply of Aquinas, take also from its walls the psaltery of Alighieri. Unroll the precedents of the Church's past; recall to your minds that Francis of Assisi was among the precursors of Dante; that sworn to Poverty he forswore not Beauty, but discerned through the lamp Beauty the Light God; that he was even more a poet in his miracles than in his melody; that poetry, clung round the cowls of his order. Follow his footsteps; you who have blessings for men, have you no blessings for the birds?"

Does poetry cling round the cowls of our Anglican "religious"? What is this movement doing to correlate with Thought, Poetry, and Music also? Can the artistic temperament rest within its bounds? Will it admit the Bohemian?

We do not forget the valuable work in scientific apologetic, historical research and other branches of Thought which is adding lustre to the name of

• In a non-technical sense. He was a Tertiary of St. Francis.

Cowley St. John and Mirfield, but we are now thinking more particularly of the religious interpretation of Thought, Poetry, and Music. Community life should be specially fitted for cultivating and giving a religious meaning and force to the experiences and talents of the artist, poet, and musician. The ground of much of their experience is common to both. The religious and the artist have a common mysticism. Alike they seek to transcend the particular and express the universal. Alike they see and use in Nature the symbolism of the Divine. ecstasy are known to both, both need the discipline of work. Dedication to his art is the need of the Bohemian, as consecration to his. Lord is the need of the "religious." Hence the divorce lamented by Francis Thompson need not be. Were they afforded an opportunity of individual development of their craft within the wise limits of a

Forms of

patient Rule, singers might become saints. Within the wise limits of a

patient Rule both Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto might have been redeemed. Yet we have been told by a religious that since renunciation is of the essence of life under vows, an artist or a poet seeking entrance would have no guarantee that his gift would be employed, though he might trust the discretion of his Superior, and that for a time he would certainly have to lay it entirely aside. Now this is just what the poet and artist cannot do. His inspiration cometh when it will, and must be obeyed there and then, or for ever lost. Besides, the creative mood is an experience, and as such the religious life should accept it and incorporate it into the general body of religious experience. Beauty cannot be dallied or trifled with. The singer sings because he must. It is not satisfactory to tell him to wait for permission. The Breviary offices themselves are largely the recitation of sa

cred poetry. Are we to assume that such poetry can no longer be written? The poet and the religious are alike in search of the Absolute: both seek union. The poet needs the faith of the religious, the latter can learn from his brother's intuitions. "Serious art," says Hartmann," "whose possession can only be had at the price of devout effort, is more and more neglected every day. Artists of genius are not born because the times no longer need them."

Let our religious communities, therefore, make open provision within their rule for the serious cultivation of art in all its forms under religious sanction. In the laity houses which have been suggested, vocations of this kind would be discovered, stimulated and employed, and thus even the Bohemian might become less of a reproach than he often is. Poverty as freedom from excess and extravagance of idea and expression; chastity as simplicity, purity, and naïveté of form and figure; and obedience as singleness of aim and conformity to the lawful dictates of Inspiration, these are permanent needs of the true artist and poet-needs that may be met by the modified application of a religious rule.

It is perhaps matter for regret that, so far, in the communities for men The Church Quarterly.

already established within the Church of England, most of the members are either ordained or become so. If the suggestions embodied in this article are at all practicable then it is distinctly desirable that the lay element in any new or extended community should be strongly represented. Orders entail certain clerical functions upon the ordained which do not quite permit of the development suggested. While it is desirable, in some respects, that a Superior should be ordained, in order that due provision for the service of the altar may be permanently secured, yet a lay coadjutor would probably provide for the greater lay individual development desired.

Are we expecting too much of this movement? Nay, can we expect too much of it? Perhaps no other single organization has such an opportunity as this bas, to synthesize all the manifold activities and experiences of our complex life. Its more obvious importance as a prayer factor and as a means of giving a wise direction to the present revival of interest in the experiences and literature of mysticism has been but lightly dealt with here in order that these less noticed parallels and opportunities should not be forgotten.

CHAPTER XVI.

Captain Cutlass laughed immoderately when Norah met him that afternoon returning from a cavalry charge against the dolours, and told him how Penelope had made the artist in affected ecstasies look like a boy found surreptitiously playing with a doll. "You ought to have seen poor Reggie!"

Hartmann, "Philosophy of the Unconscious," vol. 1.

she exclaimed; "I never saw a pinker poet. First, he tried to make out that his melancholy had been got in another ruined priory, and that he had only borrowed the name of Pen's Ardfillan for the sake of its associations. Pen declared that such poetic license was a crime; it was no better than to write an elegy and then go out to murder a man to fit it. Then he said the origin of a poet's emotion did not