favorably noticed in this Review, Vol. vii, No. 2, it is a most admirable primer. This little book is characterized by all the excellences which we remarked in the author's earlier and larger works-the same command of facts, the same fairness in interpreting them, the same skill in inductive reasoning, the same caution and reserve in the statement of conclusions; and yet, as we observed in our review of Dr. Jevon's second book, "we think that we detect, as would not be unlikely in this latest effort, an even firmer grasp of principles and an even more confident mastery of his position". It is not a primer of comparative theology, like Dr. Kellogg's Handbook of Comparative Religion, that he has given us. He deals not only with the doctrinal resemblances and differences of the religions, but takes up such expressions of religion as Magic, Sacrifice, etc. While he does not, as Dr. Kellogg did, write as an ardent Christian missionary, his conclusions point toward the uniqueness and supernaturalness of the Christian religion. In a recent lecture by Louis Henry Jordan, B.D., on Comparative Religion, Its Origin and Outlook, he has been criticized for "busying himself with the problems of the anthropologist" and for "introducing a purely speculative element". We cannot concur in this criticism. To us he would seem to enter Anthropology only when its problems emerge in Comparative Religion; and his conclusions impress us, not as speculation, but as just and necessary inferences from facts. Princeton WILLIAM BRENTON GREENE, JR. Comparative Religion. Its Origin and Outlook. A Lecture by Louis HENRY JORDAN, B.D., Member of the Institut Ethnographique International, Paris, Author of 'Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth', etc., etc. Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press: London, New York, Toronto, Melbourne and Bombay. 1913. Pamph., pp. 16. IS. net. This lecture has been called forth by the publication within the brief space of ten days in England of two books bearing "the simple title 'Comparative Religion"". These books are Comparative Religion by Frank B. Jevons (The Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature) Cambridge, 1913, and Comparative Religion by J. Estlin Carpenter (The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge). London, 1913. These "primers", for such they aim to be and are, Mr. Jordan criticizes on the ground that "they are found continually busying themselves with the problems of the anthropologist; nor are they blameless of the charge that they sometimes indulge a fondness for sudden excursions into the realm of purely conjectural criticism". At the same time Mr. Jordan holds that "both of these 'primers' are noteworthy in an eminent degree, and are really far more important than either their size or price serves to indicate". He thinks that they are doomed to be superseded; but he believes that it is not too much to say that "the results they are destined to effect will give them a permanent place in the early literature of the subject." This lecture is characterized by Mr. Jordan's well known knowledge of the literature of Comparative Religion, his zeal to define its boundaries more exactly and sharply than seems to us always possible, and his tendency to deny, as we maintain unwarrantably, the exclusiveness of Christianity. Princeton. WILLIAM BRENTON GREENE, Jr. Mysticism. A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiri- The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary, brought out of divers tongues The primary object of this notice is to give some account of Miss Underhill's Mystic Way, in which she formally presents her views of the origin and nature of Christianity. We have associated with this book in the heading, however, the titles of such others of Miss Underhill's publications that have come into our hands as are serious in form, in order that The Mystic Way may be seen in its setting. We should not like to suggest that Miss Underhill's novels by which she has been previously known-The Grey World, 1904, The Lost Word, 1907, The Column of Dust, 1909-were written without serious purpose or are without significance as disclosures of her mind and of the direction of her studies. On the contrary they already reveal to us the intensity of her engagement with what is loosely called the mystical aspects of life, and no doubt embody, in an imaginative form, much of what she would consider symbolically at least wholesome instruction for our sense-preoccupied world. In The Grey World we are told how the neurotic son of a London tailor, dying in a hospital, catches a glimpse, as he passes through it to his next incarnation, of that "grey world" which lies behind this, and lived in consequence throughout his next earthly life with the curtain which hides that world from our view worn rather thin. It is a Dean's son, who is the hero of The Lost Word; and we are shown in it how, brought into intimate contact from his earliest years with the symbolism and mysterious romance of a great cathedral, he found his way, despite the insistent pull of earthly passion, into dimly apprehended relations with an unseen permanent existence where he held communion with the great artistic spirits of the past. In The Column of Dust we learn how a bookseller's clerk in London summons a spirit, who, however, refusing to be used by her, uses her rather, and how out of it all sacrificial love comes to its rights. In all three alike Miss Underhill seeks her inspiration in praeter-natural themes, and manifests a profound preoccupation with the supernatural, not to say the morbid, phases of life. From these novels alone we might assure ourselves that here is a writer who is ready to insist seriously that there are more things, not in heaven merely but here on earth, than are dreamed of in our starveling five-senses philosophy: and indeed that the most real things which surround us are not those which we touch with our clumsy fingers and gaze at with our dull eyes and taste with our gross tongues. It is not a matter of surprise that such a writer should come forward at length as a serious eulogist of mysticism. Among Miss Underhill's serious writings we need not delay long over her little volume of verses. In the greater number of the pieces included in it an attempt is made to give expression to mystical moods. These do not seem to us the most successful. Strange to say Miss Underhill's muse does not appear to move easily in such moods. We quickly gain the impression also that verse is not her most happy medium of expression. There are some lofty conceptions; there is much fine language; here and there a well-turned phrase meets us; we can smile at a conceit like that embodied in "The Idol"; we can respond to the stirring counsel of "Memento, Homo"; we can thrill with the grim lesson of "The Backward Glance". But the volume leaves us cold-and uninstructed. Little more need be said of the collection of The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary. For all that appears on the surface, a purely literary motive might have presided over its production. Here is a by-way of mediaeval literature but little trodden by recent feet. Not merely students but amateurs "of mediaeval manners and Christian mythology" may find interest in exploring it. Certainly Miss Underhill has done her work well and made this sufficiently dreary series of folk-stories and hagiographs as attractive as possible. There is a sentence near the close of the brief but competent Introduction, however, which may suggest that she may have had a deeper than a merely literary purpose in seeking to give new life to the Mary-legends. Speaking of the mediaeval attitude towards the Virgin she remarks upon "the simple and familiar friendship, mystical adoration, and unfailing trust" which were given to "Goddes Moder and oures" by those who, as she phrases it, "were in every sense her children". And then she adds that it is "the aim of this book", "to drag back", not only the "literary expression" of this sentiment "from the shadowland to which it has retreated", but the "sentiment" itself. May we infer that Miss Underhill has had, then, a directly religious motive in seeking to revive the knowledge of the Mary-legends? It is not altogether easy to make quite sure of Miss Underhill's precise religious standpoint. On the basis of her two solid works on Mysticism alone-which embrace her professed contribution to religious discussion-we might readily think of her as a Modernist Romanist. We do not suppose we do her injustice at any rate in imagining her in congenial society when in the company of, say, Friedrich von Hügel or George Tyrrell. Many of their points of view she certainly holds in common with them; some of their suggestions she works out in detail; and, if we mistake not, the ultimate issue of her religious thought is very much theirs-perhaps, we may add, in somewhat extreme expression. The whole argument of the work which is more especially in our mind as we write-The Mystic Way-might be represented as the detailed explication of a tendency apparent in von Hügel (it is no doubt present in more or less strength in all Mystical writers) to which Söderblom calls sharp attention—the tendency, we mean, to think of Jesus as only a high-point in the religious development of humanity, which attracts the eye of men and to which we must also aspire, while there is withheld from Him all truly creative effects on the religious life of the world. Perhaps it is not right to hold George Tyrrell too closely to everything he wrote in even the last years of his singularly ununified career. But he seems to have seriously meant it when in the early days of the last year of his life he declared: "Houtin and Loisy are right, the Christianity of the future will consist of mysticism and charity, and possibly the Eucharist in its primitive form as the outward bond: I desire no better". Perhaps even Mysticism no doubt seemed to him something less than solid ground: "Mystics think they touch the divine," he explains in one of his moods of scepticism, "when they have only blurred the human form with a cloud of words." The precise effect of Miss Underhill's discussion of The Mystic Way, in any event, is to place her in the same category with Houtin and Loisy and Tyrrell as here expounded. She reduces Christianity to simple Mysticism. The background of the volume called The Mystic Way is provided by Miss Underhill's magnum opus, the elaborate volume on Mysticism. This volume is brilliantly written. All the resources of a trained literary art are expended upon it, and its pages are not only illuminated with numerous well-chosen extracts from the Mystical writers who are thus permitted to tell in their own quaint and often singularly impressive language exactly what they are, but are also gemmed with vivid phrases caught from the Mystics and used by Miss Underhill in her own composition with exquisite skill. Above all it is written with a verve and enthusiasm which impart to it an élan (as Miss Underhill would call it, in deference to Bergson) that sweeps the reader wellnigh off his feet. It is divided into two parts, called respectively "The Mystic Fact" and "The Mystic Way", in the former of which an attempt is made to tell what Mysticism is in contrast with other tendencies, while in the latter the several steps and stages of the Mystical process are described in detail. The effect is that we have what Mysticism is elaborately explained to us twice over, and one would think it must be the reader's own fault if he rises from the book without a clear conception of exactly what it is that Miss Underhill at least would have him think Mysticism to be. It is an indication of the fluidity of the notion-perhaps also of the almost incurable ambiguities of the current usages of the term-that one requires, even so, to pause and consider before he is quite sure of the precise limits of the sense in which Miss Underhill employs it. Formal definition of the term begins for us already in the Preface. "Broadly speaking," we read there (p. x), “I understand it to be the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood." This is "broadly speaking" indeed. By the final clause, Mysticism is at once separated from all "positive religions" whatever; and (as we are immediately told) it is made matter of indifference to the experience of "mystic union" in which it "attains its end", whether that union is conceived to be with "the God of Christianity, the World-Soul of Pantheism, the Absolute of Philosophy" (p. x). "Attempts to limit mystical truth— the direct apprehension of the Divine Substance-to the formulae of any one religion," we are accordingly told later (p. 115), "are as futile as attempts to identify a precious metal with the die which converts it into current coin." It is upon the little word "innate", however, that the hinge of the definition turns. Mysticism is "the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order". In other words it is "natural" religion; and it is therefore that it is quite independent of all possible conceptions of that "only Reality", which is here called "the transcendental order”. Let philosophers call it "the Absolute"; let theologians call it "God"; think of it as Personal Spirit, think of it as the impersonal ground of Being, think of it how you choose: the human spirit moves by its own intrinsic gravitation towards it, and this gravitation towards it is Mysticism. Obviously "Mysticism" is used here as but a name for the inherent native religiosity of the human spirit. Subsequent formal definitions advance us but little beyond this. Thus, for example, when at a later point Miss Underhill is again (as in the Preface) animadverting upon the loosenesses of the current usages of the term, she emerges with this crisp assertion (p. 86): "Mysticism, in its pure form, is the science of ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else." She does indeed go on to declare that "the mystic is the person who attains to that union, not the person who talks about it"; that it is not a matter of "knowing about" but "Being" (she spells it with a big B); but she seems already to have closed that question by defining it as "science"-for "science" is "knowing about" ex vi verbi. When, among sciences, she declares Mysticism to be this particular science, namely, "the science of ultimates", she seems to identify it with what we are accustomed to call Metaphysics; but that she can scarcely mean this is manifest from the parallel phrase which she immediately adjoins: "the science of union with the Absolute"-for certainly Metaphysics is not that. What is apparently meant to be asserted is that Mysticism is the systematized knowledge of "union with the Absolute"; or, since the emphasis is thrown on the practical side, perhaps we may say (as we speak of |