in Domini, the central figure in "The Garden of Allah" (Stokes). Mr. Hichens has taken a great stride forward in this unusual story—unusual first in its background, for never before, in English at least, have the scenery, the atmosphere, and the loneliness of the desert been brought before the eye and the imagination with such splendid skill, so that the story takes on a kind of epical quality from the breadth and splendor of the background against which it moves; unusual in the second place because the plot, although in a way a very simple one, is not only baffling but is practically novel; unusual in the third place because rarely has a woman of such elementary force of character been depicted with such freedom, such delicacy, and such purity. The book is a study of really noble human passion which has its roots in love, as such passion always must have, and which passes through a great experience into spiritual affection.

Mr. Phillpotts's "The Secret Woman (Macmillan) is also a study of passion, but of a far different order. It is a story of terrible frankness, dealing without evasion with the elemental forces of the human tragedy, but without morbid interest or curiosity, and binding the penalty to the sin. Like all Mr. Phillpotts's stories, it sketches with beautiful feeling and skill the background of Devonshire. In this, as in all other stories from the same hand, the scenery of that enchanting country is constantly before the eye, and the whole story is a transcription of the life of a little section of Devonshire. The reader passes into the next county and finds himself looking at the sea from the hillsides of Cornwall in Mr. Quiller-Couch's "The Shining Ferry" (Scribners), a novel which does not lack its element of tragedy born of the old attraction of the man and the woman, in which the highest poetry and the deepest tragedy have had their roots since time began; but it abounds in quaint humor; it has the smell of the sea; it contains charming descriptions of children; and that quality of the old Duchy which Mr. QuillerCouch loves so well and understands so thoroughly penetrates the story from beginning to end.

Among the novels from American hands best worthy of attention must be placed Mrs. L. H. Hammond's "The Master-Word" (Macmillan), a study of the relation of the races in the South, at once frank and idealistic. A woman discovers that her husband is the father of a mulatto child, and at his death, after a terrible struggle with herself, takes the child into her keeping and educatęs her; not along the lines on which she educates her own daughter, but in order to give her the best chance of free development. The tragedy of the victim of the mixed race is uncompromisingly faced and solved-first, by a clear recognition of the facts in the case, without any evasion from philanthropic motives or sentimental feeling, and then by the application of the Master-Word, the motive of supreme love. The story is unusual in its nobility of spirit and its sanity.

Mrs. Shafer's "Beyond Chance of Change" (Macmillan) presents no problems and involves no tragedy, but is a delightful transcription of life in a little community in the Central West before the fever and rush of recent years set in; full of the peace of landscapes the charm of which most Americans do not yet understand; of the quiet and leisure of the older time; of the native humor, kindliness, and courtesy of the older Americans, with glimpses of childhood which are immensely refreshing and consoling.

Those who have assumed that American humor, while not exhausted, has developed every possible variety of form, have yet to make the acquaintance of "The Fugitive Blacksmith" (The Century Company), a kind of modern Arabian Nights, the story of an original character in the old Southwest, told in a succession of chapters recited in a sandhouse in Memphis to a delightful Irishman, in the company of a group of tramps, the whole suffused with humor and not lacking in pathos, and wholly original.

The list might be somewhat extended, but these stories may be taken as examples of the admirable work now being done in fiction by hand, in contradistinction from the work done by machin

ery.

On the platform of the National Congregational Council in 1904 a speaker of high repute as a statistician affirmed, "Our National vice is stealing"-referring to the well-known facts of political corruption, frenzied finance, and extortionate monopoly. Side by side with such an utterance stand the facts that nearly one-third of the population is in church membership, over one-half of it adherents of churches, and that for forty years the National coinage has been stamped with the religious profession, In God We Trust. The glaring anomaly cries aloud for explanation, and for ending. The situation reminds one of Juvenal's account of conditions in the time of the Cæsars:

"Virtue is complimented and chilled." Morality, indeed, is in as high general repute as ever, but too commonly it is a partial morality seen in those who "Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to." This semi-morality, consisting in correct private habits, and in keeping on the safe side of the civil and criminal law, coupled with the unreal and merely conventional morality that cares little for moral ideals and moral progress, creates the present need of a moral revival for social salvation.

Practical morality may be defined as the art of living together in a communal life. Morality is essentially social, a unifying influence, but not such is the half morality described in Clough's sarcastic version of the Sixth, Eighth, and Tenth Commandments, as observed in trade:

"Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive Officiously to keep alive.

Thou shalt not steal: an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat.
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition."

"Business is business," to be sure, but what is the current conception of business? A widely used text-book on. political economy1 by a Christian man,

"Introduction to Political Economy," by A. L.

Perry, page 44, edition of 1877.

it down, some twenty-five years ago, as the accepted doctrine that "the ground on which men trade is self-interest," and went on to say that "no other motive is appropriate." This theory is still too influential in the commercial, industrial, and political world. What Marley's ghost in Dickens's Christmas tale discovered in the unseen world, and came back to tell his skinflint partner, Scrooge, "Mankind was my business, the common welfare was my business," is plain to any one who sees the fact that all legitimate business is simply the supply of services for the satisfaction of other men's needs. There are highminded men, a small but growing number, who adopt this view, and conduct their business in the spirit of the Golden Rule as a ministry of social benefits. But the anti-social view of business as the pursuit merely of private interests still dominates the general mind. Were a young man at the entrance of a business career to confide to any captain of industry that his choice of an occupation had been motived by a view to the largest benefit that his services could bring to the community-the motive universally required of one who proposes to become a teacher of morality and religion-his steel would be thought too soft for its work. He would be reminded that that is philanthropy, but men go into business for what they can get out of it. So it has come to pass, since competition was found to result in the rival mowers mowing off one another's legs, that combination has been substituted, so that producers can now "hold up" consumers for instance, telephone-users and beef-eaters-fixing price by power to put on what the market will bear. Intake of individual gain, not output of social benefit, is the grand and general desideratum, and moral demands are deemed satisfied if the intake is not of a generally stigmatized kind, as that of the wolf or python. Workmen care for quantity of wages more than quality of work; corporation managers for enlarged dividends more than improved public service; small office-holders for salary more than public interests. Social benefit is indeed inseparable from individual activity, but

it figures, so far as thought about, only among incidentals. Only a minority, among whom are medical men, army and navy men, clergymen, and professed philanthropists, exemplify the social spirit of thorough morality as distinct from its half-way substitute.

Here is the very tap-root of social discord, decay, and danger, the semi-morality of the self-regarding virtues, incapable, apart from the other-regarding virtues, of meeting the demand either of democracy or of religion. Its essential virulence breaks out in the exorbitant practices that have drawn from eminent ethical thinkers the declaration that the most dangerous class is not composed of vulgar criminals, but of socially respectable, unscrupulous exploiters.

Contributory to this paralysis of the social conscience is the current political fallacy that misplaces the social basis on the rights of man. However justifiable in a transient emergency the Declaration of rights with which our National existence began, the kingdom of heaven, the only stable social order, begins with a declaration not of rights but of duties. We are born, not into rights, but into duties, on whose fulfillment all rights are morally conditioned-duty to nourish the social life that nourishes our life, to subordinate private to public interest, to seek first of all the common good in which our own is involved. Whatever legal rights may be claimed by repudiators of this congenital duty are terminable by the power that created them; they are not moral rights at all.

Dr. Gladden has said, and as Wickliffe held, there is no moral right to anything that its possessor uses immorally. Acceptance of the non-ethical doctrine that makes duty a corollary to primary rights, instead of making rights a corollary to primary duty, has debased morality and defiled religion. This, together with the ethical fallacy that the self-regarding virtues per se constitute morality, neutralizes the spirit of Christianity, just as cold iron imprisons fiery oxygen in the rust resulting from their combination. And so the Christian conscience is benumbed. Revenue for church and university is drawn from human rookeries prolific in disease and vice. Wares are Wares are

cheapened by forcing children into the premature labor that stunts body and mind. The charity that mitigates social wrongs is weakly substituted for the justice that should prevent them. "The heresy of Cain " involves the churchman together with the infidel. "I am hoping for war with Spain," said a New York churchman; "it will be a good thing for my Southern railway interests." don't mean to attend the Christian Endeavor meetings any more," said a young New York churchwoman; "East Side girls come there, and I can't recognize them on the street."

"I

Thus short and scant in normal humanity is the half-morality of self-interested virtue accounted respectable in society, and permitted to suffice for good standing even in churches. To religionists of this character an ancient parallel is on record in the Old Testament-the heathen colonists in the Holy Land, who "feared Jehovah and served other gods."

"Back to Christ" has become the watchword of the social theology that seeks to get below divisive dogmas to unifying faith. "Back to Christ" must be the watchword of the social morality that is complete enough to undertake what Horace Bushnell declared to be "the great problem-to Christianize the money-power of the world." The world's mistake has not been in desiring free competition, but in choosing the competition that divides men instead of that which unites; competition in getting instead of the competition in giving which Christ inculcates; competition for goods to be unequally apportioned between the weak and the strong, instead of competition for the good will and grateful esteem to be poor in which is shame and sin. Neither has democracy erred in protesting to princes, "We are as good as you;" but it errs in omitting to confess to its lowly servitors, "You are as good as we." And Christ corrects its neglect by his saying that he who would be the greatest must be the servant of all.

It is but a partial preaching of salvation through Christ that fails to emphasize the saving principles which he embodied in these precepts, incarnated in his example, and glorified by his faith

fulness to them, even to the Cross. How ineffective is such preaching the attitude of the masses plainly shows. The work of the New Evangelism is to preach the whole Gospel, to utter the ancient call, "Come to Jesus," as a call to his enthusiasm for humanity, to his discipleship in service at the divine altar of human needs. Only thus will the needed revival of religion that many long for put an end to the reproach of the modern Church, that it tolerates a type of Christianity which, being but incompletely moral, is partly anti-Christian.

A Lenten Meditation

The background of the Lenten season is a desert or wilderness, with two figures only to fill the wide and lonely space-the figure of Christ, and the figure of Satan, the incarnation or personification of evil. Great experiences, such as that through which Christ passed on the way to a clear understanding of his own personality and his mission, come to men only in solitude.

No man comes face to face with God or with himself in a tumult. There must always be in all these great experiences a certain detachment, a solitude of the spirit if not of the body; for such experiences involve concentration, the absence of the tide of externalities which sweeps a man out of himself; a dying down of the immense tumult of the world which distracts the mind; the fading out of sight of the vast variety of interests and objects which disperse attention. It is significant that the great religions which have inspired and comforted men have been born in solitude and are associated with lonely places; Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism are of the desert. The temptation of Christ, the crucial experience of Buddha through which he passed to the discovery of the ultimate truth, the realization of his mission by Mohammed, are associated with solitude and silence.

There has come perhaps no greater change in the religious life of the Christian world than the transition from the old sim

plicity to the modern complexity of life; from the old concentration of thought and interest to the modern dispersion of thought and interest. To the earliest seekers after God that pursuit was not only supreme in interest and observation, but there was very little to withdraw attention from it, to break in upon the concentration of the spirit. Occupations and interests were few; life ran deeply, but it ran through narrow channels. To-day, for the best men and women, there is an immense range of interests, a vast dispersion of energy, a wide area of sympathies. The religious life can no longer be expressed in meditation alone. A thousand works of necessity and mercy break in upon the calm of the Sabbath day, a thousand calls for help assail the ears and reach the heart of those who are most eager to live in the presence of the Infinite; while to those whose affections have never been fixed on these things all life throbs with vitality expressed in other activities, concentrated in other interests. Whether men will or not, the world of to-day is crowded with significant and important works, and even the best are distracted by the number of objects which claim their interest. It is not so easy to live in the constant thought of the presence of the Infinite to-day as it was a thousand or even three hundred years ago. This does not mean that the world has gone backward, that religion is less potent, or that men are less holy; it does mean that there is a new temptation to forgetfulness, that to all men and women come inevitable distractions, and that it requires a more definite habit of mind and a stronger will to carry the consciousness of God about in the streets of great cities, in the tumult of modern life, than it did in the cities in which Christianity was first preached and the lonely and solitary places in which many of its miracles were wrought at the beginning. The very landscape which is the background of the Lenten season suggests the solitude and isolation in which alone the highest knowledge comes, and suggests also the great perils in the life of the Christian of to-day.