Trench Warfare
MR. CHARLES GARDNER, already well known for his studies of William Blake and other works, has written a most interesting, htimulating, yet curiously uneven book. Like an American layer cake, it seems to consist of two different kinds of material, produced by two different levels of his mind. At the beginning and end are serious and nourishing sections which represent the best he has to give us ; and this best is very good. Here we have an admirable and often moving account of the imperishable substance of Christianity—the "faith delivered to the saints "—of the direction in which we should look for reunion of the various bodies by which that Faith is held, and of the true nature of that substantial agreement which still exists between them. Mr. Gardner's outlook is that of the Christocentric supernaturalist. Whilst fully sympathising with the modern world, its problems and its needs, he will have nothing to do with the minimizing theology and rational- ized Christology of the Modernists ; insisting on the whole Catholic faith in its paradoxical splendour, difficulty and fascination. His defence of this position is chiefly carried through by means of a series of vigorous and well conceived attacks ; in the course of which all hostile forces, from Bishop Barnes to the deplorable products of Anglo-Catholic book- stalls, are chastised with a winning impartiality. These sallies occupy the middle section of the book ; they form, so to speak, the ginger filling of the cake. The Dean of St. Paul's, Mr. Chesterton, the old and new Evangelicals, the Anglo-Catholics, the cult of the Little Flower and other less attractive developments in the Latin Church are dealt with in succession. Amongst much acute criticism, we here find a good deal of matter which seems more closely related to journalism than to theology. Thus the survival of the true faith is not really affected by the personal appear- ance of Mr. Chesterton, or the " wintry " temperament of Dean Inge. So too when Mr. Gardner, discussing the popular devotion to St. (no longer Blessed) Teresa of the Child Jesus, would "like to remind Roman Catholics that the Little Flower was twenty-four when she died," I, who am not a Roman Catholic, would like to remind Mr. Gardner in the most friendly spirit, that his own professed belief in the Super- natural should make him very chary of measuring the opera- tions of grace with a stop-watch.
Of the entertaining chapter dealing with "Some Women Rebels" it would ill become me to speak ; since, to my great surprise, I have been accorded the honour of a place amongst them. But I should like to assure Mr. Gardner en passant that my selection of suitable candidates for hell is smaller than that which. he here attributes to me. My belief in Purgatory being, apparently,, more robust and realistic than his own, I am not short of housing accommodation. Whilst We are in this neighbourhood; I should much like to ask him Whether he has read that astonishing product of the French Catholic revival, Georges Bernanos'a Sous le Soleil_ de Satan.
For this book, under the guise of imaginative fiction, expounds a view of reparation which tmust surely be taken into account by all who dare to touch on that mysterious doctrine, and .without which the real nature of sanctity cannot be under:. stood. John Donne, of whom Mr. Gardner in his last chapter gives an admirable and eloquent eulogy, and whom he proposes to us as a type of that surrender of the whole man to the transcendent which Christianity in every age requires, would well have comprehended the place of reparation in the strange
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