THE SOUL OF A BISHOP.* Tins is not the first
story we have had of the conversion of a Bishop to Modernist ideas, but it is in one respect unique. Mr: Welts's Bishop is converted, like St. Paul, by a heavenly vision ; but tho vision does not follow at all closely upon the lino of the Bishop's previous doubts and difficulties ; it is specifically a vision of reality, produced by the administration of a drug, " not in the pharma- copeia," prescribed by a medical man who has been investigating the subject of illusions. Consequently the God who is revealed to the Bishop has to be accepted as the real God, and he is, we need hardly say, the God of whom Mr. Wells has become the prophet. The book therefore has no psychological interest as a study in religious development. There is much more in it about the Bishop's nerves than about his soul. " His spiritual wreetlinga were almost exclusively nocturnal. In the daytime he . . . believed in God and the Church and the Royal Family and himself securely ; in the wakeful nighttime he experienced a different and novel self, a bare.minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious." The Bishop's attacks of insomnia are described at great length and with much detail. But the Bishop himself becomes interesting only when, after his vision, his conscience calls upon him to renounce his Orders, and with them his comfortable position in society. All that part of the story is well told. Mr. Wells gives us a very human picture of the home life at the Palace--the aristocratic wife, the daughter with modern ideas, the incapable Chaplain (though why the Bishop retained his incapable services we are not told)—and a corresponding picture of the life in the suburban villa to which the Bishop is reduced by the loss of his official income. There is a good sketch of an older Bishop who advises his brother to retain his position and modernize the Church from within, and an amusing caricature of the sentimental neophyte, a wealthy American widow, who wishes to build the Bishop a symbolical temple in which to preach his new religion. The reactions of this emotional lady on the Bishop's family form the most natural element in the book.
Mr. Wells's Bishop cannot take rank among his author's successes. He has little individuality, and what there is has no consistency. For the most part he is but a mouthpiece for Mr. Wells ; and when Mr. Wells is letting himself go ho forgets that a man after an acute attack of neurasthenia and a religious crisis cannot escape from all the influences of his breeding and professional education. He makes him by birth a Serope, and we know from Chaucer that the Scrapes bore azure, a bend or before the Grosvenors were heard of. And yet he lets him smoke furtively in his own garden and hide his cigarette from a little boy who looks at him over the wall ; he lets him speak of Queen Victoria as " that old German Frau," and call Coein's version of Veni Creator Spiritus " a veritable Charlie Chaplin among hymns " ; (by the way, what does Mr. Wells mean by saying that the hymn " misses its accusatives " 1). When a " sentimental novelist " remarks in conversation to the Bishop ; " What puzzles me is why the early Christians identified the Spec- maticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third person of the Trinity," the Bishop replies " Alt I that indeed ic the unfortunate aspect of the whole affair." Now the Bishop, who by hypothesis is a gentleman, would not have pretended to a knowledge of the history of the Logos doctrine which he did not • The lost of a Biehop. B9 B. 0. Wells. London : Cassell and en Bs. aetl possess ; and yet had he understood what he was talking about he would have explained to the novelist that Philo had already identified the Logos with the representative of the Creator before there were any " early Christians " to do so. The Bishop, we gather, was not intended to be a scholar, but if he had learned Greek for three months he could hardly have made such a gross blunder in construing as the version offered on p. 102 of Revelation i. 10. Mr. Wells as a way sometimes of making a vaguely drawn character persuasive by a lavish use of circumstantial detail, but in the case of the Bishop this resource fails him, because Bishops are somewhat rare birds, and cannot easily be studied. So he uses the apron and gallon as though they were the outward end visible sign of episco- pacy instead of being the dress of church dignitaries in general; and she gaiters play a ludicrous part in the heavenly vision by becoming unbuttoned and impeding the Bishop in his pursuit of God. We learn with interest that Bishops, even when they wear purple coats in the evening, do not wear purple breeches ; but unless Mr. Wells assures us that he has with his own eyes seen a Bishop undrees wo shall decline to believe that the most dexterous of Bishops could rid himself of breeches, " pants," and " black boson" by a single stroke of legerdemain. But into these aroma we will not further PrY- Nor dare we venture to comment upon the angel, who has long talks with the Bishop, further than to say that he is oven more affable than Milton's Raphael—ruffling the Bishop's hair affection- ately, and dropping into twentieth-century slang—and as like Mr. Wells as Raphael is like Milton. He seems to be as well informed as Mr. Wells himself about the Cathars and Gnostics and Manichean, and the ambiguous history of the Nicene Creed. Ho shows the Bishop all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and the Bishop and he come to the conclusion that the two groat hindrances to a universe aspiring to be good are kings and priests. It is a simple doctrine, and, pace the angel, we should have thought an exploded one.
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