Father Dolling : a Memoir. By Joseph Clayton. (Wells Gardner,
Darton, and Co. 2s. net.)—It would be ungracious, or worse than ungracious, to say anything in disparagement of R. P. Dolling. There never was a man who gave himself up to the best service of others with a more whole and undivided heart. A blameless boy, he grew up to be a man of rare courage and devotion, with gifts of a peculiar kind that made him fit for work to which few were equal. But if the story of his life in- creases our admiration for him, it does not shake our conviction that there was something perverse about his position. "Loyal to his Church, but disobedient to the Bishops," seems to describe one aspect of It This is what his biographer writes :—"An affectionate request from the Bishop Dolling would have obeyed "—a man cannot obey a request—"but the Bishop wrote as a Bishop con- cerning the Church services, and Dolling resigned." " To stay in was to admit the right of an outside authority to interfere with St. Agatha." "An outside authority " ! What next? The real difficulty of the situation was this. R. P. Dolling did not believe that he could do good work outside the Anglic.an Church, and he could not persuade himself to keep within its laws. The man. who wants complete liberty of action cannot find a place within any organised society. Probably in the Anglican Church he had more freedom than he would have had anywhere else, but that Dolling hardly felt.
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