THE WAR AND THE SOUL.• Ma. R. J. CAMPBELL'S métier
is to be a popularizer. He can come down to any one's level and bring everything else with him. He sets to with his facile pen to popularize the universe ; if he could, he would popularize its Author. Like many a stronger thinker, he is reedy at this moment to offer patent solutions for all the moral and religious problems of the war. He begins, as a rule, to tackle any enigma by saying it is not an enigma at all. Then he offers his answer for our consideration. " The problem of what is wrong with the world is not greater by one iota because of the war than it was before the war began." Why should we, he asks, expect to be happy t " Why should we assume that it is God's business, so to speak, to see that we are made happy in this world ? " Not that Mr. Campbell seems to think the world, even at the present moment, an unhappy place. " If any man wants to be cured of religious pessimism or any other kind of pessimism he had better go to the front." If he himself had been an unbeliever before he went there, he would, he assures us, " speedily have been cured." But if Mr. Campbell is cheerful, he is also censorious. He abuses the Germans whole-heartedly enough, but he has a sneaking admiration for them in many ways. " How dove the situation look now ? " he asks (obviously he alludes to many
• l'he War and the Soot. By IL. J. Campbell. London : Chapman and Hall• uetj months past). " If there be unity of purpose anywhere, it is net with us. Strikes, incompetence, and party factions have brough• the nation to the very verge of ruin, and if they do not cease forthwith will precipitate us into it. There is only one mind and will in Germany. and that is the mind and will to destroy us." The English newspapers, on the other hand, make him furious with their pessimism ; yet the sentence we have quoted is but an epitome of what the most pessimistie of them say. But to leave " the front," whereof it should be said that Mr. Campbell gives us some interesting details of his sojourn, and tuna to theology. " Religion After the War : Will Christianity Survive ? " —this is the heading of one chapter, and the anxious reader may be assured at the outset that Mr. Campbell thinks the creed of Christendom not yet doomed. " What is Hell ? " is another of Mr. Campbell's startling titles. " Is Hell a. place or a state ? " he asks. " I should say it is both, but specially the latter," he makes answer to himself. " The revolt against the dogma of eternal torment as popularly construed has gone too far," he thinks. But somehow Hell retains little horror as known to Mr. Campbell. As for Heaven, that is also a region which Mr. Campbell can speak of with assurance. He is certain of reunion in the next world :—
" What is called natural affection may therefore have to become merged in something higher, but without being either dimmed or destroyed. I cannot doubt it myself. It will never become indifference ; it will only cease to be exclusive. And I believe, too, that the rather sad fact, sad from one point of view, which none of us can help observing, that the dead are soon forgotten, is more or leas an illusion."
To prove that a good many " sad facts " which no one can hells observing are more or less illusions is, we think, the aim and object of this rather frothy book, whose superficiality is to some extent redeemed by war anecdotes which bear the stamp of truth.
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