WITHIN OUR LIMITS.*
IN the preface to this volume, which consists of lectures and
essays read to various societies, chiefly the Newnham College Sunday Society, Miss Gardner explains her title as follows :— " The title was suggested in the course of looking through the essays with a view to publication, as emphasizing the one principle that seemed to run through them all : that for clear thinking on fundamental principles and for concentrated action in dealing with present-day problems, as well as for the sympathetic and rational interpretation of the past, we need to spend more time and energy than we always feel ready to give in marking out the several fields before us, pointing out distinctions among the things submitted to our observation, and tracing as far as possible their relations to one another."
We doubt if any human being could have guessed without this explanation what the title meant, and when he knows, it will possibly not seem a very just or happy condensation of that meaning. However, we quote the passage because it certainly does express the peculiar quality of these addresses.
They are attempts at clear thinking on present-day problems, intellectual and moral, or on certain periods of past religions history. Of course, such a thread of connexion running through the various papers, being merely one of method, does not give them the unity of a book. The reader who passes from a lecture on the Greek Spirit to a paper on Christian Apologetics, or from a talk about Responsibility to a lecture on History, will get little profit. But taken singly as a whet- stone for one's own reflections these papers should do for many readers what they were intended to do for their first hearers; that is, help them to clear their ideas. Every young lady who heard the discourse on Reason and Feeling, with its interesting illustrations and occasional touches of wit, must have felt that it marked an epoch in her self-knowledge. What could be better than the description of sentimentality as "fatty degeneration of the heart," or this about the Romantic reaction after the eighteenth-century intellectualism ?—
"Feeling in very extreme fermi (as in those of the French Revolutionists who formulated the Rights of Man) sometimes tried to get into the clothes properly belonging to reason; but they never fitted—passion wore itself through at the elbows."
The Woman's Movement, Flirtation, Charity Organization, the Majority and Minority Poor Law Reports are some of the things discussed in the light of the proposition that the solution of all social questions requires the co-operation of right feeling and right reason.
A good many of the papers deal with religious topics, and they are all discussed with religious feeling and no little religious insight. Some persons will, no doubt, disagree with opinions expressed on particular questions, especially in the essay on miracles, but from the general conclusion even on that subject there could hardly be dissent. " The secularist and religious views of life are poles apart. The distance between miraculous and non-miraculous Christianity is small in comparison." For the inventor of new religions, who is supposed to be treated with some respect in a certain learned society at Cambridge, Miss Gardner has a good-humoured laugh.
"In a clever pamphlet called Religion: a Criticism and a Fore- cast, the author, a very able Cambridge man, after indignantly denouncing all religion with any ecclesiastical or dogmatic elements, declares that the religion of the future ought to have a • Within 0.11. Limits: Essays on Questions Moral, Religious. and Historical. By Alice Gardner. London : T. Fisher Unwin. [7s. 6d. net.]
ritual. Ritual, apart from special rites, is not made, but grows. It would be harder to create a brand-new ritual than a brand-new House of Lords or a brand-new system of versification."
On such deep matters as sin and its remission and the duty of public worship Miss Gardner writes as a conservative, but at the same time with the knowledge and sympathy of one who understands what many other intellectual persons are thinking on these matters, so that her conclusions cannot be charged with obscurantism. In regard to the former she says :— " I am inclined to think that the scientific view of things fits in better with the idea of salvation as worked out by tears and blood than it does with the easy-going fashion, in religious and non-religious circles alike, of treating moral delinquencies, except those of a flagrant description, as something very unimportant and not to be taken too seriously."
Among the reasons she offers for joining in public worship are the great moulding power of such a habit, the impres- siveness of joining in any action with a great concourse of people, or, again, the binding power exercised by smaller associations for worship, as well as the distinctively religious significance of communion with God.
"There should be the less danger of unreality in any practice of Christian observances, because with us such observances are essentially a falling back on fundamental principles. It was an important practice with tho Stoics to repeat ever and anon to themselves those truths with regard to the nature of good and evil, man's place in the cosmos, the nature and limits of human responsibility, which served them as guidance and security in all their life and thought. And similarly every Christian, in every act of worship and in every attempt at religious thought, is going back to primary truth."
In regard to the forms of public worship there are some wise sentences in another essay :- "Ritual ought always to keep abreast of the highest religious ideas of the time as to theology and morality, and though it is not necessarily dependent on intellectual or aesthetic considera- tions, it should not be repugnant to the good sense or the good faith of educated people. The keeping up of the standard is not to be effected in general by introducing new ways, but by dropping such of the old as have come to seem unmeaning or puerile, and reinterpreting the rest so as to give them a higher meaning."
This passage comes from an essay on "Ritual in its Historical and Psychological Aspects," which is one of the most interest.. hag in the volume. We have preferred, however, not to select any particular paper for discussion, but to indicate the general trend of the writer's thought. It seems to us that the Newnham ladies are very much to be congratulated on having so sound and wise and sympathetic a religious teacher as Miss Gardner; and we hope that the publication of these thoughtful papers may very much enlarge the range of her influence.
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