with the social sacred and hence religious, we would include within a religious complex only those objects which are regarded as capable of giving help. … Moreover we differ from Durkheim in regarding the power which makes the object capable of being a religious object a personal and not an impersonal one. Our theory agrees with animism in holding that the soul is the important thing in religion, but it is the soul or self that is experienced as very efficient that is anthropomorphised to become a god” (p. 403).
It is evident that manaism thus conceived is no longer sharply opposed to animism, the belief that the soul is “the principle by which all things” are to be “explained.” And the hotly debated question of the relative priority of manaism and animism thus becomes, as Miss Campbell says, “irrelevant”; for mana cannot be prior to the soul when it is part of the soul (p. 224). “ W cannot,” she says, “find any culture where the concept of mana is present” in which “there is not also a belief in spirits in the sense of ghosts or dream-doubles. Either concept,” the writer adds, “may assume the leading rôle (p. 253). … Manaism as well as animism results from the tendency of the human mind to interpret things in terms of its own inner experience.”
Wellesly College.
A History or the Christian Church, Williston Walker. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918. Pp. xiii, 624, $3.00.
Students have long felt the need of a manual covering the whole field of Church History to serve as a guide to more detailed study of the best and most recent literature of the subject, and as a text-book accompanying the lectures of the classroom. Professor Williston Walker has at last given us such a work in a form attractive both to the professional student and the general reader. It is remarkably complete and well proportioned, presenting the most recent developments in the life of the Church and exhibiting the full internal growth of organization, worship, and doctrine as well as the outer fortunes of the historic institution. The obvious demands on such a book, apart from the purpose of stimulating interest in the subject, are that it should furnish the data in a precise and accurate form, that the data should be constructed in terms of the historical development established by modern investigation, and that the account should be written in the impartial spirit of scientific intelligence. Professor Walker’s book meets these demands admirably. All the essential facts are pro- �
