hand, the book is stronger on the destructive side. His attack on miracles is telling, and he forcefully shows the impossibility of longer maintaining a credible form of religion that will not cheerfully accept the conclusions of scientists and look at the world from their point of view.
Perhaps it is not unjust to accuse the author of an almost dogmatic attitude in the sense that he often appears more disposed to force his own opinions on the reader than to lead the latter to form independent conclusions. The general tone of the book will not be likely to lead a student who accepts the author's views to desire to study further into the philosophical problems involved. Many of these problems would appear to such a student to be finally disposed of, and the rest would appear incapable of solution. The book seems likely to prove of most benefit to those students whose religious upbringing has been such that they will not readily agree with the author, and so will be provoked to further thinking. And there will be many such students. For the book everywhere seems to take for granted a form, extremely liberalized to be sure, of the type of Protestantism that in this country is fond of calling itself 'evangelical.' This seems to be what the author means when he speaks of "our religion" (e.g., p. v). He consequently frequently makes bald assumptions and assertions (like the Trinity being revealed to man as a matter of immediate experience on the one hand, and the inessential character of Church, creeds, and sacraments on the other), that will appear preposterous either to liberal Jews, Unitarians and agnostics or else to ritualistic Protestants and Roman Catholics. All of these standpoints may be—and in the experience of the reviewer usually are—represented in, and, taken together, are held by a very respectable minority of the ordinary American university class in the philosophy and psychology of religion.
The author deserves commendation for his discriminating selection of precisely the problems of religion in which undergraduates who take courses in the philosophy of religion are most interested. He deserves high praise for his courage and frankness in expressing his convictions openly upon these subjects, delicate as many of them are. He writes in a vigorous, attractive style, and everywhere his pages will prove intelligible to the beginner. In the main his conclusions are probably those to which most psychological and philosophical thinkers on religious subjects incline. No previous book has been so successful in all the points just mentioned. Notwithstanding its serious faults, the book is a genuine, timely, and valuable contribution to the popular literature of the psychology and philosophy of religion.
William K. Wright.
Dartmouth College.
This volume contains the substance of a course of lectures delivered by the author in the summer term of 1914 as Wilde Lecturer on Natural and Comparative Religion in the University of Oxford. It is an attack upon the soci-
