I am not surprised at, but regret, the inevitable failure of the author to note here something which should give pause to every opponent of the Christian religion such as himself. He perceives (and very well describes) the breakdown of Islam as a culture after its early brilliancy. He notes that the second chapter in its power was only begun by that tide of abominable barbarism in the eleventh century—the Turkish hordes. He might have noted—it is certainly a thing which every judicial student of religion should note (unfortunately Mr. Wells cannot possibly be judicial when the Catholic Church is anywhere within ten miles)—that the Christian culture alone has not shown this recurrent “fainting sickness.” Its material circumstance has risen and fallen slowly. It has had a rhythm, as every living organism must have; but it has not had fatal fatigues. _Its resurrections have been from within._ Attacks from without have always strengthened it, whether it were attack upon the spiritual body—martyrdom and heresy—or attack upon the political body—Mohammedan and Pagan invasions. This Character in the Catholic culture is unique. The comparative history of religion will give you no parallel to this: and I say again that the impartial and really sceptical student of religion would note immediately in his studies this mark peculiar to the Catholic Church; account for it as best he could by some natural explanation, but note it. The long passages upon the Ottoman Turks, upon the great thirteenth-century Mongol move, form the opening of Book VII. The description is full and good, and the accompanying sketch maps illuminating. Mr. Wells is to be blamed in sparing those men the epithets which he is ready to fling at any Christian armies and particularly at those which impose orthodoxy upon the mortal enemies of our culture. But that is only to be expected; and I think I have wearied the reader enough with emphasizing this unfortunate feature which deprives his work of solidity and permanence. Our armies never reached the barbaric depths of cruelty and mere destruction. They were creative. The section on the travels of Marco Polo is first-rate. I find in it again, of course, the silly little sentences against Catholicism which he cannot avoid, the condemnation of the word “illiterate” coupled with the word “theologian” as applied to Charlemagne; the contrasting of the Catholic Church with an imaginary “teaching of Jesus” (p. 443); an absurd suggestion that the Mongols would have become Catholics if it had not been for the Priest; a sneer at the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century (of all centuries!) for its loss of the conquering fire of the early Christian Missions; a complaint that the Papacy did not convert the Empire of Kubla-Khan—which he imagines to have been thirsting for conversion to Papistry, but only willing (apparently) to accept it in a Protestant form.