On the religious development of the last thirty years I can find but little that is gladdening, to myself, at any rate, to say. There are ferments going on in the Church of England which have shown themselves in a series of books produced by Oxford and Cambridge men, each of them representing some greater concession to modern critical and historical knowledge than the one before it. The war, no doubt, has gripped the hearts and stirred the minds of men, in relation to the fundamental problems of life and destiny, as nothing else in living experience has ever done. The religious minds among the men who are perpetually fronting death in the battle-line seem to develop, on the one hand, a new and individual faith of their own, and, on the other, an instinctive criticism of the faiths hitherto offered them, which in time may lead us far. The complaints, meanwhile, of "empty churches" and the failing hold of the Church of England, are perhaps more persistent and more melancholy than of old; and there is a general anxiety as to how the loosening and vivifying action of the war will express itself religiously when normal life begins again. The "Life and Liberty" movement in the Anglican Church, which has sprung up since the war, is endeavoring to rouse a new Christian enthusiasm, especially among the young; and with the young lies the future. But the war itself has brought us no commanding message, though all the time it may be silently providing the "pile of gray heather" from which, when the moment comes, the beacon-light may spring. The greatest figure in the twenty years before the war seems to me to have been George Tyrrell. The two volumes of his biography, with all their absorbing interest, have not, I think, added much to the effect of his books. _A Much-abused Letter, Lex Orandi, Scylla and Charybdis_, and _Christianity at the Cross-Roads_ have settled nothing. What book of real influence does? They present many contradictions; but are thereby, perhaps, only the more living. For one leading school of thought they go not nearly far enough; for another a good deal too far. But they contain passages drawn straight from a burning spiritual experience, passages also of a compelling beauty, which can hardly fall to the ground unfruitful. Whether as Father Tyrrell's own, or as assimilated by other minds, they belong, at least, to the free movement of experimental and inductive thought, which, in religion as in science, is ever the victorious movement, however fragmentary and inconclusive it may seem at any given moment to be. Other men--Doctor Figgis, for instance--build up shapely and plausible systems, on given material, which, just because they are plausible and shapely, can have very little to do with truth. It is the seekers, the men of difficult, half-inspired speech, like T. H. Green and George Tyrrell, through whose work there flashes at intervals the "gleam" that lights human thought a little farther on its way.