Beyond the above I cannot go, but I must add that the lines are of the most perfect metrical lucidity and the purest melody when compared with some written by the LAUREATE in _Ibant Obscuri_. * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._) Mr. H.G. WELLS also among the New Theologians is not an entirely unexpected event. We have all had intimation in his later writings of the coming of some such thesis as _God, The Invisible King_ (CASSELL). I can see the deans making mincemeat of the rash author. All's well if they'll eat some of the meat. And they may. At least this is no super-subtle modernist divine dealing out old coins surreptitiously stamped with a new image and superscription, but a plain blunt heretic who knows his mind (or, rather, mood). But it is a reverent, indeed, I dare to say, a noble book. The sanely and securely orthodox may read it with profit if with shock. It should brace their faith, and will rob them of nothing but a too-ready doubt that so forthright a house-breaker may be a builder in his own way. There is indeed more faith in these honest denials than in half the assents of the conformists. Just because it is not a subtle book it should not be "dangerous." It is romantic, rather; inspired, you might loosely say. The _Index Expurgatorius_ will of course list it when they learn of it; but foolishly, because while the philosophy, the cosmology, the metaphysics may be advanced (so advanced as to be called hasty and apt to run into the theological barrages), the religion, the mysticism, the "conviction of sin," the vision of the invisibles, the perception of the imponderables, are positive, vivid, sincere, passionate in phrasing and in intention. Sincere as Mr. WELLS is always sincere; sincere rather than stable, patient, learned and so forth. I rather wonder that he insists so much on his _finite_ God. The postulate hardly touches his real thesis. And I find it easier to believe that there may be some things behind "this round world" that Mr. WELLS cannot fully understand because he (the author) is finite--and busy--than accept what seems a contradiction in terms to no particular end. * * * * *