Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, who recently intrigued and perhaps just a little scandalised the town with a most engagingly flippant and piquant farce all about an accidentally bigamous beauty, certainly shows courage in launching so serious a discussion as _The Unknown_. And in the silly season too. I see that in a quite unlikely interview (but then all modern interviews are unlikely) he defends his right to discuss religion quite openly on the stage. Of course. Why should anybody deny that religion is to the normally constituted mind, whatever its doxy, an absorbingly interesting subject; or that the War hasn't made a breach in the barriers of British reticence? Whether to the point of making a perfectly good married Vicar (anxious to convict a doubting D.S.O. of sin) ask in a full drawing-room containing the Vicaress, the Doctor and the D.S.O.'s fiancee, mother and father, "For instance, have you always been perfectly chaste?"--I am not so sure. Nor whether the War has really added to bereaved _Mrs. Littlewood's_ bitter "And who is going to forgive God?" any added force. If that kind of question is to be asked at all it might have been asked, and with perhaps more justice, at any time within the historical period. For the War might reasonably be attributed by the Unknown Defendant thus starkly put upon trial to man's deliberate folly, whereas.... No doubt, however, Mr. MAUGHAM would say the shock of war has (like any other great catastrophe) tested the faith of many who are personally deeply stricken and found it wanting, while the whisper of doubt has swelled the more readily as there are many to echo it. So _Major John Wharton, D.S.O., M.C._, having found war, contrary to his expectation of it as the most glorious manly sport in the world, a "muddy, mad, stinking, bloody business," loses the faith of his youth and says so, not with bravado but with regret. The Vicar, with dignity and restraint, but without much understanding and not without some hoary _cliches_; his wife, with venom (suggesting also incidentally sound argument for the celibacy of the clergy); the old _Colonel_ and his sweet unselfish wife, with affection; and _Sylvia_, _John's_ betrothed, with a strange passion, defend the old faith, _Sylvia_ to the point of breaking with her lover and getting her to a nunnery--a business which will in the end, I should guess, lay a heavier burden upon the nuns than upon _John_. The indecisive battle sways hither and thither. It is the _Doctor_ who sums up in a compromise which would shock the metaphysical theologian, but may suffice for the plain man, "God is merciful but not omnipotent. In His age-long fight against evil we can help--or hinder; why not help?"