If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which while it must have given its author pains to write--so full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it--must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt that he is, followed his vision. In every man's heart there is a lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him--though it would be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation--what Barbey d'Aurévilly once wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the Christ stand!" CHAPTER XXIV PILLOWLAND