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which we would here examine in particular. This method consists in appealing to the authority of the religious experience whenever argument is lacking, at the same time that no indication is given as to what the religious experience may be. Those individuals who are not fortunate enough to know it by acquaintance are at once thrown out of court—a ruling the justice of which in general no one will question. It is, of course, useless to discuss a problem with those incapable of comprehending it. But trouble arises for Mr. Webb when, upon his own ipse dixit, and that only, he rules certain particular gentlemen out of court as not having had the religious experience. The reader at once asks whether, although their words may not betray acquaintance with the religious experience as Mr. Webb knows it, they may not possibly have enjoyed it all the same in some manner of their own. Who is to decide the matter? Remember Hamlet's remark to Horatio; or in more modern language, the "varieties of religious experience" are many. Mr. Webb is not on firm ground here. In thus ruling out Signor Croce and others, he shows perhaps more prudence and certainly more haste than logic.

The matter becomes comphcated when we discover that the religious experience he denies to Signor Croce is by no means very clear to Mr. Webb himself. He is insistent that the religious experience justifies our considering the Deity as no less than the Absolute, as insistent as he is that the religious consciousness demands that God be all in all. Yet he is very careful to qualify his statements by such words as "seem," "I venture to think," and so forth. If, therefore, we take his book as an argument for the validity of his conclusions, his diffidence regarding his knowledge of his own argument's very foundation will certainly shake our confidence, especially as it appears in strong contrast to his confident exclusion of certain thinkers from the field of discussion. In fact, we may be led to feel that Mr. Webb proves very little in the course of his book, since his final appeal is always to an undefined experience concerning the implications of which he is at the same time boldly assertive and modestly uncertain.

Luckily, however, God and personality are subjects about a man gifted with insight and power of expression can say much to advantage without proving anything. Little disappointment will be expressed that Mr. Webb has not proved all he has to say