dom in him.' And again, ‘In this book it is assumed that God responds, that he gives courage, and the power of selfsuppression to our weakness.' It is assumed that God responds! There is no attempt to prove it, because Mr. Wells's belief on this point rests, not on argument, but on experience. The reality of his religious experience is one of the most interesting things in Mr. Wells's theology, especially to Christians.

No living writer of fiction has made so many attempts to describe that immediate experience of God which gives certainty and passion to the religion of all who have passed through it. The visions in The Soul of a Bishop, and the religious experience of Mr. Britling, are still fresh in the public memory. But similar descriptions, varied and often beautiful, sometimes strangely convincing and reminiscent of the writings of the mystics, are scattered through many of the novels. There are many in The Passionate Friends. As far back as 1906, In the Days of the Comet shows that he understands the mental and spiritual conditions of such experience, and can describe its effects. He describes, in a way which shows the influence of James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, how restricted living and base immediate motives make life unendurably bitter, how disappointments and thwartings light up, though indistinctly, the darkness of the unregenerate life, until a sudden disgust, a sense of unworthiness, a realization of sin, issue in the desire for a comprehensive sustaining communion, a great passion to escape from the jealous prison of self...

It is in Mr. Britling Sees It Through that Mr. Wells has given his most realistic description of religious experience, and one which illustrates what is the common Christian instinct, that the important conditions of spiritual illumination are not physical, but moral.

(As our Lord said, 'He that doeth the will of God, he shall know.') It was when Mr. Britling was doing all that he could do to make future wars impossible, by writing a letter which should attempt to explain England to Germany, the ordinary decent Englishman, father of a son who had fallen in the war, to an ordinary decent German father whose son had also been killed, it was then, as he tried to say the reconciling word, that he realized the presence of the God of whom he had thought many times:

a presence so clear to him that it was behind his eyes and in his brain and hands. . . . Mr. Britling's thinking about God hitherto had been like someone who has found an empty house, very beautiful and pleasant, full of the promise of a fine personality. And then as this discoverer makes his lonely, curious explorations, he hears downstairs, clear and friendly, the voice of the Master coming in.

The Christian God, at the beginning, was a democratic God, a King whose subjects were all his dear children, who numbered the hairs of their heads, and gave his Son that they might share his freedom. The patient trust in the plain man, which expected the best from him and waited until he gave it freely, implied no less than this. This was the religion of Jesus, of St. Paul at his best (as when he wrote the Epistle to the Galatians), of Luther when he wrote The Freedom of the Christian Man. For this faith Father Tyrrell was a martyr, and this is what is expressed in Rabindranath Tagore's King of the Dark Chamber.

If there is such a thing as Divine Providence, this is what God is revealing to the men of our generation through the political, social, and economic movements of our time, and through modern science also. And it inspires a significant passage in Joan and Peter, a passage which suggests what is part of

the ultimate Christian solution of the 'Problem of Evil.' Peter dreams that he seeks out God, and arraigns Him for the lack of decency, the lack of order, all the cruel and unclean things, in the universe. God challenges him to change it. 'If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it.' He has been busy complaining of God and his pastors, masters, and teachers. But from himself, positive achievements are still to seek. He has been a vigorous member of the consuming class, but he's got nothing clear and planned. He complains of God's lack of order:

Where's the order in your own mind? If, says God, I was the hot-tempered old autocrat some of you people pretend I am, I should have been tickling you up with a thunder-bolt long ago. But I happen to have this democratic fad as badly as anyone - Freewill is what they used to call it and so I leave you to work out your own salvation. And if I leave you alone, then I have to leave that other that other (like you) at Potsdam alone. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the Kaiser. I've got to leave you all alone if I leave one alone. In spite of the mess you are in. So don't blame me. . . . There is n't a thing in the whole of this concern of mine that Man can't control if only he chooses to control it....

Intellectually, of course, Mr. Wells is an agnostic. But he is not an agnostic of the school of Huxley, but of the characteristically English, and Christian, school of Bishop Butler and Mr. Balfour. He knows how indefinable are the grounds of faith or doubt, how subconscious, bedded deep in what is instinctive and hereditary and nonrational, are the roots of the 'will to believe.' There can be no mathematical demonstration of spiritual realities, the answer to faith's questions is always, as it was to Elijah, a voice of silence. It is higher than language, deeper than thought, wider than all definition. And

yet it is there, more, not less, real and significant than the things we can state and prove and pigeon-hole. The concluding passages of Joan and Peter are an impressive statement of this Higher Probability.

There was a light upon his life, and the truth was that he could not discover the source of the light nor define its nature; there was a presence in the world about him that made life worth while, and yet it was nameless and incomprehensible. It was the essence beyond reality, it was the heart of all things. . . . It did so uphold him that he could go on, he knew, though happiness were denied him; though defeat and death stared him in the face.

The important thing about Mr. Wells's religion, as this passage illustrates, is that, like Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman, he is dominated by the certainty of that which logic cannot prove, the faith in which is beset by almost insuperable difficulties, which stands rooted in denials, but for whom he feels the undeniable obligation to give all that he is, come what may. The Undying Fire, Mr. Wells's fascinating modernization of the Book of Job, shows a man whom the urge of God drives on to conquer doubts, weakness, and the tyranny of circumstance:

There burns an undying fire in the hearts of men. By that fire I live. By that I know the God of my salvation. His will is Truth; his will is Service. He urges me to conflict, without consolations, without rewards. He takes, and does not restore. He uses up and does not atone. He suffers perhaps to triumph, and we must suffer and find our hope of triumph in him. He will not let me shut my eyes to sorrow, failure, or perplexity. Though the universe torment and slay me, yet will I trust in him — and if he also must die- nevertheless I can do no more; I must serve him.

The reality of Mr. Wells's religion is revealed most convincingly, perhaps, in an important detail that is easily overlooked, although in it Mr. Wells es

But the more ordinary witness of genuine religious experience is that God is an abiding presence, in whom we live and move and are, who is so terrible that no man can see His face and live, from whose overwhelming presence, though we flee in fear, we cannot escape. This terror of the infinite is the note of

Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven.

In the experience of the mystics these two elements are combined, the search for God and the terror of God, 'love and dread,' as Mother Julian calls them. And they are combined in Mr. Wells.

The individual human mind [he says in Boon] spends itself equally in headlong flight from the Universal, which it dreads as

MANY years ago it was an American, Captain Mahan, who made England understand the fundamental principles of sea power. Now, a British writer1 repays the debt by explaining to the Americans the strategical situation in the Pacific, and calling their attention to the omissions and deficiencies in their naval preparations that make for almost inevitable disaster if they have to fight Japan in the near future. It is

1Sea Power in the Pacific. By Hector C. Bywater. Constable.

extraordinary that no American writer has undertaken the task; many 'scare' books have been written, dealing with imaginary Japanese assaults on the Pacific coast, and other absurdities, but no one before Mr. Bywater has attempted an informed study of the navies of the two Powers and the strategical and political factors in Eastern waters that would determine their activities in case of war.

Mr. Bywater's book contains an analysis of the existing and projected

fleets of the two rivals, and shows in conclusive fashion how Japan has built with the strategical necessities of a war with America in mind; while the United States has piled up Dreadnoughts haphazard, Congress has year after year knocked out of the naval bills items providing for Pacific bases and for fast cruisers, until the American fleet appears, in spite of its paper strength, unfitted for the task of fighting Japan. All of the more modern Japanese ships of the line, for example, are two knots faster than the corresponding American vessels, and Japan has four battle-cruisers, while America until 1923 will have none; so that if, before then, the American fleet should venture into Eastern waters subsequent to the almost inevitable capture of the Philippines, Japan could hazard an indecisive action, inflict as much damage as possible, and break off the battle at her own time, without permitting the more numerous but slower United States Dreadnoughts to force a fight to a finish.

If a Japanese-American war takes place, Mr. Bywater seems to believe, it will occur at the moment chosen by Japan, very possibly late in 1922, and will result in its initial stages in the defeat of the United States and complete success for the Island Kingdom. Why should the two nations fight next year, if they are to fight? On this point Mr. Bywater is most interesting. Next year, he says, Japan will enjoy a relative strength that she can never again hope to reach. Possibly the battleship Tosa, with ten 16-inch guns, will be in service; certainly Japan will have the Nagato and the Mutsu, carrying eight sixteens, together with five other super Dreadnoughts and four battle-cruisers of the Kongo class capable of 27 knots. The United States in 1922 will possess twenty-one super-Dreadnoughts, apparently a crushing supe

riority. But the fastest of these can make only twenty-one knots, the first three American battle-cruisers will not be ready until the year following, and the Nagato and Mutsu, not to mention the more powerful Tosa, will be two knots faster than the Colorado and Maryland, the only American ships then in commission carrying guns of equal strength. Moreover, the American fleet will not in 1922 possess any modern fast light-cruisers.

Mr. Bywater demonstrates, then, that in 1922 the Japanese war fleet in its own waters, or in the Eastern half of the Pacific, can engage the American fleet with a squadron of battleships and battle-cruisers all faster than the Americans, and so able to strike and break off the action when it suits the Japanese admiral. With the passing into service, in 1923, of America's mighty battle-cruisers, this ability to strike and run away, and leave to destroyers and submarines the task of finishing off disabled enemies, will be lost. After 1922 the American fleet might be able to force a fight to a decision, and this could lead only to the defeat of Japan.

There is still a stronger reason, however, why Mr. Bywater seems to fear war next year. He declares that 'the issue of an American-Japanese war would primarily be decided by the fate of Guam.' Guam, we are told, is 'the key to the Pacific.' It is situated 1510 miles west of Manila, and is 3330 miles. east of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.. The Philippines, Mr. Bywater declares, could not be made the base for the entire American fleet, which would run the risk, or certainty, of being trapped there. Accordingly, Japan at the outbreak of hostilities would find the islands an easy prey, too far removed from the Pearl Harbor base, 5000 miles away, to be defended, were it not for the island of Guam. Mr. Bywater writes:

To say that Guam bears to the Philippines the same relation that Heligoland bore to the German Bight, or that Malta bears to the defense of English interests in the Mediterranean, would be to understate rather than to exaggerate the facts of the case.

By properly fortifying and developing this island as a naval station of the first rank, the American people would do much to relieve themselves of anxiety as to their future in the Western Pacific; for no power would venture to molest the Philippines while a strong American ́ fleet in being' was based at Guam, only 1500 miles away. On the other hand, lacking fortifications, docks, magazines, and other appurtenances of a great naval base, the island would not only be useless as a point d'appui, but must fall into the enemy's hands. The fate of the Philippines is thus indissolubly connected with that of Guam. We may, indeed, go further, and say that the issue of an American-Japanese war would primarily be decided by the fate of Guam.

pro

The bearing of Guam on the possibility that war may be provoked by Japan in 1922 lies in the fact that the American Government has at last awakened to 'the supreme importance of this lonely outpost in the Pacific.' Secretary Daniels, in his 1920 report, stated that 'the project for the development of Guam as a naval base is gressing'; but these plans have not yet progressed beyond the paper stage, and, therefore, if war came next year they would be useless. Mr. Bywater indicates that, given time, Guam could be made an impregnable base for the American fleet for the cost of less than one battleship. Stationed there, the fleet could raid the Japanese traderoutes with Europe, protect the Philippines, and Japan would have no hope of winning the war. But will there be time to fortify Guam? Mr. Bywater's comment on the Japanese mandates in the neighborhood of Guam is significant. He writes:

VOL. 310-NO. 4020

There is convincing evidence that the Japanese are fully alive to the significance of the island, and are not disposed to remain passive while America makes a belated effort to repair her long neglect of this magnificent strategical position. The majority of the European delegates at the Peace Conference were mildly surprised when Japanese envoys urged their country's claim to the former German territory north of the Equator.

It is doubtful whether even President Wilson and his staff realized to what they were committing themselves when after some hesitation, it is true - they acquiesced in the clauses which confirmed Japan in the possession of the Caroline, Pelew, and Marianne Islands, excepting Guam, and of the Marshall Islands. The effect of this arrangement has been to surround Guam with a cordon of potential Japanese strongholds and naval bases. Japan, as mandatory of the islands, is not entitled to fortify them; but that she would forego the use of such invaluable bases in case of emergency is not to be believed. Hostile submarines, working from a base at Saipan Island, in the Marianne group, would be within a few hours' sail of Guam. A few hundred miles to the southwest lies Yap. This island is admirably adapted for use as a base for submarines or other vessels operating against the GuamManila line of communications, and so long as it remained in enemy occupation this route would never be safe.

Assuming war between America and Japan, and that the Philippines and Guam were promptly captured, Mr. Bywater rightly declares that American public opinion would not accept defeat and make peace, but would force the United States fleet into the Pacific, to attempt a counter-stroke, at whatever risk.

The author's analysis of the probable course of events is interesting, and probably sound. Following a popular outcry and the submission of the government at Washington to the demand for action against Japan, 'several courses would be open to the American