tion, but, as Professor McIlwain remarks, is "one of the most effective presentations against the temporal claims of the Pope." The book, indeed, did for the seventeenth century something of the work accomplished by Döllinger's The Pope and the Council in the great infallibilist controversy. It caused many, said the Archpriest Birkhead, "to stagger about the oath." The discussion is valuable not so much for any novel elements that it contributes, as for its clear perception, and that from the standpoint of a convinced Catholic, of the evils of the temporal power. Barclay saw without difficulty that if the Roman cause were upheld, the result would practically make the ecclesiastical world an imperium in imperio. The supposed papal control over kings, in any save the spiritual sense of prayer for the sinner, he stoutly denies from lack of scriptural authority. That, of course, upon which Barclay pinned his faith was the complete division of secular and religious worlds a point of view which, logically worked out, would have cut at the root of James' own position. Bellarmine's answer to Barclay reasserts the logical necessity of unity and so discovers the apex of worldpower in Rome. But restatement is not response; and though Bellarmine may have satisfied his own intelligence, he did not quiet the fears of the Catholic conscience in England. For, after all, not only had they an imperative desire for peace, not only were they, as 1588 had shown, most fiercely conscious of their nationality, but the picture of a church, as Barclay drew it, deriving its strength from the unearthly splendor of the spirit, could not but make an eager appeal where political necessity added thereto an attractiveness which spelt domestic comfort. With the opening of the Thirty Years' War, the struggle was transferred from the arena of the mind; and material and economic exhaustion drove both parties to a compromise which it is doubtful if they would otherwise have made. The inevitable result was the slow development of the secular state. Uniformity proved to be too costly an ideal, and doctrines of right gave place to doctrines of expediency. It is not at all clear, as Dr. Figgis has insisted, that the result is unalloyed gain, yet the vindication of the right to be wrong which is implied in this evolution is perhaps not less valuable than what has been lost. What was involved was, of course, the necessity of toleration. Men do not urge either that Transubstantiation or the Thirty-Nine Articles are not doctrines for which it would be worth while to die; but they are driven by experience to the admission that this is a question upon which difference of opinion is not merely possible but also possible without penalty. Sooner or later, that toleration makes the state neutral and thence passes logically into indifference. The passion for uniformity breeds persecution; persecution, so far from destroying, seems almost to provoke diversity of outlook; diversity of outlook is in turn the parent of knowledge. The controversy which the acts and writings of James produced is, in fact, the necessary prelude to modern freedom. V It is also more. It was fought upon an issue that is far from dead. The experience it engendered forced men to admit that it is a mistake to propagate religious creeds by force. Westphalia meant that the Roman Church would never again exert decisive political influence. But the passion for unity did not die; rather was it transferred to the sphere of the secular state. The churches have had to struggle against the control of the state in a fashion hardly different from that in which the states of the Middle Ages fought against the dominion of Rome; nor can they as yet be said to have succeeded. The Oxford Movement, the rise of the Free Church in Scotland, the Vatican controversy of 1874, the Kulturkampf, are all of them protests of a church which refuses, like the Reformation Church, to regard itself as the creature of an alien body. Nor has the state hesitated to use in its turn the doctrine of the indirect power. The famous Free Church of Scotland case is nothing so much as the assertion by the state that where property is dependent upon dogma, the secular courts will constitute themselves the judges of its disposition and that without regard to the basic tenets of the association involved. The state, in fact, constitutes itself the ultimate reserve power in a manner at no point dissimilar from that of Rome three centuries ago; and it may yet again become true, as it was true in the seventeenth century, that the protests of organized religion will break down the fabric of the sovereign state. Certainly the problem of voluntary associations in their connection with the political organ is the most urgent that confronts us. Nor is this all. Such external relationships present a problem about which, in the perspective of recent political theory, there is no special reason to despair. But the internal relations of the state present questions for inquiry that suggest a singular resemblance to those of the Stuart time. We are no longer, at least in theory, dependent for our political decisions upon the will of a single man, even though the number upon whom resolution seems to rest is, in an ultimate analysis, curiously small. But while it has proved reasonably easy, at least since 1829, to maintain religious toleration, political toleration we have not yet secured. "There are in our day ", wrote Lord Acton in 1877, "many educated men who think it right to persecute." The national state, at least, has thought itself emancipated from the need to tolerate dissent; and we penalize heterodox opinion in politics hardly less cheerfully than heresy was penalized in the Middle Ages. In affairs of state, in fact, we do not as yet admit that the duty of the individual is to contribute his best personality to the common good. Rather do we insist by government enactment that personality shall flow along certain preconceived channels. Yet that is in truth to destroy the uniqueness in which the essence of personality consists. It is to pursue exactly that mirage of uniformity against which the liberal thinkers of the Counter-Reformation were struggling. No state can be free, which penalizes thought. To make political authority commensurate with the bounds of mind, is to misread the history of a thousand years. For if liberty is not the protection of an initiative which, as Mr. Graham Wallas has pointed out, must be continuous if it is to be vital, it is not worth the cost of attainment. Yet this is an historical truth we have still to learn. It is herein that work such as that of Professor McIlwain possesses its especial import. No man can realize the bearing of what Bellarmine and Widdrington, Andrewes and Du Perron were trying to teach, without a more exact understanding of the problems of our time. Politics are not merely vulgar, in Seeley's admirable phrase, unless they are liberalized by history; they are, in fact, in large part unintelligible. For there is a real sense in which the problems of politics are perennial, and if the answer of each generation is different, it yet deposits a tradition which determines the environment of our next response. Nothing is today more greatly needed than clarity upon ancient notions. Sovereignty, liberty, authority, personality-these are the words of which we want alike the history and the definition; or rather, we want the history because its substance is in fact the definition. No period has so illuminated these questions as the Counter-Reformation. It is in some sort the birthplace of the modern state. The history of its ideas is in a special way the history of our social origins; and we bear upon the external aspect of our political life the scars of the special experience encountered in that epoch. That is why an analysis of its fundamental ideas is little less than a public service. HARVARD UNIVERSITY. HAROLD J. Laski. A HENRY ADAMS ON THINGS IN GENERAL' S the work of a literary craftsman, The Education of Henry ness in this respect has already received and will long continue to receive the fullest recognition. Fastidious criticism may deny the perfection of the artistry in some points of detail-may question the fidelity of the craftsman to his chosen theme and may doubt the aesthetic purity of the device by which the profoundest problems of humanity's history and philosophy are presented and discussed in the guise of an individual's education. But the work as a whole will never fail to command the homage due to genius. As autobiography, the volume is of more importance here. The private life of Henry Adams made, indeed, no contribution to the substance of either history or politics, and public life he had none. Yet his book reveals clearly enough that he was a true Adams, and it is a monument to that family in the fourth generation hardly less significant and noteworthy than those reared in public life by the three earlier generations. Why the fourth generation with all its undoubted talent and opportunity did not attain political distinction like the other three, is a question to which Henry Adams, as well as his elder brother, Charles Francis, devoted speculative attention. Both ascribe an important part in the result to defects in their education. Charles Francis in his Autobiography manifests some resentment toward his father for not making the son a better "mixer" and for failing to expel from his character by main force the shyness and self-consciousness that were his undoing. Henry takes upon himself full personal responsibility for his own shortcomings, but with gentle humor points out the repeated instances in which the impersonal forces of history have interposed impassable barriers between him and various forms of usefulness. That the formal educational advantages of Harvard and a German university were worse than useless in the case of Henry Adams, his own conviction is strong-much stronger probably than will be that of most of those who read his demonstration of it. In 1861, he accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission to Europe, as that father had accompanied the grandfather, and the grandfather had accompanied 'The Education of Henry Adams. An Autobiography. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1918.-519 pp. the great-grandfather. As private secretary to the American minister to Great Britain during the Civil War, Henry Adams had the chance to pursue, as the sole student, a perfect educational course in politics and diplomacy. The most costly tutors in the world were provided for him at public expense-Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Westbury, Lord Selborne, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, and their associates, paid by the British government; William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams, William Maxwell Evarts, Thurlow Weed, and other considerable professors employed by the American government. Yet the most important lessons that he supposed he had learned in this imposing course were found forty years afterward to have been a mass of distortion and error. No wonder his retrospect of his life conveys a general impression of failure. At the end of this period of education in England Henry Adams published a magazine study of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. This was preceded by a year or two of dawdling along in the conventional life of the best English society, to which the triumph of the North in the Civil War had insured the unrestricted admission of the Adamses. Thus, as he sums up the situation, Henry Adams found himself, at twenty-eight, still in English society, dragged on one side into English dilettantism, which of all dilettantism he held the most futile; and, on the other, into American antiquarianism, which of all antiquarianism he held the most foolish. This was the result of five years in London. Even then he knew he had made a false start. He had wholly lost his way. If he were ever to amount to anything, he must begin a new education, in a new place, with a new purpose [page 222]. But an unkind fate still pursued him. He sought solace in the fashionable Darwinism of the day and, expecting to reach "some great generalization which would finish one's clamor to be educated ", looked into natural selection, natural evolution and natural uniformity. "Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every oneexcept curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative, practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity" (page 225). Unhappily some thoughtless person introduced Adams to the Terebratula and the Pteraspis, and in an instant, for reasons that are obvious to every reader, the hope of a well-fitting, hand-me-down suit of education of Darwinian make disappeared forever. Returning to America, Adams selected the press for a career and |