Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/345

Rh the bare and primal fact that it is. It is heartening that of late at least a score of books have been published, all assailing our present form of civilization with bitter irony, sarcasm, ridicule. The old serene satisfaction of the fifty years that assembled around the turn of the century, is gone, and in its place has come disillusionment, with scathing depreciation following after. It is in America that the attack is most fast and furious, but constructive vision does not match destructive criticism, such as there is coming rather from England. For this reason it is the more encouraging that a book such as this should be put forward at this time, for it is essentially constructive, and gets deep down to the roots of things.

What Mr Sedgwick has found is no more than that which was a commonplace during the first fifteen centuries of the Christian Era, lost altogether amongst those peoples that accepted Protestantism, yet nevertheless of the very essence of Christianity, as Catholics have always known and as Mr Sedgwick has discovered for himself. In his preface he puts it in few words, and thus:

"I merely wish to lay stress upon the fact that, for one reason and another, Christianity, at least among Protestants, has cast aside, or dropped out, a great part of the ancient practise that, during many centuries, helped it adapt itself to human needs, enabled it to produce heroic and radiant personalities, and shed over it a poetry which it now lacks. I refer to the practise of withdrawal from the world of ordinary life and from the usual occupations of men, into some solitary or sequestered place, where in hermitage or monastery they might give themselves up to contemplation, meditation or prayer, and to such labours in library or garden as should best fit the mind to be the dwelling-place of whatever thoughts might seem to them the highest, best and most beautiful.

"And as, to my way of thinking, such sequestered habits and practises are of the essence of Christianity, for without them it goes about its tasks, halt and maimed, in helpless inadequacy, so also I believe that the individual life, unless it takes advantage of those practises, withdrawing apart to think high thoughts, and to reconsider by the light of such thoughts its hopes, ambitions, and desires, is, and must be, imperfect.”

Through brief but penetrating studies of such as Saint Anthony,