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of experimental proof few present-day thinkers are able to count immortality as other than a more or less wellgrounded hope." "Religious men hope and believe, perhaps, as much as they ever did, but they are more apt to distinguish their hopes and beliefs from proven facts and to refrain from insisting that they must be accepted by all men of sound mind and good will." As for evolution, that has promoted the substitution of natural for legal conceptions in theology. "Death is no longer thought of as a punishment for sin, but as the necessary condition of progress. Life is pictured as an education rather than as a probation, and future blessedness as an attainment rather than as a reward. The whole notion of man's relations to God and of God's treatment of man is thus transformed, and large modifications in the old conceptions of salvation, redemption, and atonement necessarily result." Everywhere relativity and change has taken the place of absoluteness and fixity. Three chapters deal with the newer conceptions of God as contrasted with the older dogmas.

Throughout the volume the writer gives full weight to "the social emphasis " and the striking results of our democratic development. He explains the natural opposition of a large group of socialists to religion, and concludes with the generous statement that socialism constitutes for multitudes

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HAT Selma Lagerslöf has written is not the usual romance. It is a fragment of the history of an ancient spiritually self-sufficient northern community. Since remote times the Ingmarsson family have held the Ingmar estate. It is just a farm, worth perhaps ten thousand dollars, but in the days when Cinderella served her cruel sisters it passed for a kingdom and importance still clings to it. The owner of the Ingmar estate enjoys an influence far beyond its limits. He is Big Ingmar to the community, provided it holds him worthy, and it is around the fortunes of this Ingmarsson family that Selma Lagerslöf's history is built.

1

The history sets out with the moral perplexities of Ingmar Ingmarsson, proprietor of the Ingmar estate, but not yet accorded the title of Big Ingmar. Several years earlier Ingmar had courted Brita of Bergskog, daughter of a member of parliament, and had carried her home, with her parents' consent, but not with hers. It was Ingmar's intention to marry her shortly, but the house needed painting before the wedding and times were hard, so Ingmar put the ceremony off. Brita was very unhappy, partly because of the dumb devotion to work and thrift prevailing on the Ingmar farm, and partly because of the postponement of the wedding. But life moved on, with her will or without it, and in due time Brita found herself an expectant mother, with no suitable cliff at hand from which to throw herself. Her child was born, and done to death, for which she was most justly sentenced to some years in prison. Now her time was expired, hence Ingmar's perplexity. Should he bring her home and marry her, in spite of everything, or

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should he remain at ease and permit her family to carry out their plan of sending her to America to begin life anew? If only his father were living, to advise him! And as he reflects, his imagination carries him bodily up into a halfheathen heaven, where his father holds an estate very like the terrestrial Ingmar Farm. "And now, as I come into the living room I see many peasants seated on benches along the walls. All have sandy hair, white eyebrows and thick under lips. They are all of them as like father as one pea is like another. 'Oh, these are relatives,' says father. 'All these men have lived on the Ingmar Farm, and the oldest among them is from way back in heathen times."

"Father's" advice on the question of Brita is none too clear, but the result of his intervention is that Ingmar brings Brita home and marries her, and what is more difficult, wins her. And thus, somewhat to his surprise, he earns the title of Big Ingmar, hitherto withheld from him. So much for one generation of the Ingmar dynasty. Until Ingmar dies, gladly, because Brita has gone before, and heroically, in rescuing some little children sweeping to destruction on a spring torrent, we may turn our attention to what else is going on in the community.

Something, indeed, very important is going on. Modern ideas are beginning to penetrate. The naturalistic old heaven that brooded warmly over the earth is dissolving under the compound telescope and metaphysical theology. Industrialism begins to penetrate Dalecarlia, with its attendant transvaluation of persons and ranks. Back currents of efficiency and humbug are setting in from the Dalecarlians who had emigrated to America.

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The village schoolmaster is the first to make himself unwittingly an agent of revolution. He is awakened by the religious ferment stirring in the neighboring villages. He founds a Mission House, where he teaches the whole Bible, and freedom of thought according to Luther. Soon other persons besides the schoolmaster become convinced that they have a religious mission. An uncouth peasant feels the spirit descending upon him, and begins to preach. The demon of religious anarchy has become established in the peaceful old valley.

Matters temporal fare no better in the community. With the death of Big Ingmar, his daughter Karin succeeds to a sort of regency, as young Ingmar is still a child. The tall, stoop-shouldered, laconic Karin expects to be wooed and won only for her wealth and state, and so accepts one youth's attentions, but on their journey to the city to buy wedding ring and prayer book, he takes a drop too many, and is promptly cashiered by Karin, who joylessly substitutes for him Elof Ersson, a young fellow of unimpeachable past. Elof Ersson, however, proceeds after the wedding to decay quite spontaneously. With his shameless debauchery the inheritance of the Ingmar Ingmarssons begins to disappear, and young Ingmar has to be consigned to the schoolmaster's care, to preserve him from the brutality and de

$1.95 grading example of his brother-in-law. Luckily Elof breaks his back before he can work irreparable mischief, and at length dies. This opens the way for the return of the first wooer. This honest fellow marries Karin and enters upon the regency. Young Ingmar is inclined to train himself for schoolmaster, but is brought back to a sense of his destiny as head of the Ingmar house by the insistence of THE BEN FRANKLIN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION Strong Ingmar, a remote relative. The vital business of

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young Ingmar thereafter is twofold-to recover the Ingmar Farm and to marry pretty Gertrude, the schoolmaster's daughter. All of which would have turned out happily but for the demons of religious schism now beginning their wild dance in the community.

The leader of the dance was John Hellgum, half mystic, half impostor, who had been leader of a little band of religious schismatics in Chicago. Soon Hellgum had succeeded in splitting the Dalecarlian community into two camps, the Hellgumists and the unbelievers, who would have no commerce with each other. To the Hellgumist camp were attached both Karin, Ingmar's sister, and Gertrude, his betrothed. Ingmar himself held aloof, and only by the lucky chance of saving Hellgum's life was he able to keep himself from being cast forth by his kin. Hellgum, morally defeated, returned to America, where he fell in with a kindred body of religious enthusiasts. These won him to the project of founding a home of true belief in Jerusalem. Returning once more to Dalecarlia, Hellgum got together his band of the faithful. Eagerly or reluctantly, they agreed to sell all they had and to follow Hellgum. Karin did not waver in her determination to sell the Ingmar Farm and all it contained to the highest bidder, even to a soulless lumber company. Young Ingmar, penniless, stood at the gate as the auctioneer dispersed the accumulated possessions of generations of Ingmars. At his feet knelt old servants of the family silently beseeching him to save the Ingmar Farm; in his soul all the Ingmars of the past commanded him to set his personal interest behind that of the Ingmar line. For he could save the Ingmar estate if he would take to wife the daughter of rich Sven Persson, who was ready to buy the Ingmar Farm for his daughter. Young Ingmar yielded, and the dynasty was saved. Gertrude, the schoolmaster's daughter whom Ingmar loved, joined the Jerusalem emigrants. With great

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noise and excitement the pilgrims set out. The ancient community had cast forth its sons and daughters who had dared to disturb its sleep, as it had doubtless done many and many a time in the past, and will do many and many a time in the future.

What has the history of this trivial and obsolete family line to do with the great problems stirring in the modern world? This picture of an ancient social organism, completely weathered into its natural environment, gives the reader a new grip on reality. He is permitted to realize, for a moment at least, how ephemeral is much that seems to us of world-shaking bigness. The Ingmar Ingmarssons and their neighbors will live on when nationalism and imperialism and socialism have become words void of content.

"Jerusalem" is called a masterpiece by Selma Lagerslöf's ardent admirers. Thus to describe it is to wrong its author. The book is a stage in its creator's development in the direction of a really natural form of fiction, which aims at realism not through enthroning the base or trivial, but through the reduction of all values to their true proportions. There are no heroes in real life; only persons who at rare moments attain to something like heroism. There are no unwavering inextinguishable passions: only passions that burn and flicker and die out. It is by a cumulative process of overvaluation of personalities and passions that the conventional canons of fiction have been established. Selma Lagerslöf is working back toward the clarity and honesty of north European storytelling of the era preceding the romantic aberration. She presents a wealth of perfectly drawn characters, perfectly real emotions, but all are small. Selma Lagerslöf's masterpiece is yet to be written, but "Jerusalem" indicates that it will be achieved.

According to Formula

A. S. J.

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This collection of poems consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty of which were published in his first volume in 1911. Of these fifty, seventeen were written before the poet was twenty-one. The remaining poems appeared chiefly in "New Numbers" and were collected after his death and published in England under the title of "1914 and Other Poems," twenty thousand copies of which have already been sold.

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VOLUME V

REPUBLIC

A Journal of Opinion

New York, Saturday, November 20, 1915

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Correspondence.

M

76

ANY shrewd political observers are predicting that the Democratic party is destined to break on the issue of "preparedness." Certain indications undoubtedly point in that direction. Mr. Bryan has not accepted the President's policy, and he is likely to carry with him so many Democratic members of the House that Mr. Wilson will be forced to depend on Republican votes for the passage of his measures. The Republicans will certainly use the advantage of their position for the purpose either of acquiring a little party capital, or of emphasizing the schism among their opponents. They can insist on amendments which if accepted will make the Republicans jointly responsible with the Democrats for military preparation, and if rejected will prevent the legislation from passing. In the former case the Bryan democracy will be still further alienated, and in the latter the administration will have failed without being able to place responsibility for the failure exclusively on Republican shoulders. All this is plausible, but it

Number 55

cannot be accepted as true until the extent of the revolt among the Democrats is disclosed. They will be urged by unusually powerful reasons to stand by the administration and so improve their chances of victory in the coming election. They may or may not succumb to these arguments. This will depend largely on the energy and passion which Mr. Bryan puts into his fight against military preparedness. He holds the key to the situation, just as he did at the time of Mr. Wilson's nomination and election. The political pressure exerted on Mr. Bryan not to carry the fight too far will be enormous. On the other hand, Mr. Bryan's attachment to an interpretation of Christianity which absolutely condemns all war and all preparation for war is absolute and unequivocal. Can he resist the temptation to serve the Prince of Peace by doing all in his power to keep this country free from the dominion of the lords of war? Perhaps, but we do not believe that he will.

N

OTHING can be done about the sinking of the Ancona except to await the report of the investigation undertaken by American consular officials. The account furnished by the Austrian government controverts all the accusations made by the Italian government. An exhaustive and disinterested inquiry should establish the facts; and until the facts are established, no decision can be reached and advice as to the decision is gratuitous. In one respect only can the course which the American government ought to adopt be called clear. If the Ancona did not attempt to escape, this country cannot begin all over again with Austria-Hungary the controversy which it is supposed to have settled with Germany. The principles for which it stands have been declared to all the belligerents explicitly and publicly. An Austrian submarine must be held to an accountability for their violation no less strict and no less immediate than that which would be applied to a German.

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