BOOK REVIEW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 17, 20 January 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

BOOK REVIEW.

DR. A. MAUDE ROYDEN'S «HERE AND HEREAFTER." (By S.) This volume of sermons, published by Putnam, will be welcomed by the many admirers of one of the most earnest and gifted preachers of our time. The sermons aro 27 in number, they cover a wide range, and are divided into the two parts suggested by the title. The first 12 deal with such topics as Meekness, the Hardness of Life, and the Sense of Having Missed Something of Life, some real and vital experience. In tho other 15 such subjects as Iminor-, tality, Personal Survival, and the Way of tho Cross are discussed. Miss Royden is unconventional and conversational, with a style and mode of appeal altogether her own. She is not a theologian, docs not' trouble herself much about the strict exegesis of a text eft a passage, and is not altogether orthodox, but she is helpful and comforting and what the old divines would call edifying. Aiming at giving her hearers and

readers a definite message, she speaks simply and directly, yet every address is marked by thought, culture, and wide reading, by sincerity, sympathetic understanding of men and women, and loyalty to Christ. Sometimes, too, there is a touch of humour in what she says, and always it is kindly and in good taste. J. H. Jowett, one of the outstanding English preachers of a few years ago, used to urge ministers to cultivate the wooing note in their preaching. Miss Hoyden's sermons are not exactly characterised by the wooing note, but they have what is much the same, the winning note; she is persuasive. Not a little of her success is due to two things. One is the frankness with which she identifies herself with us, takes us into her confidence and tells us something of her own experience. The other is the freshness and aptness of the illustrations she uses, many of them from the books she has read. She is at her best in such addresses as those on the first three subjects I have mentioned, and in the address on our Lord's saying about the hardness of the way that leads to eternal life. Last week I gave a fairly full extract from the book, and the following extracts will servo as examples of the appositeness, freshness, and felicity of the illustrations she uses. Speaking about saying the right thing at the right moment, she quotes Nurse Cavell's saying '"'on the edge of death": "Patriotism is not enough: I must have no anger or bitterness in my heart against anyone," and then refers to a Roman Catholic chaplain in the war. He had gone out to help someone who was wounded under fire, and the dying soldier said to him, "I don't belong to your Church, Padre." "No," was the reply, "but you belong to my God." Here are typical sayings of her own: "If we arc not very much alive, we shall escape a good deal of pain. We shall not. escape altogether if we have got any life at all. And the more life we have, the more pain we shall have." "(Christ) never said, 'Come unto Me, and you will Not have any yoke, and you will Not have any burden!' Christ-always faced the hardness of life. Have you never been puzzled by that saying about the sparrows not falling to the ground without our Father? For they do fall to the ground. He never pretended they would not." "A woman complained to me once that because she was married and had children she was not able to do public work. 'Isn't it terribly hard?' she said. Well, yes, it is liard in the sense that life is always hard. If you have one kind of life you cannot have another. Those who are free are also without something that that woman has, and something they find it very hard to be without." One wonders in reading such a book as this at the opposition of so many good people to women occupying the pulpit.