Propaganda

FALSE PROPHETS--James M. Gillis-- Macmlllan ($2.00). This book endeavors to refute the Messrs. Shaw, Wells, Freud, Conan Doyle, Haeckel, Neitzsche, Mark Twain, Anatole France. It concludes with a chapter on The Revival of Paganism and another called Back to Christ--or Chaos. Written by a Paulist Father, it is sectarian religious propaganda. It goes so far as to call a rival creed "not a religion but . . . a patchwork composed of odds and ends, shreds, and fragments of false philosophies, put together in an amateurish way by a sadly uneducated Yankee woman."

If it be true that faith transcends reason, then no theosophical disputation conducted by a believer can be intellectually honest. At some points reason will fall back for support upon faith. Here, these points are many and marked. Yet, within the confines of his citadel, Father Gillan moves always in the open. He is wide-read. He is honest. He is witty. It is with great good humor that he takes the measure of Shaw's "automatic and mechanical perverseness," with true Christian charity that he pities Mark Twain's incurable despondency and Nietzsche's insane courage. He is hygienically, not narrowly, sceptical of Freud's unsavory deductions; gorgeously, not bitterly, ironical over Wells' exuberant absurdities. His deprecation of the naivete of Sir A. C. Doyle, "the open-air man," is as painless as his attack is concentrated upon the lubricity, cynicism, "impurity" and "degeneracy" of Anatole France.

A book written for the headier, readier, unsteadier sheep at the intellectual outskirts of the Roman fold, False Prophets will be found strong tonic by the sheep of other folds. For the ranging wolves of Agnosticism it will afford mettlesome opposition.