ALCITIN on the Latest Books

They Don't Know Their Faith
ARE WE REALLY TEACHING RELIGION, by F. J. Sheed (Sheed and Ward, 2s.), SMAL L, paper-covered booklet of only 54 pages, this all the same contains more wisdom and sound common sense than many books on roughly the same subject but three times its length.
The pamphlet is the outcome of a conference given a couple of years ago to teaching nuns in Dublin, and the subsequent inquiries from teachers who heard it there; or afterwards read it in rough copies.
The answers to the inquiries are in the second part of the pamphlet, "On Teaching the Key Doctrines," and occupy the last 20 pages.
No teacher can afford to dismiss lightly the indictment which is implicit in Mr. Sheed's remarks on his 30 years' experience in dealing with those young men and women who serve in the Catholic Evidence Guild.
"They have learnt the proofs of all sorts of Catholic doctrines, but they do not, and seem to have no desire to know, what the . . . doctrines themselves mean. . . . They can prove that the Gospels are authentic. I have hardly ever met one of them who has read the Gospels. . . . The products of our Catholic schools-ten years or more after, you understand, when I meet them-lack two things "overwhelmingly. They lack the shape of reality
as expressed in the dogmas, and they
lack any inside knowledge of what the individual dogmas mean."
Mr. Sheed has some trenchant things to say about the teachers of religion as well as the teaching of religion. It would be wrong to give the impiession that this pamphlet is only. or even pi imarily. for teachers in the professional sense of the word. It is for parenis, too, for they remain par excellence the teachers of religion if it is taught and is not merely a subject of instruction.
Poet Laureate
JOHN MASEFIELD, by Muriel Spark (Peter NevIll, 15s.).
MISS SPARK is less ambitious than her title would suggest. This is not a critical appreciation of tht whole of the published work of the Poet Laureate nor an exhaustive life. It is a careful and on the whole convincing plea for the thesis that John Maselield "excels" in the art of story-telling.
Even in this object Miss Spark confines herself to those poems which she thinks are "durable." She analyses the three great narrative poems: "The Everlasting Mercy." "Dauber" and "Reynard the Fox." Into an analysis which tries to assess the poetical quality and worth of the writing she introduces helpful and illuminating references to Masefield's own experience.