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New Zealand Tablet, 13 March 1919, Page 26

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"The High Romance" . We have just finished an engrossing book by Michael Williams, an American writer, who has given the world an autobiography that deserves a place beside the few great books which by their sincerity and powerful self-analysis have won universal recognition. There are not many: St. Augustine's Confessions, Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung, Newman's Apologia, and perhaps half-a-dozen others are all we have. Mr. Williams tells in a vivid American way the story of his struggles towards the Light. He was baptised a Catholic, but as his mother was a "Protestant and his father died at sea while the boy was very, young, he soon lost all religion. He went forth from the quiet little seaport town of his birth and, hampered by a tendency to consumption, plunged into the vortex of city life. How hard he found the way and what perils beset it he tells with a frankness qualified by an artistic reticence that does not make the book less beautiful. Rising and ailing, .following Will-o'-the-wisps into morasses, finding out the hollowness of new gospel after new gospel, at length—in the middle way of life—he sees the stars above his head and a new light shines in on his soul, making plain all the riddles and all the mysteries that had perplexed him. The Little Flower had thrown a rose in his path. He picked it up and it made his days forever sweet. r -y> - ■... -• , 0-

An Earthquake He was living in San Francisco at the time of the great earthquake, and the description of it in his book" is striking: - "We're up against trouble all the time in our dealings with water, and fire, and —but we consider the earth a straight, clear-cut proposition. "So when i\t cuts loose. . . . Oh, I give it up ! There aren't any words for what you feel in an eartnquake shock. "Here's a bit of a hint. Suppose you were on a ship at sea, on a long, long voyage, so that the motion, the fluidity, the freedom of movement, were part of your very being— are saturated with motion, —and suddenly the watar becomes a solid substance, and the air becomes rigid, and the ship stops and is held without a quiver, like a toy ship frozen inside a block of ice. Well, the solid earth, that morning in San Francisco, was behaving like the unstable sea—"Oh, but what's the use ! The feeling simply can't be described ! It dates back to chaosto a time before there was any law and order or solid substance. Only those who have gone through a quake can understand me. I'll just add this, however, that we who have gone through a big quake understand what other people can only think they understand-—namely, that the foundation, the underlying principle, of all material tilings from the ultimate atom to the biggest star in the heavens is nothing that can be seen or. touched or handled or known by any sense, but is forever imponderable, and unnamable, and eternally inscrutable. We hint at it in.such terms as the cosmic ether, polarity, gravitation, and so forth, and so on. Some of us, however, are still old-fashioned enough to say, the Hand of God."

The New Paganism The New Paganism caught him on its flood. For a time he was like the many hungry ones who seek in art and literature to "make their soul," realising that material things are unsatisfying and that the soul does not live by bread alone. He discerns in the intellectual movement a trend towards the Light. He does not ridicule Mr. Wells because Mr. Wells is a Socialist: he takes him as one of the keenest observers of the flow of the tides and currents and one who may help to lead others out of the whirlpool: "Thousands of writers work to supply the huge modern demand for entertainment, and for something to pass away the time. Apart from these, there is that constantly increasing number of writers who definitely and consciously are 'artists,' and who consider their work to be socially important. And these writers nearly all concur in that dogma which Mr. Wells has so forcibly phrased." Here is the quotation from Wells which he quotes in proof of the trend towards God: "Z conceive myself to be thinking a* the world thinks, and if I find no great facts, 1 find, a hundred little indications to reassure vie that (rod, comes. < Even those who have neither the imagination nor the faith to apprehend God as a reality will, I think, realise presently that the Kingdom, of God. over a- world-wide system of republican States is the only possible formula under which we may hope to unify and save mankind." Thus, in the dark wood he found religion. Later, he found his own soul.

The Bishop's Move One day Mr. Williams determined to call on the Archbishop of San Francisco. In a little time Dr. Hanna found out that his visitor was steeped in modern mysticism, and forthright he had the key to his soul. "Why," he said, "do you not read the books which will tell you about the real mystics? Get The Little Flower and Sister Elizabeth and come foack to me when you have read them." One day later Mr. Williams came back. "I surrender." he said. The Archbishop stood up, kind, paternal, radiant as the Father must have

been when, the Prodigal Son came home. "Now, you must go to confession. That is what you need. It will clean the windows of your soul and the light "will come in and drive away the darkness; then everything will be easy." It was with a joyous heart that the pilgrim went away. He told Katie Lynch—the Irish telephone operator who had a place in her heart and another in her prayers for all the light-hearted journalists who went in and out past her office her boys, whom her Catholic heart mothered lovingly. And the next morning she knelt in the chapel of the Carmelite Sisters to see him go up to the altar rails to receive our Lord into his soul. He was a new manreborn spiritually, looking forth on life and its troubles and problems with a new vision, possessing a new strength which made the rough way easy henceforth, and an inner light that beautified by its spiritual glamor the lives of those around him. One has to go back to Dante to find a comparison worthy of the ending of this autobiography. Michael Williams had been down to hell and through its awful circles. And at last— nel mezzo eammino—for him, too, came the vision of the starry skies and the sound of the murmuring sea, harbingers of the peace that passcth all understanding. Sister Theresa promised to shower down roses on earth from her place in Heaven. One—a golden rose—came in the path of Michael Williams, who from it learned to know what God is and man is and to be happy at last; happy as lie was when, a child in the far-away town by the sea, his father brought him to Mass. The High, Romance is a fine book. Its lesson is this: This is eternal life, to know Thee, the only true God, and Thy Son,, Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast. sent.

Wake Up, New Zealand ! From an Australian paper:— "The Forbes (Wilcanuia) Jockey Club have notified Tattersall's that as a special compliment to the new bishop, whose coming has raised their town to the dignify of a city, they are holding a race-meeting that will beat all previous records.