Welsh Journals

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The writer has obviously in mind throughout the book the ordinary churchgoer. He presupposes, however, a considerable interest on the part of the reader, and the book is by no means written in a popular style. The opening chapters are excellent -probably the best in the book-and the reasons for belief in miracles is argued convincingly. Three chapters are given to an examination of the documen- tary evidence. Dean Roberts's careful and concise synopsis of the results of criticism should prove helpful to a great many who have little time for reading Biblical Criticism, but desire to have some assurance regarding the documents on which their faith is founded. The later chapters are somewhat disappointing, especially the one on The Witness of the Church." This must of course, in every age, be the greatest argument for the Resurrection of our Lord and the supernatural character of His message. But the force of this proof is not felt in this chapter, and we are left here and in the following chapter wondering what exactly the existence of a church or our own personal experience really does demand. The various arguments need relating to each other. Even the documentary evidence is the witness of personal experience and can be interpreted only in the light of our own experience. Such a comparison of our experience with that of the early disciples may lead us to a clearer and more spiritual conception of the Resurrection and its meaning. While this book may not succeed in convincing many sceptics, it will serve for those who have faith, as a useful handbook to a clearer understanding of the sources of our belief in the Resurrection. Ancient Town-Planning." By F. Haverfield, Oxford. Clarendon Press. 6/- net. The moral of Mr. Haverfield's interesting book is the rather comforting one, that here at least we have not a great deal to learn from the Ancients. The Greeks, our masters in most arts, seem never, before the military despotism of Alexander, to have carried their ideas on the subject beyond the designing and care of their public buildings, and of the great processional way by which the town was usually divided, the private dwelling-houses being left to grow up as they pleased and where they pleased. With the Macedonian conquest of Asia Minor and the consequent establishment of large new towns through- out the Near East, some more systematic arrange- ment became necessary. The public buildings, which had been of so much importance in the city states of Greece, now lose their prominence in these new cities, which are no longer individual states but mere units in a huge Empire, and the scheme of arrangement is naturally based on military lines, the almost invariable rule being a chessboard system of streets crossing at right angles and com- posed of rectangular blocks of houses. Interesting illustrations of the universality of this system are to be found in the sixth book of Polybius, where this historian, by a curious reversal of the real analogy, describes this street planning and general arrange- ment of a camp as being precisely paralled to that of a city, and in the description given by St. John in the twenty-first book of the Revelation, of the Heavenly Jerusalem. With the domination of Rome, we are on different ground again. Italy undoubtedly contains occasional traces of some regular planning of prehistoric settlements, and it is usual to base subsequent Roman developments on a foundation of Etruscan teaching, but this Mr. Haverfield considers an unsafe inference. One can, however, say with cer- tainty that. in the last days of the Republic, there had arisen, through the fusion of ancient custom and Graeco-Macedonian example, a more or less regular chessboard" system, differing in detail from that of Macedonia, but distinguished by the same principal features. This system spread throughout the whole of the Western Empire, finding two of its most interesting examples in Britain, where Silchester and Caerwent still shew ground plans evidently laid out on the common model. But the curious thing about these two comparatively small settlements is that they, far more nearly than any other ancient towns of which we have record, approximate to the modern idea of Garden Cities, since the house blocks or insulae are not in either case filled in with buildings, but seem to have retained a very large proportion of cultivated land. It would be pleasant to find evidence here that Wales had given the lead to Europe in one of the most valuable of present day social innovations, but unfortunately Mr. Haverfield makes it tolerably plain that the nature of these cities was due to the inability of a backward agricultural population to fill this elaborate framework laid down for it by Roman civilisation. But in any event we may not, as has been said, give much of this credit of modern town improvement to the Romans. Rome had not to deal with our modern problems of overcrowding and industrial pressure, and it is not surprising that she never paid much attention to open spaces and complicated sanitation.