patiently, carefully, like other scholars. She gives God thanks and makes no parade of that; she even, with a slight ostentation of superiority to scholarship, calls attention to her deliberate omission of footnotes.
She comes to her task, as I take it, with these special preparations of her insight: birth and upbringing in a small Illinois town at just about that stage of religious petrifaction, of stiff-necked killing literalism, which Jesus encountered in Capernaum. To this she adds years in the rainless places of California and the Southwest, studying Indian folklore, poetry and religion—in short, the elements of barbaric culture, such as Hebrew tradition carefully preserved from the ancient times when Jehovah first entered upon bloody competition with the gods of the heathen, whose fat of rams and oxen smoked over against his. She brings an intimate, almost a first-hand, acquaintance with the universality and the deep natural significance of spring festivals and of the atoning sacrifice among primitive peoples, without which no modern commentator can speak with authority of the Doctrine of Atonement. Furthermore, Mrs. Austin has been for years a, student of the psychology of "genius," a phenomenon which she keeps under constant observation. Finally, as she reminds us, she has the intuitions of a woman, and she is proud of it.
Mrs. Austin comes to Jesus as an equal and treats him as such. I mean precisely that. She comes to him as a small-town mystic and she treats him as a small-town mystic. Her writing here is clear and free from the pseudo-scientific jargon into which she sometimes lapses. Her insight appears to me remarkable, and her treatment of the problem far more illuminating, consistent and persuasive than that of Signor
