AN IDEALIST.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 40, 16 February 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

AN IDEALIST.

Suggesting Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Butler's "Erewhon," and Bellamy's "Looking Backward," Sir Francis Younghusband's "The Coming Country" (Murray) takes its place in a thoughtprovoking quartet. He writes of what our Empire might become if imbued throughout with deep and genuine Christianity. He suggests the formation of a league similar to the Christian Endeavourers of the eighteenth century, with the object of adding something more practical than the established Church; of bringing home to everybody the need of spirituality and the advantages of a childlike affection for one's fellows, and an absolute honesty of purpose in all departments of life. It is always hard to convince the poor that poverty is not the worst thing which can be suffered, or that riches do not invariably carry ease and pleasure and happiness with them. He visions another race of people of a higher grade than ourselves studying the earth people from a distant planet, and wondering that they are so long in attaining a pleasure of serenity so easily gained by the gate of spiritual teaching and experience. That we misuse such freedom as we have, and that even the most hardened materialist is conscious of something niissin™ in his life is cleverly illustrated by examples, and the possibilities of his scheme of spiritual tuition are well demonstrated in the form of fanciful fiction. Revivalism he takes as a direct reply to urgent prayer, and not a mere emotional phase, as was thought by many when Robert Evans was swaying great congregations in Wales. That the book is written in all sincerity is evident; and that it may touch some hearts if it does not produce such a league of earnest souls as he imagines, U its justification.. -■

"It is by this philosophy, presented with great wit and considerable learning, set forth in volumes often of easy fascination, arranged with a bland confidence that all men and women arc the victims of their sensuality, and that the only result of thinking is to escape from the 'consequences of thought, that Anatole i France lias charmed so many people. It is a philosophy curiously in accord with | the world of younger people af trr Ihe I war; the failure of tilings hoped for, the I disappointment in things believed, the I treachery of things loved made it easy | for too many of us to discredit hope and faith and love. It is always a temptation to visit the consequences of our own weaknesses on the nature of things, and to find an excuse for our faults in j the making of philosophies that exalt them into necessities. The temptation is fatal and if yielded to leads only to desolation and dishonour; the system which it leads man to embrace is one with which Christianity can have nothing at all to do."—R. Ellis Roberts in "Reading for Pleasure, and other Essays."

At the annual business meeting of the Edinburgh Scott Club, Mr. Stanley Baldwin was elected president of the club for the ensuing year. At the subsequent dinner Professor Gordon, of Oxford, proposing the toast of "The Memory of Sir Walter Scott," said it would be very soon 100 years since the pas-sing of Sir Walter Scott and the waves of fashion beat harmlessly upon his name. Fashion, no doubt, of prose and verse had changed since the lays of "Marmion" and. the

"Lady of the Lake" shook Scotland and England and the arrival of the last Waverley was bulletined in London and sent families scurrying to the door. They might now almost call Scott an "ancient." Ho took his rest with the classics. Professor Gordon said he hoped they were in no anxiety about Scott's fate. To exhibit that 'kind of anxiety was not to know literature. It was to be ignorant, or at least forgetful of what true literature was. It was to misapprehend the long slow process by which the great powers expressed in literature spread their influence and propagated their virtue. The great virtue that there was in the life and writings of Scott was being absorbed somewhere, almost everywhere, in the reading humanity of the world. °