AMONG THE BOOKS.

Press, Volume XLIV, Issue 6902, 7 November 1887, Page 6

AMONG THE BOOKS.

The number of books on New Zealand is already legion. Some of these are solid histories, and some are passing sketches. From Messrs Simpson and Williams (Christchurch) we have received the very newest book, the title of which is " Our New Zealand Cousins." The book is published by Sampson, Low and Co., and the writer is the Hon. J. Inglis, formerly a resident in New Zealand, but now Minister for Education in New South Wales. After an interval of twenty years, Mr Inglis visits us, nnd gives his impressions of our scenery and manners, and his opinions on our progress and prospects. We may say at once that the book is crisply and brightly written. As far as we have tested its statements, the book is trustworthy also. The description of th_ Hot Lakes district has air the fidelity - of a photograph. Mr Inglis was fortunate enough to see the Terraces before their destruction. It is sad to think that while the verbal description remains, these wonders have gone for ever. In many ways the author shows that our means of travelling and our hotel accommodation are superior to those of New South Wales. Into the author's political opinions we need not enter, except to ioin in the hope that our politics are becoming purified. The charm of. the book lies rather in the simple arid truthful portraiture of our surroundings, and the signs of our advancement. We 'sample' the . book by presenting the following extract, which will have a strong local interest: —

• " The changes in Port Lyttelton arelittle short of phenomenal. What was but a bare harbour, with a shingly beach, on which we had to step from watermen's boats, which plied between ship and shore, is now a magnificent port, with Jan enormous embracing breakwater, with stately wharves on .massiye piles, reticulated with ; a __t J wJori. of rails, along which the busy locomotives suort and steam. Trucks laden with produce are propelled merrily along. Great sheds line the shores. A big terminal railway, station skirts the sea face, where once the waves lapped the strand. A noble observatory crowns the promontory above. The quarantine station is bright and gay with houses and gardens. The town runs its open streets up the steep hill, and the houses overflow into every nook on the hill sides, and jostle each other almost into the water. A great area has been reclaimed. Old stone warehouses have been pulled down to make way for the railway and locomotive sheds, and a blackened, smoky archway, low down near the great graving dock, shows mc the sea end of the famous tunnel through the towering mountain, which Moorhouse projected, aud which had not been begun when I arrived in the colony.

Writing of Christchurch, the author says: — Climb the Cathedral spire, by all means, and enjoy the view. The. Avon windthrough the town. An outing in one of the dainty pleasure skiffs on its limpid waters is one of the pleasant experiences of the place. From the spire you look down on busy streets stretching from a common centre, and each one as itnears the circular town belt loses itseLf amid villas and gardens, and poplars and groves. Such a itis in urbe is surely unique. The schools and colleges are thickly scattered over the fiat beyond the river. I remember when it was a wilderness of marshy sedge tussocks and flaxbushes. Now. the architectural triumphs Would 'do credit to any cathedral city at Home. The museum, under the able curatorship of Dr. Julius yon Haast, ranks as the finest in all Australia. Indeed, the collection in some respects is not inferior to that of any European capital. The Botanic Gardens and Park are exquisitely laid out, and set off by the silvery ribbon-like Avon, which purls gently alqng, meandering through the groves and ornamental lawns. The ocean bounds the view'bii one side, and faraway, verging the plain,.the snowy Alps fringe the picture "With their glistening crests of spotless white on the other. It is a beautiful panorama. One' could easily fancy himself back in the Old Country. But the sights are soon exhausted, and the flatness is apt to become ' c just a leetle monotonous." * ; -

From the Government Printer we have received " The State: The Rudiments of New Zealand Sociology," by James H. Pope, Inspector of Native Schools. Mr Pope has done a bol6*Et_nng in attempting to teach the Native children of this colony the elements of sociology. JBut we .will not say that this boldness is rashness also. Mr Pope has thoroughly grasped his sub. ject. The conclusions reached by the acknowledged masters of the science have been thoroughly assimilated. Here and there we might linger over some point and criticise it adversely, but on the whole the matter of the book is warranted by the best lights thrown on the subject. The author, moreover, has considerable power of arranging and presenting his matter. There is an orderly sequence in the thought. Some of the arguments are made as simple as is possible, regard being had to the abstruse nature of the subject. As showing at once the clearness and the caution with which the book is written, we subjoin the following:—

" The doctrine of 'the greatest good to the greatest number' in all its forms only tells us, in a rather loose kind of way, without hinting what happiness is, that our aim must be to give the greatest happiness to the greatest, number; and in one of its forms it tells us, without any warrant whatever, that if we act according to our lights, and leave others at liberty to do the same, each will secure for himself the greatest happiness that is possible for him. Now, it is probably very true that in the end the best motive, if we could find it, would lead up to the greatest happiness of the greatest number; but the principle is quite useless as a motive or as a rule of- conduct for men so ignorant as the best informed of us- are, though it might serve>w_U enough for beings of a higher order, gifted ; with far greater power than we possess of learning what in, the end >vill produce happiness and what will not, and of deter**" hiining whether. leavings every man to do what he pleases; himself ;w_l really bring tho greatest possible-happiness to the greatest number. Wt do not object to the""greatest happiness-" principle, and cannot; a great part of this book is ; based upon it—that is, we _aye been endeavouring throughout to discover how the greatest happiness to the greatest number is or may be produced* All that we say is that there.is no reason-to believe that this principle Can, by itself,.yield us the best motive fqr ihdiyic-ual.conduat, oiy indeed, any itrue motive at all. Most people khOvv very well'that it is this very question*, of- the,' motive—the ichy and wherefore"of our doing'what is right—which is the great bone of contention amongst writers on moral subjects. Mr Pope has presented this difficulty clearly enough in the above extract, In the words we are now going to the writer suggests rather than expressly asserts where the highest? motive and pattern of all right and kindly action can be found. With-this-extract we part company with the book:—... ... pearly nineteen hundred years ago there lived a" teacher who, by some means which it/ is unnecessary-fpr us to inquire abouthere, WaSgifted with a marvellous"-know-' ledge of -men—Of their weakness and their fslly, of their tendency to evil and of their. capacity for good—a knowjedg-,. that has neither before nor since been s__pas.*-*ecL or even equalled: The accounts of--h__. that have peen handed down tons show that this Teacher had the greatest sym- ; pathy with and affection for all men both. in their joys and in their trials and sufferings, and an earnest desire to help them to get clean "away from wickedness and ignorance,, By his conduct, and by his treatment of those who came to be taught he showed that he made no distinction between rich and poor, clever aud foolish —between those who had lived low vulgar, and wicked lives and those who hao been respectable. ; AH were allowed to come to him and learn what he had to teach them. One of the principal methods of instruction used by him was to tell short stories full of meaning. Among these well-known stories the following may be mentioned:—"The Lost Sheep," " The Prodigal Son," " The Good Samaritan," " The Pharisee and the Publican," and "The Merciless Creditor." All these stories are of sinip.. construction, and when they have been heard onca or twice they can hardly be forgotten. These stories teach among other, things, the foolishness of pride and vanity, the wickedness of harsh conduct to the helpless, and the nobleness of generosity, kindness, mercy, and forgiveness.

Subscribers to the Public Lib.arv should ask for the new Life of Luther, published by Cassell and Co. The writer, Dr. Baynes, is better known as Peter Baynes, under which name he won considerable reputation for his criticisms on the leading poets and novelists of the Victorian half century. Dr. Baynes is a bit of a rhapsodist. His style is vigorous and pictorial, but it occasionally run into extravagance. Here, however, as everywhere, the style, Buffon says, is tbe man himself. Passing from the garb to the thought, we arc struck with the fineness and sureness of Dr. Baynes' touch as a critic. Luther's own style is thus capitally hit off:— "Luther, as liimsolf well knew, was never a master of language in the sense in which Erasmus was a master of language. He did not round and polish his sentences. His gift of expression was that of saying .with unmistakable, clear-, ness and force what he meant to say. It was substantially the same kind of linguistic power which we in England have seen exemplified in the writings of Swift and Buriyah, ih the sermons of Mr _p_r-' ?eon, in the speeches of Mr John Bright, t has the solid quality that acts upon the ereat central body, the great middle class, of mankind. It may be doubted whether, any man known to history has possessed the gift of moving, by speech, great masses of sensible, serious, wholly unaffected, but not highly cultivated or markedly superior persons, in such perfection as Martin Luther." , • • There are few pairs of " noble brothers more striking in history than Luther and Mclanchthon. They differed from each other lv many important respects, and yet they became united .by the strongest bond of'affections :--"'Finerih the quality of-his erudition, more elegantly correct and melodious in the golden How of his speech, than' Luther, Melaiicbthon. recognised without a moment's hesitation that the rugged Saxon was the kinglier of the two. All that art could do. all that education and scholarship could effect, Was} he" instinctively felt, of no account in comparison with the heaven-derived energy and original force of the son of the Mansfeld miner. The strong affections of Luther, on the other hand, seemed to find theln/special object in tiny Philip, so gifted, sOYragile, and to enfold him in an intense embrace."

One great aim of the writer is to bring the man L-ther before us. The words of the reformer, as we have of ten heard, were half battles. We have read of his courage, moral and physical. But along with these qualities there was an abounding cheerfulness.

"To nothing," says Dr Baynes," in the character of Luther has the consciousness of unanimous Gerrnanyandmankind given more explicit testimony than to his yeniality. But his own experience of natural enjoyments had been limited in the extreme ; and the deep shadow of monasticism, cancelling the sunlight of the soul, and silencing its singing birds, had enveloped him in his youth. From that shadow he had not, even at the Wartburg, completely emerged; but the dawn had come, the'sunbeams were abroad, the broken masses of cloud were in retreat before the glad wind of morning. His mind had now reached that stage in spiritual evolution at which he could respond, on this test question of the right religious use of Nature's bounties, to the inspiration of St. Paul. He could understand the principle which governed the Pauline treatment of the subject—to wit, the moralising potency of natural joys when accepted with thankfulness from the Divine Father."

It is agreed on all hands that Luther's translation of the Bible exerted a powerful influence on the German language. Luther's German, like the English of our authorised version, was simple, direct and vigorous. The reformer's qualifications forthis great work are given in thefollowing passage, and with this extract we take our leave of a stimulating book :—

"His superb genius for going to the heart of things—for hitting the mark—for seeing the essential—did not fail him here, Unquestionably, also, though it cannot be said of him that his sympathies ran equally through the whole gamut of Scriptural sentiment and thought, it may be maintained that he surpassed the crowd of translators both in the range and in the intensity of his Biblical sympathies. No modern man has lived so completely in the idea of God ; and the idea of God is the inspiration of the Bible. It was well said by Carlyle that . the Bible is the most earnest of books; it is also the least affected of books; and Martin Luther was the most earnest man of an earnest time — the man most thoroughly exempt from affectation in the frank, strong, unaffected sixteenth century.;. By his character too, and his breeding he. was the man to apprehend, or rather to feel, with nicest sympathetic intelligence, the combination in the Bible of great thoughtsand simple words—thoughts of legislators, poets, prophets, statesmen ; words not merely intelligible, but instantly intelligible, to childlike men. Luther, like Goethe, was impatient of long involved processes of thinking and demonstrating. His genius was intuitive rather than scholastic. And the Hebraic mind • was.pre-eminently of this kind—light came to it by inspiration, not by ratiocination. In this fact of Luther's constitution we have the key to much in his fierce revol. agaitist' Aristotle and the schoolmen. .Cardinal truths, essentially self-proving, were absolutely the soul's element of Luther. All this adapted him to fee a prince among Bible translators."