REVIEW.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIII, Issue 7567, 20 February 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

REVIEW.

Voices Crying in the Wilderness. London : Macmillan and Co., 1885. Souk few years ago society was fairly startled to hear that in London, that great centre of civilisation and intellectual enlightenment there existed a circle of people whose religion was professedly that of' pagan Greece and Rome. Who these strange worshippers were, and of what their religions rites consisted, never came to light; indeed, the truth itself of the statement seemed so doubtful that the fact of its being made was forgotten, when, lo 1 without warning or apparent cause, there issues from the press a book which professedly introduces us to one of the worshippers in question, and reveals a reason for the cultivation of the worship so strangely revived —or rather tells us the use to which one of its professors put it. The story, for suoh it ultimately resolves itself into, opens with a beautiful description of the waning night which enshrouds one of the lovely islets of these Southern Seas. On a lonely peak is reclining the youthful form* of one who is awaiting the rising of the Bun. "To him the sun was a form divine; to be out beneath its endlessly new light was life and joy. He knew, indeed, a trance of fervid rapture before an image in a temple; and, when his father stood before it, and raised his bands, and cried to it, and the smoke of - the scented wood dimmed the air, Arthur would feel a transport of delight. But out here, on the hillside, alone with his god, it was far better. It was so quiet, so grand, so still. He was the god's, and so was all the earth and ail the sky. And all men looked up, and walked in the light of the god; and the beautiful god shone and shone, till his great burning light was all too much, and yet there was an endless rapture in his shining. There oame the golden gleam at last, and Arthur fell on his face. 'Hail, god of fire, hail! Thou hast oonquered the darkness, thou hast cdtne again to turn our night into day 1 Hail, great god, hail!' And the great ball of light was half-re-vealed, and the brilliance grew into one wide dazzle over all the sea. He gazed till the too great light was a darkness to him, and then veiled his face. The tears in his blinded eyes were sweet to him; he loved to find himself so weak, so overpowered by his great god. He loved to feel ' helpless- j it made the god seem all the more utterly resistless and strong. ' O sun-god, hear me!' he cried again and again, lying before that brightness on the ground. It was not that he had request to make; he had none; he was content. His all-powerful father worshipped him, and ministered to every wish; the rest of his world held only slaves and subjects for him. But it was beautiful to speak to that mighty one, and .to feel himself heard ; it was great to be certain that his poor voice could reach to the heart of that golden flame. He did not know that his worship was a strange one. He did not know that the son of a modern English gentleman—a man of Eton boyhood and Cambridge youth—was an anomaly, worshipping the sun on a flower-starred Pacific island. How. he came there - , . . he never asked. He remembered , nothing else." Suoh is the language of the first portion of the story of Arthur Vane, whom his father, early losing his wife, took with him for a cruise in his yacht through the islands of the Pacific, on one of wbioh the pair were left by the crew, who, taking possession of the vessel, there left their master and his infant child. Arthur's father, whose faith had always been a nominal one, openly rejected it at the loss of his wife ; but, being thrown amongst the natives of the island on whioh he was left,' and his generous heart desiring to civilise them, he perceived that without some motive such as religion supplies, his object would be unattainable. Believing in nothing himself, he ohose the sun as the best thing for his purpose to which Ito direct the islanders' attention, and taught them to regard it as their divinity, erecting a temple, placing in it a statue of Apollo, and constituting himself the priest. In this belief Arthur was brought up, and in it he implicitly relied until some chance words of his father, uttered in the strong.agony of impending dissolution, shattered ms idol to fragments. Then came a bitter darkness, and the void caused by his father's death plunged him into the depths of despair. The narrative here takes a deeply religious tone in describing how a partial faith is awakened in Arthur's mind by the instructions of a missionary, whom the faithful natives have fetched from a neighbouring island. The teaching of this sympathetic friend, however, does not supply the want that it creates in Arthur's mind; and it is not until he has arrived in England that his cousin; whose picture, as a woman of 1 an intense spiritual instinct, is beautifully ' pourtrayed by the writer, ministers to his crying need. More need not be told of the story or its characters. Suffice it to sa;r that,' although the book is at the first glance" a somewhat perplexing one as . to its motive, it is, to those who read between the lines, a valuable contribution to the literature of the present sceptical age. % T J