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Otago Witness, Issue 1855, 10 June 1887, Page 34

LITERATURE.

CRITICAL SKETCHES.;

By Abistaeohus.

CHBEKFUL HOMES.

This is a companion to Dr Kirton's other book, called " Happy Homes, ( and How to Make Them." It is an excellent book, and should be read by every man and woman, single or double. It is replete with poetical quotations. The chapter upon falling in love and courting is perhaps the best. Speaking of falling in love at first sight, we have got an apt couplet : The very instant that I saw you did My heart fly at your service. A good wife " adds to her husband's happiness, subtracts from his naves, multiplies his joys, divides his sorrows, and practises reduction in the expenditure of £ s. d." We are truly told that " a good wife is to a man wisdom, strength, and courage ; a bad one is confusion, weakness, and despair." She should have a good temper, which is " the, philosophy oi the heart ; it is a perpetual 1 sunshine in the house, importing light, warmth, and life to all within its influence." Addison tells us that " a cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will always make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty, and affliction ; convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable." The author clearly •has no love for doctors of medicine : Better to hunt in fields for health unbought, Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught t The wiße for cure on exercise i depend, God never made His work for man to mend.

Dr Kirton is of opinion that " marriage with peace is this world's paradise." When a man secures a really good wife " he has now four eyes for speculation, four hands for operation, four feet for ambulation, and four shoulders for sustentation." A perusal of such a book cannot fail fco improve the heart, and render one holier, happier, and purer. It is well written, the quotations in prose and , poetry are well selected and arranged, and the,, whole influence of the work is highly beneficial and beneficent.

MYTHOLOGY AND FOLK LORE.

This is a learned book, of about 400 pages, from the pen of the Eev. Sir George W. Cox, Bart., M.A. The work, like th*e author's titles, is a strange medley of sacred, secular, and soholastic disquisitions upon confessedly abstruse questions. The myths he endeavours to trace to a common origin. " Wherever we go — in the west, the north, or the east — we are confronted by fabrics of .popular tradition built up of the same' materials. Everywhere we find the conflict of the bright heroes with dark demons, dragons, and monsters." From a common home in Central Asia sprang the germs -of our mythology, ancient' as well as modern. The oldest Trinity was the fire, the air, and the siin. " In the most ancient hymns and prayers of the Hindus the Supreme Creator and Kuler of, all worlds was invoked under many names, all of which were regarded as denoting his power or his goodness." In ancient 'as well as in modern times people always drew a distinction between religion and mythology. " The Zeus of the Olympian courts is partial, unjust, fond of rest and pleasure, changeable in his affections and unfaithful in his love, greedy, wrathful, and impure. The Zeus to whom the people pray is not only irresistible in might, but also just and righteous. ' Here, as in India, the religious convW : nns of the worshippers rose into a region in< leasurably higher than that of their mrtho igy." All things are bound fast in thegutspof Necessity, which is more powerful than Zeus himself. I should like to live in " the land of the Hyperboreans, who know neither day nor night, nor storm, nor sickness, nor death, but live joyously among beautiful gardens where the flowers never fade" — with Aphrodite by' my side, followed by Eros and Himeros— love and laughing. In Elysium there is no grief, sorrow, sickness, nor pain. The leaves never fade, and the fruits glisten upon the branches the whole year round. Cox has no doubt " as to the origin and nature of the materials out of; which mythological fables have been shaped.'* The stream of mythology, ancient and modern, sacred and profane, vulgar or classical, flows from an original spring in Central Asia. Accordingly, " our knowledge of the source whence the stream flows will add indefinitely to the interest with which we trace its wanderings, until by the confluence of its tributary waters it swells into the great ocean of natural epic poetry, while incidents which, regarded as events in the lives of human beings, must' appear absurd, or impossible, or disgusting, will not unfrequently be invested with a touching truth and beauty."

So much for this exceedingly erudite, interesting, and edifying treatise upon "The

Science of Comparative Mythology and Folk ■Lore.'? ,j.r • > - - HEEOES AND, MARTYES OF SCIENCE. ■ ' H-.jC.Ewartgivesusavery readable book on this*. subject, accompanied with 30 pictorial illustrations. Columbus and Galileo were both great men ; for the one doubled the habitable earth', while the other expanded the universe to infinity," They were for a long time regarded as madmen, but "by sheer persistency of,, .unconquerable conviction" they bored their way through obstacles of inert stupidity and 'explosive bigotry. Columbus had, however, an eye to the main chance, and Galileo meanly recanted. They " did not Belong to that highest type of heroism in which' self is eftaced fciy a mission or an idea." They were, 1 ; however, grand characters, leading lives of- aspiration, s.tudy, and adventure. They were men of quenchless ambition, undismayed; by neglect,' contempt, and weary delay.' Great men are often centuries in advance ; of their age. Friar Bacon, for example, anticipated the inductive method of philosophy three centuries before Lord Bacon. He insisted upon the pre-eminent importance* of experience and fact. "He wanted knowledge emancipated from false authorities, and the progress of discovery freed irom. the blockade of prejudice." He fully realised ,the necessity of studying Nature by experience and observation. The hindrances to the comprehension of truth were authority, custom, the vulgar herd, and pretentious knowledge. Bacon on his deathbed weakly regretted the labour he had undergone for the sake of knowledge and mankind. When Galileo first pointed his telescope to the sky he saw, that the whole world of. learning was wrong, and had, consequently, to endure persecution ; but superstition weakened his understanding of the vast difference, between fact and fiction, and, unlike Pblycarp, he meanly recanted. Keligion alone can nerve the heart at the stake ; conscience, not intellect, makes the hero.

There is really no conflict between religion and science. " The true line for the apostles of religion, is to insist on the imperishable facts of consciousness, which can no more be shaken than the foundations of the world." True religion may be put in a nutshell : "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, 0 God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God. "When shall I come and appear before him 1 " The revelation of God in the soul is the response to that cry. . "Kepler had a far deeper insight into universal law .than Galileo. To the world " his whole; career seemed to be a succession of disappointments, bereavements, and betrayals. I ,' Yet he drew up calendars, and almanacs, and horoscopes — knowing them to be futilities — for a crust of bread ? In religion, he could not play the hypocrite, and yet, according to him, "it is more honest to" draw up .almanacs with predictions than to .beg my bread"!

Sir Isaac Newton, unlike Galileo, was ''reverenced, honoured, rewarded, followed to his grave by the homage not only of his own countrymen but of the world." He was quite disinterested, and the pursuit of truth carried to him its own reward. He had no " preconceived opinion as to the physical order of the world." He calmly rested on induction. He sat for seven years in Parliament- arid never broke silence, and died at the age of 85 years. His magnum ojnis — the " Principia' 1—"1 — " is mainly an exposition of mathematical principles governing the mechanism of the universe." He had the faculty of concentration and abstraction in a marked degree. He was, in short, a great thinker and calculator. " His endurance, like his thought, was clothed in silence." When we lift up our, eyes to the nocturnal vault, his name rises to our memory, as "we gaze on a sailing planet or watch a falling star." Newton's soul was steeped in reverence ; his inward eye was keen, his spirit calm, "and so God made, him the high priest of the starry temple, the prophet of the order of the world."

Denis Papin launched the first steam vessel in 1707, and the stolid boatmen " cut the matter short by dragging the machinery out of the boat and shattering it in fragments (before the eyes of its agonised maker." He ■was the pioneer of the triumphs of steam, and an example " of the melancholy way in which mankind have treated the men whose discoveries and inventions have led that progress" — that unprecedented progress of our age. . ,

Thomas Canipanella was 'the embodiment of the reviving energies of "truth against oppressive corruption in the sixteenth century. He saw the hollowness of the separation between philosophy and religion, and no torments could bend, him to falsehood. He despised accusations of magic and witchcraft, intimidation and incarceration for a quarter of a century, and' rose to a 'degree of heroism higher than Galileo and Dcs Cartes. He was animated only by the love of truth, and he felt that " tho real evidences of religion lie not in books, but in the, experience of the soul." .Full of such divine life, he would not, for fear of the Inquisition commit his writings to the flames, like Des ' Cartes, nor repudiate • his doctrines, like Galileo. He had moral stamina; and was a real hero and genuine martyr of science.