A multum in parvo for the general reader. The title fully unfolds the character of the volume.
“A Complete Hand Book of Synonyms and Antonyms, or synonyms and words of opposite meaning. With an appendix.” By the Rt. Rev. Samuel Fallows, A.M., D.D. Chicago: The Standard Book Company.
This compact, neatly printed, well-bound volume is one of the most valuable of the “Standard Hand-Book Series,” edited by Bishop Fallows, of Chicago. For the English reader or writer desiring carefully to discriminate between words and phrases, anxious to use language most appropriately, we know of no single volume equaling this hand-book for utility and general adaptation to his needs.
To a member of the circle who is really a very large-hearted and noble man, as I have since found him, but who is “decidedly opposed to teaching religious truths in schools of any kind,” and who objects to being required to read the “Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation,” I have made the following reply, which I insert here, as it may meet similar cases:
My Dear Sir:—Your letter of December 27 is before me. We have provided a college outlook, a college outlook which touches every department in the realm of culture. We give a bird’s eye view of this vast world which appeals to every faculty of the soul. We touch the physical man, the physical world in which he lives, above among stars, below among stones, about among plants and animals. We study history, the history of the earth as revealed in science, the history of man as unfolded in the traditions and records of the race. We study political and social economy. We also study somewhat (to a very limited degree) the phenomena and laws of man’s moral and spiritual being. It would be a strange course of study that ignored faculties as real, as universal, and as persistent in their operations as the religious faculties. We avoid scrupulously everything that tends to the promotion of sectarianism in thought or spirit, but we believe in that profound philosophy, which all leading educators of life have recognized, that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” A culture of muscle alone is a one-sided culture. The culture of the reason alone is equally one-sided. A culture of memory alone is folly. The true culture is a culture of body, mind and heart, the soul in its entirety, with its many-sided relations to the truths which belong to those relations: God, neighbor, home, life, nation, time, eternity. The C. L. S. C. would indeed be a most narrow and bigoted thing if it were to refuse attention to the religious world. Now concerning Dr. Walker’s work on “The Plan of Salvation,” the name is, I confess, quite misleading. It is a book written forty years ago, by one of the ablest intellects of America. No American religious book has had a wider circulation. It is profoundly philosophical, and it gives a most original view of the old Jewish history; and a man’s education who calls himself an infidel is incomplete without reading that book. There is not the slightest tinge of sectarianism about it. It is a vigorous classic which every student of the English tongue should read. Hundreds of our readers, who are not members of any evangelical church, and who are skeptical in their tendency, have read the book with great delight, and though prejudiced somewhat against the title, have given words of testimony to its wonderful power as a literary production, to say nothing about the vigor of its arguments. You say you “find sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Can you not, if you find good in everything, find good in a philosophical book written by a mighty intellect, acknowledged by the scholars of the past forty years? “The Plan of Salvation” is not a discussion of the way a soul is to be saved. It is a discussion of the philosophy underlying the biblical history. You can not afford not to read it, even if you decline to prosecute our course of study. I am a little surprised that a broad man should be “decidedly opposed to teaching religious truths in schools of any kind.” What would a culture be that ignored the religious? One of the strongest arguments that I ever read in favor of the Bible as a text-book for study, was written by Huxley, who pleaded fervently for it as a book for study in every secular school. I do not “compel” you to read Walker’s book; I do not say you MUST buy the book. You may read any book on any phase of the question, Roman or Protestant, according to the tendency of your faith. Something on that line you must read to complete our broad survey.
