“Here, then, we find a prodigious mass of contradictory opinions, an infinite number of casuistical cases, a logic of scholastic theology, some recondite wisdom, and much rambling dotage; many puerile tales and oriental fancies; ethics and sophisms, reasonings and unreasonings, subtle solutions, and maxims and riddles.”—Benjamin Disraeli.
“It is a vast debating club in which there hum confusedly the myriad voices of at least five centuries. In its way, a unique code of laws, in comparison with which, in point of comprehensiveness, the law books of all other nations are but Lilliputian, and, when compared with the hum of its kaleidoscopic Babel, they resemble, indeed, calm and studious retreat.”—Prof. Delitzsch.
“It has proved a grateful task to wander through the mazes of the Talmud and cull flowers yet sparkling with the very dew of Eden. Figures in shining garments haunt its recesses. Prayers of deep devotion, sublime confidence and noble benediction, echo in its ancient tongue. Sentiments of lofty courage, of high resolve, of infantile tenderness, of far-seeing prudence, fall from the lips of venerable sages. No less practicable would it be to stray with an opposite intention, and to extract venom, instead of honey, from the flowers that seem to spring up in self-sown profusion. Fierce, intolerant, vindictive hatred for mankind; idle subtlety; pride and self conceit amounting to insanity; indelicacy pushed to a grossness that renders what it calls virtue more hateful than the vice of more modest people; all these strung together would give no more just an idea of the Talmud than would the chaplets of its lovelier flowers.”—Edinburgh Review.
A Remarkable Story.
Strange Threads. A Novel. By J. Douglas. 12mo, cloth, 60c. (15c); 22 oz
This is not only a remarkable story in itself but is really wonderful in its power to interest its readers, and in the various ways in which it impresses them. A gentleman whom the Christian Leader, Cincinnati, calls “a wise and critical connossieur” pronounces this book, with the possible exception of Vanity Fair, “the most original novel I ever read. * * I should have to go back as far as ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette,’ to name a novel as good as ‘Strange Threads,’ and I am not at all certain that this is not as strong as either of them.” And the Leader calls the book the “creation of a master imagination” and declares it to be “evidently the product of a genius.” The burden of testimony is along this line. Still there are
A FEW CONTRARY MINDS
whose opinions we quote in connection with the favorable criticisms.
“One can conceive that with less effort the author might write a passable book. As to the present book it is fairly unreadable, and the veriest devourer of romances cannot possibly get past the opening chapters without the feeling that he is in for a bad time.”—Daily Bee, Omaha, Neb.
“The publisher has done more than the writer for this book. The type and paper are so agreeable that one is tempted to read on, long after the discovery that there is little in the matter worthy of serious consideration. The author has shown a certain shrewdness, however, in filling the vacuum produced by absence of intellect in the book by cramming it with sentiment.”—The Epoch, N. Y. City.