Unfortunately for our first impression of the merit of the little volume of which “Surly Tim” is the initial story, we began our reading with “Lodusky,” attracted to it by the locality of the tale, its hill people and dialect being a loadstone to us, but lately returned from similar surroundings. But as even in our mountain Edens we find the trail of the serpent, so in “Lodusky” we seemed to be treading the familiar path of moral irresponsibility and the tyranny of personal magnetism, and we craved the flaming sword of the archangel to put the evil to flight.
Nor did our impression grow fairer on turning to “Le Monsieur de la Petite Dame.” But in “One Day at Arle” and in “Seth” we welcomed truly the author’s strong and exquisite pathos. In these pictures of the sorrow of the laboring classes the author draws with a pencil full of feeling, working under a sky whose hue is the leaden monotone of modern French landscape painting; a break of sunshine here and there, but the light seems to fall, after all, on earthly stubble and the dumb, almost soulless faces of patient cattle that know nothing beyond their daily furrow and the mute, faithful service they bear a kindly hand at the plough.
We are reminded of the pathos of Robert Buchanan’s North-Coast verse, and we close the little volume sadly, almost as if all human sorrow wherein is no Christian joy stood at our threshold, asking from us an alms we had no power to give.
Repertorium Oratoris Sacri: Containing Outlines of Six Hundred Sermons for all the Sundays and Holidays of the Ecclesiastical Year; also for other solemn occasions. Compiled from the works of eminent preachers of various ages and nations by a secular priest. With an introduction by the Rt. Rev. Joseph Dwenger, D.D., Bishop of Fort Wayne. New York and Cincinnati: Fr. Pustet, Typographus Sedis Apostolicæ. 1877.
This publication is to be continued in monthly parts, each part containing the outlines of two sermons for each Sunday and holiday for one quarter of the year. There will be four volumes of four parts each, so that when the work is completed there will be eight sermons for each occasion.
It will, if it fulfils the promise of this first number, be the best and most complete collection of the kind ever published so far as we are aware. It hardly needs to be said that plans of sermons such as are here given are very much more valuable to a preacher than the actual sermons themselves; for there are few who can give with much effect the words of another, to say nothing of the trouble involved in committing them to memory. The sermons of great pulpit orators are indeed extremely useful and deserving of study as models of style; but a few will answer that purpose as well as a thousand.
The work is in English, being designed principally for use in this country. It is most earnestly to be hoped that it will receive the liberal support which it certainly deserves.
Nicholas Minturn. A Study in a Story. By J. G. Holland. 1 vol. 12mo. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1877.