With the readers of this REVIEW, Professor Phelps is one of its most popular contributors, as he is at the height of popularity personally and as a teacher, with Yale students. His "Browning: How To Know Him" is one of the best helps in studying that poet. From some points of view the book now before us might be entitled The Bible: How to Know It-how to know it better, or at least in a different way from what some of us have learned, an additional way that will make it seem more wonderful and divine than ever as well as ...
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With the readers of this REVIEW, Professor Phelps is one of its most popular contributors, as he is at the height of popularity personally and as a teacher, with Yale students. His "Browning: How To Know Him" is one of the best helps in studying that poet. From some points of view the book now before us might be entitled The Bible: How to Know It-how to know it better, or at least in a different way from what some of us have learned, an additional way that will make it seem more wonderful and divine than ever as well as more closely human. We would like to put this fresh and vivid little book into every home in America. It would fascinate young and old with the transcendent charm and overmastering superiority of the Bible above all other literature. "Sprightly and forcible, full of vitality and the gusto that lures us to read," says the Evening Post's critic, whose notice goes on: "Professor Phelps shows how the influence of the Bible pervaded all medieval literature, but also its equal if not greater powerful presence in the literature of today. Kipling and Stevenson are saturated with the Bible; they reek with its influence in style and in matter." Professor Phelps truly says that "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" could not have been written without a profound knowledge of the New Testament. [The same is true of lbanez's great book, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"] Professor Phelps adds: "That arch pagan, George Moore, who boasts that he has not even a grain of faith, and who, in an autobiographical sketch, put down as his chief recreation religion, wrote a long novel on the life of Christ; and, although it is filled with sacrilege, it exhibits the away over his heart and mind held by the greatest personality in history. He found that he could not escape from the Son of man, and wrote this book to relieve his own mind, as old Burton wrote a treatise on melancholy to cure himself of it." Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch reminds us how Edward Fitz-Gerald recognized the superiority of the Bible by asking, "What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had had the writing of the Parables?" Sir Arthur adds: "Without pursuing that dreadful inquiry I ask you to note how carefully the Parables-those exquisite short stories-speak only of 'things which you can touch and see'--'A sower went forth to sow, ' "The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took'--and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount and nearly all the most impressive parts of the New Testament." There are but three chapters in Professor Phelps's book. The first is the most convincing, most captivating, and, so far as we know, the greatest essay on "Reading the Bible" ever written. Its forty-six pages are capable of making more converts than tons and shiploads of commentaries. The METHODIST REVIEW for March, 1919, was enriched by an article on the same subject by the same author. Passing the chapter on "Saint Paul as a Letter-Writer," we notice "Short Stories in the Bible." This last chapter says: The Short Story must be based on one event, or on a series of emotions called forth by a single situation. The lyrical poems of Robert Browning are short stories told in verse; he probably invented more plots than any other writer, and it is interesting to recall the remark of one of the shrewdest cinema managers of our time, who emphatically declared, "Robert Browning is the greatest writer for the movies that ever lived." Now as the Bible excels all other books in poetry, in prose historical narrative, in prophetic eloquence, in philosophy, political economy, and in worldly wisdom, so the finest short stories are to be found in the Bible. And these brief tales illustrate every phase of human nature. I heartily wish I might read for the first time the Bible stories, and judge them apart from the years of childhood training and instruction.
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