Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1893 — A Canon's Good Word for Novels. [ARTICLE]

A Canon's Good Word for Novels.

So far as principle goes there Rover has been in the world anything to compare with the Christian code as a training to the instinct, says Canon Browne, of St. Paul’s, in a recent article in tho London Humanitarian. And if I were asked what is tho host practical handmaid to that code, not as a matter of religious opinion or belief, but as a guide to a working instinct, I should answer that I know nothing better than a cloan, sweet, healthy novol; where the people are parubles rather than portraits; aro not impossible people, but tho better kind of every-day people; bright with tho charms which in real life lie dormant in so many; men and wortion moving through tho pages, with whom women and men as they read can honestly and wholly fall in lpvo. If only one of those who have tho power would make to this generation tho priceless present of a book that is not indeed a picture of a paradiso before the fall, but is not a picture of a hopelessly fallen world, where man is cruel and bru'al, and the sufferings of women are awful; if only such a writer would give us a wholesome book, whore sin and sorrow are not absent but aro in tho shade, and brightness and sympathy and love are tho forces that guide the instincts upward, and teach us to hopo for and show us how to labor for the happiness, the regeneration of a fallon world.