Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 156, June 11, 1919Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 156, June 11, 1919
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
That audacious paraphrase of the Book of Job, _The Undying Fire_
(CASSELL), seems to me to be marred by a fundamentally false note. I am
sure that Mr. WELLS is as serious about his new God in the Heart of
Man as he was about the Invisible King--I've no sort of intention of
sneering--but I cannot credit him with belief in the Adversary, who by
arrangement with the Almighty (as set forth in a discreetly flippant
prologue with something of the flavour of those irreverent yarns
invented and retailed by Italian ecclesiastics about Dominiddio) visits
_Job Huss_, the headmaster of Woldingstanton, with the plagues of his
desperate trial. However I take it that the author was anxious that his
parody should be as complete in form as possible, and, being rather
impressed by the insouciance, not to say insolence, of the Satan of the
original, seized his chance of bizarre characterisation and "celestial
badinage" and let consistency go hang for the time. Certainly the
theological disquisitions of Mr. WELLS are remarkable not for their
formal logic, but for their provocative quality and the very real
eloquence of detached passages of the rambling argument. In particular,
taking up again the thread of _Joan and Peter_, he gives such a survey
of the scope and glories of a new education that is to salve the world's
wounds as would move the heart of a jelly-fish. Mr. WELLS has his own
methods of justifying the ways of God to man. He may be discursive,
impatient, rash, perhaps a little shallow; but he has an undying fire of
his own. He is certainly not dull. And therefore orthodox divines and
pedagogues may perhaps have a real grievance against him. But I can't
imagine any serious-minded man in a serious time reading this book and
not getting hope and courage from it.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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