“Mr. Hartford, I received a copy of your book, The Christmas Room as a gift for my birthday in October. I just wanted you to know how much I appreciated so much of it. My husband passed away 3 years ago after being in a wonderful caring center for about 8 months. I actually experienced many of the kind people that you had in your book and it made my Christmas much easier. Thank you for writing it and I just wanted you to know it meant a great deal to me.”
Many thanks for that kind note.
But reading that book also prompted Claire and me to think about the books that had actually made the world better -- at least, our world. We decided to make it a project, one that would cause us to look back, remember, and evaluate the books that had most shaped our lives for the better. It proved to be a very worthwhile exercise for us both and we have decided to share it. We hope you find our answers of interest even as we suggest that you consider pondering a similar experiment. So, let’s go. Aside from the Bible itself, we are going to tell you the 10 Books That Made Us…And 5 Others That Also Helped.
You'll find that piece on the Vital Signs Ministries website right here.
The other day I picked out The Strong and the Weak (1948). Perhaps because I was reading it in between sessions with Cal Thomas’ Watchman in the Night, the Book of Hebrews, and Rafael Sabatini’s novel The Snare, I found Tournier tough going for awhile. But I stayed doggedly with it and, by the time I had started the last third of the book, I was really pleased that I had done so. Not because it had ever become easier reading, but because the Lord was underscoring several of the points Tournier made in the book and letting me clearly know that I had a lot to learn, think about, and apply.
But because very few of you will take my recommendation so passionately that you’re going to go order the book for immediate reading (!), let me pass along a few of my favorite quotes from Paul Tournier’s The Strong and the Weak.
Speaking of the “great illusion…that there are two kinds of human beings, the strong and the weak. The truth is that human beings are much more alike than they think. What is different is the eternal mask, sparkling or disagreeable, their outward reaction, strong or weak.” (Pages 20,21)
“The reason why so many conversations remain shallow is that the speakers are all running away from one another…They hide their vulnerable selves behind a screen of banal remarks, polite compliments, witticisms, or artificial extravagances. An absolutely honest and direct intercourse, free from subterfuge, pretense, evasion and swank is difficult to maintain. As soon as it becomes dangerous, we wrap ourselves up like warships in a smoke-screen.” (Pages 97, 98)
“One can never foresee the means that God will use to touch a man’s heart, the roads along which He will drive him, nor the moment at which He will intervene in his life. It may be at the height of happiness, or in the midst of a painful crisis. It may be my means of a slow process of evolution, or quite suddenly and unexpectedly. But it is always through the free intervention of the Spirit.” (Page 143)
“For the respect for the human person, the protection of the weak, charity, and the necessity of salvation by God, professed by Christianity, our age has substituted the cult of the State, the veneration of force, the crushing of the weak in the struggle for life, and confidence in the greatness of man, ceaselessly climbing the ladder of progress and power.” (Page 161)
“A man’s true value consists in his likeness to God. What gives value to his thoughts, his feelings and his actions, is the extent to which they are inspired by God, the extent to which they expressed the thought, the will, and the acts of God.” (Page 163)
“We are all equal in sin and in moral wretchedness. It is conventionalism which judges men by their social facade, whereas the gospel looks into the heart…The further we advance in the Christian life, the more we become aware of our sin. It is as if weights were continually being added to one of the pans of a balance; and each time this happens we need more of God’s grace in the other pan in order to reestablish the equilibrium.” (Page 175)
“Faith is a strength, a concrete and practical strength. The Christian life is not abstention. Genuine conversion, far from paralyzing the person, makes it dynamic.” (Page 202)
“I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am not criticizing the strong. It is right that they should use in His service the natural gifts entrusted to them by God. But the authentic mark of the Spirit is just this sincerity by which the strong may recognize how much of their action is only too human, and admit that they are not as strong as they are reckoned to be by the mass of their followers who have set them up as leaders. The greatest witness the weak can bear is in the victories they can win over their own natures and the strength of the Spirit. The contrary is the case with the strong. The strong man witnesses best not by showing off his strength or his power to dominate others with his mind or his words, but in his victory over himself in becoming humble, tolerant, and gentle. This is the more difficult because he has a part to play that is more in the public eye, and because it is no longer a question of influencing others (which he finds easy) but of mastering himself...The fact is that true faith is as difficult for the strong as for the weak.” (Page 216)
“That day I realized all at once that when my services were called upon in the church, it was much more because of my natural than my supernatural gifts. That evening I was with some friends and told them what God had shown me, and I knelt down with them to pray that thenceforward He would build my service to Him more on what came from Him, and less on what came from me. Let us therefore be careful not to confuse natural strength with that of the Spirit.” (Page 218)
“Faith does help us to accept our nature, to carry its burdens like a cross, to offer it to God to be used in His service, to derive some good from it and not merely suffering.” (Page 241)
“If our lives are directed by the Spirit, we may count upon real particular victories over our natures, but we can never expect a total, final victory. It is quite as wrong to deny the partial victories as to exaggerate their importance. Our nature may be transformed in part; but there remains a part of it that we must simply accept as it is. To prefer the fairy-story is in fact to rebel against our human condition, to refuse to carry our cross, to seek to know in this life the complete liberation which will be ours only in the life hereafter.” (Page 246)
“As we travel this road, we find that grace constantly increases...Grace is infinitely bigger than we imagine. All has already been accomplished in Jesus Christ. In proportion as we recognize the evil in our own hearts, we appreciate more fully what he has done for us. In proportion, as we become aware of our wretchedness, we see that He has already answered it in advance by His sacrifice.” (Page 249)
“He is alive. If we open our hearts to Him, He fills them with His presence. Insofar as He thus lives in us, we are delivered from our weak reactions, while at the same time becoming more aware than ever of our weakness. We are delivered also from our strong reactions, while at the same time receiving from Him a strength that is beyond compare.” (Page 251)
And this brings me to the subject of reading. Because that’s one of my areas of ongoing resolution, I take a little time at the end of every quarter (or somewhere near there) to review, remember, evaluate, and recommend my recent reading. Here is how I wrote up my “reading report card” for the 2nd quarter.
Grade -- B+. Books read -- 16. “Yes, our schedule seems to be busier than ever, but I can’t let that be the full explanation for my book numbers being a little lower than normal. I need to do better at avoiding distractions; to work on creating a comfortable atmosphere more conducive to reading; to set more time aside for living room reading with Claire; to continue encouraging others to read (including reading the same books as me); and to spend a bit more time on posts for The Book Den blog. Above all, do not let the spirit of the age (a “cancel culture” that dumbs down one’s reading skills, attention span, and appreciation of the crucial importance of reading quality books) make any more inroads into my life.
And in An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis explained his convictions this way, “The majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work…Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.”
Similar observations were made by Francois Mauriac --“Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you re-read.” And by Vladimir Nabokov, “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only re-read it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a re-reader.”
With that perspective explained, here’s the reading list.
* I closed March’s reading while we were still in Branson with Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. A fine story. (A re-read.)
* May was an extremely busy month and I only got in two books. I finished the series by enjoying The Return of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien and then spent a pleasant evening with a Golden Age mystery, Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin.
* June’s reading included another Edmund Crispin mystery, Swan Song (not quite as good as the earlier one of his); Edmund Crispin) and a re-read of C.S. Lewis trilogy -- Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.
* And so that makes only 15 books. What’s #16? Well, that would be one the reasons I haven’t finished more titles this quarter because, along the way, I have carefully been making my way through William L. Shirer’s classic history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This book too is a re-read but one with so much information (startling, detailed, and spiritually challenging information) that it is taking me awhile to move through its more than 1,200 pages.
So, there you go – a quick quarterly reading review written, at least in part, as an encouragement for you to join me in beating back the lethargy and the lure of the television by reading more. Indeed, I close this post with a snappy (and very quick) video apologetic on the matter.
The result is that in a matter of hours a few tech companies can demolish any targeted business or ideological competitor. An upstart like Parler, a conservative free-speech alternative to Twitter, was on a trajectory in early January 2020 to sign up twenty million new users. Yet it was virtually strangled in a single weekend by the coordination of Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet. They colluded, operating with the shared idea that the tiny Twitter rival did not appropriately censor user content in the post–January 6 climate. The tweets did not suit the tastes of the left-wing Big Tech industry.
Parler went in hours from a rising conservative answer to Big Tech’s social-media monopoly to a nonentity.
Accordingly, Alphabet kicked Parler off its Google Play Store. That exclusion made it impossible for millions of mobile-phone users to download access to the application. Apple banned Parler from its Apple App Store, even though it was already ranking as the number-one free application. Amazon cut Parler off entirely from its Amazon Web Services. As a result, Parler went in hours from a rising conservative answer to Big Tech’s social-media monopoly to a nonentity.”
(From Victor Davis Hanson's not-to-be-missed article, Silicon Valley’s Moral Bankruptcy, published last May in The New Criterion.)
“He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed." (Isaiah 53:5)
Pay attention, all families of the nations, and observe! An extraordinary murder has taken place in the center of Jerusalem, in the city devoted to God’s law, in the city of the Hebrews, in the city of the prophets, in the city thought of as just. And Who has been murdered? And who is the murderer? I am ashamed to give the answer, but give it I must. For if this murder had taken place at night, or if he had been slain in a desert place, it would be well to keep silent; but it was in the middle of the main street, even in the center of the city, while all were looking on, that the unjust murder of this just Person took place.
And thus He was lifted up upon the tree, and an inscription was affixed identifying the One Who had been murdered. Who was He? It is painful to tell, but it is more dreadful not to tell. Therefore, hear and tremble because of Him for Whom the earth trembled.
The One who hung the earth in space, is Himself hanged; the One who fixed the heavens in place, is Himself impaled; the One who firmly fixed all things, is Himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel.
O frightful murder! O unheard of injustice! The Lord is disfigured and He is not deemed worthy of a cloak for His naked body, so that He might not be seen exposed. For this reason the stars turned and fled, and the day grew quite dark, in order to hide the naked Person hanging on the tree, darkening not the body of the Lord, but the eyes of men.
Yes, even though the people did not tremble, the earth trembled instead; although the people were not afraid, the heavens grew frightened; although the people did not tear their garments, the angels tore theirs; although the people did not lament, the Lord thundered from heaven, and the most high uttered His voice.
But the Lord arose from the dead and mounted up to the heights of heaven. When the Lord had clothed Himself with humanity, and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer, and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned, and had been judged for the sake of the condemned, and buried for the sake of the ones who were buried.
He rose up from the dead, and cried aloud with this voice, “Who is he who contends with me? Let him stand in opposition to Me. I set the condemned man free; I gave the dead man life; I raised up the one who had been entombed.”
“Who is my opponent? I,” He says, “am the Christ. I am the One who destroyed death, and triumphed over the enemy, and trampled Hades under foot, and bound the strong one, and carried off man to the heights of heaven. I,” He says, “am the Christ.”
“Therefore, come, all families of men, you who have been befouled with sins, and receive forgiveness for your sins. I am your forgiveness, I am the passover of your salvation, I am the Lamb which was sacrificed for you, I am your ransom, I am your light, I am your Savior, I am your resurrection, I am your king, I am leading you up to the heights of heaven, I will show you the eternal Father, I will raise you up by my right hand.”
This is the One Who made the heavens and the earth, and Who in the beginning created man, Who was proclaimed through the law and prophets, Who became human via the virgin, Who was hanged upon a tree, Who was buried in the earth, Who was resurrected from the dead, and Who ascended to the heights of heaven, Who sits at the right hand of the Father, Who has authority to judge and to save everything, through Whom the Father created everything from the beginning of the world to the end of the age.
This is the alpha and the omega. This is the beginning and the end -- an indescribable beginning and an incomprehensible end. This is the Christ. This is the King. This is Jesus. This is the general. This is the Lord. This is the One Who rose up from the dead. This is the One Who sits at the right hand of the Father. He bears the Father and is borne by the Father, to Whom be the glory and the power forever. Amen.
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Nicholas Carr)
“What the FDA Hasn’t Told You About Mifepristone” (Erik Baptist, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom)
“The New Great Game” (Joel Kotkin and Hügo Krüger)
“Are We the Byzantines?” (Victor Davis Hanson)
And three from me:
“Nothing Good Does God Withhold”
And a book I just finished and loved, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Anthony Estolen)
“In the biblical view the issue is not modern versus postmodern. Both these views are partly right, and both are finally wrong. Nor is it rational argument versus story or reason versus imagination. In fact it is not either-or at all. The deep logic of God’s truth can be expressed in both stories and argument, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans.
This is one reason why C.S. Lewis has had such enduring appeal. At times he was coolly rational, as in Mere Christianity, while at other times he engaged the imagination brilliantly, as in The Screwtape Letters or The Chronicles of Narnia. There is a time for stories, and there is a time for rational arguments, and the skill we need lies in knowing which to use, and when.” (Os Guinness, “Fool’s Talk”)
In particular, a young priest and language scholar in England took Erasmus’ New Testament to his very heart. He was William Tyndale, a man who would later testify that he found Jesus Christ in that Greek New Testament and, depending upon Christ's mercy, Tyndale dedicated his life to producing the Holy Scriptures in the English language.
However, Tyndale’s great vision was opposed by strictly and ruthlessly applied laws prohibiting the translation of the Bible into the language of the people. Indeed, parents had been burned at the stake simply for teaching their children the English version of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments.
But God honored William Tyndale’s noble desires and the brave, diligent, prayerful work it required to bring them to pass. The Bible was translated into English and disseminated throughout the country. And though Tyndale paid the ultimate price, being martyred by strangulation and burning in October 1536, he considered his life's work a wonderful investment for his eternity.
The Bible in our own language, my oh, my. We have heroes to thank for this awesome blessing and a heroic heritage to treasure. And, of course, a Bible in our own language that we should be reading (and obeying) much more than we do.
Extra note: The bronze statue shown here was created by J.E. Boehm in 1883. This bronze statue was placed in Whitehall Gardens on May 7th 1884 as part of the 80th anniversary of the British and Foreign Bible Society.
The Inscription on the front of the plinth reads...
William Tyndale
First translator of the New Testament into English from the Greek. Born A.D. 1484, died a martyr at Vilvorde in Belgium, A.D. 1536.
“Thy word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path” - “the entrance of thy words giveth light.” Psalm CXIX. 105.130.
“And this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his son.” I. John V.II.
The last words of William Tyndale were “Lord! Open the King of England's eyes”. Within a year afterwards, a Bible was placed in every parish church by the King's command.
I’ve pondered these thoughts after recently re-reading two short works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. White Nights is 55 pages, Dream a mere 25 pages but, especially when read together, they illustrate how remarkably changed were Dostoevsky’s attitudes and perceptions of life from his early years starting out in Saint Petersburg’s literary circle until his days in Staraya.
White Nights was written in 1848. Dostoevsky was young and just getting started. He had high principles and firm hopes – both rooted in an optimistic socialism. He was a very emotional, introspective man (those traits never changed) but he was a believer in rationality, progress, and the positive role that a Christian could have in establishing meaningful relationships and in building a just society.
White Nights is a compelling love story that reflects these things. It isn’t an easy read for Westerners. Indeed, the lovesick protagonists are sometimes maudlin and verbose to a point most of us would believe silly, but one must remember Dostoevsky was writing to a 19th Century Russian audience who loved Pushkin’s and Gogol’s over-the-top emotional scenes.
The story introduces a young recluse who has retired into a weird, introspective fantasy life after failing in normal relationships. He imagines passersby as his friends; he thinks of buildings as greeting him in his daily walks; he builds love castles in the air. But one day he fumbles his way though a strange circumstance in which he actually speaks to a girl. He loves her immediately and releases all the stored up passion in his lonely heart. She eventually agrees to marry him until an unexpected twist in the story takes her back to a former suitor. It’s all a bit eerie and, on the surface, every relationship left in the story looks unhealthy and doomed.
But not exactly so. For Dostoevsky describes the boy’s love, unrequited as it is, to be an ennobling, liberating, and highly spiritual experience. And even in a Western reader’s discomfort with the story’s heavy emotionalism (and perhaps their disappointment in the story’s conclusion), one is left with a moving respect for Dostoevsky’s commitment to the exalting power of unconditional love. It is a bright and joyous tale even though the boy loses the girl (as a wife anyhow) because it reveals how sacrificial love has transformed the boy’s life into something beyond loneliness. He is now a man with a true heart and noble goals who is finally involved in the real world.
But White Nights was written before Dostoevsky’s arrest, before the famed “almost execution” where he was minutes away from a firing squad. It was written before his imprisonment, exile, and intense suffering from a variety of illnesses. The changes wrought in the author's life by these grievous trials were profound. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s already emotional and introspective personality began to bend still further towards mystery, then doubt, and eventually to a fascination with the irrational and morbid. Though still deeply religious, the optimism and joy ebbed away from Dostoevsky and he began to plumb the murkier waters of man’s fallen nature.
His contemporary Ivan Turgenev determined that Dostoevsky was the nastiest Christian he had ever known.
So by the time Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Dream of a Ridiculous Man nearly 30 years later, his beliefs and artistic purposes dramatically changed. This, the last short story he ever wrote, is a brief and bizarre tale about another reclusive dreamer and another accidental (but life-changing) meeting. As the story begins, the protagonist (never named) is planning his suicide. He has ceased to think along rational lines but is guilty of overthinking nonetheless, trying to fathom the deepest motives behind his and others’ actions.
A crying child, panicked because of a catastrophe that has befallen her, appeals to the man. He shuns her, even runs away from her. But his subsequent examination of why he was so cruel and selfish distracts him from his suicide plans. He sleeps for the first time in days. While he sleeps, he experiences a wild dream in which he’s taken to another planet, an Edenic society where the inhabitants are all gentle, loving and pure. However, rather than embracing the peace and innocence he finds here, the protagonist ends up contaminating the entire world. The people of the paradise all fall into sin just as did Adam and Eve. The story thus allows Dostoevsky ample opportunity to describe the bleak pessimism that now owned his life.
Below is an excerpt…
They learned about shame and they made a virtue of it. The concept of honor appeared, and each alliance hoisted its colors. They started to torture animals, and the animals escaped into the forests and became their enemies. They fought to secede, for independence, for individual advantages, for what’s mine and what’s yours. They ended speaking different languages; they experienced suffering, and came to love; they declared that suffering was the only way to Truth. Then science spread among them.
As they became evil, they talked about fraternity and humanitarianism and came to understand those concepts; as they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up voluminous codes of laws to enforce their justice – and built a guillotine to enforce their laws.
They only dimly recalled the things they had lost and refused to believe that there had been a time when they were pure and happy. They even dismissed as ridiculous all possibility of return to that lost bliss, branding it a pipe dream. They were unable to visualize or conceive of it...
Religions appeared worshiping the nonbeing and self-annihilation for the sake of an eternal repose in nothingness.
Finally these people grew tired in their senseless efforts and suffering appeared on their faces. Then they proclaimed that suffering is beautiful because suffering alone contains thought. So they praised suffering in their songs. I walked among them wringing my hands in despair and crying over them. I believe I loved them even more than before the suffering had appeared on their features, when they were still so pure and beautiful. I loved their degraded earth more than I had loved it when it was a Garden of Eden, if only because sorrow had made its appearance in it. Alas, though I’ve always welcomed sorrow and torment myself, I was not happy to see them struck by it, and it made me cry.”
Near the end of Dostoevsky’s story, the man finally awakens from the nightmare. But it has caused him to be an even stranger, more manic personality than ever. In fact, he becomes a kind of preacher -- though he confesses that he doesn’t make much sense and is really quite unable to put into words the message of his dream. He is ridiculous to others and even to himself.
Ironically though, Dostoevsky’s hero is no longer suicidal. He’s not even lonely or unhappy. He now understands that true happiness, real spirituality is something which emerges from feeling, not thinking. He had been too tied up by rationality. Freedom came as he released himself to God. And God was to be found not in organized religion or divine revelation but from purely subjective sources...even the surrealism of a dream.
The Dream of the Ridiculous Man thus underscores several of Dostoevsky’s philosophic themes from those last years of his life. Society is a sham, composed of hypocritical people and unjust institutions. Religion surely gives meaning to an individual’s life, he would argue, but it will be a religion that is subjective, incommunicable, non-rational. And suffering, even when it is caused by wickedness, is a positive thing not because it provides opportunity for character transformation (which would be the traditional Christian view), but because it thus provokes an escape from the world of reason and social relationships into the more profound spiritual mysteries of the self. In Dostoevsky’s view now, prayer becomes less a conversation with God than it is an exercise in self-contained meditation.
Certainly Dostoevsky’s popularity has waned in recent decades. His dualism, dark moods and distorted characters are tough to take in regular doses. Readers now prefer brighter themes. Even the most committed cynics have moved away from such dark writers as Kafka, Nietzsche, Camus, and Dostoevsky, preferring their skepticism colored in lighter shades and guided by the elements of Eastern religion or socialism, Scientism or liberal self-help formulas, even Gaia-inspired nature love.
And Christian readers? Well, they were never all that attracted to Fyodor Dostoevsky anyhow. And while they might be persuaded to share an occasional evening with such curmudgeons as T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, or Hilaire Belloc, Fyodor Dostoevsky was way too much of a downer to endure. True, there is that marvelous chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, “The Grand Inquisitor,” that they read in college or in an anthology. That was okay. But for the long haul, they desire cheerier companions, Christian writers who applaud and promote the fruits of the Spirit in one’s life -- writers who gratefully acknowledge objectivity, rationality, social relationships, beauty, the value of love in action, the trustworthy revelation of Scripture, and the triumph of Christ’s atoning work.
Had Fyodor Dostoevsky kept the enthusiasm for life and love and optimism that he so compelling portrayed in “White Nights,” I have no doubt he would have remained not only in the pantheon of great writers, but in the one dedicated to popular and beloved writers as well. But alas, by concentrating his search for truth in the turgid waters of subjective suffering, mystery, and the unknowable depths of the human psyche, he made sure his following (that is, the people who actually read him and try to understand his work) will be small.
The first of those classes Coleridge believed were the sponges. They were those, he said, “who absorb all they read and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied.” Ouch!
The second class consisted of the sand glass (moderns would know them as hourglass) readers. These retained nothing from their time with a book. Indeed, they were content to merely get through the book for the sake of passing the time.
The third class? They were the strain-bags, like our day’s tea bags, who retained merely the dregs of what they read.
And, finally, Mr. Coleridge described the fourth class of readers as “mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read and enable others to profit by it also.”
Mogul diamonds; that, of course, is the class to shoot for, becoming a reader that allows quality books to illuminate his own life and then who gratefully passes the glistening shine on to others.
But the book I picked up at The Antiquarium was unique in several points. For instance, it served to introduce me to a writer who was remarkably talented in many genres. Indeed, this particular book showcased the writer's skill in poetry, essays, journalism, literary criticism, and short stories. There was an especially arresting quality about the writer's perspective as well. He looked at the same things that others did but from a different angle, one that illuminated and made memorable the truth of the thing. And finally, he was a master wordsmith who wrote in a style that liberally used metaphor, symbol, paradox, and humor -- and yet one which produced an analysis of even complex matters that was clear as glass.
And I'd better add this. The writer was an absolute delight to read! Fascinating, provocative, convincing, inspiring, and, like I said, quite funny. Even when he was making the most serious of moral exhortations, he was able to do so with mirth, wit, and a charming confidence.
Not bad for three dollars.
But before I knew of those GKC books and poems that would become treasured reading for me down through the years (The Man Who Was Thursday, Manalive, "Lepanto", Orthodoxy, the Father Brown stories, Heretics, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Thing, The Club of Queer Trades, "The House of Christmas," "The Donkey," the numerous collections of essays, and much more), I was first drawn in through reading just one enchanting essay while standing in the dark stall of that Old Market book shop.
That essay was called "On Running After One's Hat" and it was for that essay alone that I bought the book and began my adventure.
By the way, if you're interested, that very essay, "On Running After One's Hat," can be read on-line right here. Go ahead; do it! And I hope that it stimulates and delights you like it did me those many years ago.
Then said Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, "I am going to my Father's; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder."
When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said, "Death, where is thy sting?" And as he went down deeper, he said, "Grave, where is thy victory?" So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
In these wet and windswept evenings of autumn, just having returned from a rather wet and windswept couple of weeks of ministry in Great Britain, I am once again enjoying the provocative novel of Michael Ende, his masterful The Neverending Story. The novel is a modern fairy tale, wonderfully filled with surreal characters, magic, heroism, and bold adventure. It is an extremely entertaining read. Nevertheless, it is much more than that. The Neverending Story is also a very special fantasy, one that provides a bountiful share of spiritual applications in its thrilling and memorable pages.
And why does Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) resound so deeply within us all? Because it is a story of profound repentance and reclamation, a story that offers to our history of moral cowardice, failure, and guilty conscience the welcome hope that change for the better can occur.