BOOKS.
MR. SHELDON'S " SERMON-STORIES."* MR. SHELDON, the minister of a Congregational church in Kansas, has presented the public with a literary puzzle. He has written a number of short stories which have attained perhaps a larger sale than any works of fiction that ever were published. In America and England he is said to have had something like three million readers. The books are called "sermon-stories." They were originally read to a Sunday evening congregation. Their purpose is to show the effect on ordinary men and women of a determination to act in accordance with the probable action of Christ had Christ lived in this century. The second title of one of the books, " What would Jesus Do 1" is the catchword running through them all. The plan of all the stories is much the same. The reader is introduced to the hero—a journalist, a manufac- turer, a mine-owner, a minister, or a farmer, as the case may be—just when he has made up his mind to apply this test, " What would Jesus do 1 " to all his public and private actions ; and the stories describe the many changes and sacri- fices which his new rule of life forces upon him. Mr. Sheldon, though dissatisfied with the present state of society, is not a Socialist ; he has no theory of political economy,—no know- ledge of that science, we should say. There are few dogmas in his sermons, and he offers very little argument to uphold what there are. He is not the advocate of any particular Church or system. Every man is to be guided by his own conscience, only bringing to bear on his actions this one test. The difficulty that consciences differ he admits, but he thinks that the amount to which they differ is exag- gerated, and there we quite agree with him. We do not think that moral eyesight differs much more than physical. No two people see quite alike, but physical phenomena make much the same impression on different pairs of eyes, or there would be no value in corroborative evidence. The outcome of their conversion is the same in all Mr. Sheldon's characters. They lead a very unselfish and strictly Puritan life. The stories are not badly told, but, though they are trimmed up with some exciting incidents, they are not exciting. They do not contain a single epigram, and hardly a grain of humour. For English readers they must, of course, be more entertain- ing than for American ones, as they describe a life which is to us, to a certain extent, new. The weary round of the Western farmer, who hates his work and longs for books and social intercourse, interests us, and so does the hard life of poor Mrs. Kirk, who left her comfortable home to live in a " sod house" or a "dug out" as a country minister's wife. Her daughter, too, the " hired help," may amuse those who are not in the way of helps. A general servant with £40 a year wages, two evenings out in the week, and the privilege of "answering back" to her mistress, is unknown on this side of the Atlantic ; but these are only pictures picked out of Mr. Sheldon's overwhelming mass of purpose. Worldly success or failure is quite immaterial to his converts. Malcolm Kirk, an " out West " minister, and perhaps the best-drawn character in all the books, sacrifices his scholarly tastes and all the instincts of his nature in the hope of weaning a lot of roughs and cowboys from gambling and drink. He had great literary abilities—we take them on the author's word—and he was offered the editorship of a religious newspaper. He would have liked the work better than any- thing in the world, but he thought he ought to stick to the cowboys, so at the last moment he resisted what he thought temptation, and threw the letter accepting the post into the fire, his poor little tired wife meekly giving up her hopes of civilisation, and only begging her husband to " save the stamp." The mine-owner in another story raises the wages of his men to what he considers a decent wage, and does his best to influence his class to do the same. The effect of his action on his fortune is not very satisfactorily explained, but apparently he scattered but to increase. Whether or no he ought to keep his riches at all is a question which agitates him all through the book, but he finally decides to keep the control and responsibility of them, spending largely in philan- • Richard Bruce; The -Twentieth Door; The Crucifixion• of Philip Strong; Malcolm Kirk ; Robert Hardy's Seven Days; In His Steps ; The Redemption of Free Town; and His Brother's Keeper. By Charles II. Sheldon. London : Frederick Warne and Co. fed. each.] thropic ventures for the good of his men. This last story is horribly wanting in taste; and we cannot but feel repulsed by the heroine—a Salvation Army lass—who marches through the town singing "Get out, Mephisto." The upshot of all the stories is a slightly modernised Puritanism. Mr. Sheldon deprecates drinking, gambling, smoking, and even dancing, as belonging to the pleasures of the saloon ; even too much indulgence in athletic sports is to be avoided as an amusement more fit for children than for serious men. Sunday is to be strictly kept. A journalist in one of the stories suffers many heartburnings, and makes many sacrifices, to avoid writing on or for Sunday. Politics, with unconscious irony, Mr. Sheldon does not think an edifying subject for Sunday meditation. His Sabbatarian arguments, oddly enough, do not come out of the Old Testament. The Old Testament, indeed, has very little place in his mind. " The Sabbath was made for man," that is enough, in his eyes, to prove that, as a time of rest, change, and worship, it is necessary to the spiritual life. We have read somewhere lately that if twenty men in full health were sure that they would only live a week, one would give his time to prayer and nineteen to drinking. Mr. Sheldon has given his hero, Robert Hardy, seven days to live, and has thought of a third alternative. Robert Hardy does in the face of death what for years he has not done,—his duty. He sets to work to improve the machinery in his ironfoundry, and to lessen the fatalities arising from too much economy and too slack discipline. He tries to make amends for his former neglect of his children, and to gain some influence over a backsliding son whose friendship he has never had time to cultivate. No one could have done in seven days what this man did, but the preacher is heedless of probabilities. His moral is so carelessly wrapped up that it bursts through the paper. Yet there is something curiously Apostolic about this narrative method.
With these stories before us, we cannot but wonder what has induced three millions of people to buy and read them. Of course they are cheap, but so are much more interesting things which do not sell many thousands. The only answer to this question which we can think of is that the public buys them because it agrees with them. The great majority of the English-speaking peoples are still, thank God, Puritans. Puritanism has not yet touched the lowest class,—they are too uncivilised to stand its discipline. It has become ineffec- tive in the upper class,—they are some of them too frivolous, and some perhaps too thoughtful, to bear its regulations, but it is the ideal of the majority. The only • difference between the new Puritanism and the old is that the ordinary man has now less time for thought than formerly, and he is less interested in abstract theology. Schemes of salvation and justification, apart from justice, have no meaning for him, but he still hungers and thirsts after righteous- ness. These books illustrate what we may call "a rule of thumb" for the production of a good life, and this is what the average man wants. To our mind, their moral significance is increased tenfold by their literary insignificance. Too many of the upper classes have played till they are useless, too many of the intellectual class have thought till they are paralysed by agnosticism ; but the great class below them who are surging up to swamp them are not going to play too much nor to think too much. They are going to act, and to act—if only the Puritan spirit keeps alive (and the sale of these books looks as if it were pretty vigorous)L-according to their conscience. For our race the Puritan road leads, we believe, to salvation. All others deny the genius of the people and lead to—perhaps France.
Previous page
