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religion

The Long Sunday, by Peter Fletcher (1958)

Church, prayer, going to Sunday services and weekday evening meetings remains the center of life for some families and communities. One hundred years ago, they were the frameworks of the rituals and values of many English people, particularly those of the class of shopkeepers and lesser professions. Each denomination and sect identified itself through its practices and principles.

As Peter Fletcher shows in his memoir, The Long Sunday, the Wesleyan Chapel in their East Coast seaside town was the center of his family’s lives, the measure by which they judged themselves and their neighbors. His parents’ commitment to faithful attendance, service in countless supporting chores, and application of the church’s strictures to control their children and condemn their neighbors was the one point on which they could agree. They were united in their ability to place their brethren in precise order of damnation or salvation. They knew “who was making eyes at whom, who was being married, who was expected to die, who was prosperous, who was running for bankruptcy, who was suspected of secret drinking, card-playing and other vices.”

This was even easier when it came to other Christian churches. “I could have prepared a seating-plan of Heaven — this is where my concentric circles first come in — showing exactly where the members of the several denominations, from Salvationists to Roman Catholics, would find themselves in relation to the Great White Throne.” “Without the slightest hesitation I could have decided to whom to distribute harps and haloes, and who would be fortunate to secure ‘standing room only’ on the edge of the outer darkness.”

In all other matters, Peter realized as he grew, their primary function was to serve the other as “a catalyst precipitating resentment.” His father was to blame for all his mother’s disappointments, and vice-versa. “The one thing they had in common was their religion.” They projected their expectations onto their children, and in his zealous quest to please them by achieving all possible prizes for service, rote learning, and generally pious demeanor, Peter acknowledges that “By the time I had reached the age of fourteen I was an unsufferably self-righteous little prig.”

At that point, however, his attitude began to change, and it was primarily due to his own quiet, careful observation of the adults in the congregation. He began to notice the discrepancies between what people did and said in church and what they did after. “For reasons best known to themselves the adults were by common consent playing, and thoroughly enjoying, a highly dramatic game of ‘let’s pretend.'”

That didn’t prevent him, though, from throwing himself headlong into throng when an Evangelistic Campaign pitched its tent in town. “I was one of those into whose hands this great enterprise had been committed. I was on the inside, looking out.” He goes to all the meetings, and vies with the best of them when it came to profess his sins and ask for redemption: “the longer one person went on the longer would the others be likely to go on when their turn came. So once a prayer meeting got under way there was no telling when it would stop.”

Growing up in an environment go strenuously concerned with following the straight and narrow path did mean that certain aspects of Peter’s upbringing were neglected. Here, for example, is the sum of his father’s attempt to explain the facts of life:

“That’s a tom-cat, but it has been cut.”
“I didn’t notice anything wrong with it.”
“Of course you didn’t. I said it’s been cut.”
His tone of voice indicated that the word, ‘cut,” had some special significance, but I hadn’t the remotest idea what it was; so after a pause, I said, Oh, has it?”
My father asked:
“You know what I mean, don’t you?”
I answered, “No.”
“Well, if you don’t know what I mean, I can’t tell you!” My father replied, and relapsed into morose silence. And that was the beginning and the end of all the parental instruction I ever received into the mysteries of procreation.

It is only when Peter enlists in the Royal Ordinance Corps several months after the start of the war in 1914 that he is able to step free of the pressure to “play along” with the rituals of his family and the church. Being treated as an anonymous and presumably incompetent recruit comes as something of a relief. And when a big, coarse, hard-drinking Welshman in his unit shows some kindness to him after Peter passes out on the parade ground, he realizes that the man is treating him in a more truly Christian manner than anything he had experienced in nearly twenty years’ daily life in the Wesleyan Church: “I have given up the religious which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy, or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday.”

The Long Sunday is a remarkable effort to understand a time, a place, and a way of making sense of the world that Fletcher himself has moved on from without ever giving the sense that he is trying to reject it or undermine it by revealing its flaws. Whatever flaws he can now recognize in his parents, their rituals and beliefs, and their efforts to pass them along to him, he is less interested in passing judgment than in achieving some perspective and balance in his understanding. And in that regard, The Long Sunday is a model of a clear-eyed but deeply sympathetic approach to revisiting one’s past.

Peter Fletcher went on to become a psychologist, working for many years in the London Clinic for Religious Psychology and writing a series of guides aimed at common readers such as Mastering Life, Mastering your nerves (1939), Emotional Conflict (1958), and Understanding Your Emotional Problems (1968).

The Long Sunday, by Peter Fletcher
London: Faber & Faber, 1958

What’s Right with the World, by Marcus Bach (1973)

Cover of What's Right with the World

Marcus Bach was something like the Jan Morris of religion. Starting with They Have Found a Faith (1946), he wrote around a dozen books about his encounters with religions, cults, sects, and other groups of people gathered around a belief system, be it large or small. Every once in a while, I read a chapter or two from one of his books, a number of which are available from the Internet Archive or Open Library. The diversity of faiths is something that fascinates me, even if I haven’t yet found a particular harbor in which I’m ready to drop anchor, and Bach had an admirable capacity for openness and accepting people’s beliefs at face value.

Feeling rather bleak about the state of things after spending the last three weeks in the U.S., I went to find one of Bach’s books to sample and was surprised to find What’s Right with the World (1973) — a title I’d managed to overlook. Its title certainly offered about as obvious a palliative to my discontents as one could ask for. I’m pretty skeptical when it comes to any self-help-ish sort of book. From my experience, they’re usually a handful of good but simplistic ideas swaddled in a hundred pages or more of padding, a bit like feeding your soul or character a marshmallow. When I saw the inscription in the Open Library copy, however — “For Alice — What’s right with the world? You! Marcus Bach” — I couldn’t resist. One of the constant right things in my world is my daughter Alice.

Marcus Bach inscription in What's Right with the World

At the time Bach wrote the book, he and his wife were living in Palos Verdes, California. In those days before emission standards, things in the L.A. area tended to appear bright and sunny but a bit too hazy, and one could argue that Bach’s outlook in What’s Right with the World suffers from the same effect. As a reviewer once wrote of another of Bach’s books, “One wishes at times he would use a dash of bitters.” And when Bach shifts from observation to reflection, he can become as fuzzy as the best new-age guru Southern California could offer: “The best way to deal with complexities and dilemmas is to view the macro-world from within the framework of a balanced micro-world until the outward vision can be gauged and governed by a sound inward sight.”

R-i-g-h-t.

But at least he’s honest about his lack of definitive answers:

Religion is my beat, and in my research I had often tried to figure out the complex gamut of life’s strange polarities. I had engaged in speculation all the way from karmic causes, on to the sins or virtues involved in these equations, straight through to plain, unadulterated fate. Rarely had I been any wiser for it all.

What’s Right with the World is a collection of anecdotes from Bach’s life and travels, involving everything from bird-watching in Australia to listening to a Russian Orthodox choir in Kharkov to sitting in a 24-hour rest-stop restaurant in Illinois. From these he gleans just a few conclusions about “what’s right with the world.” And though 45 years separate us from that time, I found them useful reminders of what we still have the opportunity to advance, no matter what vandalism a few people in power manage to commit:

  • The overall trend from exclusiveness to inclusiveness
  • The shift from a sense of infallibility to an attitude of honest evaluation of what we actually believe in enough to live by
  • A turn from a disregard of nature to a respect for nature and her laws

I’ll skip Bach’s final conclusion, which involves something about “balanced micro-macro persons” that is probably best left back in 1973. These three are good enough for me to hold onto.

Because I need to remind myself that most of the events that have caused me to lose sleep lately are signs of the energy people can put into holding onto beliefs long past their sell-by dates. Nature is holding us accountable no matter what further disregard Scott Pruitt shows for it. Lying is not a viable way to prop up an aura of infallibility. And the only exclusive membership any of us can truly claim is in the species Homo sapiens: anything else is a temporary construct. Few writers remind one of that fact as effectively as Marcus Bach — but I recommend looking to They Have Found a Faith, Faith and My Friends (1952), Had You Been Born In Another Faith (1961), or Strangers at the Door (1971) rather than What’s Right with the World. It’s a bit too hazy.

What’s Right with the World, by Marcus Bach
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973

The Right to Heresy: Castellio Against Calvin, by Stefan Zweig

Cover of the first U. S. edition of 'The Right to Heresy'

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· Editor’s Comments
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Excerpt


The town had assumed a morose visage like Big Brother’s own, and by degrees had grown as sour as he, and, either from fear or through unconscious imitation of his sternness, as sinister and reserved. People no longer roamed freely and light-heartedly hither and thither; their eyes could not flash gladly; and their glances betrayed nothing but fear, since merriment might be mistaken for sensuality. They no longer knew unconstraint, being afraid of the terrible man who himself was never cheerful. Even in the privacy of family life, they learned to whisper, for beyond the doors, listening at the keyholes, might be their serving men and maids. When fear has become second nature, the terror-stricken are perpetually on the look-out for spies. The great thing was–not to be conspicuous. Not to do anything that might arouse attention, either by one’s dress or hasty word, or by a cheerful countenance. Avoid attracting attention; remain forgotten. The people, in the latter years of Big Brother’s rule, sat at home as much as possible, for at home the walls of their houses and the bolts and bars on their doors might preserve them to some extent from prying eyes and from suspicion. But if, when they were looking out of the window, they saw some of the agents of Big Brother coming along the street, they would draw back in alarm, for who could tell what neighbour might not have denounced them? When they had to go out, the citizens crept along furtively with downcast eyes and wrapped in their drab cloaks, as if they were going to a sermon or a funeral. Even the children, who had grown up amid this new discipline, and were vigorously intimidated during the “lessons of edification,” no longer played in the debonair way natural to healthy and happy youngsters, but shrank as a cur shrinks in expectation of a blow. They flagged as do flowers which have never known sufficient sunlight, but have been kept in semi-darkness.

Editor’s Comments


No, this is not a passage from 1984. I did replace three words–“Calvin’s” and “the Consistory”–to confuse things, but aside from that, one could believe the time and place described was that of 1984 or of Poland under Soviet occupation. In fact, Zweig is describing Geneva in 1553, under the rule of John Calvin.

Raised a Roman Catholic, Calvin underwent a spiritual conversion as a young adult and took up the emergent reformist (Protestant) faith. His book, Institutio Christiane Religionis, was the first serious attempt at a Protestant theology and proved enormously successful and influential. Stopping in Geneva one night in 1536 on his way out of France, he was convinced to stay by a fellow reformist, Guillaume Farel, and he soon became the leading spiritual leader in the city. Although exiled for several years due to a dispute with the city fathers, he was eventually invited back.

Calvin seized the invitation as an opportunity to exert political as well as spiritual control. Within a short amount of time, he was able to establish a religious state to parallel the civil one, with officers, rules, and enforcers–wardens and the Consistory mentioned above. Calvin’s state quickly eclipsed that of the Genevese city government, and his rule was uniform and severe:

Two burghers played skittles: prison. Two others diced for a quarter-bottle of wine: prison. A man refused to allow his son to be christened Abraham: prison. A blind fiddler played a dance: expelled from the city. Another praised Castellio’s translation of the Bible: expelled from Geneva. A girl was caught skating, a widow threw herself on the grave of her husband, a burgher offered his neighbour a pinch of snuff during divine service: they were summoned before the Consistory, exhorted, and ordered to do penance. And so on, and so on, without end. Some cheerful fellows at Epiphany stuck a bean into the cake: twenty-four hours on bread and water. A burger said “Monsieur” Calvin instead of “Maître” Calvin; a couple of peasants, following ancient custom, talked about business matters on coming out of church: prison, prison, prison.

“Most savagely of all were punished any offenders whose behaviour challenged Calvin’s political and spiritual infallibility,” Zweig continues. Calvin resorted to punishments equal to the Inquisition’s worst to maintain his supremacy over all religious matters: flogging, pilloring, racking, red-hot irons stabbed through tongues. So when Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician and theologian living in France, wrote a tract questioning the principle of predestination, one of the pillars of Calvinist belief, Calvin vowed that if Servetus ever set foot in Geneva, he would not leave alive.

Unfortunately for Servetus, his escape route after being jailed for heresy in France took him right through Geneva, where he was spotted, thrown into prison, and quickly tried and convicted of “execrable blasphemies.” The only point of debate was just how he should be killed: Calvin called for chopping his head off; his council held out for burning at the stake. On October 27, 1553, he was put to flames with a copy of his book chained to his leg.

In itself, given the times, the event might have gone relatively unnoticed. As Zweig writes,

In a century disfigured by innumerable acts of violence, the execution of one man more might have seemed a trifling incident. Between the coasts of Spain and those of the lands bordering the North Sea (not excepting the British Isles), Christians burned countless heretics for the greater glory of Christ. By thousands and tens of thousands, in the name of the “true Church” (the names were legion), defenceless human beings were haled to the place of execution, there to be burned, decapitated, strangled, or drowned.

Servetus’ killing, though, was, in the words of Voltaire, the Reformation’s first “religious murder.” It demonstrated that Protestantism was just as susceptible as Catholicism to dogmatism and orthodoxy. Which, Zweig points out, illogical at least: “In and by itself, the very notion of ‘heretic’ is absurd as far as a Protestant Church is concerned, since Protestants demand that everyone shall have the right of interpretation.” Calvin, however, tried to show that his act could be justified with the same cold logic by which he structured his theology, writing a “Defence of the True Faith and of the Trinity against the Dreadful Errors of Servetus”. To eradicate all those who held opinions subversive to authority was a “sacred duty,” Calvin argued; only those who, for the sake of doctrine, are willing to suppress “tout regard humain“–all regard for things human–that can be considered truly pious.

Calvin’s attempt to establish his right to act as an agent of divine judgment that moved Sebastian Castellio, a Reformist theologian and teacher in nearby Basle, to write an eloquent rebuttal, “De haereticis”, which cut it to shreds with a logic even colder and sharper than Calvin’s. The very notion of heresy was not only contrary to Protestantism, but wholly absent from Bible. Heresy is man’s invention, not God’s: a relative, not absolute concept: “When I reflect on what a heretic really is, I can find no other criterion than that we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views.” Given that this one statement effectively condemned “a whole era, its leaders, princes, and priests, Catholics and Lutherans alike,” it demonstrated “immense moral courage.”

But Castellio not only punctured the pretense of heresy as an excuse for authoritarianism, he went on to claim that “freedom of thought had a sacred right of asylum in Europe.” “De haereticis”, Zweig shows, stands as a milestone for civilization for not just defending the right to think and speak freely, but for asserting that tolerance is the state to which we should all aspire: “We can live together peacefully only when we control our intolerance. Even though there will always be differences of opinion from time to time, we can at any rate come to general understandings, can love one another, and can enter the bonds of peace….”

Perhaps those words seem mild today, but they inflamed not just Calvin but many others who understood how directly Castellio’s argument undermined the very basis of their political and religious power. Although nominally protected as a citizen of the free city of Basle, Castellio was forced from his university post, ostracized, and driven into poverty and sickness. His death in 1563 prevented Calvin from orchestrating his return to Geneva (Castellio had lived there and even worked alongside Calvin for a time) and trial. Still, Calvin’s followers dug up Castellio’s body, burned it on a bonfire, and scattered the ashes as a post-mortem retribution.

Today, Calvin’s name is far better known and remembered than Castellio’s. Yet it is Castellio, not Calvin, Zweig argues, whose views were ultimately to win the greater number of converts. Both the American and French revolutions recognized freedom of religion and speech as fundamental rights, and “the notion of liberty–the liberty of nations, of individuals, of thoughts–had been accepted as an inalienable maxim by the civilized world.”

Controversies such as those over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Danish cartoons, wear of the hijab in French schools, and the political power of the religious Right in America all show that this acceptance may be inalienable, but it’s hardly unshakable. The words Zweig wrote in 1936, when stories of Nazi book-burnings, Stalinist mock trials, and Mussolini’s bombing of Ethiopian tribesmen were everyday news, are just as worth repeating now:

Since, in every age, violence renews itself in changed forms, the struggle against it must continually be renewed by those who cling to the things of the spirit. They must never take refuge behind the pretext that at the moment force is too strong for them. For what is necessary to say cannot be said too often, and truth can never be uttered in vain. Even when the word is not victorious, it manifests its eternal presence and one who serves it at such an hour fas given proof that no terror holds sway over a free spirit, but that even in the most cruel of centuries there is still a place for the voice of humaneness.

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The Right to Heresy, by Stefan Zweig
New York: The Viking Press, 1936

The Prophets of Israel, by Edith Hamilton

Cover of the first U. S. edition of 'The Prophets of Israel'

· Excerpt
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Excerpt


In the eighth century before Christ, all over the civilized world form had taken the place of substance in men’s creeds. The splendors of worship grew more splendid, the multitudes of priests and devotees perpetually greater; ceremony followed upon ceremony; but the spirit that had informed the temples and the shrines was gone. The old terror was dying and all but dead. Behind the magnificence was emptiness. And then something happened, one of the most important events that ever happened, which was to result in nothing less than a completely new idea of religion, an altogether different relation of men to God. In a little country of no consequence whatever to the ruling powers, to the two-thousand-year-old mother of civilization, Egypt, to the fearful, irresistible war-machine, Nineveh, to the caravans and fleets of Babylon the great, a man arose, one man, all alone, to set himself against the force of the whole world’s conviction; and after him another and then another, each always by himself against the nations, in all a mere handful of men, who had a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, a new motive-power for mankind and a new road to God, and who proclaimed this strange conception with a passion and a power never surpassed in the three thousand years that stretch out between their day and ours.

Editor’s Comments


Edith Hamilton’s books on classical Greece and Rome and their mythologies–particularly The Greek Way–have remained in print and are still used as basic texts in hundreds of high school and college courses each year. Far less well known are the three books she wrote about Biblical history–The Prophets of Israel, Spokesmen for God, and Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters. This is unfortunate, because as fine as her more popular books are, they are about cultures and religions of the past. Prophets, Spokesmen, and Witness deal with religions and issues that have remained active and current for almost 3,000 years now, and deal with them in a manner that brushes away so many cobwebs of history and interpretation that, for me at least, it is like seeing them clearly for the first time.

The Prophets of Israel was the first of the three books to be published, in 1936, and unlike the others, is out of print today. In contrast to the Greek and Roman books, for which she was deeply familiar with the source languages and texts, Hamilton’s Biblical books relied on various English translations, and principally on the King James version. She does not apologize for this, however, arguing that the leading English translations have not only proved largely faithful to the source texts but are the basis for the practice of Christianity in the English-speaking world.

Even in English, though, the prophets of the Old Testament, she acknowledges, “are really exceedingly difficult reading.” Their relentless exhortations and denunciations leave the mind “deafened and dulled”, their invocations against “the treachery of Edom”, the pridefulness of “Rabbah of the Ammonites”, or the other hundreds or thousands of utterly forgotten people cause many of us to see great swaths of the Old Testament as monotonous bouts of who smote who. And leads us to miss something truly wonderful:

They [the prophets] must not be allowed to become the possession of the few. They are not only men of towering genius, they are unique: there is nothing resembling them in all the literature of the world. They were prophets, but in a sense peculiar to themselves: their words still embody men’s ideals. They say, What out to be shall be, and the assertion seems not an expression of an unreal optimism, a dream of happy impossibilities, but a prophecy, a demand which commands our allegiance, an obligation we must struggle to fulfill.

Hamilton begins with the prophet Amos. Amos is one of the shortest books in the whole Bible, and seems a most unpromising one at first. By line four we see God threatening, “I will send a fire into the house of Hazael, which shall devour the palaces of Ben-hadad,” and the text soon becomes a litany of places and peoples He promises to “send fire into.” But Amos, she argues, is the first book in the Bible that can be dated with any accuracy, to around 750 B. C..

At that time, religion, as it was practiced by the Jews, Egyptians, Assyrians, and pretty much everyone else we have record of, had become highly dogmatic and ritualized: “Codes of complicated performance grew up…. Ritual became fixed; it could not any more be used to express this or that immediate need. Life means change, and ritual ceased to keep step with life.” It came, in fact, to be “seen as something altogether superior to life.” “Fear of the gods begets favour,” she quotes from a Babylonian text of the time; “Offering increases life.”

Into this world of rituals, priests, and offerings steps Amos. Steps right into it, in fact, interrupting an elaborate ceremony in the town of Bethel. An otherwise ordinary shepherd, he has heard God speak and is compelled to bring God’s message. “Come to Bethel, and transgress;” he tells the priests and pilgrims there. “Bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years.” What God wants of man is not rituals and offerings, says Amos: “Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.”

No, what God wants of us, Amos says, is something much simpler–and much harder: to “let judgment [justice] run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Amos, as Hamilton describes it, was the first to distinguish ritual from righteousness, to tell his people that it was less important to follow the right steps in making an offering or reciting a chant or prayer and more important to demonstrate righteousness through one’s actions towards others. “The worship of God,” Amos was saying, “had no connection with pilgrimages and sacrifices, but only with what men did to each other.”

With Amos and the other prophets who followed him–Micah, Hosea, and Isaiah–religion appears for the first time split between two paths: “worship desirable for its own sake, an end in itself, and worship as a means, good only when it results in practical good, its aim to do away with evil.” “His worship,” in fact, “had no connection whatever with anything done in a temple. It had to do entirely with men’s actions toward each other.”

I am always extremely reluctant to say or write anything about religion. I consider myself a Christian, but perhaps with just a small “c”. I see Jesus Christ as the most remarkable human to have ever lived on this planet, someone who set the highest ideals we can ever attempt to reach, but no more or less miraculous than the sun rising each morning. Not everyone shares this belief or any other that I might write down, which is why writing anything about religion is just asking for trouble.

And while I find just about everything Edith Hamilton wrote about the Old and New Testaments rings deeply true to me, I know there are others for whom virtually every sentence in The Prophets of Israel probably seems like a willful poke in the eye.

Take her view of fundamentalism, for example. For her, the Bible is very much the word of man–of many men, in fact, adding, subtracting, adapting, and reinterpreting over the course of many years:

There was no idea in those days that a piece of writing should remain as the original author had composed it. The author was always anonymous; he did not matter at all. It was a reviser’s duty to make improvements if he could, especially to introduce a moral or point one more sharply. The process of growth of the Old Testament, with pious men perpetually striving to make it more edifying, is a curious contrast to its later condition when it became inviolably fixed, each letter holy and never to be altered.

This view enables her to brush past much of what leaves many readers of the Bible scratching their heads: “Direct contradictions in the prophets which occasionally trouble the reader can be so explained,” Hamilton argues. Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters is even more willing to ascribe inconsistencies in some of the things Christ is recounted to have done or said to the need of later writers to shape the text to meet the needs of the early Church.

This is not at all because Hamilton plays fast and loose with the truth. She is utterly undogmatic and her loyalty lies only with the message she finds in the text. If anything, she has far too much respect for the truth to believe it can be found in fixed formulae. Early in The Prophets of Israel, she writes something that resonates so deeply with me as a person who values knowledge as a limitless quest that I’m amazed it is not etched over the entrance to every school, library, and laboratory:

There is no foe so deadly to the truth as complete intellectual assurance. It substitutes an easy and shallow certainty for the deep loyalties of faith. It puts an end to thought, which can live only if it is free to change. Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well. Greater knowledge does not mean greater certainty. Oftenest the very reverse is true. We are certain in proportion as we do not know. We seem, indeed, so made that intellectual certainty is not good for us. We grow arrogant, intolerant, unable to learn and to attain to better grounds of certainty precisely because we are certain. The right attitude for the mind would seem to be humility.

For this quote alone, I would place The Prophets of Israel on the shelf of books I hope to keep with me for the rest of my life. But I would recommend it and Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters highly to anyone with a Judeo-Christian upbringing who is interested in being reminded of what we can most prize and respect in our teachings. It’s like that line from Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “… to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” After reading Hamilton’s books about the Bible, I feel like I am finally beginning to understand what I learned in Sunday school.

Other Comments

Alfred Kazin, The New York Times, 19 April 1936

Mrs. Hamilton has seized the core of the prophet’s thought; from Amos to Malachi the yea-sayers exemplify the Hebrew mind in its blend of earthiness and lyricism…. For the most part, her book carries an excitement that is communicated to the reader. One feels the intensity that once shook a narrow earth.

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The Prophets of Israel, by Edith Hamilton
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1936