| Show LITERATURE Koraance With the May number Romance begins its second volume Already it has won a lace for itself in the affections of the story 0 reading public The sixty complete stories in the first volume of Romance have all of them been interesting some of them in tensely exciting and none of them in any way offensive even by suggestion The New York Story club to which credit is due for these excellent selections has done its work with a painstaking thoroughness and it has shown too a correct taste and a keen appreciation of the needs of the story reading world The first number of the second volume of R omunce is fully up to the high mark which his magazine has set for itself All sorts itsel Al of tales are here resembling one another only in their uniform excellence Even the i distinctively love storiesof which there are threeare of a widely different variety varety Among the writers are Prosper Merrimee I and Theodore de Banville the great French 1rench story tellers W H Babcock Ambrose I Bierce E H Clough Charles Scates Aus tyn Granville William Wallace Cook I Adair Welcker and Joseph Montet Romance is published monthly for the New York Story club by W H Benton 30 East Twentythird street New York A FAIR AMERICAN is the title of a charm ng story by Pierre Sales which has been translated by Laura E Kendall and pub ished by Rand McNally Co Chicago iii their Rialto series I tells of the experiences ex-periences abroad of a beautiful American girl and all those experiences wero not en irely pleasant but they go to show up In its true light what we feel is becoming an American trait the mania for running after titles The price of the book is 50c Tho May number of Our Little Men mid Tumen contains twentyfour pages of harming pictures and pretty rhymes and stories carefully arranged for the entertainment enter-tainment and instruction of the youngest readers The Hula ones always find this periodical interesting Address D Loth rop company Boston Mass Tun QUESTION COPYRIGHT A summary of the copyright laws at present in force in tho cater countries of tie world Compiled by Georae Haven Putnam Now York G 1 Putnams Sons Price SIEO In this volume of 400 pages Mr Putnam has compiled a complete summary of tho laws of the world and also presents a report re-port of legislative now pending in Grea Britain a sketch of the contest In the United States from 1S37 to 1891 in behal Lf of international copyright and certain papers pa-pers on the development of the conception of literary property and on the probable effects of tbo new American law Mr Putnam is secretary of the American Publishers Copyright league and is thoroughly thor-oughly conversant with the subject which he has here nresentod in a most complete and satisfactory form Six CENTURIES OF WORKAND WAGES A History His-tory of English Labor By James E There Kogers b P with charts and appendix by the Kev W D T Bliss New Yortc Hum boklt Publishing Co 8 Lafayette Place Price IS cents This little volumn of 160 pages comes a s No1 of the Social Science Library It is ian i-an interesting and instructive treatment of the subject stated in the title Chapter are devoted to Rural England before the Plague Town Lie the Black Plague and the Struggle for Freedom the Golden Ag and the Landlords Conspiracy the English Eng-lish PoorLaw and Modern Times There is an explanatory appendix and the work I is accompanied by charts illustrating at a glance the wagecondition of English agricultural agri-cultural and other laborers from 126 to 1885 Phrenoloclcal Journal In the Prcnolooical Journal and Science of Health for May there are several notable titles that must commend themselves to the reader whether regular or occasional especially the piquant remarks in The Voice Laughter and The Hair and tho odd Reverie on Feet with Its striking strik-ing sketches of attitude the interesting biography of Dr Charles Caldwell recall a very marked character ot forty years ago prenological hits of which Professor Sizer has selected four begins 1 series ol item that will add to the liveliness of his depart ment Dr Kenealys very significant study Tho Talent of Motherhood IS concluded with such pertinent and valuable inferences that they deserve to be written in golden letters Address Fowler Wells Co 775 Broadway New York Theosophy Elsewhere I have said that the first object ob-ject of the theosophical society is the universal sal brotherhood of man But there are obstacles ob-stacles to the realization of this scheme of altruism Spirit in its struggles with the forces of nature has lost its singleness of perception in the bewildering allurementai of an earthborn love and on turning back to worship at the source of its spiritual existence istence it is blinded by the flashes of bodily bod-ily passion which play across the mental horizon and lend so wiord a beauty to its earthly life while it is smothered in themes fu the-mes of desires which rise from the physical t phys-ical body that work shop of the Divine Ego and envelope the clear mirror of the soul in ever changing and deceptive shadows shad-ows Thus man has ceased to realize tho rength of the bonds which bind him to his fellows making the good of one the good of all and the misery and degradation of a single human being the special curse and active destroyer of the human race T rhe separateness of personal aims and am b ittousnad egoismhave become a necessity neces-sity of modern progress since competition and the survival of the fittest in the strug g le of life are held to be the only means by which advancement in civilization can be made The wisdom religion meats the un r easonable contradiction of our age thus s hown in the bitter strife of man against nan under the tegis of a Christianity b > reathing the sincerest spirit of brotherly ove with the two grandly philosophical d octrmes of Karma and Reincarnation We s ay that every religion and every sect may ili i f traced far enough back through the rei > L li igious history of mankind bo shown to h aye common origin in one worldwide region li re-gion So that while the theory of Karma a Reincarnation should lead to a practi c al expression of the feeling of universal b jrotherhood the comparative study of re li gious dogmas should by synthesizing them t end to reconcile sectarian difficulties ando and-o lead to a feeling of fellowship among men of every clime and every social sphere We say that in the beginning all mon held t o one belief and In the SecretUoctrine vritten by Madame Blavatskya mass of in t erestinK information is collected in proof o f this assertion Briefly men lived in the p tossession of a spiritual knowledge corn non to all Thin gnosis becoming vulgar i zed by the more complete immersion of s pirit in matter typified in the biblical s tory of the fall took on the sacerdotal fp orm and the physical necessities of the p lersonal man Then followed of necessity t ho confusion of tongues or the splitting u ip of spiritual knowledge into creeds and d dogmas The strife between spirit nndV matter good and evil had hitherto been r cnolined to the moulding of the physical envelope of quasiethereal man but with t he more perfect formation of the animal b ody through which spirit tries to mani f est itself on earth this internecine ntrifa b rarst through the limits of the now fully i ndriduallzed clay the human form and c arrred on its spiritual warfare Into the external ex-ternal relations of man with man Na l Ions and families plunged into those rellfr b ous wars and disputes recorded in history and which are alike a disgrace to human reason and to human love But when it is clearly understood that these are but the natural result of spirit striving to recognize i tself through the mists that rise from the everish activity of earthly life when in act a perfectly reasonable and philosophical philosophi-cal conception of tbo origin and cause of this multiplicity of creeds this splitting up of divine knowledge has been acquired hen it is natural to hope that the brotherhood brother-hood of man may cease to be a dream and become practically effective unhindered as it must then baby any requirement of the denial or acceptance of particular beliefs be-liefs each religion being recognized as a j lust if partial reflection of the one great universal truth necessary to give expression expres-sion to the particular mental characteristics characteris-tics of those peoples or nations among whom it may have grown upThos Wit hams Fellow Theosophical society |
