Show Book Review Number of By M. Neff Smart a Number of by University of Utah Ralph Waldo Emerson had in to write an introduction to Thomas Carlyle's volume and is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of and every lordship and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a football into the and kept in the with merciless kicks and and yet not a word is punishable by statute it is a political tract It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all and disposes them with a master's with a heart full of manly offers his best counsel to his Emerson further pointed out that it requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the contemporary practical poet cannot descend into the turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts but when the political aspects are so calamitous that the sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the a higher than literary inspiration may succour It may appear or to draw the parallel between s new volume of essays and Carlyle's rambunctious and but in essay after essay of the new volume we see as he is affectionately called by his descend into the social and religious arena to lay bare and expose our our our out-worn and our Philistine Yet is a gentle man as becomes a professor of English at Brigham Young He would not risk hurting his friends and neighbors by lacing the the and the political systems through which we operate unless he believed the outlook for our particular generation were so so desperate as to require a shock He believes that our society is that therapy is centuries roll wearily peopled by human beings devoted to old convictions and old centuries filled with old old old and with the old tragedies born of all of It would seem that the time must eventually come when the old order of things will be effectively and a new order effectively And it would seem to me that the challenge of the old and proposal of the new might well come from the faculties of our colleges and from the men and women whose lives are supposed to be dedicated to the the and the spread of to the in a Philistine according Wp live mei total culture been more else has a society accommodated to the demands of an m-SS a life devoted to the of The American has unco with his i own confused the divine purposes the tenets unwittingly merged material and This religious beliefs with the principles and practices of all The pity of his economic according tragedy of lie to the Ss felling that in the attainment of a suburban mansion he has fulfilled his manhood realized his in so has enjoyed di vine assistance and This is an appalling debasement of both God and In Christensen's religion is a precious largely or his discouraging world the poet found nothing more discouraging than He felt in his heart that religion should be a quest for eternal which would draw men together in unity and Basic in his own religion was a sense of God as Father and of all men as But everywhere in the competing creeds of the world he found beliefs and sentiments that divide men and incite hostility among Even in Christendom he found vestiges of primitive ideas and dogmas which made of the Father of all men a tribal or regional deity devoted primarily to the protection of special races and particular and pray for the blessings of but really strive only for the things of They pray for peace on earth and good will toward all for personal profit and they foster the and hatred out of which wars are They beseech Him to aid the sick and the but they oppose any social change that would bring the blessings of medicine and surgery to those who need them But Christensen is not a negative even if at times he His volume has essays of hope and one of high good Perhaps it would be most fair to say that his critique of Archibald MacLeish's is representative of the and perhaps is the best essay of the Here applies his unquestioned scholarship and rich humanism to discuss the plight of MacLeish's modem bereft of and the victim of nuclear and his wife Sarah are in their extremity of physical and spiritual Sarah peers into the surrounding The candles in the churches are The lights have gone out in the Blow on the coal of the heart And we'll see by and We'll see where we The wick won't burn and the soul Blow on the coal of the heart and we'll know We'll know Here the play ends to Christensen's profound In the lines lie the professor's Man on the darkling plain must look for light not in church and sky but within Only in love can he find his iS a deal of the Jeremiah in a Number of but the warnings are and documented out of the literature that P A knows and Thus he insures that his is not The as Harry A. O vers tree t says in the manifold who nf Sm to com- |