Books

...he was usually—though we are not told of this in the case of Ani —ceremoniously hunted away afterward with sticks and stones...

...The Reformation in England demonstrated that it was necessary for the nouveaux riches to have some sort of "divine" bolstering...

...Hence the later animal and bird-headed gods...

...Sir Wallis is quite clear that it did not come out of the indigenous Fellah, who will still, as it was once put, be digging in the mud of Egypt, as he has been digging ever since at least Neolithic days, when the last British soldier has ceased to be...

...Nietzsche and his kind had been no more than a deposit of conceit, brushed off by the first genuine consciousness of sin...

...If it were only for this account the book would be worth having, but it is replete with other information as well...

...It is all very hectic: but there is vivid, first-hand journalism in the description of Moscow during 1923, at the end of the long famine— Moscow infinitely scarred and shabby, infinitely dirty and hungry and hysterical, with exorbitant prices upon every necessity and the fear of disease or the secret police as the beginning of all wisdom: and over its swarms of transplanted peasants, laborers, tyrannical Soviet officials (largely Jewish by birth, but infidel by conviction) starving aristocrats of the old regime, Mission workers, adventurers and Utopians from every nation under heaven, the lurid glamour of a tremendous but treacherous ideal...

...The Semitic invaders came in and thus, by one or the other, there were erected the pyramids and the other wondrous works with which we are all familiar...

...Moses was the champion of an oppressed people and Christ was opposed by the national leaders of His day...

...Christ was an anarchist who opposed the state and denounced interest, to the scandal of the ruling classes...

...It is a tale of adventure, with a vengeance—even if one cannot remember most of the adventures when it is all told...

...the Exodus outwardly had all the earmarks of a revolution...

...Katherine Bregy...

...This individual Sir Wallis believes to be an African...

...At the age of four he had already read the Bible through twice and it is impossible to catalogue here the list of languages and sciences of which he had made himself master before his school career had terminated...

...still possesses...

...And 300 pages of photographs are really more irritating than interesting...

...It is the familiar story of the dominant conqueror in small numbers directing the labors of a less intelligent and unprogressive aboriginal race...

...What visions of Chestertonian paradox or of the subtly simple fantasies of a Francis Jammes those Fourteen Thumbs conjure up...

...What have the Bolshevists of Russia and President Calles to show except theories...

...We begin with the death of Ani, the arrival of the Kher-heb or undertaker, and the decision that the funeral arrangements were to be of the most expensive character, costing about $1,250 of our money...

...And Moses, Christ's great predecessor, was a murderer and a fugitive from justice, a labor-leader and a "red" conspirator, a lover of the worker and a hater of the bosses to whose blandishments the patriarch, Joseph, ruler of Egypt under the Hyksos Pharaoh, had succumbed...

...Ernest F. Boddington...

...We have also the history of Egypt and its Pharaohs from the earliest times, together with the cartouches of these monarchs, each with his name in hieroglyphics...

...Steffens goes astray when he assumes that, because Moses and Christ were revolutionaries and right, Lenin, being a revolutionary, was also right...

...Lincoln Steffens, whilom muck-raker of Rooseveltian "trust-busting" days, following in the footsteps of Alexander Berkman, the Reverend Bouck White, and President Calles, with The Call of the Carpenter brought up to date...

...For here is the same beauty of description, the same disclosure of character by an unfolding as natural yet as inevitable as the unfolding of the seasons on the farm itself, and the same cumulative drama in the march of every-day events, which have marked all her offerings of maturer years...

...The Fourteen Thumbs of Saint Peter, by Joke M. Nankivell...

...Judged as such, it has value, but in workmanship it does not equal Mr...

...Spell Land, by Sheila Kaye-Smith...

...Steffens admits that "the Mexican and Russian revolutions revolve in their courses as alike as two stars...

...Adams, President Harding served as model—though skilful and generally sympathetic, is not always convincing because of the too violent obtrusion of the mise en scene...

...Those arrangements, as the author says, were the outcome of the Egyptian's belief "that his soul would revivify his body...

...Thus we may say of Egyptian culture that it was a culture from Egypt, but not the culture of Egyptians...

...Revelry, set deliberately, as the author recently announced in an interview, "in an atmosphere of stale tobacco smoke, of liquor and of dissipation, because it has been in that atmosphere that the worst scandals of our political history have been hatched," is not pleasant reading...

...613 It may be asked, What light does this book throw on the claim that all culture ultimately came out of Egypt...

...Next enters the "paraschistes," who opens the body with a flint knife...

...The development of the intervening years, the influences exerted on the growing man by Emily Branwell and Oliver Mills, most of all the influence of the farm itself, well-named Spell Land, are indicated with a simplicity yet a sureness of insight which make this a modern novel of a quality far beyond the average...

...Steffens says...

...In calling upon church members to accept Bolshevism because its proponents are so often hounded, Mr...

...Steffens proposes to bring the present-day Christians before a Christian inquisition...

...they were "the result of a firm assurance in his mind of the truth of the doctrine of immortality, which is the foundation of the Egyptian religion, and which was as deeply rooted in them as the hills are in the earth...

...One party alone in the history of the world possesses the right to draw analogies between its experiences and the Exodus...

...He has also adopted some Ingersollisms, but with an important difference, and this feature of his book is more interesting than any other to a student of the Bible...

...Still less can one recall the personalities of the rather motley crowd of people involved—even of the errant Englishwoman through whose eyes and ears the kaleidoscopic story comes to us...

...the nomes or divisions of the country...

...For such a man the second scale—about $300—would have been parsimonious and, of course, the very much cheaper methods employed for the poor were not to be thought of...

...Now this fine volume, twice the thickness of its predecessor, appears, the harvest of the author's life-work as keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum...

...The editor of Columbia, and the Knights of Columbus should be interested in learning that they have been vindicated by a sympathizing intimate of the Mexican and Russian worthies, who ought to know, if anybody knows...

...Needham thought that he could translate the hieroglyphics through the medium of Chinese, but the attempt proved to be as impossible as one would now expect...

...It is a work of fiction, and as such it should be judged...

...rjp HE first edition of this book was printed in 1893, a slim A volume which the writer of this review purchased at that time...

...respectable Christians who as a matter of duty add their meed of contempt to the burdens borne by publicans, harlots, agitators, and other social outcasts...

...It is his desire to jolt loose the teachers of Methodist and Baptist Sunday-school classes from the congregations of the godly, and at the same time to save them from complacency and Coolidge...

...There is nothing novel in Mr...

...Then one turns back the cover, blossoming in purple and orange, and finds that it is only another book about Bolshevist Russia...

...To many, not the least interesting part of the book will be the story of the decipherment of the inscriptions...

...But Mr...

...IT MUST be a tired word—"intriguing"—but it exactly describes the title of this curious book...

...This important book should be of the utmost interest to all students of antiquity and above all, perhaps, to students of the Old Testament, for though space does not permit of further specification, it may be said that there are numerous references to the relations of the chosen people with the Egyptians...

...good Christians who think good government depends on having good men in office...

...We learn of the use of mummies for medicine, for the mediaeval and even later pharmacopoeiasm contained all sorts of horrible and useless substances...

...2.50...

...It is perhaps natural that it should be coarse in outline as well as in detail of execution, but the delineation of the central figure—for whom, according to Mr...

...and that is the party to which Saint Stephen, the Christian martyr, belonged...

...Religion and economics do have an intimate connection...

...The Anabaptist opponents of Cromwell saw in him "the man of sin" and "the beast" of the Apocalypse...

...Here the truth is revealed at last...

...so that the undertaker's charges were by no means exorbitant...

...and so on...

...Adams's Success...

...That is Edward Hincks, an Irishman and graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who from an obscure vicarage of the then Established Church of Ireland, early in the last century, sent to the Royal Irish Academy, a paper which (according to Brugsch, a first-class authority on the subject) employed the true method of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics...

...New York: The Macmillan Company...

...He confutes Ingersoll's Mistakes of Moses...

...We leave the tomb prepared by Ani for himself and for his wife Tutu, who had been laid there to await him, sealed with slabs of stones which fitted so closely that even the thin blade of one of our penknives could with difficulty be inserted for half an inch...

...Obviously, and with the zeal of the newspaper "hound," the author has tried to describe everybody she has seen and everything she has heard during a brief but meaty visit to Red territory...

...and Cromwell himself in the presence of his followers waxed eloquent over the prospect of a Congregationalist conquest of the world, with the hosts of "Pride's Purge" led on by the Lord of Sabaoth...

...He is applauded by Upton Sinclair, who hopes that the "righteous and all Christians" may be benefited by the book and come to "understand the ways of God in our time...

...She looks upon the sins of communism and of capitalism with equal eye...

...the amulets, and in each case, also, the hieroglyphics appropriate to them...

...To make the details of that procedure clear to us, the author, as in the earlier edition, takes the concrete case of Ani, the Priest of Amen, of whom we know all that is to be known from his tomb and from the remarkable Book of the Dead which he prepared long before his own passing...

...Adams "has done his work more bravely, relentlessly and righteously than other men...

...IT IS with surprise that one learns that this story of a Sussex farm is one of the earliest of Miss Kaye-Smith's works, published in England sixteen years ago and now reprinted in America as a result of the success in this country of the author's latest novels...

...Steffens avails himself of the faulty conclusions of "higher criticism" about the "composite authorship" of the Pentateuch and the miracles of the Old Testament...

...Sir Wallis upholds the right of Young, as opposed to Champollion, the French Egyptologist whose claims, though they are actually great, have been unduly pressed by his fellow-countrymen...

...In fact, there is something almost inhuman about the detachment of that young person...

...His followers were communists...

...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...

...When the reader parts company with him, he is a man who has passed through many phases of emotionalism and of belief, but ''the old illogical faith of his childhood had never been destroyed in his heart...

...Claude Shepherd is first introduced to the reader as an imaginative child of ten years engaged in testing a statement made by one farm-girl to another in an exchange of whispered confidences he had overheard, that it was possible to conjure up the arch-fiend by repeating the Lord's Prayer backward...

...She dislikes being knocked down in the street, but does not seem to mind having her clothes confiscated by the police and being imprisoned naked for two or three days—especially as bacon and eggs are eventually forthcoming...

...The Mummy: A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge...

...Steffens has evidently forgotten that the Fifth Monarchy Men, who believed the world to be in desperate need of something they had, were rejected by Christendom...

...It must be acknowledged that there is something in what Mr...

...Much has happened in the way of discovery in that time and the results are included in this book...

...Here is Mr...

...Since the beginning of the Mexican and Russian revolutions, it would appear, Mr...

...Disregarding as utterly as one wishes the name of "Bolshevism" that has been attached to the phenomena in question, can anybody doubt that both revolutions spring from the same source ? Robert R. Hull...

...Steffens has taken to reading the Bible in the hope of being able to orient these two phenomena with reference to the whole of human history, with the result, naturally, that he has discovered the Bible to be a "book nobody knows...

...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...

...He discovers that the "bad" are always for, and the "good" always against, God...

...The "atrocities" of the Old Testament are defended as proper means to the end of bringing the united Israelitish nation to its inheritance in the promised land...

...And being far too tolerant to have any discoverable preference in the abstract question of religion—or irreligion— she is quite as much impressed by the heads of the Atheist Mission as by the venerable Russian patriarch...

...He qualified as a medical man, but his labors extended over many domains of knowledge, among others, that of hieroglyphics, the discovery to the decipherment of which stands very largely to his credit...

...We are then enlightened in the most vivid manner as to all the varied processes of mummification...

...And the apostolic thumbs are only spurious relics once enshrined—at prudent distances—by the Orthodox Church, now collected with malicious care for an exhibition by the Atheist Mission: which band of ardent fanatics, finding the pious frauds once again stolen and carried (for some hazy reason) to England, promptly rise to the occasion by substituting fourteen newer frauds gathered from the nearest graveyard...

...He searches the whole range of Holy Writ for polemical matter that will serve him against comfortable Christians who yawn over the usual sort of sermons in the usual sort of pews...

...The liberal, after reading this part of the book, will not be able to berate the Inquisition with his accustomed fervor...

...A mathematician, among many other claims to distinction, he was the discoverer of the undulatory theory of light...

...But as she does not seem to have taken time to think about the experiences or to draw any conclusions, her book will make slight appeal to people whose faith or whose philosophy demands some sort of interpretation of life...

...Revelry, by Samuel Hopkins Adams...

...Besides Champollion and Young, however, there is a third man whose name must not be omitted...

...Its title, The Mummy, signalizes the fact that an enormous amount of our knowledge of the ancient Egyptians is derived from their funerary remains, the central figure of which was the embalmed and mummified corpse...

...There is danger that many readers may lay too great stress on the work as history, may accept it as the full elucidation of all the gossip and whisperings of Washington during the Harding administration...

...Young was one of those rare beings, an infant prodigy whose after life did not belie his early promise...

...the numerous deities...

...but it does not follow, because Mormons, Millerites, and Muggletonians keenly feel the indifference and hostility of the world about them, that they severally have the divine imprimatur...

...Steffens has only followed the precedent established by the ordinary Protestant polemic with an unpopular cause...

...The most satisfying por614 trait, one shaded with care and always in proportion, is that of Senator Thorne...

...The practice came to an end when it was discovered that, the legitimate source of supply having run out, the Jews were manufacturing mummies from the bodies of those who had died in hospitals, often of loathsome diseases...

...The publishers describe Revelry as "a contemporary historical novel," and a letter from the Reverend John Haynes Holmes, which they send to reviewers, declares Mr...

...New York: Boni and Liveriffht...

...In fact, the work is a cyclopaedia of Egyptian information on all topics except architecture and art, of which the author modestly declines to write, declaring himself to be no expert on those matters...

...He was dominated at a very early date by foreigners, possibly Sumerians, who brought with them a knowledge of the arts and crafts and a higher religion in which the gods were represented as men...

...14.00...

...He, too, was a worker of miracles, and he was neither a communist nor a foe of the state...

...He dallies for a time with the idea that "Christ was a Socialist...

...Moses and Christ came with divine credentials and both were workers of miracles...

...and has constantly referred to in that intervening third of a century...

...The Plymouth brethren find all sorts of analogies in Holy Writ to explain their unpopularity with other denominations, and the "Come-Outers" find recompense for their obscurity and lack of respectability in the thought 612 that they belong to the company of David and his fellow outlaws in the cave of Odollam...

...One curious but ineffectual attempt is not mentioned in the book, that made by John Turberville Needham, a Catholic priest of the eighteenth century, better known as one of the writers in the controversy over spontaneous generation...

...The "spoiling of the Egyptians" is even commended...

...Bertram C. A. Windle...

...They were lengthy, for in one case on record the emblaming lasted sixteen days, the bandaging thirty-five, and the burial seventy—in all, 121...

...Steffens's biblical discoveries...