Review: The Wrestler of Philippi

The Wrestler of Philippi by Fannie E. Newberry

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


The Wrestler of Philippi had the potential to be a good story. It's set in an exciting time period--the reign of the emperor Nero. It has the plot element of searching for long-lost family members, which is generally interesting. It even had a few scenes that could have been very powerful.

However, several flaws spoil the book. I might forgive the cocoa beans, though that is a serious historical error, and I might even forgive the clearly late-Victorian language of the characters, if the characters were characters at all. But they aren't. Nobody in the book is well-developed because the author tries to follow too many different threads, rather than sticking with one story. (Yes, I know Dickens could do that successfully, but few other people can.) Newberry attempts to weave in some biblical characters and events, such as the demon-possessed girl, whom Paul healed; the mesh does not work out though and only adds to the confusion of divergent story lines. The author also goes out of her way to rationalize a miracle, and then produces an ending more unbelievable than any miracle. She fails to evoke any sympathy for her characters, and in the end falls far short of any real dramatic power. Much better historical fiction for young people is out there; skip this one.



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Review: The Well and the Shallows

The Well and the Shallows by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the ways in which G. K. Chesterton really impresses me throughout this little book of essays is in his deep understanding of the right relationship between Christians, and social and economic concerns. Too often we tend to catch on to something, such as democratic-republican government, and make it part of our religion. We sometimes act similarly about capitalism, forcing ourselves to defend its faults as though it was straight out of the Bible instead of straight out of the Enlightenment. Or we may go in another wrong direction, and say Christians should have no concern in "worldly" affairs. One system is as bad as another and all of them are fundamentally none of our business.

The truth is that neither of these standpoints correctly represents Christianity, which is in its nature, both extremely other-worldly, and extremely concerned with this world also. Chesterton put it quite well in the essay "When the World Turned Back": "We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things." We should, by all means, be actively involved in all the concerns entailed by the command to love our neighbors as ourselves, whether politically or socially or what-have-you, but we should never come to a place where we forget that any man-based system is capable of going wrong.

In this little book, Chesterton wrote words that should be the motto on the door of every Christian activist: "Try a Monarchy if you think it will be better; but do not trust a Monarchy, in the sense of expecting that a monarch will be anything but a man. Be a Democrat if you like (and I shall always think it the most generous and the most fundamentally Christian ideal in politics); express your sense of human dignity in manhood suffrage or any other form of equality; but put not your trust in manhood suffrage or in any child of man. There is one little defect about Man, the image of God, the wonder of the world and the paragon of animals; that he is not to be trusted. If you identify him with some ideal, which you choose to think is his inmost nature or his only goal, the day will come when he will suddenly seem to you a traitor."

As Chesterton suggests in the title of the book, it is the world that is shallow, and Christianity that has the well of truth. We may acknowledge that the puddles of the world may hold some good water, and we may pour into them of the "living water," but we should never mistake the puddles for the well.

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