A BISHOP’S OPINION OF “ENDYMION.”

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2514, 11 April 1881, Page 4

A BISHOP’S OPINION OF “ENDYMION.”

The Bishop of Manchester, presiding on January 29 at the annual meeting of the Failsworth Industrial Society, said he did not often read novels now, though when a lad he read almost every one that came out. Although a good novel was very great refreshment, he had very little time for reading such works now, and he did not suppose he had read more than two new novels during the ten years of his episcopate ; but when a man who was a great statesman, and had been Prime Minister of this Country, wrote a novel, he supposed one was bound to read it, and he had read “ Lothair” and “ Endymion.” He did not know whether the Failsworth Co-operative Society had the latter fanciful novel on their bookshelves or not, but he might say that he had read it with a good deal of amusement and interest, and though it was not a very satisfying novel to his mind, he picked out two sentiments from it that seemed to him to be altogether the two best sentiments in the book. One had reference to horse racing, which it described as the most demoralising passtime practised in the country. The other sentiment was more germane to that meeting. He found, in connection with a sort of socio-political discussion in one of the chapters, one of the interlocutors in which he thought was a gentleman who was supposed to represent the Young England of the future, the statement that we had not yet exhausted all the possibilities of our situation, that he believed society bad a great future and a vast horizon before it, and the mighty spell that was going to work all this vast good for the great mass of the people of England was co-operation.' The Bishop went on to speak warmly in praise of co-operation, which he thought was a much better thing than competition.