BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 191, 10 February 1912, Page 6

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

THE DICKENS CENTENARY.

(By James Wortley)

Last Wednesday practically every centre of literary culture throughout the English-speaking world would be think-, ing of Dickens, for February 7, 1912, was i his centenary. These centennial celebrations have now come to be quite a" feature of the bookman's world, and the various newspapers and magazines for this month will no doubt vie with one another in attempting to do full justice to the name and fame of our typical English novelist. One feels quite unable to add anything to the paeans of praise that, ever since Charles Dickens first had England at his feet, have arisen from the growing mass of admirers. Dickens' characters have become so grained into the national life that to-day we cannot picture a world without Pickwick. A reader of Dickens for the first time will feel something like the visitor to "Hamlet" the other evening at the Theatre Royal, who came home and told her friend that the play was* only a' string of quotations. We have known all about Mrs. Gamp and Sam Weller, and Uriah Heap and little Emily long before we read the stories ourselves. The man in the street who possibly has not read a line of Dickens understands exactly what is inferred by Mrs. Caudle's curtain lectures.

Tn speaking of Dickens, one can, how- J ever, express what Dickens means to him. i To me Dickens is the embodiment of ] the Christian, or otherwise Western, J ( civilisation. In that this spells reform," ' Die-kens was its embodiment. Dickens' ' pillorying of many evils—the debtor'i prison, the hustings, the boarding school ' of that day—hustled these features out of existence. The monthly instalment! of Dickens' works were nervously awaited by those who lived- a life of sham 01 of evil. Each instalment turned some hitherto conventional stone in the national life, and the nation stood by watching the evil things it had sheltered scuttling away out of sight. He recreated in the national life a healthy detestation of all pretence, of superficiality. Dickens was always to be counted on to take the side of the downtrodden, the weak, the simple, and the poor against those who would take advantage of them, and the humanitarian legislation we enjoy to-day has but followed the pathway indicated by Dickens. Since then, venturing a personal 1 opinion, it seems entirely fitting that the successive Christian festivals of Christians i should be marked, as they have been for years, by the publication of new editions of this much loved man, whose writings always inculcated the, truly Christian virtues of kindness, peace,) temperance, justice, truth—all summed] up in one word —humanity. j SCIENCE AND RELIGION. I Science and religion are incommensurables, and there is no true antithesis between them—they belong to different universes of discourse. Science is descriptive, and offers no ultimate explanation; religion is mystical and interpretative, implying a realisation of a higher order of things than those of sense —experience. Men are led to religion along many pathways—from the contradictions of the moral life, from the facts of history, and from what is experienced at the limits of practical endeavor, emotional strain and intellectual enquiry. It is not difficult to see why the rapid | development of science should have affected, for a time of transition at least, the frequency with which men tread the last-named three pathways to religion—namely, from baulked struggle, strained emotion and baffled enquiry. The socalled "conflict" between science and religion depends in parts on the clashing of particular expressions of religious belief vith facts of science, or on a clashing of ! particular scientific philosophies with religious feeling, or on attempts to combine, in one statement, scientific and religious formulations, or on the application of psychological inquiry to the phases of religious experiences, or on the contrast of two moods. While i science can give no direct support to religious convictions, it establishes con- J elusions which the religious mood mayj utilise, just as philosophy utilises them, and transfigures, just as poetry transfigures them.—Professor J. A. Thomson, Regius Professor of -Natural History, Aberdeen University, in "Introduction to Science," Home University Library.