COMPARATIVE RELIGION.
Sir,-It is surely unusual to find, in what professes to be a critical work, so many mis-statements in such a_ small space as are to be found in your quotation from Lord Raglan’s Death and Rebirth: A Study in Comparative Religion, He says: "The same conduct which, in one age, causes a man to be regarded as a hero or saint, in another causes him to be regarded as a criminal, a fool, or just an ordinarily decent man." In which of these categories would he place St. Peter Clavier, the saint of the South American slave trade; St. Francis Xavier; David Livingstone, Florence Nightingale, St. Vincent de Paul, Grace Darling, and Captain Oates?: It may be possible for the noble Lord to put his mind back into the past, but for ordinary people who study the beliefs of the past it is merely a little difficult. His statement that "the most enlightened and humane man of his age, Sir Thomas More. ... thought that the proper punishment for the crime of translating the Bible into English was death by burning" is without foundation. More mentions with approval several such translations, prior to Wycliff’s. So many glaring errors, so easy to check, in such small compass, would indicate that the book is of little value to the student.
HAMISH
DHU
(Lower Hutt).
(We print this letter because it is reasonable comment on a quotation printed at some length on one of our pages, But we have, in fact, not seen the book from which the quotation was taken and cannot therefore open our columns to a discussion of its merits or fail-ings.-Ed.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 359, 10 May 1946, Page 21
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273COMPARATIVE RELIGION. New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 359, 10 May 1946, Page 21
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