The Worcester spy. [volume] (Worcester, Mass.) 1898-1904, 1901-12-13
OLD-FASHIONED SUNDAY
SCHOOL BOOKS

In Captain BUTT" the new novel
by Max Adeler' (Charles Heber
Clark the author pays his respects to
some dreadful books that were in IL
braries of the Sunday schools which
our parents and grandparents attend
ed:
There was one a favorite writer
for children-a favorite with the par
ents-who, inspired with a praise
worthy desire to impel them into paths
of peace, produced certain volumes
which were classed under the general
name of Allegories. In these little
stories the characters were children.
The books We're bound in black, to be-
gin with, so that they were dismal and
discouraging merely to look at. as they
lay upon the table at home.
"One of them began with the graphic
description of place called the Desert
of Tin. That word Tin, which greeted
the infant mind upon the very first
page, had in it something that was
sinister and fear-inspiring. Sin was bad
enough, but sin could be partly COM
pretended. Tin, however appeared
to have some sort of kim
ship to sin, and yet to be
Infinitely and incOmprehensibly more
dreadful. Even if Tin had been a place
of waving trees and fountains and
flowers and birds 1t would have been
open to grave suspicious that behind
these beautiful objects lurked some
mysterious destructive force, concern
ing which children might have appre-
tensions that would do we'll to keep
their wits about them. But Tin, far
from having any alluring scenery, was
represented as a dreary, dead, forbid
ding desert, in which was no kind of
vegetable life but prickly things to
catch and tear you, and no animal life
excepting snakes and scorpions ever
alert to bite and poison you.
Most of the bOy-readers felt that
they could pull through safely with
snakes alone, because you can at the
wait for his tail to die at shutdown;
but the habits, and indeed the very
outlines of the scorpion were unknown,
and so the assured presence of scor-
pions which lay in wait for Grant
boys appeared to make that wilderness
of Tin in a particular sense terrible.
Every healthy boy felt as If he would
like to stay away from it; but this,
the uGkindly author assured him, he
could not do, for the wilderness of Yin,
in the allegory, represented this green
old rolling earth of ours, and the Jour-
ney across the cactus planted, scor-
pton-haunted desert stood for the hui
man life that every good boy and bad
boy must live.
Some very bold boys felt that bad
as was the outlook presented
by the author, they could face
the horrors Of the journey
with the boys and girls in the
book If these had been named Jim and
Aleck and Mary Jane; but the writer
of the allegory knew to the child mind,
and he was too acute to supply any
such excuse for diminishing the mise
ries of the situation. The boys were
named Uric and Bertram and Alaric
and Perseus, and the girls were Hilda
and Ethelberta and Ursula-names
belonging to no children known to the
poor little American Sunday School
scholar and conveying to his mind the
notion that about these very boys and
girls themselves there was something
elfish and uncanny.
'All through the book Uric and Hill
da tramped across the desert, striv-
ing in desperate and most
discouraging manner to reach some
kind of a Promised Land, away off
somewhere, and as the Sunday School
child of thoughtful mind read and
read, he was likely to reach the con-
clusion that the best thing the Prom
ised Land had to offer wasn't worth all
that misery and finally to give his
sympathy and approval to Alaric and
Ethelberta, who didn't try hard
enough, and so missed the Promised
Land and were lost somewhere in the
desert"