Your ShelfYour Projects

BOOK NOTICES

14%

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 14, 1882

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 59, No. 11.

Read the full edition

BOOK NOTICES.

KEY TO SCRIPTURE.

We have received advance sheets of a work entitled, “Collection of Thoughts, or Key to Scripture.” The book professes to give “an explanation of all the incomprehensible passages in the Bible, a reply to the questions asked by Paine in his ‘Age of Reason,’ by Bishop Colenso in his ‘Attack upon the Pentateuch,’ and to the reverberation of the questions by Ingersoll and others.”
The most serious criticism we have to offer upon the work is the fact that the author, being a native of Russian Poland, and a Jew, has not sufficiently mastered the English language. His meaning is often obscure, and idioms are employed that sound strange to an American ear. Often the subject of the sentence is omitted; and again, the sentence wants a predicate. Terms are often inaccurately employed, as in the quotation above, where the author proposes to explain “incomprehensible passages.” Surely this were impossible; he evidently means difficult or obscure passages. The work should be carefully revised, and the defects removed, before it is placed before the public. Price, $1.00 to $1.50. J. L. Stone, Chicago, Ill.

SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST.

“Sin against the Holy Ghost and Exposition of Religious Frauds.” By Thomas Crispin, Detroit, Mich. 80 pp., morocco binding, $1.00.
The author declares that “the clergy are no more to be relied upon for truth, honesty, and virtue, than the politician,” denounces “Methodism, Baptistism, Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, and Roman Catholicism,” and says that “these church doctrines made by the different organizations called churches are only so many shams and frauds on the world, and constitute sin against the Holy Ghost in every sense of the word.” The reader can judge from these quotations of the nature of the book. There are plenty of religious frauds every one knows, and doubtless much sin against the Holy Ghost; but such sweeping assertions as the foregoing can never be defended.