It is hard not to enjoy a book that has chapter headings such as:
In which Mr. Pickwick thinks he had better go to Bath, and goes
accordingly.

It is nice to know finally where Mr. Grundy comes from.  You
know, as in, "He is a regular Mr. Grundy."  I knew what it
meant, generally, but never why it was said.  Now I know.

Mr. Pickwick had dropped in for a bit at the Magpie and Stump,
while there he joined in a group of the usual crowd, one of which
was Mr. Grundy. 

There was a pause in the conversation and the chairman of the group
said, "Mr. Grundy's going to oblige the company with a song."

"No he ain't," said Mr. Grundy.

"Why not?" said the chairman.

"Because he can't," said Mr. Grundy.

"You had better say he won't," replied the chairman.

"Well, then, he won't," retorted Mr. Grundy.  Mr. Grundy's positive
refusal to gratify the company occasioned another silence."

On the Finished Pile:

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austin. This is the cutest of her
books. I don't think Catherine has the depth of character
and development that is seen in Emma, Lizzy, Anne, Fanny,
or Eleanor, but she is a darling of a girl.

I especially enjoyed the biographical notes before the Oxford
edition of this book. In a letter, written just a few weeks
before her death, Miss Austin spoke to a friend of a domestic
problem she was facing. She wrote the following words which
speak to her strength and sweetness, "But I am getting too
near complaint. It has been the appointment of God, however
secondary causes may have operated."

Also on the pile is:

Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray. This gem
of a book was on our bookshelf, as it has been for 25 or so years,
but I had never taken the time to read it. It is an excellent
treatise on redemption. The last two chapters, which covered
union with Christ and glorification, were especially moving.

This book is on Monergism's top 40 all time list of books to
read.

On the Finished Pile:
Mansfield Park by Jane Austin and
Lovers Vows (which is the play that forms such a large
part of Mansfield Park) from the German of Kotzebue and
translated by Mrs. Inchbald

Jane Austin always soothes the heart. Lately a little soothing
has been needful.

But today is a nice warm day and we are taking the day off to
go visit Mingo Wildlife Area.

On the Finished Pile:
Jane Austin: The Minor Works

What needs to be said. This is Jane Austin mainly in her youth.
It is funny, insightful, unpolished, but good. Included at the
back are notes she recorded about the reactions of her friends
and family to various of her main novels. It was so interesting
to see how different were the viewpoints on which were their favorite
heroines or story lines. I am now reading my least favorite of her
novels. I'll tell you which one that is when I am finished.

On the Finished Pile:

"Covenant Theology: The Key of Theology in Reformed Thought
and Tradition" by Peter Golding.

Covenant Theology is a combo of a history of the development of
Covenant Theology through the years of church history and a
definition of Covenant Theology itself.

I loved the following quote from Geerhardus Vos that Golding puts
towards the end of the book.

"Only when the believer understands how he has to receive everything
from the Mediator, and how God in no way whatever deals with him
except though Christ, only then does a picture of the glorious
work that God wrought through Christ emerge in his consciousness
and the magnificent idea of grace begin to dominate and form in his
life. For the Reformed, therefore, the entire ordo salutis...is
bound to the mystical union with Christ....Now the basis for this
order lies in none other than in the covenant of salvation with
Christ."

In one of my first ever posts I quoted from Chesterton's
Orthodoxy.

I tend to put down a lovely quote from a book and call it
a review. I'm lazy like that.

John Piper has a much better review of the book.

On the Finished Pile:

Faith Beyond Feelings by Jonathan Edwards.

Here is a quote that sums up the book:

"The more a true saint loves God with a gracious love,
the more he desires to love Him. His uneasiness
concerning his lack of love for God will increase. The
more he hates sin, the more he will want to hate it.
He will regret that he still has so much remaining love
for it. The more his heart is broken, the more he will
want it to be broken further. The more he thirsts and
longs after God and His holiness, the more he will long
and breathe out his very soul in more longings after
God. Like a kindled flame that rises higher, the more
ardently it burns, the more it will continue to burn."

John Piper says in the Appendix of A God Entranced Vision
of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards:

As a hell-deserving sinner I never could have dreamed of
spending eternity with God in ever-increasing joy in the
ever-increasing revelation of God himself. All I could
expect was destruction and misery. But wonder of wonders,
"Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the
unrighteous, that he might bring (me) to God" (I Pet. 3:18).

There are books with great first lines, and there are
books with great last lines. But hands down the book
that has both the best first and last line has to be
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Every time I read, "It was the best of times, it was
the worst of times....", I tingle with anticipation.

Every time I read, "It is a far, far better thing that
I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better
rest I go to, than I have ever known.", I am crying.

Dickens is just so very satisfying.

When Kent and the boys returned from the Reality Check
Conference in Chattanooga, TN, they brought me back a
special gift. They brought me a copy of the recently
released book the Discipline of Spiritual Discernment
by Tim Challies. (They even had him sign it for me.)

Who needs chocolates and flowers when there are books
to be had?

This paragraph, that I read this morning, give a good
picture of what Challies is getting at in his book.

"When we have rejected the doctrine of the sufficiency of
Scripture, we allow Christians to depend on things other
than the Bible as their guide to matters of life and faith.
In particular, people begin to depend upon mysticism, upon
ways of supposedly knowing God apart from the Bible. They
look inward for intrinsic wisdom rather than outward to the
Bible for its extrinsic wisdom. They forsake biblical reason
in favor of feelings, voices, visions, or other subjective
means of supposedly knowing God. This is a deadly error, for
spiritual discernment must be founded upon God's objective
revelation of himself in Scripture. We can only judge between
what is wrong and what is right when we know what God says
to be true. We can know this only from Scripture."

On the finished pile--

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

What a fun and rollicking read. I am still trying
to catch up on what I was never offered in H.S. or
College.

I did not even know that Twelfth Night is the source of
the following quote.

"Some are born great,
some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

A Book Review and a snide comment on the Prosperity Gospel

Finally on the finished pile is History of Christianity
in the Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Fall of
Constantinople by William Ragsdale Cannon.

It was informative and interesting though not written in an
absolutely fascinating style.

And now I am all excited to read The Reformation of the
Sixteenth Century by Roland H. Bainton. His writing goes
down very easily. Probably in part because of the time
period. What a crucial, crucial time in history. And how
thrilling to understand it was part of God's big plan.

Anyway I loved this bit from the Introduction.

"Prosperity itself corrupts. A medieval monk formulated
the law of the monastic cycle: "Discipline begets abundance,
and abundance, unless we take the utmost care, destroys
discipline; and discipline in its fall pulls down abundance."

Why was I never told what a rip-roaringly lovely read
Beowulf is? It is the earliest extant poem in a
modern European language, but the modern
translations today (the one I read was translated
by Burton Raffel) are not difficult to understand.

Beowulf is the hero who rescues the Danes from the
monsters Grendel and Grendel's mother. He then,
after a long and glorious reign, kills the dragon
that is assailing his own people.

Following is a sample of this little book:
...The monster would have murdered again
And again had not God and the hero's courage,
Turned fate aside. Then and now
Men must lie in their Maker's holy
Hands, moved only as He wills:
Our hearts must seek out that will. The world,
And its long days full of labor, brings good
And evil; all who remain here meet both.

From the reading pile:

"Each one looked very much like the other (except for
the color, of course) and some looked even more like
each other than they did like themselves."
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
(I am reading this to Hattie)

"'Miss,' said Jimmy Waites breathlessly, 'Eileen Burton's
knicker elastic's busted, and she won't come out of the
lavatory she says, until you brings a pin!' Miss Gray
put the ring in her bag and hastened away, while I returned
to my room to choose the morning hymn, observing, as I went,
how seldom one can indulge in the inflation of any sort of
emotion without life's little pin-pricks bursting the
balloon.

'And a very good thing too,' I was moralizing to myself,
'emotions cannot be enjoyed without them becoming dangerous
to one's sense of proportion,' and I was about to develop
this lofty theme, when I caught sight of Ernest, and was
obliged to break off to direct him to wipe his nose."
Village School by Miss Read

"I have a feeling that childhood has been robbed of a great
deal of its joys by taking away its belief in wonderful, mystic
things, in fairies and all their kin. It is not surprising
that when children are grown, they have so little idealism or
imagination nor that so many of them are like the infidel who
asserted that he would not believe anything that he could not
see. It was a good retort the Quaker made, "Friend! Does thee
believe thee has any brains?"
Little House in the Ozarks: The Rediscovered Writings by
Laura Ingalls Wilder

"The most salutary social institution to emerge in the
West during this period between the fall of Rome and the
pontificate of Gregory the Great was Benedictine
monasticism. This institution became the primary, if not
the sole, preserver among the barbarians of the classical
writings of antiquity. Rome employed it as its chief
agency of evangelism and instruction in the Christian faith."
History of Christianity in the Middle Ages
by William Ragsdale Cannon

Snippets from The Spreading Flame by F.F. Bruce.
(Which is a history of the rise and progress of
Christianity from its beginnings through to the
conversion of the English.)

P. 294
Nor can any Christian or group of Christians contract
out of some share of responsibility for these scandals;
un-Christian behaviour on the part of any Christian
is a disgrace to all Christians. (Ouch)

P. 296
Doctrinal controversies which should have been confined
to the calm consideration of synod and lecture-room
were bandied about in the market-place and became the
playthings of popular turbulence. (Perhaps the market-
place has been replaced by blogville.)

P. 304
For Arianism reflected a temporary phase of thought,
and by conceiving of Christ as neither God nor man,
but something in between, it deprived Him of any real
mediatorship or saving power. (It always comes back
to who Christ is and what His relationship to the
Father is.)

P. 309
Athanasius stood for principle at any price; Constantine
for concord at any price. (Time to examine myself, I fear
I am weak.)

P. 311
On the one side and on the other attempts were made to
accommodate the Christian faith to current modes of
thought, but these accommodations usually proved, on
scrutiny, to be basically inconsistent with the substance
of the faith itself. And this was just as well, for the
current modes of thought to which people tried to accommodate
the faith sooner or later went the way of most modes of
thought;...(This sounds like a commentary on post-modernism
and the attempt to align Christianity with it.)

P. 314
The various heresies that sprang up in the earliest Christian
centuries are by no means out of date. They reappear
regularly in one form or another from generation to generation;
as Miss Dorothy Sayers has emphasized, they are "largely the
expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying
to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point
where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought."
(Not only do I agree with this, but, I had to include the
quote from one of the greatest mystery writes of all time.)

What I really want to do is to write a post on intentional
living, and I want to post the video I made of the gazillion
hummingbirds that have a feeding frenzy every morning and
evening at our feeders.

I also have some neat links I'd like to direct you to...

But, due to extreme lack of posting time I will just mention
that in 10 minute increments I read Murder Must Advertise by
Dorothy Sayers. It was nice to find a new Dorothy Sayers (well
not new, just newly acquired) at the Mayberry Library.

And now I just want to tell you that if you have never read
the Miss Read books then you are living in an arid land. Read
this quote and then go beg or borrow or buy all the Miss Read
books you can find.

"'I always speaks fair of folks when I can,'" continued Mrs. Pringle
self-righteously, putting down her dustpan and settling herself
on the front desk for a good gossip. The desk groaned under her
thirteen stone but knew better than to let the lady down. 'There's
mighty few these days as can be spoke fair of in Fairacre-a proper
lazy, shiftless, godless, money-grubbing lot as they be. As I
said to Mr. Pringle only last night: "If this is the age of
flatulence," I says, "then there's something in being poor but
honest!"'"

There wasn't a lot of time for reading while I was
in Mexico, but I did manage to reread Agatha Christie's
Thirteen at Dinner.

Reading anything by Dame Agatha is like coming home to
a meal of chicken and dumplings. It is satisfying. I
actually prefer Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot, but I'll
take either.

Since Thirteen at Dinner is a mystery, I can't divulge the
plot it its entirety or the punch will be taken away from
your reading. The book includes Hastings, humor, the lovely
English society and Poirot's grey matter, and so, what else
does a book need to be good? Nothing.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is an incredible book.
The translation I read, translated by Constance Garnett
is 870 pages long. It does not seem 870 pages long.
The compelling story line pushes one along as surely as
a tug boat pushes a barge. The only difficulty comes at
the beginning in sorting through all the Russian names,
surnames, middle names and nicknames. They are used so
interchangeably that it takes a bit of a mental effort
to master them.

This book, though, should have been named Levin. He, and
his wife Kitty, are the characters that shine as gold
through the whole sordid love affair of Anna and Vronsky.
Surely Anna is beautiful, charming, and delightful, but she
is also cold, calculating, selfish and extremely needy.
Vronsky is rich, handsome and devil-may-care, but he is also
self-centered and in love with himself.

Levin is tortured by his own failings as a man and a husband
and a member of society, and it is this very torturedness that
makes him so real and likable. His coming to grips at the
end with his Maker brings the entire novel to a satisfying end.

I am not clever enough to understand all the societal ramifications
of the book as far as Russian culture and politics are concerned.
I do know though, that I am glad to have this book on my bookshelf.

I've set myself a course in church history for the
next several months. First in line is a book I am
working my way through at present. The Spreading
Flame by F.F. Bruce begins at the beginning and will
take me through to the conversion of the English.

Today I found this piece of meat to chew on.
"That God incarnate should enter life by a unique way
...is not improbable, but perfectly fitting. That
God incarnate should live a life of perfect holiness,
marked by works of miraculous power and teaching of
pre-eminent wisdom, is not improbable, but just what
we should expect. That God incarnate should die--
there is something in the highest degree amazing.
Die He did, none the less; but this could not be the
end. When we have seen this act in the drama of our
salvation, we wait breathlessly for the sequel, and
greet it as something divinely natural: this is the
one 'whom God raised up, loosing the bonds of death,
because it was not possible that death should hold
Him fast.'"

Dining With the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts
with Modernity by Os Guinness is the first book I've
read by Guinness. I would like to read a more recent
book by him.

Dining With the Devil was published in 1993. That is
not so long ago. It is an interesting commentary on
the way we view the world's progress that 14 years would
seem almost an eternity in terms of change and modernization.

14 years ago we had only been in Mayberry for 1-2 years. We
moved to a small country church and away from one that was
not yet a megachurch, but which was well on the way. It has
now arrived. Almost every time I go to The Big City I pass
the main campus of the church we attended up there.

It is difficult to squash into a few words the ideas that
Dining With the Devil puts forth. I underlined and astericized
so much of it that I may as well just reproduce the whole
thing. Since I can't do that, I'll try to give the main
thrust.

Guinness says that the managing, marketing, psychology and
means of communication that are used by the modern church,
especially the modern megachurch, can be useful, but that it
is definitely a case of buyer beware. It is quite possible
that the world will be won to the church, and that in the
meantime the soul of the church will be lost.

His main position is that faith is losing authority in
both the life of the church and the individual believer.
On page 18 he states the crux of the matter. "What
people believe no longer makes much difference to how
they behave."

His development of this idea, beginning with mourning the
loss of the importance of the written word in society and
moving through to questions that should be asked if we,
as Christians, are to be truly discerning, is the meat of
the book.

Guinness does not write for the casual reader. It takes
work to read a book like this, but it is definitely worth
the brain energy put forth. Following is one of the many
paragraphs that I underlined in this book. (P.27)

"...The second common deficiency is that the church-
growth movement--true to its American evangelical
parentage--displays a minimal sense of historical
awareness....Two periods, for example, would give
fruitful parallels: the late eighteenth century
and the story of European liberalism's engagement
with the 'cultured despisers,' and the early
nineteenth century and the story of American
evangelicalism's fateful seachange during the
era of Jacksonian populism. This early nineteenth-
century change is a particularly important precedent
because it was not so much from Calvinism to
Arminianism as from theology to experience, from
truth to technique, from elites to populism, and
from an emphasis on 'serving God' to an emphasis on
'servicing the self' in serving God."