"In God's Ways," the second of the two great novels, is a
work of which it is difficult to speak in terms of measured
praise. With its delicate and vital delineations of character,
its rich sympathy and depth of tragic pathos, its plea for
the sacredness of human life, and its protest against the
religious and social prejudice by which life is so often
misshapen, this book is an epitome of all the ideas and
feelings that have gone to the making of the author's
personality, and have received such manifold expression in
his works. It is a simple story, concerned mainly with four
people, in no way outwardly conspicuous, yet here united
by the poet's art into a relationship from which issue
some of the deepest of social questions, and which
enforces in the most appealing terms the fundamental
teaching of all the work of his mature years. First of
all, we have the boyhood of the two friends who are
afterwards to grow apart in their sympathies; the one alert
of mind, imaginative, open to every intellectual influence,
also impetuous and hot-blooded; the other shy and
intellectually stolid, but good to the very core, and moved
by the strongest of altruistic impulses.
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