“The Cynic puts all human actions into only two classes, — openly bad, and secretly bad. All virtue, and generosity, and disinterestedness, are merely the appearance of good, but selfish at the bottom.
Joseph Hocking is the Lutheran Librarian’s favorite Christian novelist. Though mostly forgotten now, during his lifetime he was widely read and greatly beloved throughout the English speaking world. Most of his books deal in some way with the struggles and conflicts of living as a Christian in the modern world.
“It is exceedingly clever, and excites the reader’s interest and brings out the powerful nature of the clever young minister. This most engrossing book challenges comparison with the brilliance of Lothair.
“A writer possessing not only a fine literary gift, and a marvelous power of intense emotional realization, but a fresh, strange, and fascinating imaginative outlook. We know of nothing published in recent years which, in lurid impressiveness and relentless veracity of rendering, is to be compared with the realization of the fatally dominant alcoholic craving in the study entitled ‘A Literary Gent.
“There can be no doubt of the force and freshness of most of the book, of the fine literary quality of some of the chapters, and of the interest of the whole.