And unless I am wrong throughout this brief analysis, Samuel
Butler, who mentally and spiritually is essentially our
contemporary, would not, if he were writing now, concern himself
with theology at all, but with the shams and unreasons which are
the vested tyrannies set over us to-day. Erewhon, when we last
hear of it, is about to become a modern colonial state. Its
concern is with an army and with economics. Chow-Bok, the savage,
now become a missionary bishop, is about to administer its
ecclesiastical system. Its spiritual problems no longer center
upon the validity of miraculous tradition and the logic of a
theological code. But the vested interests (represented by Pocus,
the son of Hanky) remain. These Butler would attack in the needed
fashion. These remain the enemy.
VII
CONCLUSION
DEFINING THE INDEFINABLE
I am well aware that literature or even such an inconsiderable
part of literature as this gay book on my desk or the poem on the
printed page, as a whole is indefinable. Every critic of
literature from Aristotle down has let some of it slip between his
fingers. If he describes the cunning form of a play or a story,
then the passion in it, or the mood behind it, eludes him.
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