Friday 22 March 2024

A Cheerful Book

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Sir Sidney Colvin, 5 vol (London: William Heinemann, 1924), II, p.297 [‘To Mr. Dick’, 12 March 1884]:

The Bible, in most parts, is a cheerful book; it is our little piping theologies, tracts, and sermons that are dull and dowie; and even the Shorter Catechism, which is scarcely a work of consolation, opens with the best and shortest and completest sermon ever written; upon Man’s Chief End.