The Circuit Rider - A Tale of the Heroic Age #224885

Obligations of a novelist to tell the truth. Lawyers and even ministers are permitted to speak entirely on one side. But no man is worthy to be called a novelist who does not endeavor with his whole soul to produce the higher form of history, by writing truly of men as they are, and dispassionately of those forms of life that come within his scope. Much as I have laughed at every sort of grotesquerie, I could not treat the early religious life of the West otherwise than with the most cordial sympathy and admiration. And yet this is not a religious novel, one in which all the bad people are as bad as they can be, and all the good people a little better than they can be. I have not even asked myself what may be the moral. The story of any true life is wholesome, if only the writer will tell it simply, keeping impertinent preachment of his own out of the way. Doubtless I Shall hopelessly damage myself with some good people by confessing in the start that, from the first chapter to the last, this is a love-story. But it is not my fault. It is God who made love so universal that no picture of human life can be complete where love is left out.