Spiritual Boreham, Frank W.: A Handful of Stars. V1. 19-Mar-2011

[weatherwax]

Frank William Boreham (3 March 1871, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England - 18 May 1959, Melbourne, Victoria) was a Baptist preacher best known in New Zealand, Australia, and England. (His birth coincided with the end of the Franco-Prussian War and he could say in later life that, "Salvoes of artillery and peals of bells echoed across Europe on the morning of my birth.")

Full title: A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds

Excerpt:
The Height evidently accepted the challenge of the Depth. Heaven hungered for the love of Earth, and so the stars were thrown. I have gathered up a few, and, like children with their beads and berries, have threaded them upon this string. It will be seen that they do not all belong to the same constellation. Most of them shed their luster over the stern realities of life: a few glittered in the firmament of fiction. It matters little. A great romance is a portrait of humanity, painted by a master-hand. When the novelist employs the majestic words of revelation to transfigure the lives of his characters, he does so because, in actual experience, he finds those selfsame words indelibly engraven upon the souls of men. And, after all, Sydney Carton's Text is really Charles Dickens' Text; Robinson Crusoe's Text is Daniel Defoe's Text; the text that stands embedded in the pathos of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the text that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had enthroned within her heart. Moreover, to whatever group these splendid orbs belong, their deathless radiance has been derived, in every case, from the perennial Fountain of all Beauty and Brightness.