I should admit at the outset that I didn’t read this book, I listened to it, superbly read by Mirron Willis. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is, of course, a classic American novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852. In its first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the US and 1,000,000 in the UK. It was second only to the Bible for book sales in the US in the 19th century.
Though it is an old book, it is not heavy or difficult. It is, after all, a novel, and one that is all that a novel should be – exciting, tragic, sad, funny, enlightening and edifying. I say edifying because Tom, around whom the story revolves, is a believer in the Lord Jesus and one who suffers much for His Name. There is much in the book that exposes the subtlety of compromise among those professing the faith, and that is not irrelevant to our own times. Many genuine Christians living in that era were quite blind to the evils of slavery. To what are we blind?
CS Lewis wrote, when recommending the reading of old books, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.“
And why old books? He explains further:
“Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.“
Lewis is right. Old books are wonderfully adapted to enhance our perspective on the present, and when one such as this is also rich in many other ways, why would you not seek out a copy for yourself?
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