THE SUNDAY STAR

Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

30 July 1916

(page 6)

REVIEWS OF BOOKS OF MIDSUMMER.

A PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY. Being the Letters of Stuart [Henry Stuart]. Edited with an introduction by Aleister Crowley. Washington: Published by the author.

A week or so ago we had a book of prophecy by H. G. Wells. In this book Mr. Wells declared that any one possessed of a broadly generalized knowledge coupled with the scientific imagination and habit could extend the present into its logical future, or, in other words, any one thus endowed could prophesy. His book was informing and illuminating, but it was too sane and convincing to permit us to accept Mr. Wells as an Elijah or an Elisha. But this book gives us a prophet of the true Hebraic brand. Here is one who, from the high place of his own mind, hurls thunderbolts and paints hell fire and brimstone with fervor and a fine flaming effect. By way of something like 200 “letters” this prophet shakes the world-drift of this globe around him and—neck-deep in it—he pulls out, hit-or-miss, handfuls of its follies and banalities, its sins and its ignorances. Politics, government, industry, commerce, finance, social custom, religion and personal comment on this or that one in authority make up, in part, the topics upon which this torrent of language is cast. And the language itself is as much of a protest against the ordinary behavior of this medium as the thoughts which they represent are in rebellion, against the common run of thinking. This motley of letter-writing is gathered up under the headings, “The Dollar,” “China,” “War,” “Aunt Margery,” “Miscellaneous.” The introduction, by the editor, is so much in the spirit and manner of the author himself, that one is set to wonderment over the fact that there is another person in the world so much like “Stuart” as is Aleister Crowley, the editor of this volume.