In this new novel of his, Mr. Walpole has shown a most remarkable understanding of the depths and the heights of human nature. The story is the modern equivalent of the Book of Job. It is the blinding of a man by his own selfishness, and his punishment by a long series of misfortunes.

Archdeacon Brandon is not a bad man--he is a man who might have been a saint but for his own egotism. Blind to all but his own ambitions, he sought to dominate everything and everybody in the diocese as he had so long dominated the Cathedral. For years he succeeded. Like Job he seemed the favorite of a merciful God, but, again like Job, his testing was inexorable. First his friends, then his son, his wife, and finally even his God Himself seemed to desert him. Step by step his punishment is meted out to him, until finally he is overwhelmed by it all, and goes down to his grave a despised and unhonored man.

The book is a series of pictures--magnificent pictures of life and human passions--and through them all the magnificent figure of the great Cathedral towers; calm, unchangeable, a silent witness of the struggles and petty trials of the human puppets who swarm at its feet.

"The Cathedral" is not a "modern" novel in the sensuous way that that term is so often used, but it is a novel that every thinking man should read, and digest. It is a book to make men think--a quality rare enough in the novels of today.