Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Riley Hughes

Critical Essay by Riley Hughes

On page 572 (the final page) [of Dear and Glorious Physician] Miss Caldwell adds this sentence (in parentheses) after her own final sentence of the novel: "Continued in the Holy Bible, Gospel of St. Luke, and Acts I and II." There is something awesome in assurance like that, something that defies comment. Lucanus (St. Luke) is a very pedestrian fellow who finally comes to some faint understanding of God.

Lucanus strikes this reader, at least, as a rather dimwitted figure, unable to account for his miraculous powers of healing and, even in his attraction to the new religion, a man who acts remarkedly like a twentieth-century agnostic. If Christianity is Pickwickian and shadowy in Dear and Glorious Physician, the decadent, pagan Roman world is not. What with licentiousness and "the disturbing mysticism of the Jews," poor Lucanus has, over these interminable pages, an unhappy career of it. As for his...
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