XV
TIMOTHY BONDAREF
How strange and odd it would have seemed to the educated Romans of the middle of the first century, had anyone told them that the obscure, confused, and often unintelligible letters addressed by a wandering Jew to his friends and pupils would have a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times more readers, more circulation, and more influence over people, than all the poems, odes, elegies, and elegant epistles of the authors of that age ! And yet that is what has happened.
Equally strange and odd must my assertion seem to people to-day, that Bondaref's work — at the naivete' of which we condescendingly smile from the height of our mental grandeur — will survive all the other works described in this Dictionary, and have more effect on people than all the other books mentioned in it put to- gether. And yet I am convinced that such will be the case. And the reason of my conviction is, that just as there are an innumerable quantity of false paths that lead nowhere and are therefore unnecessary, but only one true path that leads us to our aim and is therefore necessary, so also there are an innumerable quantity of false, unnecessary thoughts, but only one true and needful thought, or, rather, direction of thought ; and that true and needful direction of thought in our time has been expressed by Bondaref in his book, with a force, clearness and conviction with which no one else has expressed it. Therefore, the many works that now seem so important and necessarv may vanish completely
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