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Giovanni Papini, in his voluble, not to say garrulous, and, as I find it, almost unreadable "Life of Christ," turned away from all that ornate estheticizing, with execrations on the "decadents," because he had become a good Catholic and wished to become a best seller.

Mary Austin turns away from all that because it really does not interest her. In "A Small Town Man," published originally in 1915, and now republished with revisions and a more explicit statement of her conclusions, Mary Austin comes to the interpretation of Jesus, as every sincere interpreter must, with just what she has of her own that can give her an original and personal view. She has, she assures us, studied her Biblical literature, topography, ethnography, etc.,