Rambles: Round Reformed Lands (Classic Reprint)

The Rev. Dr. Good turns out to have been a prominent clergyman in the American Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, who also taught at the Central Theological Seminary and served for a time as president of the General Synod (thanks, once again, Wikipedia!). He published a number of historical works about the Reformed Church in Europe.

Researching his historical works, Dr Good, like any conscientious nineteenth-century writer, wanted to see things for himself, and made a series of visits to the places associated with the great figures of the Reformation. Visits he most certainly would not have used a popish word like "pilgrimages" for, although that was clearly what they came down to. This travel book about his experiences in Switzerland and show more Germany is evidently intended as a frivolous spin-off from his more serious work. But we can't reasonably expect very high standards of frivolity from a Calvinist pastor in search of Zwingli's birthplace...

I was expecting to dip into this book, have a good laugh at its period quaintness and prejudices, and put it back on the shelf. But I found myself warming to Dr Good's style in an odd way: he's so patently a kind and sincere person, despite his frequently expressed prejudices against Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, "rationalists", foreigners (other than Reformed clergy), Jews and black people (the last of these doesn't really come into play in this book, but I deduce it from his reaction to the Black Madonna at Einsiedeln). He reminds me very much of certain kindly old clergymen and church elders I knew when I was a child (obviously, they would have been at least a generation younger than Good) - people you feel too much respect for to want to disagree with them, even when they are exhibiting 20/20 tunnel vision. His style really has all the elements of that type: the rambling anecdotes about vaguely embarrassing misunderstandings (usually involving going into a church by the wrong door); the unsubstantiated tales in which unnamed and unverifiable people experience good fortune as a result of following the Reformed faith; the ludicrously weak pulpit puns (standing on a bridge in Berlin: "And here (I am almost ashamed to confess it) I find myself on a spree."). Silly, but so delightful, at least when it's a century away and not happening over an interminable Sunday tea when you really want to get away and play in the garden.

Dr Good seems to have been unlucky with his printer, but his loss is our gain. Apart from the unfortunate title page layout ("yes, but what about the square ones?" was my automatic reaction...) we get a whole string of unconventional American spellings of German place names: Frankford for Frankfurt and Meurs for Moers being the most striking. A few historical figures also get Americanised in a rather Mark Twainish way - "Thomas A. Kempis" was easy enough to decode, but "John A. Lasco" took me a moment or two longer to work out (he's more usually either Johannes a Lasco or Jan Łaski).

An engaging little bit of fun, but also mildly interesting in filling in a few little gaps in my knowledge - I wasn't really conscious of the distinction between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions in German protestantism, for instance, but reading his account of things like the Diakoniewerk in Kaiserswerth (which I knew of as the place where my mother's parents met) the pieces started to fall into place with what I already knew. show less