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Excerpt from Ring Rule and Ring Ruin: A Picture for the People Scene I. - A room in the Grand American Depot. J. Coolie Planning, Vice-President of the Inter-Oceanic Railway, and Samuel Slykes, Esq., an Attorney, sitting together smoking. Planning. - Well, Sam, how goes the chapel? Slykes. - Goes, Coolie? A reg'lar run - no let up, I tell you. Shammius Chapel beats my old locomotive "Nancy," mended, packed, greased, and rubbed like a tea-pot - track straight, and pine knots under biler - whizzin' sixty mile an hour. Planning. - Shammius Chapel then's a spec! hey! old fellow, pays? Your down-town building sold well, and your up-town edifice will rise in value every day. After paying expenses, forty per cent. over for parson, and charitable uses! Ecclesiastically, and commercially, Sam Slykes is a shrewd fox - sharp as that animal on his cane-head! Slykes (flourishing his cane.) - Coolie, have a fellow-feelin' with the brute, that's a fact - sort of a brother of mine - same great-grand-papa in old times. Rather have a fox for my ancestor than a monkey! Planning. - Sam, I am not anxious to pursue the line of your ancestors, nor of my own, fearing each might prove a hemp one - vegetable rather than animal. But I do want to know how you have filled Shammius Chapel with such crowds. You seem to run a church as well as you ran a locomotive. Slykes. - Thing's plain as a steam-gauge. Parson got into trouble - family big - expensive wife - bills and vacations long, cash and visits short - scandal with the women. Pews wouldn't rent - income bad - congregations slim, and a general grumble. Then comes in Sam Slykes, my boy, to foreclose his mortgage, and drive the old failure off. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

O'Day illustrates how Tolkien's fantasy trilogy, "The Lord of the Rings," contains Christian truth and wisdom that have much to say about the contemporary world and mankind's beliefs, spirituality, and sense of self.

Can power be wielded for good, or must it always corrupt? Does technology destroy the truly human? Is beer essential to the good life? The Lord of the Rings raises many such searching questions, and this book attempts some answers. Divided into five sections concerned with power and the Ring, the quest for happiness, good and evil in Middle-earth, time and mortality, and the relevance of fairy tales, The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy mines Tolkien's fantasy worlds for wisdom in areas including the menace of technology, addiction and fetishism, the vitality of tradition, the environmental implications of Tolkien's thought, Middle-earth's relationship to Buddhism and Taoism, and more.