The ‘Little Minister’ is a light comedy, filled with a delicate romance and brightened with the humors of Thrums. It is a light comedy, despite the ambitious strain of the love passages, and the entertainment it affords is, on the whole, an exercise of one’s sentiments, not one’s intellect. The ‘Little Minister’ is a book in which much that happens has no better reason for happening than that the author wishes it to. When we read the story in an idle hour we do not quibble at it for abandoning logic and pleasing us, without regarding the rules of the game. But such shortcomings constitute the difference between a pleasant book and a great book.