Invitation to the Classics. Edited by Louise Cowan and Os Guinness. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998, 384 pp., $34.99.

For many, the word "classic" serves as a warning, like the poison label plastered on a bottle. In our time, readers generally flee from the classics, being reminded only that they serve, or did in pre-postmodern days, as texts for education, dreary reading, and examinations. Indeed, if not construed as lethal, then the classics have come to be viewed as medicine that, while good for one, is distasteful or disappointing. The present age appears to have forgotten that the classics are, as the rubric implies, benchmarks of illustrious and lasting literature, enduring in the power of ...