The Measure of the Rule
The Measure of the Rule is a 1907 coming-of-age novel about a country teacher who migrates to the city to study engineering, but is forced by dint of circumstance to go to a teachers' training college, where he meets his wife-to-be. Written by the one-time Detroit [Free Press] journalist Robert Barr it is both an indictment of an age gone by in which discipline and religion slide towards perversion and voyeurism, and a reminiscence of an innocent time before the great conflicts of the twentieth century, a time in which respect, delicacy and modesty prevailed in the relationships between man and woman, student and teacher. A complex and forgotten masterpiece of observation, whimsy and melodrama, it is reminiscent both of Mark Twain and Booth Tarkington. The title comes from 2 Corinthians 10:13 "according to the measure of the rule which God hath distributed to us, a measure to reach even unto you"