THE WORK BY G.A. STUDDERT KENNEDY,M.A.,M.C. Rector of S. Edmund King and Martyr, Lombard Street. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE LORD BISHOP OF LONDON THIRD IMPRESSION LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4 NEW YORK, TORONTO BOMBAY, CALCUTTA AND MADRAS 1925 MAR 30 1925 CK .ST9. INTRODUCTION THIS book will make people think. It will give them, to use the author's phrase, "A pain in the mind." Too many of us do not think at all; others do not think deeply enough. It is hard to say which is the most irritating: the shallow optimist or the shallow pessimist. In Christian circles the shallow optimist is the most common. He does not really face the tragedies in life, the inequalities in human lots, the injustice by which the innocent so often suffer for the guilty. No one who has been through what the author has been through during the War and since can help facing it, and the usefulness of this book consists in this: that it shows it to be a possibility, even when you have faced everything, to keep your faith, tremblingly, but still to keep it in a good God. "In the beginning was the Word "-everything is contained in that sentence, according to the author, who paraphrases it thus: "Right at the heart of the ultimate reality there was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, a Person expressing a rational purpose which man can, in some measure, understand." The whole book is a thesis upon this, and, although the opening chapters will be found difficult to some, all will understand and appreciate the most moving chapters with which the book closes. |