Man's life of purpose
The message that comes to us through this volume commands our attention because of the dignity of the gospel it embodies, and also because of the unusual process of authorship. Taken in its scope, I know of no utterance that in its meta-physics and morals is more exalting and salubrious than the redemptive word that comes to us through this writer.
There are many notes of magnitude and hopefulness being struck in our latter-day ethical philosophies, but so many of them are deficient in the fundamental requirement of any really illuminative system of thought — the requirement of sanity.
It is easy and pleasant, to begin with, a broad and sweeping hypothesis, such as that God is an infinite being — infinite in truth and in love, and infinite quantitatively, to the point of exclusion of all other beings — and from this hypothesis deduce a universe whose sky is without a shadow, whose rhythm is without a breach. Christian Science, for instance, is a religion quite logical and splendidly optimistic.
Grant, its premise and its deductions are just as rigid in their inevitableness as the deduction of pa- vi Foreword pal infallibility from the postulate of an infallible council of the church. But any religion that is going to appeal to the critical spirit of thinking people must have a postulate that covers the facts of life and the facts of love, so far as they are attunable to the structure of the human mind and conform- able to the deliverances of the senses as they operate upon this earth plane.
When a man tells us that there is only one sub- stance at the root of things, he may be telling us that which is true, but which is not true for us, be- cause we are so constituted that the world as it impinges upon our consciousness divides itself into two factors of being —the one spiritual and the other material.
When we turn our thoughts within, we are conscious of spiritual being. When we touch the world by the organ of vision, or by the organ of hearing, or by the specific contacts of our muscles, we are conscious of a world that is different in its quality from the spiritual world that we know through introversion; we are conscious of a world of matter, a world of quantity, of dimensions, of spatial limitations, of resistance and ponderosity.
Contents:
I Work of Man 3
II Work of Life in Man 21
III Man the Life Immortal 51
IV Work That Helps Life 75
V Free Will of Life Personal 91
VI Man, the Life of Free Purpose .... 113
VII Will for Life Worthy 141
VIII Man the Thinking Life 155
IX Worth of Life in Man 161
X Wise Life Becomes through God's Teaching 197
XI Helpful Thought 201
XII Final Word 205
