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النشر الإلكتروني

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Whether you may be an inquirer for the way of life I know not. But this I know-it is a way of blessedness most precious and profitable. It has God's gracious, fatherly oversight and keeping along the journey here. It issues in the unalloyed, unspeakable and unending joys of His immediate presence hereafter.

I would fain impress this upon you. Allow me therefore, in this opening chapter, to give a few reasons serving to show in some measure its surpassing claim upon your thought and action. If you are already an earnest seeker after the way bear with me a little for the sake of someone who may not be.

The question of bread, in one form or other, has never lost its interest for the human family. Its need and how to obtain it has perforce engaged their attention and effort through all the centuries. This common and unfailing interest attests the importance of this way of the natural life in the thought of mankind.

Now should there be a similar interest shown always and everywhere in the way of the supernatural or spiritual life, would it not equally attest the importance, both of the way and of all inquiry concerning it? Truly. Now this has been one of the great, outstanding facts of human history. A recognition of the relationship of this life, for good or ill, to the world of the invisible, has characterized the human family amid all the variations of its earthly destiny. The law of God, unwritten or written, has been so present and operative everywhere, that the inevitable sense of alienation wrought thereby has led, just as surely, to efforts having for their object the propitiation of the invisible Power. The question, "How can man be just with God?" has been of perennial and world-wide interest. It may be, as it has been, answered, now in one way and now in another, by different peoples, but the fact of its unfailing presence and its attempted answer by all, is surely a tribute to its importance as one of the great and undying race questions of this mortal life.

Not only so-in making the estimate you must have regard to the sacrifices which men have been willing to make in answer thereto. This it is which reveals the awful gravity of the need and the intensity of the grasp which this question has

upon the heart and mind of man. It has been recognized as one involving life and death, so that, in answering it, life, in one way or other, has been prominent as a solving element. Life has been realized as forfeited, and, in the hope of making good the loss, life has been offered by way of acknowledgment.

Now this confession and hope finds typical or symbolic expression in the offering of the lower animal life. But this did not always satisfy the human heart, crying out, under the pressure of its deep-seated cravings. Amid the blindness of their sin-darkened nature and the greatness of their need they hesitated not to offer the life of man himself. Human sacrifices attest the greatness and intensity of man's conscious need. They bring home to you, as nothing else merely human can, the surpassing importance of all inquiry as to the way of life of the question, "How shall a man be just with God?"

And not only in the days of old were children immolated on sacrificial altars for the sin of the soul, but in the modern years have they been given over to death out of deference to this craving of the human spirit.

Then, too, all the infinite variety and degree of self-inflicted penance, found along the line of effort after a condition where the soul may feel

that the question of its being just with God has been answered satisfyingly-this also joins in unison with the rest proclaiming the transcendant importance of the inquiry.

Neither are you to overlook or forget the fact that this inquiry concerns a life compared to which, in duration, the present dwindles into utter insignificance. Onward, onward, ever and endlessly onward as the duration of God himself, while at the same time filled with the unspeakably glorious elements of a never ceasing and limitless growth,-what a life is this as compared to that of the present transient existence.

How it impressed the minds and hearts of prophet and apostle and with what vivid imagery they gave expression to the fact. "My days are swifter than a post." "Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble." "Behold thou hast made my days as an handbreadth: and mine age is as nothing before thee." "Remember how short my time is: wherefore hast thou made all men in vain ?" "Thou carriest them away as with a flood: they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up." "We spend our years as a tale that is told." "For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow?" "Mine age is departed, and is re

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