Introduction 11 



will still be somewhat involved, will not be altogether 

 easy of comprehension? Indeed, is it not the way of 

 much that is truly worth while to be a little hard in 

 places, hard to understand and hard to endure? 



I have done my best to make the arguments compre- 

 hensible to any educated person impelled by a genuine 

 desire to understand them. These italicized words 

 touch, as I have previously indicated, the cardinal 

 question, the answer to which will measure the volume's 

 fate. If a reader finds anything in the book in its 

 general title or the titles of any of the four essays, 

 or in any of the subheadings, or any of the sentences 

 or paragraphs taken by themselves, that makes him 

 strongly suspect the discussions deal with matters of 

 vital concern to him personally and to his fellow beings, 

 he will follow the essays through and find few incom- 

 prehensible spots in them. I am quite sure there is 

 nothing harder to understand in them than there is, 

 for example, in the Book of Job, in some of Saint 

 Paul's letters, or in parts of Mrs. Eddy's Key to the 

 Scriptures and Guide to Health. 



Each of the essays was written originally for a par- 

 ticular group of persons and a particular occasion, 

 and each, consequently, bears the marks of its en- 

 vironment in true bio-evolutional fashion. What the 

 original and form-influencing environment of each was 

 is indicated by a footnote appended to each essay itself. 



The order in which the essays are placed in the vol- 

 ume is almost if not quite the reverse of that in which 



