A race's redemption

Front matter

JOHN LE

DAWSO

Class 1 -

Preface

Truth wins its way slowly. It is well, however, for us to remember that it does so surely. No part of it can always remain either covered up or lost. It is now established that God's general method in creation was that of those long upward processes which we indicate by the word evolution ; and if the interpretations represented by this volume are correct, it will eventually be everywhere confessed that his method in redemption is the same. The aim in creation was to bring matter to its highest possibilities by allying it with the vital, the moral and the spiritual, as these exist in man; and the goal of redemption will be attained when man reaches that summit where the spiritual in him will assimilate all else to itself, causing even his coarse clay to disappear in the process. Indeed this work might, not too unsuitably, have been entitled "Evolution through Christ."

The Twentieth Century version of the New Testament has been used, not because it was regarded as absolutely correct at every point, but because it is in present day English, and because by using it in place of improved translations which he himself might have attempted, the author could give all his readers the opportunity

PREFACE

of verifying his quotations. The Old Testament passages, on the other hand, have, as a rule, been drawn from the English revision of 1885.