Publisher's Synopsis
Volume 1 : It sees in the world of human beings more folly and weakness than perverse power and malignity; and especially does it see there many fragments of truth and goodness and few wholes. The fragments of truth and goodness, where they subsist in good faith with regard to fuller truth and goodness,can already, in their degree and way, be of touching beauty and of real worth-of value, also to the opponents of those who hold these fragments. With regard to non-Christian religions and as to how fervent Christians can respect these religions at their best, I love to think of Cardinal de Lavigerie, the jealous Missionary Archbishop-of his alighting from his carriage and proceeding on foot past such Mosques as he happened to pass in his Algerian Diocese. If the reader will now take as one whole the three Parts of this book, he will find, I believe, that all are equally penetrated by an ultimate mental and spiritual conviction and habit which the writer has never ceased, now for fifty years, wistfully to find to be somehow rare amongst his fellowmen, even amongst those who are sincerely religious. There runs here throughout everything the sense that Religion, even more than all other convictions that claim correspondence with the real, begins and proceeds and ends with the Given-with existences, realities, which environ and penetrate us, and which we have always new to capture and to combine, to fathom and to apprehend; all this, however, neither as springing from scepticism nor as leading to it, but, on the contrary, as stimulated and sustained by a tenacious conviction that a real, if dim, confused knowledge of reality is with us already prior to all our attempts clearly to analyse or completely to synthesise it.
