HAROLD BEGBIE AND "THE ORDINARY MAN."

Northern Advocate, 6 September 1913, Page 3

HAROLD BEGBIE AND "THE ORDINARY MAN."

The writer of "The Ordinary Man and the Extraordinary Thing" thus explains how he came to write that book, so different in its setting from his earlier stories of conversion: —

An unknown correspondent, the librarian of a university in America, writing to me about "Broken Earthenware" and "In the Hands of the Potter," asked me some months ago to write a book dealing with "the conversions of ordinary people, respectable men and women, who do not indulge in drunkenness, or theft, or lying, or gross immorality." He went on to say: "Because of the conditions that surround them, many people know only those who belong to the respectable classes, and I am sure that many of your readers, of whom 1 am one, would welcome a work narrating the religious experiences of our brethren who belong neither to the "submerged tenth" nor to the "four hundred."

Of course the supreme test of religion is its influence upon the central host of humanity. If education and refinement can Safeguard civilisation, and if the bulk of mankind can advance in virtue and righteousness without religion, such conversions as are narrated in "Broken Earthenware" might well become merely curious and interesting problems in psychology.

The conversion of a respectable man can be as wonderful and beautiful a thing as the conversion of a great sinner; but it is seldom that the result of that conversion utters itself in an uprush of burning and torrential love which bursts the flood-gates of self-repression, and flows over the whole brotherhood of man in a tide of self-forgetting care and compassion. And now in this book I show that conversion is quite a common experience among ordinary men, is very often nothing more than a secret turning of the face toward God, a private decision to live a new life, a personal and wholly tranquil choice of the soul for Christ as its Master and Saviour. No priest appears to be necessary, the excitements of Dhe revivalist preacher are absent; in the privacy of its own soul, the spirit jturns from evil and faces toward good.