More Twice Born Men by Harold Begbie from 1923 with the original dust jacket

More Twice-Born Men

NARRATIVES OF A RECENT MOVEMENT IN THE SPIRIT OF PERSONAL RELIGION

by Harold Begbie.

This book was published with the title More Twice-Born Men in the United States editions. The title of Life Changers was given to the book for the editions published in England.

This book was published in 1923. This book is extremely rare to find with the original dust jacket!

This is an early book about the Oxford Group Movement and its founder Frank Buchman. This was an important piece of publicity with the endorsement of a popular writer of the time.

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More Twice-Born Men is comprised of century-old stories of men who had their lives changed so profoundly and so dramatically that the original book was reprinted 11 times.

More Twice-Born Men is also about a man, Frank Buchman, who was first and foremost a teacher. Buchman could change the lives of students and scholars in the course of a single conversation; changing those lives so profoundly and persuasively that the world was in disbelief. Buchman started a movement that reached the shores of America and lives today in the form of many 12-step programs. While the original movement was founded on Christianity, its principles and ideas moved beyond religion and Christianity into a more generic spiritual movement.

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Included on the dust jacket is a quote and endorsement from William James, author of Varieties of Religious Experience.

“Twice-Born Men was a publishing event of some years ago, and since its publication over 500,000 copies have been sold. William James was so moved by its narratives that he said his own book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, might well be called a Postscript to it. Today the same author in a similar work throws a new and much more significant light on the same subject. More Twice-Born Men is a series of character sketches, each the story, or rather the confession, of a young man; for freshness, originality, and the revelation of Christianity as a power of miraculous force, they have hardly an equal in the literature of religion.”

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Here is an excerpt from the Preface:

ALMOST in secret, a strange work has been going on for the last two or three years among the undergraduates of many universities, not only here in England but all over the world. This work, of which the general public knows nothing at all, and of which the religious authorities so far as I can gather have never heard, is the activity of a single person.

Something more than a year ago I made the acquaintance of this man, and learned from him that he considers privacy essential to his method, at any rate that he regards publicity as a grave danger. His genius, I think, lies in thinking with an intense preoccupation of individual persons. To him the man is much more than the multitude, the part infinitely greater than the whole, which is probably true in the spiritual sphere. Any idea of "mass production" in his work is to him dreadfully repellent. Therefore it is that he shuns publication of any kind, nurses the shadows of privacy, and never for one moment dreams of calculating his gains in statistics.”

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Here is an excerpt from the First Chapter:

AT the outset I will make it quite plain how the method of F. B. chiefly differs, in my opinion, from the methods of most other men engaged in work of this nature.

But I must be frank with the reader, and tell him at once that F. B. would probably correct me at almost every point of my explanation, thrusting in with theological formulas which he himself considers essential to the success of his work.

I make bold to think, however, on the same ground which entitles the least of us to say that the onlooker sees most of the game, that I discern better than F. B. himself what makes his work so extraordinarily fruitful.

This would be an insufferably vain assumption if I had not confirmed my opinion on several occasions in discourse with those whose lives have been so marvelously changed under the influence of F. B. They are my witnesses.

In the third chapter of this book the reader will see how amply I am justified in proffering this particular excuse for what otherwise would certainly be an impertinent presumption.”

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This book is in excellent condition. There is minimal wear to the cover. There is no writing or markings in the book. The dust jacket has experienced edge wear and tears at the spine. The back of the dust jacket has tape to repair tears.

Please view all of the photos for the conditions.