Broken Lights by Harold Begbie

Broken Lights

A Short Study On the Varieties of Christian Opinion

by Harold Begbie

This book was published by New York George H. Doran Company in 1926.

PREFACE

“TOWARDS the end of last year (1925) I contributed to the columns of the Daily Mail newspaper a brief series of articles which attempted to give an account of certain schools of religious thought.

These articles brought me so interesting a correspondence from many quarters of the world that I decided, as many of my correspondents urged me to do, to develop the idea on a larger scale, and to publish it in a more permanent form.

It had seemed to me from the outset that if the average thoughtful man, whose mind is at present undecided what to believe, could find in a single volume, and expressed in quite simple and untech-nical language, the reasons which induce various devoted men to believe what they do believe it would help him to come to a more rational decision concerning his own opinions.

This feeling in my mind has strengthened since the articles appeared, and I am now convinced that a book of this nature may serve a useful purpose in the somewhat bewildered life of the present

much lie in the divisions which unhappily distract the Church, as in the tendency of the disputants to conduct their controversies in terms so remote from the language of common experience, that the average man is coming more and more to regard religion with the same sort of hopeless indifference with which he regards higher mathematics or the theory of relativity. Religion does not help him. It perplexes him.

This bewilderment in the public mind, leading to indifference, is not only dangerous to the average man, but dangerous to the Church. For it leaves experts or officials in charge of institutions which are vital both to the health of the individual and to the orderly progress of civilisation, institutions in which every man ought to take as deep an interest as he takes in the destiny of his country and the happiness of his own home. One of the consequences of this indifference on the part of the average man is a timorousness and an indecisiveness on the part of the experts; so that it is now perfectly plain to all those who have studied the matter that these divided theologians will never come to a common understanding on the Christian Faith until they are forced into greater activity by the pressure of public opinion.

Therefore this book has two objects: to stimulate interest in religion on the part of the average man, and to remind the experts and officials in charge of religious institutions that in all those matters which divide them the spirit is of infinitely greater importance than the letter. 

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This book is in very good condition with minimal wear to the cover. There is a library stamp on the title page and pen markings on the copyright page. There is no other writing or markings inside the book.

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