From the PREFACE.
To the readers of Clear Round! the following Notes are offered as a solution of the perplexing thoughts and questionings therein summed up in those five words: What does it all mean?
It is felt that, in face of the facts now disclosed, it should be impossible to make the unblushing mis-statement still alas! to be found in certain missionary magazines, viz.: that non-Christians pray to a God who never heard or answered a single prayer that was offered to Him.
Such sentiments (founded upon an ignorance which, in these days, is simply unpardonable) may indeed make Atheists-they do alienate earnest seekers from the Truth whether in this country, or in Japan where, as St. Francis Xavier found two hundred and fifty years ago, Mens minds are more delicate than anywhere else.
Ere being so quick to instruct and preach to others, might it not be well for a God-fearing man to learn humbly what he can from those whose privileges are fewer and their light more dim? For in thus comparing the Things of Our Father-the spiritual Things of his own and other creeds-he would surely gain a more sympathetic knowledge of the Oriental mind, and a readier access to its heart, and so be better prepared to set forth the Truth in love?
To the intending Missionary, therefore, these pages are affectionately inscribed with the reminder that when Our Lord interpreted to His Friends in all the Scriptures the Things concerning Himself, He probably took from the Teachings of Egypt under the shadow of whose pyramids, as the Young Child, He spent His most tender and impressionable years, as well as from the Hebrew Scriptures which, as the Boy Jesus, He learned from the Doctors in His Fathers House through hearing them and asking them questions when, according to the Custom, He became a Son of the Law; and also, from the wisdom of the sages of Persia and the initiates of India with whom (in accordance with a not disproved tradition) He passed the silent years of His early Manhood.
Certain it is that the writings of His most beloved Apostle (to whose authorship the Church ascribes the Fourth Gospel) are steeped in allusions to and breathe the spirit of Divine Wisdom as set forth in the Temple-lore of Egypt, Sumer, and Israel. Believing that the non-use of capitals before the Divine pronouns, both in the Bible and in the inscriptions translated from the Monuments, tends largely to obscure the sense to the average mind, the writer has ventured to remedy this omission, and feels confident that a closer study of the Revised Version and of the marginal readings in the Kings Printers Variorum must result in making our revered English Bible a new library pulsating with living interest when read in the light of the Ancient Wisdom of the East..