PREFACE

The only really important question in life is "What is the character of God?" Upon the answer to this question rests the whole meaning of the Creation. Why did He create at all? What have I to expect in the future? How will He treat me if I ever see Him? What am I to make of that part of the world in which I live, or of what I may know of the wider world outside? How account for evil, sorrow, suffering; above all, death?

Some have thought to evade the poignancy of these questions by denying the existence of God. Let one such thinker, qualified in every way to speak for his brethren, tell us what he makes of Life: "That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms, that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling can preserve an individual beyond the grave, that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, the inspiration, the noon-day brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole Temple of Man's Achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a Universe in ruins: all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand! Only within the scaffolding of these Truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built".

This is a quotation from Bertrand Russell's book "A Freeman's Worship"! So far is atheism from providing an escape from the perplexities and problems of Religion! "Unyielding Despair" is sour food for the soul: to be but part