PREFACE TO "DELIVERANCE"[1]
By E. L. Grant Watson
When I had completed my first book, I had a desire to write a preface, but was so strongly advised to let the book carry its own message that I refrained: with the result that only one reviewer saw what I was driving at. Later when the book was published in America, I was asked by my American publisher to write the preface which at first I had desired to write. Eighty per cent. of the American reviewers were not only sympathetic, but intelligent. Having been given the key, they read the book in the mood in which it was written. It seems to me permissible to provide such a key.
In writing this my third book, I have tried to portray a process of spiritual emancipation, of a freedom which is not content to find itself by any premature or artificial way of denial. Emancipation of this kind is difficult enough even for men; and for women, whose lives are, by nature of their biological functions, more closely interwoven in the material process, it is almost impossible. Yet sometimes it is achieved; perhaps most frequently through long or intense suffering. Yet all suffering ultimately entails joy; and so, also, through joy. Such a form of deliverance from the difficult complex of material things is not incompatible with the acceptance of life. Indeed the mistake has too often been made, that through any haphazard form of renunciation the spirit could find a short cut to its own freedom. Only through the acceptance
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- ↑ See Bibliography.
