Publisher's Synopsis
It is our purpose to make our readers realize more and more vividly the great truth that there are studies higher than those of external nature; that there are investigations nobler than those of the composition of the stars and the geological depths of the earth; that there are open to men studies more inspiring than mining, railroading, wireless telegraphy, and aerial navigation; ill short, that men are capable of and fitted for activities infinitely more advantageous than the mad rush for the mammon of iniquity, and merely earthly goods. In Christianity we possess a philosophy of life, and the chief purpose of this work is to set forth some of the fundamental points of that philosophy. Our pages are intended to remind the reader that he has a soul destined by its Maker to flourish in immortal youth amidst the war of elements, the wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds. The prevailing scientific thought of the day is almost exclusively concerned with man's body, how to provide for its comforts, how to solve the problem of its material subsistence and well.being: a problem, which, if carried to exceasive limits, unftts the mind for the study and contemplation of the spiritual, dims the clear vision of life's ultimate purpose, and gradually saps the foundations of men's practical belief in the realities of the unseen world, in comparison with which the world of science, literature, commerce, politics, and all besides is but the vanity of vanities. 3. We foresaw that the publication of this book in this twentieth century would expose us to the sarcasms, criticisms, and ridicule of men accustomed to condemn and denounce anything likely to disturb their conscience and upset their cherished views diametrically opposed to the doctrines advocated in this volume. The editor of a San Francisco daily who sacrilegiously designated the ten commandments, the law of Sinai, as "the first freak legislation," is not likely to spare us when he will read in our pages the defense of that divine law, and will see described and upheld the awful consequences, which its transgression entails here and hereafter. As Mr. Oxenham rightly observes, in his "Catholic Eschatology," "It is currently asserted that the doctrine of eternal punishment, and indeed of future retribution altogether, is peculiarly repugnant to the spirit of the age, and that the result of proclaiming it is to repel many intellectual minds from Christianity."
