Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/13

PREFACE. IX crudest materialism has placed a golden milestone in Man's pathway toward the spiritual Millennium.

As some of my readers look into the pictured faces of robed and mitred ecclesiastics, earnest pulpit orators, high-hearted women, grave reformers and strange-featured wise men from far Eastern lands, the scholarly representatives of Faiths which are alien to the habitual current of Western thought, and as they read these varied chapters in the wondrous history of the Soul, I am confident they will experience a widening of thought, and be glad that the Providence of God has, in the process of the suns, blessed them with truer tenderness and a broadened sympathy.

This Book will also be read in the cloisters of Japanese scholars, by the shores of the Yellow Sea, by the water-courses of India and beneath the shadows of Asiatic mountains near which rose the primal habitations of man. It is believed that the Oriental reader will discover in these volumes the source and strength of that simple faith in Divine Fatherhood and Human Brotherhood, which, embodied in an Asiatic Peasant who was the Son of God and made divinely potent through Him, is clasping the globe with bands of heavenly light.

May this record speed on the day foreseen by the English Laureate, who looked forward to the Parliament of Religions as the realization of a noble dream, the day when

"All men's good Is each man's rule, and Universal Peace Lies like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Thro' all the circle of the Golden Year."

Chicago, Nov. 8, 1893.