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Author’s Introduction

Author’s Introduction

Three years ago the Inner Urge came to me to write on Victorious Living. The Voice seemed to sum up what through years of dealing with inquirers has become to me a pressing fact, namely, that the most urgent necessity in human living is to be able to face life victoriously. For many—the number is appalling—are living morally and spiritually defeated. They are inwardly beaten, hence outwardly ineffective. They do not know how to live and to live victoriously. They lack resources. This book is addressed to that need.

I have tried to combine the individual and the social emphases in a living blend, with a devotional spirit running through all. The socially minded must be patient if I seem in the beginning to stress overmuch the personal emphasis. I think we should begin just there. But we must not end there. The end is the sum total of human relationships.

In the structure of the book I have tried to meet three needs: (1) A book of daily devotions for personal, group, and family devotions. Instead of making it, as usual in devotional books, a book of scattered thoughts, changing from day to day, I have woven the devotions around one theme, Victorious Living. (2) I have gathered these daily studies into groups of seven, so that the book can be used as a weekly study book by classes of various kinds. (3) I have tried to put the subject matter into such a continuous whole that it may be read through as an ordinary book.

I have begun at the lowest rung of the ladder, and have tried to go step by step to the full implications of victorious living. Mature souls must be patient with the first steps, remembering that many are not able to live a victorious life because they do not know how to link up with God’s power. I have tried to make the first steps very clear. In doing so I have endeavored to answer this letter:

I am an average young American mother. I have two very small children. I have read your last book, Christ’s Alternative to Communism. It is great, soul-stirring, ringing with truth, but it leaves me with a terrific thirst—how do you get it? You advised a bored young woman to “Try Christ, and I give you my word of honor that it will work to the degree you work it.” But how? Where to start? Then again in chapter eleven: “Today so far as I am concerned this program begins”—and, still, how? How to achieve a life evidencing the peace that passes understanding, even in myself, let alone passing it on? How does the kingdom of God start within my unruly, discontented, selfish, ungrateful, impatient, and sullen self, before I can begin to spread it? Your books (I have read several) paint a glorious picture of living life—but you forgot to tell us what brushes and colors to use, and how. I believe there must be thousands like me. Won’t you write a book about “Christ and the Kingdom Within”?

I am sure that the writer of this letter represents many, and I have written for them as well as for the mature Christian. I mentioned in my last book that I had received a request signed by many prominent Christians of America asking me to write a book on the “Inner Life.” I trust that this book fulfills that request—a request that I deeply appreciated. But, as the reader will see, it goes beyond it, for all life is one, the inner and the outer being indissoluble.

The book was written during a three-month retreat in the Himalayas, the mornings being spent in writing and the afternoons and evenings in going through a course of reading—the only vacation, if it can be called one—that I have had for some years. It was the cold season, and these hills were deserted at that time, so that my only companions were an Indian secretary and the wild animals that roamed the estate—the deer, the panther, the tiger, and the wild pig. At noon, after a morning of writing, I would take a walk through these lovely mountain paths to clear my brain, only to return to find that my faithful secretary, who was unused to the mountains, had been spending anxious moments of prayer for me until I got back safely! It was the unknown to him—to me it was the beloved known. Perhaps many of my friends across the seas will share that same anxiety and will be in anxious prayer as we penetrate from the known personal to the jungle of social relationships, and will wonder if we should not stick to the beaten paths of personal religion. But this jungle of social relations must be Christianized, for Christ must claim all life.

At the close of the retreat I had the unspeakable privilege of presenting the manuscript, during May and June, to the Sat Tal Ashram Group, made up of many nationalities, and of receiving their criticisms and suggestions.

Many in that group were led into victorious living as we made our way through step by step, and now it goes to the larger circle, and it goes out with prayer, that among them too may be many who will find through these pages a clear path from confused and baffled and defeated human living to living that is certain, adequate, and victorious.

E. Stanley Jones