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click here back to aa history bibligraphy home page The Ordinary Man And The
Extraordinary Thing By Harold Begbie Contains the unique writings of Harold Begbie. Includes chapters such as, "A Man And His Work", "The Work", "A Decent Man", "The Accidents of Life", "A Bad Hat", "The Professional Amateur", etc. Begbie's book "Twice Born Men" was an Oxford Group reading book recounting the stories of men who had experienced a conversion experience and been brought from the guttermost to the uttermost. In this volume Begbie states in the preface "In this book the endeavor is made to bring home to the minds of men one of the great and central truths of life which are so often ignored in the pressure of surface existence. This particular truth may be expresses in various ways: The veritable life of a man is lived, not visibly and externally, but in the impenetrable solitude of his soul. Profound and extraordinary change of soul are experienced by the most ordinary of men. Conversion is not generally a sudden and catastrophic experience, but for most men a gradual and imperceptible process of development. With out religion, the moral and physical progress of those great masses of humanity who carry the fortunes of civilization can never be assured. The narratives which form the main body of this book are true stories of the lives of men; and they witness, in the midst of their differences and all the variety of their circumstances, to the truth of Maeterlinck's assertion that in this present time "the pressure of the soul has increased among mankind."
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