“Suffer little children to come unto Him and forbid them not,” he said, “for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven, for our youth shall lead the whole redeemed world.” FOREWORD TO APPENDIX As a child and later a student, I recall intensely disliking Paul. I wasn’t quite sure he was a “crazy fanatic and self-hypnotized epileptic and self-deceived, unconscious fakir,” which I have heard teachers of youth in our colleges call him; terrible views for a child to hold about a saintly character—I only set them down to show how wrong teaching can color our version of the Bible—but I regarded him as fanatical, narrow, crabbed, sour, domineering, eager to dragoon men into believing as he did, whether by fear of Hell-fire, which seemed to me a cowardly fire-insurance policy against retribution or by sheer force of will, I had not decided. I distinctly disliked saints, whose milk of human kindness had turned sour. Later, years later, when I came back to read his life in the sacred records, as I would read with unprejudiced eyes in the search for facts which we carry to the reading of an ordinary life, I was amazed and staggered to find he was a small man, frail of body, short-sighted, suffering some physical ailment from the persecutions to which he had been subjected, fearless as a lion where the faith was concerned, humble and simple as a child in other matters, generous in money matters—see the loan to Philemon—so independent that while he collected funds for famine in Jerusalem, he would never touch those funds himself, but supported himself by the making of tents, for which there was great demand owing to caravan travel being universal, and so great of heart that his tenderness extended to a little slave boy, who came to him in Rome and who ultimately became the youngest bishop in the Christian Church in the third largest city of the Roman Empire. About this time I began reading the Bible as I would any other book, or a newspaper editorial, critically but shorn of early beliefs and prejudices. I read ignoring chapter divisions and verse divisions, which too often have provided controversialists with bullets for sharp-shooting in ambush by wresting sentences from context and meaning, and using them as “the Devil quotes Scripture” for his own purposes; and I can conceive of nothing that will restore belief quicker than to read the Bible as a historical record of the birth and growth of a great redemptive force for humanity—using redemption as a force in present-day life, not in a far-away, vague shadowy Kingdom of the Hereafter.