Dedication
This book is dedicated to the Prince of Peace and all the blessed peacemakers.
Acknowledgments
This book came from an urge that was almost a commandment. The best things in it did not originate with me, but too many of them were much colored by me.
Friend Glenn Clark has encouraged me so generously and helped so intelligently that my debt to him is above words.
Among others who have helped by typing and valuable suggestions are the following:
Mrs. Mary Ryan, Miss Louise Downer, Miss Alma Schweitzer, Miss Dolores Waddell, Miss C. Azella Hood, Miss Jessie Harrold, Miss Eunice Britt, Mrs. Marcia Brown, Miss Matilda Remmert, Miss Emma Van Campen, Miss Victoria Hulsteat, Mrs. Margaret Bennett, Mrs. Lorraine Robertson, Mrs. J. R. Moye, Mrs. Helen Lou Sergio, Miss Ruby Roby, and Pastor Wade Goldston.
To all these I am deeply grateful.
Introduction
Dr. Kilpatrick, the great educationalist of Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote the Introduction to Rufus Moseley’s first book. I am asked to write an Introduction to this one. We both accepted, with gratitude for the privilege.
Why should two men, very different in their approaches to life, both be drawn to Rufus Moseley, who in turn is different in his approach to life from both of us? I suppose the reason is that we see in Rufus Moseley, not an approach to life, but life itself. He has something which transcends approaches to life —he has the thing itself.
It is easy to get tangled up in Rufus Moseley’s approach to life and the paraphernalia that accompany that approach and miss the real thing. It takes some time to get him. One man said: “The first time I heard Rufus Moseley I thought he was crazy, the second time I heard him I knew I was crazy.”
Many are put off by his delivery. But you must understand that if his hands jiggle in spiritual rapture it is because it is the outer expression of his brain cells dancing in delight at the sheer joy of being. He is inwardly laughing at the rhythm of life and his outer expressions are the attempt to express that inner laughter. One must not see the delivery, but the thing he is delivering. When someone said that he didn’t like Rufus Moseley’s delivery, the quiet remark of a layman was: “Well, the batters didn’t like Walter Johnson’s delivery either.” For in a strange delivery Rufus Moseley is delivering something. What is it he is delivering?
He says he is “not a mystic, but a first-hander.” I think that expresses it very accurately. He has penetrated through forms to the real thing. And when you say “the real thing” you are compelled to write it “The Real Thing”—God. For Rufus Moseley is a God-centered man. And yet he is Jesus-centered more than any man I know. He has a deeper hold on the meaning of the Incarnation than anyone with whom I have come in contact. His is not an unanchored mysticism floating from attractive idea to attractive idea. It is definitely anchored and anchored in the historic Jesus. That makes his spirituality trustworthy. You know where to find him. He won’t be off on a tangent. The freest of men, he is the most anchored of men. With one point of his compass fixed on the Incarnation of Jesus he lets the other point sweep the whole horizon taking in everything in love. But he knows his center.
He knows his center experimentally. He has wandered through the cults in his search for reality. He tried them all. He left each one with a love-feast—a very great spiritual achievement—as he went on his way to find his final resting place at the place of God’s self-revelation—the historic Jesus. The historic Jesus is not your idea of God, but God’s idea of Himself. This is the touch-stone. If you try to bypass the historic Jesus in the name of universality you end off-center and join “the congregation of the queer.”
Rufus Moseley has an amazing moral and spiritual sanity amid an amazing freedom. He is the least and the most bound man I know. He is bound to Jesus and, therefore, free.
As you approach this book don’t expect great literature as literature. It isn’t here. And don’t expect consecutive thought. That is not the genius of Rufus Moseley. He does not take a theme and develop it step by step. But what he does do is to express in a sentence a whole insight on a subject. It is there—a gem. He has the most amazing power to sum up a spiritual law or a spiritual insight in a phrase or sentence. Some of these gems are wrapped in humor. But his humor is natural, almost unconscious. He laughs at the rhythm of life and he makes you laugh at it—a clean, healthy laughter.
Come to this book to find wisdom distilled into a sentence and a philosophy of life in a phrase and you will not be disappointed. Above all come to this book to see between the lines and through the lines the self-revelation of one of God’s Troubadours, a man who has found the way to live and enjoys living it—to the full.
—E. STANLEY JONES
Author’s Introduction To Revised Edition
Since the publication of Perfect Everything both in the United States, and in England (by Arthur James, the Drift, Evesham, Worcestershire) there has appeared a brilliant translation of the Epistles of New Testament under the title, Letters to the Young Churches by J. B. Phillips and published by the Macmillan Co. The Author translates Ephesians 1, verses 9 and 10 as follows: “God has allowed us to know secret of His plan and it is this—He purposes in sovereign will that all history should be consummated in Christ, that everything that exists in heaven o earth shall find its perfection in Him.” This translation of Saint Paul’s revelation as to God’s purpose predestination for us and the creation is the nearest to proximation I know of to what was given through me March 1936, that He (the glorified Jesus) is Perfect Everything and giving perfect everything.
The wonder of what the glorified Jesus is and is to achieve is all the more understand, precious and transforming in the light of the glorious truth that the Kingdom of which Jesus is King is the sinless, diseaseless and deathless Realm—a King in which sin, sorrow, pain, death and lack of any has been abolished. This perfect Order, or King, or Holy City, was seen coming down here by Saint John where the need of Him and this Order is so great and urgent. (Rev. Chapters 21 and 22).
This descent of the Holy City where every enemy has been abolished, including death and all that causes death, is the answer of the prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, and Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.” The Spirit and the Bride still cry, “Come quickly,” and come triumphantly. The cry becomes all the louder as the need for Him and His reign becomes the more apparent and urgent. And as Maeterlink puts it so exceptionally well, “We’re living in expectancy and perhaps in the last moments of expectancy.”
One of the very precious things recently given me is that if we depart from Him and His will for us and for all, we go from problem to problem until we become problems, and forcing problems upon the brethren; but as we repent and turn to Him and His will, all of our problems turn into testimonies. In Him and in His will, everything turns to good and to almost unbelievable good. He has already won in His own experience and in the heavenlies. He is to win here too. We hasten this winning by dedication to Him and His Kingdom, by prayer, by joyous obedience to Him and by happy partnership with Him.
Perfect Everything has been well received in the United States, in Canada, in England, and everywhere it has gone. It has the best title of any book that has yet been published.
J. RUFUS MOSELEY
Macon Telegraph
Macon, Georgia
November, 1951.