INTRODUCTION

You may try to persuade yourself that this is an ordinary book — in order that you may find comfort in the persuasion - but you cannot do so and be fair to facts.

If you need to have attention called to striking features in this blistering indictment of “some preachers” by a writer who knows what she is writing, here they are:
First, the author is not a clergyman - a man on the inside of a circle—viewing associates critically, if kindly. Rather, the book is written by a wise woman! The author has spent years in the preacher-circle, however, as a devoted and loyal wife of a pastor who has also had considerable experience as an evangelist.

Why did not some preacher see these things and say them in the homey, catchy way Mrs. Bays has said them? Was this failure due to lack of observation; or rather to the absence of inspiration? Of course it could not be that the clergy have kept quiet for fear of auto-implication!
Second, the work is quite clever. The author shows commendable resourcefulness. The free and easy style of familiar correspondence relieves of usual stiffness. The reader visualizes young “Ozzy,” and sympathizes with his mother, “Emma Alice.”

Third, the imprints of a truthful picture are found on every page. The author writes what she has seen, and says what you know is true. There is no construction of “a man of straw” to be slaughtered on the battlefield with a woman’s sword!
Fourth, herein is the use of the most powerful of weapons - a woman’s sarcasm! If it seems severe, study the wrongs the writer would right. Dire disease calls for drastic treatment, even the use of the knife, at times.

After all, it is not so much the attempted defense of a worthy woman’s onslaught, as it is a question of what will the guilty readers do with it. No real, red-blooded “preacher-man” can afford to do less than “play the man” by taking his medicine out of a wise and worthy woman’s hand, and applying it in his own case as needed, then claiming speedy restoration.

“Is it I?”
But if any reader gets the blistering he deserves, let him first get well of his ills, and then celebrate his recovery by somehow inveigling other delinquents into buying the book that blessed him!

This book deserves to be passed around, unto the end that there may be both a checking up and a bracing up on the part of pastors concerning whose blunders the author has written.