EDITOR’S PREFACE.
The Autobiography of my brother, Dr. John G. Paton has now, at my urgent entreaty, been continued by him, and carried on to the present year.
It tells the Story of the Life during the twelve years that have elapsed since Part First and Part Second were completed by the Author, and separately given to the world.
The following words from the Preface to an early Edition of the Autobiography are equally applicable to present circumstances:—“The Public hailed it from the first with a welcome so uncommon, and God has in many ways so signally owned and blessed it, that it would be no modesty, but sheer stupidity, on my part, to fail in recognizing that it has been voted a Missionary Classic by the great and free Community of Readers. I have therefore spared no pains in making it as perfect as it is in my power to do, with the help of many minute corrections from friends here and abroad, and also happy suggestions as to matters of detail from the honored Missionary himself.”
In the original Preface when the book was first published in 1889, I said: “The Manuscript of this Volume, put together in a rough draft amid ceaseless and exacting toils, was placed in my hands and left absolutely to my disposal by my beloved brother, the Missionary. It has been to me a labor of perfect love to re-write and revise the same, pruning here and expanding there, and, preparing the whole for the press. In the incidents of personal experience, constituting the larger part of the book, the reader peruses in an almost unaltered form the graphic and simple narrative as it came from my brother’s pen. But, as many sections have been re-cast and largely modified, especially in those Chapters of whose events I was myself an eyewitness, or regarding which I had information at first hand from the parties concerned therein,—and as circumstances make it impossible to submit these in their present shape to my brother before publication,—I must request the Public to lay upon me, and not on him, all responsibility for the final shape in which the Autobiography appears. I publish it because Something tells me there is a blessing in it.”
That belief was abundantly justified. The book has had a great circulation, not only in Great Britain, but also in America, and in the Colonies; and it has been translated, in whole or in part, into many Modern Languages.
JAMES PATON.
Glasgow, February, 1898.