Synopsis
From the preface to the 1st edition: “To have lived for three years so close to the mind and spirit of Rufus M. Jones has been a rare privilege and an experience both stimulating and satisfying. It has also brought me into contact with many other persons, to whom I wish to express my warm appreciation of their generous aid and advice. My thanks go first of all to Rufus Jones’s daughter, Mary Hoxie Jones, who has given me unstinted help and encouragement. She has, in the first place, put at my disposal the wealth of manuscript material which came to light after her father’s death. This includes letters, both to and from Rufus Jones, family correspondence over a long span of years, notebooks, calendars, photographs, manuscripts of articles, addresses and books, and the unpublished journal of his first trip to the Orient.
This material, which was assembled and classified, first by Mary Hoxie Jones and her mother, Elizabeth B. Jones, and then, after Mrs. Jones’s death at Haverford in 1952, by Miss Ruth Hays Smith, is now housed in the Library of Haverford College, for restricted use. It includes also notes taken by Mary Hoxie Jones on conversations with her father during the years 1939 to 1948, and after her father’s death with friends who remembered him, some of whom are no longer living. I am grateful also to Mary Hoxie Jones for permission to quote copiously from her invaluable brief biography, “Rufus M. Jones,” published in England in pamphlet form by the Friends Home Service Committee, London, 1955. And not least of all I am indebted to her for her tireless willingness to answer questions of all kinds and to check points of fact. To Henry J. Cadbury, I am grateful for a sympathetic and careful reading of the whole manuscript and to Lydia C. Cadbury for her translation from the German of the letters of Theodor Sippell to Rufus Jones.” ~ Elizabeth Gray Vining
