is sin and woe
and misery in this world. We know it all too well.

This book is not published to tell us that there is an irreconcilable
controversy between darkness and light, sin and righteousness, wrong and
right, death and life. In our heart of hearts we know it, and know that we
are participators, actors, in the conflict.

But to every one of us comes at times a longing to know more of the great
controversy. How did the controversy begin? or was it always here? What
elements enter into its awfully complex aspect? How am I related to it?
What is my responsibility? I find myself in this world by no choice of my
own. Does that mean to me evil or good?

What are the great principles involved? How long will the controversy
continue? What will be its ending? Will this earth sink, as some
scientists tell us, into the depths of a sunless, frozen, eternal night?
or is there a better future before it, radiant with the light of life,
warm with the eternal love of God?

The question comes closer still: How may the controversy in my own heart,
the strife between inflowing selfishness and outgoing love, be settled in
the victory of good, and settled forever? What does the Bible say? What
has God to teach us upon this question, eternally important to every soul?

Questions like these meet us from every side. They rise insistent up from
the depths of our own heart. They demand definite answer.

Surely the God who created in us the longing for the better, the desire
for the truth, will not withhold from us the answer to all needed
knowledge; for "the Lord Jehovah will do nothing, except He reveal His
secret unto His servants the prophets."

It is the aim of this book, reader, to help the troubled soul to a right
solution of all these problems. It is written by one who has tasted and
found that God is good, and who has learned in communion with God and the
study of His word that the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him,
and that He will show them His covenant.

That we may better understand the principles of the all-important
controversy, in which the life of a universe is involved, the author has
set it before us in great, concrete object-lessons of the last twenty
centuries.

The book opens with the sad closing scenes of Jerusalem's history, the
city of God's chosen, after her rejection of the Man of Calvary, who came
to save. Thence onward along the great highway of the nations, it points
us to the persecutions