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This UECF.NET Web Book presents Reality and Religion: Meditations on God, Man and Nature by Sadhu Sundar Singh, first published in 1924 by Macmillan and Co., Limited (St. Martin’s Street, London), together with The Macmillan Company (New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco) and The Macmillan Co. of Canada, Ltd. (Toronto). The book carries an Introduction by B. H. Streeter of Queen’s College, Oxford, dated 6 February 1924.
Author. Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889 – disappeared 1929), the Indian Christian evangelist and ascetic. See About Sadhu Sundar Singh on the book’s home page.
Origin of the text. Sundar Singh explains in his Preface that the book was written at Sabathu, Simla Hills, and completed in Urdu; he thanks Dr. A. J. Appasamy, M.A. (Harvard), D.Phil. (Oxon.), for translating it into English, and the Rev. R. W. Pelly of Bishop’s College, Calcutta, for reviewing the manuscript. B. H. Streeter’s Introduction, dated Simla and Oxford, February 1924, describes the book’s composition at Sabathu in the Sadhu’s own words and in Dr. Appasamy’s account of their work together.
This reading text. The Preface, Introduction and all twenty-seven chapters presented here have been transcribed from the OCR text of the Internet Archive scan of the 1924 Macmillan first edition:
Sundar Singh’s own wording, numbered-meditation structure, spelling and Scripture citation style (as printed, e.g. “Matt. v. 48”) are preserved as in the 1924 edition. A small number of unambiguous OCR letter-scramble errors have been corrected only where the intended word is certain from context — for example, small-capitals opening words that the scanner misread letter-for-letter (“Tue brain” for “The brain,” “Gop” for “God,” “Ir is” for “It is”), the Latin abbreviation “i.e.” misread as “z.e.,” a misread proper name (“Söderblom” for the Swedish archbishop, printed “Séderblom” in the scan), and stray page-number and running-header debris (the book’s original page numbers and the repeating running head “REALITY AND RELIGION” at the top of each page) removed for continuous on-screen reading. Chapter and meditation numbers, and Scripture chapter-and-verse numbers, have not been altered even where they might seem surprising, since these are the author’s own as printed.
What is not reproduced. UECF.NET has not re-keyed the book’s exact original page breaks or line breaks; the text is presented as continuous reading paragraphs with the chapter and numbered-meditation structure of the original preserved. The printer’s colophon and a publisher’s advertisement for another Streeter/Appasamy title, both printed after “THE END” in the original book, are not part of Sundar Singh’s text and are not reproduced here.
Rights and public-domain status. Sadhu Sundar Singh died in 1929, and this book was first published in 1924; the work is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 publication, and its copyright term has also lapsed in life-plus-70-year jurisdictions (1929 + 70 = 1999). The Internet Archive item used as the source is openly viewable and downloadable in full (PDF, EPUB and plain-text formats), with no lending or access restriction. UECF.NET presents this reading text on that basis. If any reader has evidence of a surviving rights claim not covered by the above, please contact info@uecf.net.
Scripture. Sundar Singh cites Scripture in the wording and abbreviation style of his day (e.g. the Authorized/King James Version phrasing common in Indian mission circles in the 1920s). The on-page wording and citation numbers remain exactly as printed in 1924; where a citation is unambiguous, readers may wish to compare it against the UECF.NET NKJV Bible for convenient modern-English reading.
Related on UECF.NET. Visions of the Spiritual World (Sadhu Sundar Singh, 1926), the Christian Authors page, and the English Christian Books library.
Cover. The cover and Open Graph image are original UECF.NET graphics in the site’s Web Book style; the 1924 Macmillan edition was issued in a plain cloth binding and this is not a reproduction of a publisher’s jacket.