Foreword
-FOREWORD
SOME MONTHS AGO I was looking for something in our archives room in Sevenoaks, when I saw a box labelled, among other things, KUHN.
Being of an inquisitive nature I opened it and, to my great surprise, found it contained a manuscript I had never seen before. My original quest forgotten,.I sat spellbound reading it, unable at first to believe I had really found an unpublished manuscript by Isobel Kuhn.
The style, however, is unmistakably hers, and it was accompanied by a letter dated
May 8th 1939 from her to Mr Baker, then OMF Editorial Secretary; this implies that Precious Things of the Lasting Hills, her first book, had recently been published and that she was thinking about further writing based on her circular letters. Comrades of the Second Mile (her original title for this book) had evidently been sent the year before, for she writes, 'Your letter written August 1938 came in February (!)
SecondMile People ...Itis very kind of you to take time from busy days to set my heart at rest about the arrival of Comrades.'
Why should a book written so long ago and dealing with situations long since changed now be published for the first time? Those of us who have read it feel that the spiritual teaching contained in these chapters is of timeless relevance, and has a message for the 1980s as much as for the 1930s. The six colleagues of whom Isobel
Kuhn writes were those who stood out for her as 'lights out of the night', as she puts it in the prologue. "hey have shone across our "first mile" pathway as splendid meteors trailing such radiance after them that something of their own celestial fire has sought to enter into us also.'
Some of this material will be familiar to those who have read other Kuhn books, particularly By Searching, and it need be no secret that 'Bachelor' is J O Fraser who — had such an influence on Isobel's life. Let the others remain anonymous, as she meant them to be — examples to us all in being "Second-Mile People'.
Edyth A Banks, Editor