Out of this World

Human history and culture are permeated and surrounded by long-standing traditions, folk-beliefs, and purported experiences of encounters, interactions, and conflicts with "others." These others are not human beings, as we would use the term, and do not always conform to those controlling conditions which we tend to think of as "natural law," or as more recently defined, "the laws of physics."

THIS VOLUME IS DESIGNED TO FURNISH SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE OF AN INHABITABLE SPHERE OR ZONE AMONG THE SUNS AND PLANETS OF SPACE. THESE EVIDENCES ARE INDISPENSABLE, BEING ADAPTED TO ALL WHO SEEK A SOLID, RATIONAL, PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION ON WHICH TO REST THEIR HOPES OF A SUBSTANTIAL EXISTENCE AFTER DEATH.

MANY OF THE PEOPLE who have had occasion to read this, after the first publication, have all asked the same questions. "What philosophy are you advocating? Where did you get your information? What qualifies you to write such a book?"

The Yezidis, frequently called "Devil-Worshippers," are a small and obscure religious sect, numbering about 20,000. They are scattered over a belt of territory three hundred miles wide, extending in length from the neighborhood of Aleppo in northern Syria to the Caucasus in southern Russia. The mass of them, however, are to be found in the mountains of northern and central Kurdistan and among the Sinjar Hills of Northern Mesopotamia.

Any person having a reasonable education will admit that there are many planetary worlds besides the one on which we live. But whether or not they are inhabited is an open question with most people. We had been in doubt on this point for many years, but now we are settled in our conviction that human life exists in many different worlds of space. We can give no proof of this except that we have just returned from the greatest journey we ever took. We went from world to world over long distances of space as easily as one could go from place to place on the surface of our earth.

The hearty kindness with which my fellow-countrymen received my words has been to me both a delight and an encouragement. The expressions of sympathy which have reached me from abroad allow me to hope that these pages, notwithstanding the deficiencies and imperfections of which I am keenly sensible, reflect some few of the rays of the truth which God has deposited on the earth, thereby to unite in the same faith and hope men of every tongue and every nation.

SCARCELY any department of theological science has, in the last few decades, received such marked attention and cultivation as that branch for which the Germans have adopted the felicitous appellation Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte,-the study of the age of Christ in its political, social, and religious aspects. The Schodde Translation of the Book of Enoch of 1882.