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Holiness: The False and the True by Harry A. Ironside / The Author's Personal Experience / An able Exposition of the Scripture Teaching on this Important Subject / FIRST EDITION, NOVEMBER 1912 TWENTY-SIXTH PRINTING, NOVEMBER 1988

It is my desire, in dependence on the Lord, to write a faithful record, so far as memory now serves me, of some of God's dealings with my soul and my strivings after the experience of holiness, during the first six years of my Christian life, ere I knew the blessedness of finding all in Christ. This will make it necessary at times, I have little doubt, to "speak as a fool"--even as the apostle Paul did: but as I reflect on the need for such a record, I think I can say with him, "Ye have compelled me." If I may be privileged to thereby save others from the unhappy experiences I passed through in those early years, I shall feel abundantly repaid for the effort it will take to thus put these heart-experiences before my readers.

FOR over twelve years I have considered the Fadvisability of penning these papers. There seemed some good reasons why it might not be wise; there seem to me now to be more why I should undertake it.

The two chief reasons that have come before me to hinder my writing them heretofore are these: (a) The detailing of a large measure of personal experience is necessarily involved. This is distasteful to many, and to none more than to myself. But I have been much impressed lately with the many instances in which the chief of the apostles uses his own experience as a warning and lesson to others who would put confidence in the flesh. For this cause alone I am at last persuaded to narrate my own endeavors to attain perfection by following the so-called "holiness teaching " There can surely be no charge brought against me of glorying in self in so doing. The record is too humiliating for that. Nor do I desire to take a morbid satisfaction in detailing my failures. But for this recital of my past errors and present blessedness I have not only apostolic example, but the entire book of Ecclesiastes is a similar record; written only that others might be spared the anguish and disappointment of treading the same weary path.