"A work of rare spiritual insight." - The Church Quarterly Review, 1923

"A companion volume to 'The Inner Life' and 'The World Within' so well and favorably known." -Homiletic Review, 1922

"Dr. Jones shows how the cure for our present failures lies in unutilized powers within our easy reach. - Homiletic Review, 1922

Readers of "Spiritual Energies in Daily Life," a 1922 companion volume to the author's "The Inner Life" and "The World Within" will find Dr. Rufus Jones at his best.

Jones has a message which he preaches with persuasive eloquence and a literary charm which is the ripe fruit of a sensitive religious spirit. Preachers and teachers especially will find these pages rich in suggestive ideas. Chapters IX and X on 'The Mystic's Experience of God' and 'Psychology and the Spiritual Life' are especially helpful and stimulating. They will both repay the most careful and thoughtful consideration, not only from those searching for spiritual energies in daily life, but also from those who are seeking to find a rational basis for religious experience whilst preserving its true content intact.

This stimulating volume comprises between twenty and thirty essays, mostly somewhat sermon-like in character. Referring to the great theologian of the middle ages, Dr. Jones says: "Thomas Aquinas, who neither in method nor in doctrine leaned towards mysticism, though he was most certainly a harmonized man, and who in theory postponed the vision of God to a realm beyond death, nevertheless had an experience two years before he died which made him put his pen and inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word of his Summa Theologia. When he was reminded of the incomplete state of his great work and was urged to go on with it, he only replied, I have seen that which makes all that I have written look small to me.'"

Spiritual Energies in Daily Life*

The book deals largely with these energies locked up in each one of us. Faith itself is an energy. It is not simply believing something. "It is the moral attitude and reponse of will to the character of God as it has been revealed in Christ."

One of the best of his sub-chapters is on "What we Want Most." The driving, pushing man, ambitious for wealth or position, reaches a place where he is unsatisfied. "You will find that he knows perfectly well that he is missing something. Unrest and disquiet get smothered for long periods in a mass of other aims and some men hardly know that they have such a thing as an immortal soul hidden away within. . . . But when the hard games of life prove losing ones, when the stupidity of striving so hard for such bubbles comes over him, when a hand from the dark catches away the best earthly comfort he had, when the genuine realities of life assert themselves over sense, he wakes to find himself hungry and thirsty for something which no one of his earthly pursuits has supplied or can supply. He wants God. He wants peace. He wants to feel his life founded on an absolute reality."

While the author is dealing fairly and clearly with the forces within us, suggestion, auto-suggestion, personal manifestations of sympathy, confidence, love, the difficulties of life that arouse us and bring out our best, the theme back to which he constantly goes and on which he is most eloquent is "the power that worketh in us."

Rufus Matthew Jones (1863 – 1948), professor of Philosophy at Haverford College, was an American religious leader, writer, magazine editor, philosopher, and college professor. One of the most influential Quakers of the 20th century, he was a Quaker historian and theologian as well as a philosopher.