In My Library: The Story of Man and The Priests of the Temple, by Dr. Georges Hanna

At this moment, when we are witnessing the struggle of the forces of progress with the forces of reaction — in the lawyers' fight against the men of religion, for example; in the turn of modern pens toward treating the problems of society and curing its diseases; and in the awakening of the deprived classes and their demand for the right to live, over against the exploiting and monopolizing classes of rulers, chiefs, industrialists, and merchants... at this moment, when the instincts of humanity are locked in combat with the instincts of savagery, embodied in the calls for peace rising against the call of war — Dr. Georges Hanna comes before us with two books in which he pictures glimpses of this mighty conflict, whose roots reach down into the depths of history.

The first book, "The Story of Man," is a brief history of humanity's struggle in its striving to achieve a better world — the struggle led by enlightened leaders who outran their ages in their thinking and in their moral growth, and who faced the harshest difficulties to establish social justice and strike the fetters of ignorance and oppression from the children of men. It is the history of the liberating revolutions, beginning with Akhenaten, Moses, and Socrates, and ending with the French and Russian revolutions and the revolutions that followed them.

As for the second book, "The Priests of the Temple," it is a story taken from the very heart of our social milieu: the story of a poor family whose members fall victim to misery on the one hand and to despotism on the other. Some of them revolt against the condition they are in and try to spread liberating ideas in their surroundings, and their lot is prison, sickness, and destruction.

But the book is not content to picture one aspect only of society's diseases; it sets the deprived in their hovels against the privileged in their palaces — the luxury and greed of the latter against the wretchedness and sacrifice of the former — and leaves the reader room to think and to strive, or to be moved and to take heed.