Thomas Books

I've given several away and am looking for a source where I can buy in bulk.

Fifteen Master outlines for Bible Study wrapped in a KJV Bible that will fit in your shirt pocket. If you want to know what the Bible teaches about Man Sin & Salvation this is a great guide. Buy several and give them to new converts.

The outlines are as follows. #1 The Word of God #2 God #3 Jesus The Son of God #4 The Holy Spirit #5 Sin #6 Judgments #7 Rewards #8 The Church #9 Prayer #10 Faith #11 The Abundant Life #12 Repentance #13 The New Birth #14 God's Plan of Salvation #15 How to Witness Effectively.

John 20:31 "But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is The Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name."

However, at the end of the Boer War Reitz was unable to accept British rule and went into exile and this is where the second volume, Trekking On starts. After a disastrous effort at hauling freight by ox cart in Madagascar which nearly cost him is life, Reitz is persuaded by Smutts to return to South Africa where he regains his health and enters local politics. At the outbreak of W.W.II Reitz joins the South African Army and takes part in the putting down of the Maritz rebellion and the campaigns in East Africa. Once the Germans are defeated in Africa he travels to England and , having decided firmly which side he would prefer to be on, joins the British Army as a private. Following a chance meeting with Smutts in London he experiences a dizzying rise in rank and ends the war, after seeing much action as the Colonel of a famous Scottish regiment.

The final book in the trilogy, No Outspan, covers Reitz's life in South African politics between the wars and concludes with him as Deputy Prime Minister of South Africa sitting on an advisory panel to Winston Churchill. in London. During this time he is visited by an Englishman who returned to him the Mauser rifle he took from him when Reitz became his prisoner during the Boer War. The last time I heard this rifle is still in the possession of Reitz's son and is regularly shot by him.

The Trilogy has been published by Wolfe Publishing as a one volume set in recent years and if you see a copy for sale, grab it!

Rudolf has been working for ten years on a biography of Mendelssohn, yet has failed to write even the first line of his work. "I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition, but now had resolved to begin writing it on the twenty-seventh of January at precisely four o'clock in the morning, after the departure of my sister." It is an intention to begin writing that recurs again and again throughout Rudolf's narrative, an intention to begin writing at a specific time in a specific location after the completion of specific preparatory tasks. And in each instance, Rudolf fails to begin, a sign of procrastination bred by obsession or of extreme writer's block or of extreme mental imbalance.

When Rudolf's sister leaves the house, he still cannot begin to write. Despite her departure, her aura remains: "Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had . . . There's no defense against a person like my sister, who is at once so strong and so anti-intellectual; she comes and annihilates whatever has taken shape in one's mind as a result of exerting, indeed of over-exerting one's memory for months on end, whatever it is, even the most trifling sketch on the most trifling subject."

This theme, Rudolf's hatred for his older, worldly sister, runs throughout his narrative, the sister becoming one among many reasons (or excuses) for Rudolf's intellectual paralysis, his inability to write, even his inability to function in day-to-day life.

But it is not merely his sister that Rudolf despises. He also despises Vienna, the city where he once lived (and where his sister continues to live). "Vienna has become a proletarian city through and through, for which no decent person can have anything but scorn and contempt."

A complete recluse, his mental world bordering on solipsistic isolation, Rudolf no longer has any interest in social life of any kind. "To think that I once not only loved parties," he reflects, "but actually gave them and was capable of enjoying them!" Now he sees no reason or need for the company of others, for the people Rudolf spent years trying to "put right" but who only regarded him as a "fool" for his efforts. As Rudolf thinks, in a long, discursive interior response to his sister's claim that his desolate, morgue-like house, "is crying out for society":

"There comes a time when we actually think about these people, and then suddenly we hate them, and so we get rid of them, or they get rid of us; because we see them so clearly all at once, we have to withdraw from their company or they from ours. For years I believed that I couldn't be alone, that I needed all these people, but in fact I don't: I've got on perfectly well without them."

Rudolf is isolated in his own mind, a man who cannot accept the imperfections of others and of the world, but also cannot accept his own imperfections. And it is perhaps this, more than anything else, which explains his inability to get along in the world, his inability even to write the first sentence of his Mendelssohn biography. "Once, twenty-five years ago, I managed to complete something on Webern in Vienna, but as soon as I completed it I burned it, because it hadn't turned out properly." As Rudolf says, near the end of his short, but exhausting, narrative:

"I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself."

"Concrete" leaves the reader exhausted from Rudolf's excessive and relentless narrative, giving truth to the remarkable power of Bernhard's literary imagination and narrative voice. It is a stunning literary achievement, perhaps the best work of one of Austria's greatest twentieth century authors.

Rudolf has been working for ten years on a biography of Mendelssohn, yet has failed to write even the first line of his work. "I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition, but now had resolved to begin writing it on the twenty-seventh of January at precisely four o'clock in the morning, after the departure of my sister." It is an intention to begin writing that recurs again and again throughout Rudolf's narrative, an intention to begin writing at a specific time in a specific location after the completion of specific preparatory tasks. And in each instance, Rudolf fails to begin, a sign of procrastination bred by obsession or of extreme writer's block or of extreme mental imbalance.

When Rudolf's sister leaves the house, he still cannot begin to write. Despite her departure, her aura remains: "Although she had gone, I still felt the presence of my sister in every part of the house. It would be impossible to imagine a person more hostile to anything intellectual than my sister. The very thought of her robs me of my capacity for any intellectual activity, and she has always stifled at birth any intellectual projects I have had . . . There's no defense against a person like my sister, who is at once so strong and so anti-intellectual; she comes and annihilates whatever has taken shape in one's mind as a result of exerting, indeed of over-exerting one's memory for months on end, whatever it is, even the most trifling sketch on the most trifling subject."

This theme, Rudolf's hatred for his older, worldly sister, runs throughout his narrative, the sister becoming one among many reasons (or excuses) for Rudolf's intellectual paralysis, his inability to write, even his inability to function in day-to-day life.

But it is not merely his sister that Rudolf despises. He also despises Vienna, the city where he once lived (and where his sister continues to live). "Vienna has become a proletarian city through and through, for which no decent person can have anything but scorn and contempt."

A complete recluse, his mental world bordering on solipsistic isolation, Rudolf no longer has any interest in social life of any kind. "To think that I once not only loved parties," he reflects, "but actually gave them and was capable of enjoying them!" Now he sees no reason or need for the company of others, for the people Rudolf spent years trying to "put right" but who only regarded him as a "fool" for his efforts. As Rudolf thinks, in a long, discursive interior response to his sister's claim that his desolate, morgue-like house, "is crying out for society":

"There comes a time when we actually think about these people, and then suddenly we hate them, and so we get rid of them, or they get rid of us; because we see them so clearly all at once, we have to withdraw from their company or they from ours. For years I believed that I couldn't be alone, that I needed all these people, but in fact I don't: I've got on perfectly well without them."

Rudolf is isolated in his own mind, a man who cannot accept the imperfections of others and of the world, but also cannot accept his own imperfections. And it is perhaps this, more than anything else, which explains his inability to get along in the world, his inability even to write the first sentence of his Mendelssohn biography. "Once, twenty-five years ago, I managed to complete something on Webern in Vienna, but as soon as I completed it I burned it, because it hadn't turned out properly." As Rudolf says, near the end of his short, but exhausting, narrative:

"I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself."

"Concrete" leaves the reader exhausted from Rudolf's excessive and relentless narrative, giving truth to the remarkable power of Bernhard's literary imagination and narrative voice. It is a stunning literary achievement, perhaps the best work of one of Austria's greatest twentieth century authors.

"..., and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other. Fundamentally it was not Schopenhauer's head that determined his thought, but Schopenhauer's dog. It was not the head that hated Schopenhauer's world, but Schopenhauer's dog. I don't have to be demented to assert that Schopenhauer had a dog on his shoulders and not a head."

"...my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself."

"It actually makes us ill if we always demand the highest standards, the most extraordinary, when all we find are the lowest, the most superficial, the most ordinary. It doesn't get us anywhere, except in the grave. We see decline where we expect improvement, we see hopelessness where we still have hope; that's out mistake, our misfortune. We always demand everything, when in the nature of things we should demand little, and that depresses us. We want to achieve everything, and we achieve nothing. And naturally we make the highest, the very highest demands of ourselves, completely leaving out of account human nature, which is after all not made to meet the highest demands. The world spirit, as it were, overestimates the human spirit."

etc., etc. ...