But most people think that to make a book it is enough to have an idea and then to take so many words and put them together. Not so. A kiln of tiles, a pile of rocks, are not a house. To build up a house, to build up a book, to build up a soul, are undertakings which require all of a man’s power. The aim of this book is to build up Christian souls because that seems to the writer at this time in this country an urgent need. He who has written it cannot now say whether he will succeed or not. But readers will recognize, he hopes, that it is a real book and not a collection of scraps, not an assemblage of little pieces, a book that may be mediocre and mistaken, but which is constructed: a work built up as well as edifying or building up; a book with its own plan and its own architecture, a real house with its atrium and its architraves, with its divisions and its vaultings—and also with some openings towards heaven and over the fields. The author of this book is, or would fain be, an artist, and in writing it he could not forget his own character. But he declares here that he has not wished to create a work of Belles Lettres, or as they say now, of “pure poetry,” because at least for this time truth is dearer to him than beauty. But if his powers as a writer, however feeble they may be, as a writer loving his art, are sufficient to persuade one more soul, he will be more thankful than ever in his life for the gifts which he has received. His inclination towards poetry has perhaps been of use to him in rendering fresher and more vivid the picture of those things which seem petrified in the usual hieratic consecrated wording. The man of imagination sees everything as though it were new: every great star, wheeling in the night, might lead you to the house hiding the Son of God; every stable has a manger which, filled with dry hay and clean straw, might become a cradle; every bare mountain top flaming with light in the golden mornings above the still somber valley, might be Sinai or Mt. Tabor: in the fires in the stubble, or in the charcoal kilns shining on the evening hills you can see the flame lighted by God to guide you in the desert; and the column of smoke rising from the poor man’s hearth shows the road from afar to the returning laborer. The ass who carries the shepherdess just come from her milking is the one ridden towards the tents of Israel, or the one which went down towards Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. The dove cooing on the edge of the slate roof is the same that announced the end of the great punishment to the Patriarch, or the same that descended on the waters of the Jordan. For the poet everything is of equal value and omnipresent, and all history is sacred history.