The author begs the pardon of his austere contemporaries if rather more than is fitting he lets himself go to what is nowadays disdainfully dubbed eloquence, illegitimate issue of pompous rhetoric and illegitimate mother of overemphasis and other dropsical growths of elocution. He knows very well that eloquence displeases moderns as bright red cloth displeases the fine city lady, as the organ in a church displeases minuet dancers, but he has not always succeeded in dispensing with it. When it is not borrowed declamation, eloquence is the ardent expression of faith, and in an era which has no faith there is no place for eloquence. And yet the life of Jesus is such a drama and such a poem that in place of the words, worn thread-bare, which have at our disposition, we should use only those “torn and sentient” words of which Passavanti speaks. Bossuet, who knew something about eloquence, once wrote: “Plût à Dieu que nous puissions détacher de notre parole tout se qui delecte l’esprit, tout ce qui surprend l’imagination, pour ne laisser que la verité toute simple, la seule force et l’efficace toute pure du Saint Esprit, nulle pensée que pour convertir.” Very true, but difficult to achieve. At times the author of this book would have liked to possess an eloquence vivid and powerful enough to shake all hearts, an imagination rich enough to transport the soul by enchantment into a world of light, of gold and of fire. Yet at other times he almost regretted that he was too much the artist, too much the man of letters, too much given to inlaying and chiseling, and that he did not know how to leave things in their powerful nudity. Only when he has finished a book does an author know how he ought to have written it. When he has set down the last word, he ought to turn back, begin at the beginning, and do it all over again with the experience acquired in the work. But who has, I do not say the energy to do this, but even the conception that it ought to be done. If on some of its pages this book sounds like a sermon, there is no great harm done. In these days when for the most part only women, and an occasional old man, go to listen to the preaching in churches, where mediocre things are often said in a mediocre manner, but where more often still, truths are repeated which ought not to be forgotten, we must think of the others, of the scholarly men, of “intellectuals,” of the sophisticated, of those who never enter a church, but sometimes step into a book-shop. For nothing in the world would they listen to a friar’s sermon, but they condescend to read it when it is printed in a book. And let it be said once and for all, this book is specially written for those who are outside the Church of Christ; the others, those who have remained within, united to the heirs of the Apostles, do not need my words.