The author excuses himself for having written a book with so many, with too many pages, on only one theme. Now that most books—even his own books—are only bundles of pages taken out of journals, or short-winded little stories, or short notes taken from note-books, and generally do not go beyond two or three hundred pages, to have written more than four hundred pages on one theme will seem a tremendous presumption. The book certainly will seem long to modern readers used to light wafers rather than to substantial home-made loaves. But books, like days, are long or short, according to what you put into them. And the author is not so cured of his pride as to think that this book will remain unread on account of its length, and he flatters himself that it may be read with less tedium than other books that are shorter. So difficult it is to cure oneself of conceit—even for those whose wish it is to cure others. 6 Some years ago the author of this book wrote another to describe the melancholy life of a man who wished for a moment to become God. Now in the maturity of his years and of his consciousness he has tried to write the life of a God who made Himself man. This same writer in those days let his mad and voluble humor run wild along all the roads of paradox, holding that a consequence of the negation of everything transcendental was the need to despoil oneself of any bigotry, even profane and worldly, to arrive at integral and perfect atheism; and he was logical as the “black cherubim” of Dante, because there is only one choice allowed man, the choice between God and nothingness. When man turns from God there is no valid reason to uphold the idols of the tribe or any other of the old fetiches of reason or of passion. In those proud and feverish days he who writes affronted Christ as few men before him have ever done. And yet scarcely six years afterwards (but six years of great travail and devastation without and within his heart), after long months of agitated meditations, he suddenly interrupted another work begun many years ago, and almost as if urged and forced by a power stronger than himself, he began to write this book about Christ which seems to him insufficient expiation for his guilt. It has happened often to Christ that He has been more tenaciously loved by the very men who hated Him at first. Hate is sometimes only imperfect and unconscious love: and in any case it is a better foundation for love than indifference.