The book we need is a living book, to make Christ more living, to set Christ the Ever-Living with loving vividness before the eyes of living men, to make us feel Him as actually and eternally present in our lives. We need a book which would show Him in all His living and present greatness—perennial and yet belonging intimately to us moderns—to those who have scorned and refused Him, to those who do not love Him because they have never seen His true face; which would show how much there is of supernatural and symbolic in the human, obscure, simple and humble beginning of His life, and how much familiar humanity, how much simple-hearted plainness shines out when He becomes a Heavenly Deliverer at the end of His life, when He becomes a martyr and rises again divinely from the dead. We need a book which would show in that tragic epic, written by both Heaven and earth, the many teachings suited to us, suited to our time and to our life, which can be found there, not only in what Christ said, but in the very succession of events which begin in the stable at Bethlehem and end in the cloud over Bethany. A book written by a layman for the laymen who are not Christians or who are only superficially Christians, a book without the affectations of professional piety and without the insipidity of scientific literature, called “scientific” only because it perpetually fears to make the slightest affirmation. A book, in short, written by a modern writer who respects and understands his art, and knows how to hold the attention even of the hostile. 4 The author of this book does not pretend to have written such a book; but at least he has tried as far as his capacities can take him, to draw near to that ideal. Let him state at once with sincere humility that he has not written a “scientific history.” In the first place because he could not; in any case because he would not, even if he had possessed all the necessary learning. He warns the reader, among other things, that this book was written (almost all of it) in the country, in a distant and sparsely settled countryside with very few books at hand, with no advice from friends or revision from masters. It will, therefore, never be cited by higher criticism or by those who scrutinize original sources with a microscope; but that is of little importance compared to the possibility of its doing a little good to a few souls, even to one alone. For as he has explained, the author wishes this book to be another coming of Christ and not another burial.