And then there have been great souls, whom I cannot well name here, but whom I would nevertheless refer to in reverent gratitude; souls that have taught me that deepest of facts and of lessons,--the persistence, across the centuries, within the wide range of the visible and indeed also of the invisible Church, of that vivid sense of the finite and the Infinite, of that spacious joy and expansive freedom in self-donation to God, the prevenient, all-encompassing Spirit, of that massively spontaneous, elemental religion, of which Catherine is so noble an example. Thus a world-renouncing, world-conquering, virile piety, humble and daring, humane, tender and creatively strong, is at no time simply dead, but it merely sleepeth; indeed it ever can be found, alive, open-eyed irresistible, hidden away here and there, throughout our earthly space and time. * * * * * In matters directly connected with the publication of the work I have especially to thank Messrs. Sciutto of Genoa, the photographers to whom I owe the very successful photographs from which the plates that stand at the head of my volumes have been taken; Mr. Sidney E. Mayle, publisher, of Hampstead, for permission to use the photogravure of St. Catherine’s portrait which appeared as an illustration to a paper of mine, in his scholarly _Hampstead Annual_, 1898; Miss Maude Petre, who helped me much towards achieving greater lucidity of style, by carefully reading and criticizing all my proofs; and my publisher, who has not shrunk from undertaking the publication of so long a work on so very serious, abstruse-seeming a subject. Even so, I have had to suppress the notes to my chapter on “Catherine’s Teaching,” which throughout showed the critical reasons that had determined my choice of the particular sayings, and the particular text of the sayings, adopted by me in the text; and have had to excise quite a third of my Appendix, which furnished the analysis of further, critically instructive texts of the _Vita e Dottrina_, the _Dicchiarazione_ and the _Dialogo_. If a new edition is ever called for, this further material might be added, and would greatly increase the cogency of my argument. * * * * * The work that now at last I thus submit to the reader, is doubtless full of defects; and I shall welcome any thoughtful criticism of any of its parts as a true kindness. Yet I would point out that all these parts aim at being but so many constituents of a whole, within which alone they gain their true significance and worth. Hence only by one who has studied and pondered the book as a whole, will any of its parts be criticized with fairness to that part’s intention. To gain even but a dozen of such readers would amply repay the labour of these many years.