Translator’s Note
ATHER LUDOVIC DE BESSE has explained sufficiently in his Preface the circumstances in which these two books of Father de Caussade’s Spiritual Instructions on Prayer originally appeared. Both books have been out of print for many years.1
The subject matter of these dialogues is of such grave importance that I have felt it necessary to translate them as literally as was compatible with intelligibility, and I am only too conscious of the shortcomings of their literary form in English. Nor have I shrunk from faithfully reproducing Father de Caussade’s many insistences and repetitions, sometimes rather wearisome in his native tongue, and doubly so in a translation. I hope the reader will bear this in mind and be indulgent. De Caussade’s meaning has, I hope, been faithfully rendered, and this is what really matters to the student of Mystical Theology.
A. T.
Footnotes
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M. Henri Bremond has brought out quite recently—in March of this year—a new edition of both books in one volume, under the title: Bossuet Maitre d'Oraison (Bloud et Gay, 1931). He has followed the text of the original edition of 1741, reproduced, in the original of this translation, by Canon Bussonot in 1892 and 1895. XXXlll C ↩
Chapter 2 of 31