Preface

During the Advents, Lents, and Months of Mary, I have been accustomed to preach in the Church of the Oratory on points connected with the spiritual life. These Addresses have been, very familiar, and also, from long personal intercourse with my hearers, more intimate and affectionate than such Addresses would have been under different circumstances. I enjoyed the highest liberty which a preacher can have, a tolerable certainty that I should not be misunderstood, at least by those who habitually heard me; and of strangers and chance auditors I naturally took no account.

As these Addresses had neither the formality of Lectures, nor the dignity of Sermons, I have been accustomed to call them Conferences, using the word rather in a foreign than a native sense. A selection from these is now presented to the reader, as nearly in. the form in which they were preached, as I could remember.

It has been my custom to have the notes of them, very full and detailed, prepared several

Vlll PREFACE.

weeks, often several months, before delivering them. They were then revised before preaching, and very often annotated immediately after preaching, when necessary or desirable changes struck me in the act and fervour of delivery. There is nothing which brings out any want of logical sequence, or any disproportionate arrangement of thoughts, more vividly than the act of preaching, and I have repeatedly profited by this fact. The notes were then laid aside, some for two years, some for one year, some for a few months, before I finally revised them for writing, and at last wrote them out. I have long adopted this custom with what concerned the Spiritual Life, so as to secure myself from putting forth mere views struck out in a heat, and also that I might convert the opinions expressed, whatever their intrinsic value might be, into judgments ascertained with care, matured by experience, and revised with jealous repetition under various circumstances and in different moods of mind.

There is a sort of general unity in the selection which occupies this Volume, as the Conferences will be found on the whole to apply to matters closely related among themselves, and proper either to one stage of the Spiritual Life, or to stages which have a close affinity with each other. They embody, also, certain views on the relation of grace to natural character, and on what may o be called the Natural Side of the Supernatural

PREFACE. IX

Life, which I regard as being of considerable importance in these times, and to which I may hope to do more justice in a distinct work. I have purposely put them forward now in an unformal way, though they lie as a complete and coherent system in my own mind.

The publication of these Conferences, though not an unwilling one, is due to the persuasion of others. For I have been held back by the fear, and indeed the certainty, that I could not expect, among the general readers of a Book, that safe interpretation of familiar affection, which makes even voice and look contribute to secure me, with my habitual hearers, from being misunderstood in the Chair of the Oratory.¹

Footnotes

1. n ↩