Preface to Third Edition

IT is obviously difficult for an author to discern the causes of the success of his own work, but I venture to think that a third edition of this book would not have been so speedily called for but for the fact that it states the Faith in a clear and uncontroversial manner and illustrates it as reflected in the prayer-life of the saints who have lived most nearly in and by that knowledge of God which the Faith reveals and conserves. Men are tired, not only of vulgarised and diminished versions of the Catholic religion and of the constant stream of controversy in which they have been involved during the past few years, but also of the lack of foundation and content in so much present-day preaching and teaching. The world can only be won back to the Church by Christians becoming more Christian, as Peter Wust says, and this will only be in the degree that devotion is founded on a living faith, born of a contact with Divine reality. The work of the Church is to make Christians, and, as a writer in a recent number of the Hibbert Journal well says, to help ' people who are weary of fruitless striving and endless argument to find the goal of their spirits in prayer.' The very kind reception afforded to one's efforts in this direction may, perhaps, be taken as some indication of what men of goodwill are looking for to-day.

BEDE FROST.

Epiphany, 1932.