Masters of the Spiritual Life

book which touches the deepest springs of spiritual thought and personal devotion. It is the beautiful record of an actual experience. " It remains to all time," wrote George Eliot, " a lasting record of human needs and human consolation, the voice of a brother, who ages ago felt and suffered and renounced?in the cloister perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts and a manner of speech different from ours, but under the same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness." That is the secret of the book's great charm. It is the faithful transcript of a soul, gifted with no special endowments of intellect,favoured by no special opportunities of birth, visited by no special fervours of spiritual ecstasy, but through all the weary trials and perplexities of the religious life held steadfast to its high vision and gladdened by fellowship with God. Thomas a Kempis was born in 1380, and he died in 1471. His long life was passed in those eventful years which saw the close of the Middle Ages and preluded the great movement of the Renaissance. Just before his birth the terrible scourge of the Black Death had swept across Europe, working greater havoc and bringing more violent social changes than the fiercest wars. And Thomas was in his seventy-third year when the Fall of Constantinople placed Eastern Europe at the mercy of the Turk and flooded the West with the ...