THE NEW CHRISTIAN YEAR
Chosen by
CHARLES WILLIAMS
PREFACE
This book has been arranged on the same principles as The Passion of Christ
(published in 1939), but it covers every day of the Christian Year. It
is arranged, for convenience, according to the Sundays and chief Holy
Days of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. It was
impossible to include more Holy Days without either making the book
larger than was desirable or else selecting according to my own
personal wish. An effort has been made to ensure that all passages
chosen shall have in them some particular greatness of phrasing. The
works of the teachers and saints of the Christian Church are full of
such phrases, and it sometimes seems a pity that we should prefer the
looser and less powerful exhortations of contemporary piety. A
recovery of a greater knowledge of the greater men is much to be wished.
There are two or three names in the following passages which may
seem to recur more often than others; this may be excused by the fact
that they are probably the least known at present. Kierkegaard has not
yet become popular, nor has the wise master William Law, nor John Donne
(as a teacher of souls). Still less known is the curious collection of
goodness and dreams, the account of the eastern hermits which is called
The Paradise of the Fathers. It is needless to say that many
readers will complain of the omission of names, or of disproportion in
choice. That is inevitable in a book of this kind; there will always
be room for other books like it, and the matter in the original writers
is almost inexhaustible. A very few modern writers have been
included—not that there is nothing to be found in other moderns, but
that the purpose of the book was rather to revive the unfamiliar than
to repeat the more familiar. Certain passages have been found in books
other than their authors' own; these have, I think, always been
referred to the original. If I have omitted, in any case, to ask
permission, is is due to the difficult conditions in which the book was
compiled.
My thanks are due to Messrs George Bell for permission to include
the passages from Coventry Patmore; to Messrs Burns, Oates, &
Washbourne for those from The Cloud of Unknowing and those from the Summa
of St. Thomas Aquinas (and for these last also to the English Dominican
Fathers); to Messrs Methuen for those from Richard Tauler's The Inner Way; also for those from the lady Juian of Norwich; to Messrs Chatto & Windus for extracts from The Book of Divine Consolation and from The Paradise of the Fathers; to Mr. T.S. Eliot and Messrs Faber & Faber for the one extract from Idea of a Christian Society and passages from Murder in the Cathedral; to Messrs Sheed & Ward for those from St. John of the Cross and from Leon Bloy's Letters to his Fiancee;
to Messrs J.M. Watkins for the extracts from Meister Eckhart; to the
Right Reverend the Lady Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey for those from St.
Teresa; to the S.P.C.K. for the one extract from The Ascetic Works of St. Basil and the three from St. Seraphim of Sarov.
C.W.
Commemoration
of All Souls
1940
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