Chapter 1: Preface

Would you be perfectly cleansed from your faults;

Would you be richly endowed with virtues;

Would you have deep insight into Holy Writ; Would you triumph gloriously over your enemies;

Would you have abundant consolation when things go wrong with you;

Would you upon earth walk humbly with your God;

Would you sorrow often upon your bed;

Would you shed sweet tears in prayer;

Would you be on fire in your meditations;

Would you persevere in good works;

Would you be filled with spiritual joy;

Would you be rapt in ecstasy;

Would you enter into the deep things of God;

Would you die happily at the last;

Would you reign for ever in Heaven — exercise yourself in the Life and in the Passion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Whom the Father sent into the world, that He might give to all men the example of a perfect life, and might bring to an everlasting Kingdom those who follow Him.

Love Christ therefore: follow Jesus: hold fast to the Crucified.

Footnotes

¹ Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471) wrote Prayers and Meditations on the Life of Christ as a companion to The Imitation of Christ. Where the Imitation teaches the principles of the spiritual life, these Prayers and Meditations apply them — walking through the entire life of Christ from the Incarnation through the Ascension, turning each event into personal prayer. This English translation by W. Duthoit was published in 1908 from the critical Latin edition of Michael Joseph Pohl.

² The book is organized in two treatises: the first covers the Life of Christ and the Passion; the second covers the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost. Each chapter is a prayer — intimate, personal, addressed directly to Jesus. This is à Kempis at his most devotional: the monk who said "seek the good life, not the long life," praying his way through the life of the One who is the Good Life.