Just over one hundred years ago, one morning at the end of October 1886, a young French nobleman went into a Paris church to ask fro instruction in the Christian faith. He was twenty eight years old. Having made this decision, which he supposed to be the last if the most significant of his life, he expected to follow it to its logical conclusion. Like many others who come to faith relatively late and feel a need to make up for lost time, he proposed to take vows and spend the rest of his life in a monastery preparing for heaven, known only to God. It only remained to be decided which religious order he should enter. It was perhaps just as well for Vicomte Charles Eugene de Foucauld on that October morning that he could not see into the future, for the wanderings and searching of the twenty eight years up to that point were only a foretaste of the journeys to come in the next thirty.