The translation of this brilliant and penetrating study of humility has been a task of extreme delicacy and no small difficulty. The spiritual genius of the French is quite other than the spiritual genius of the English: it is impossible adequately to express the one in the terms of the other. The translator therefore trusts a certain unevenness of literary style will be generously overlooked, and that no one, on its account, will be deterred from studying a work that cannot fail to have a lasting and beneficent influence upon the whole spiritual life.