Charles de Condren, second Superior of the Oratory in France, has been described as one of the spiritual giants of the seventeenth century, yet this is the first life of him to appear in English. The most recent life, written in French, was published in 1855 and is now extremely rare de Condren was only 53 years of age when he died in 1641. Into that comparatively short span he had compressed so much work and given such example that Cardinal Richelieu observed, 'death has taken from us the greatest man produced by France for two centuries'.