Selected Thoughts of Thomas à Kempis

Thomas à Kempis · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages of extracts from Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, in the Latin translation made by the recusant priest Anthony Hoskins under the initials F.B., which ran to at least ten editions between 1613 and 1686. Every scriptural allusion is identified in the footnotes, and the extracts are grouped under headings.

The first group, headed how to find inner peace and true liberty, is a set of four instructions given as though from teacher to son and stated without qualification: be desirous to do the will of another rather than your own; choose always to have less rather than more; seek always the lowest place and to be inferior to everyone; and wish always, and pray, that the will of God may be wholly fulfilled in you. The second group, on how to serve God, opens with the observation that many perish through vain learning in this world who take little care of serving God, and that because they choose to be great rather than humble they become vain in their imaginations. What follows is a set of redefinitions built on the same pattern. He is truly great who is great in charity; truly great who is little in himself and makes no account of any height of honour; truly wise who accounts all earthly things as dung that he may gain Christ; and truly learned who does the will of God and forsakes his own. The interest of the passage is that every term of worldly praise — great, wise, learned — is kept but given a different measure.

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