Excerpt from Priestly Practice: Familiar Essays on Clerical Topics HE contents oi this volume have appeared from time to time during the past two decades in the pages of the Ecclesiastical Review, to the kindly editor of which standard periodical the author's thanks for permission to reprint are herewith gratefully tendered. The reprinting has seemed to be warranted not less by the favorable reception accorded to the essays on their original appearance than by the comparative dearth of English books of just this kind - books written by, for, and about priests. It may be well to state that, in visualizing my prospective reader, I have had in mind, not the cleric of distinction, the exceptionally saintly or scholarly or zealous ecclesiasti'c, but rather one who, like myself, is merely an ordinary, every day priest, a sort of clerical counterpart of that familiar lay character, the man in the street. Accordingly, both in the selection of topics and in their treatment, I have aimed at being helpfully interesting by telling such a reader some things which he himself has long known or felt, but which perhaps he has never found anyone to put in words for him, and by suggesting other things which, as soon as his attention is called to them, appeal to his good sense and compel his approval. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.