Editor's Note It was a saying of Jowett, the late Master of Balliol, that more good would be done in the future by writing the lives of men and women who have deserved well of their kind than by set treatises in theology and morals. The present series aims at being a contribution to such a service. The lives are those of our own countrymen and countrywomen; but they are, by choice, not the lives which have been officially canonised and calendared. The orthodox Hagiology is discouraging to ordinary minds. Saints about whom legends of the supernatural have gathered, while they excite our admiration, rather discountenance our imitation. Such saints become a class apart; to aspire to their society seems presumption. But the lives which, whether in this or former generations, may be distinctly proposed as examples, are frequently unrecorded, because high services leave no time for courting public notice, and the things done in secret, though visible in their results, baffle the biographer. Such lives may be rescued and enshrined ix by diligence and love; and if they are presented with conciseness and sympathy, they will serve the purpose to which Jowett referred as well as those which carry more sounding names There is no intention to confine the selection of subjects to any particular denomination of religion. While it is hard to conceive a saintly life without religion, it is possible to find saintly lives in religions of very different kinds. If a saintly life without religion can be lighted on, and a writer can be found, it shall be included in the series. No saintly life in any religion will be excluded on the plea of heterodoxy. Indeed one service which the series may render will be to recall persons of different name and sect and persuasion, to some of those Divine qualities which appear in all noble human lives, though naturally in greater abundance among the records of our own sect. We could wish that all the saints had belonged to one Church, that they had all been Catholics or Protestants, Churchmen or Dissenters, for that would have furnished strong evidence of the exclusive truth of the denomination in which they were found. But unfortunately they occur with singular impartiality in sections of the Church which delight to ban one another, and in communities which the Church as a |