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AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

BRIT

H8

Copyright, 1926.
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped.
Published March, 1926.

Printed in the United States of Americe by
THE RIS PRI ING COMPANY, NEW YORK,

R.

PREFACE

This Outline has been prepared to meet the need of English speaking Protestants who seek guidance along an hitherto untrodden path.

The educated reader who is interested in literature and its history has at present no easily accessible work that tells the story of Christian literature, and a few laymen have at their command the material for tracing that story from the beginning. In this book I have tried to tell it for them in the simplest and most direct way.

In consequence of this popular purpose the references to authorities have been restricted to books that should be found in every well furnished Public Library, and all technical and critical discussions have been rigidly excluded.

Each part of the Outline might have been crowded with detail until every chapter became a book. The enumeration and adequate discussion of any one period of Christian literature would be the labour of a lifetime. But by the aid of this Introduction the non-theological reader will be able to gain a general view of the inexhaustible subject.

I hope that the young student of theology will also find the Outline useful. There are numberless histories of Christian dogma, theology, organisation, etc., but hitherto there has been no history of the Church's literature. The student is obliged to seek through many disjointed references that which he may wish to consider as a whole.