Butlers Lives of the Saints 5 Volumes

Soft cover Perfect Bound 5 Volume Set

The abridgment of any classic work often seems to many persons a sort of profanation! Yet the abridgment is itself a splendid tribute to the excellence and utility of the original! Few people in this hurried and harassed age have the time to wade through bulky tomes however valuable, and it is to provide the busy man and woman with what is best in the production that abbreviated editions of famous books are issued. Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, which first appeared in 1745, is a very good example of the work that will serve a larger purpose in a less extensive form. Side by side with what may be called the outstanding Saints, are many notices of holy persons whose lives and deeds have not caught the imagination of the majority of readers. This, of course, is no disparagement to the canonized individuals in question. They are sufficiently well known and publicly honored chiefly in their own localities, but for some reason, not always to be easily explained, they have not come conspicuously before the eye of the Catholic world. Moreover, many of their salient achievements and virtues are abundantly represented in their more famous brethren, some of whose histories and glorious examples are recorded in this book.