Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3tt textit{~ 1 103305 FOREWORD THE publication of the fifth French edition of the textit{Life of Father Paul Ginhac, S.J., suggested the making known to a still wider circle of readers the heroic virtue and sanctity of one who has been justly called
The Man after God’s own Heart?a Model for Priests. Master of Novices, and Superior of the Tertian Fathers, in the novitiates of the Society of Jesus for forty years, Father Ginhac had few opportunities of attracting the attention of a world which is quickly won by the charm of holiness. He died as he lived, generously fighting the hard battle of self-conquest to the end, but practically unknown even in his native land of France, except to the numerous communities of priests and nuns whom the silent preaching of his example had urged along the path of perfection more powerfully than his burning words. Death, however, seemed to lift the veil which had so long concealed this hidden saint, and God glorified His Servant. An immediate demand was made for the publication of his textit{Life, which in a few years has already run through five French editions, amounting to ten thousand copies. Translations have also been issued in German, Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch and Chinese. Numerous and striking miraculous favours have been obtained through his intercession, or by the application of his relics; written] testimonies of over six hundred such favours, attributed to his power with Almighty God, are in the hands of the Vice-Postulator of his Cause. Saints, like poets, are supposed to be born, not made, but Father Paul Ginhac was a striking exception to this rule. The following pages will show that his sanctity was nogratuitous gift from God, but laboriously hewn out of the rough, coarse block of our corrupt human nature. From the da…