Christian Renaissance With Interpretations of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe, and New Discussions of Oscar Wilde and the Gospel of Thomas #267493

It is nearly thirty years since I composed the material here presented in revised and abbreviated form. The old text had a number of errors, which have been corrected. It also had many serious weaknesses of style, particularly in the philosophical arguments: too often an unnecessary accumulation of repetitive but inexact sentences was made to do duty for the more precise and inclusive single statements with which they have now been replaced; though the more imaginative and rhetorical passages, being in a manner I could not recapture, remain undoctored. The footnotes are new, and where it seems important to remember it, they are dated. For the rest, revision has been almost entirely confined to rejection, clarification and compression; where any minor insertions have been made they will be found to do no more than clarify what was already implicit. The text must still be read as a document of its time tidied as it should have been tidied at first. A copy of the corrected original is lodged in the City Library at Birmingham.<br><br>This new version has nevertheless its weaknesses. My reliance on translations of the Bible, Dante and Goethe may still be involving me in inaccuracies, though I have done some careful checking at the main danger-points, either with other translations or with the original Greek and Italian. For the Bible I use, in my main text, with the kind permission of Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, James Moffatt's translation, which has a force and vitality that have from the start enlivened my understanding. I have used Cary's Dante and, with gratitude for the permission of Messrs. J. M. Dent & Sons, A. G. Latham's translation of Goethe's Faust (see p. 105 below). Thanks are due to Messrs. Collins for allowing me to quote from W. R. Schoedel's translation of the Gospel of Thomas.