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HOLY WISDOM is now an established classic of mystical theology. It is
compiled from a fuller work written in the penal times of the seventeenth
century by Dom Augustine Baker, O.S.B., a monk of the English Benedictine
Congregation.
The author was born in Abergavenny, and
educated as a Protestant at Christ’s Hospital and at Oxford, where he
took up the study of the law. Later, becoming a Catholic after some
strange spiritual experience, he gave up his work and went to Italy to
become a Benedictine monk. For many years he travelled between England
and the Continent, giving to the houses of his Order the benefit of his
legal knowledge, and also of his spiritual treatises. In his sixty-third
year he was sent on his last mission to England. At that time, in 1638,
a summons to the English mission was a summons to martyrdom; but Father
Baker’s struggle was not only against persecution, but also
against bad health. Three years after his arrival in England he was on
the point of being apprehended when he was struck by a contagious fever
which scared away his pursuers. He died in concealment, not technically
a martyr, but undoubtedly the victim of religious persecution.
The edition of his works from which this
present reprint is taken was compiled by Dom Norbert Sweeny in 1876.
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