Robert Hugh Benson

A story of the struggle for the Catholic faith in the days of Elizabeth I. It is set in Derbyshire, and the action takes place in the years between 1579 and 1588 -- a period when to be a Catholic meant persecution, and probably death.

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) was an English writer and pacifist who became famous for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular mysticism. In the English-speaking world, she was one of the most widely read writers on these matters in the first half of the twentieth century, especially for this book "Mysticism" published in 1911. It sold so many copies that no other book of this type was able to meet with the same great success until Aldous Huxley came out with The Perennial Philosophy in 1946.

From Amazon.com: This third of Robert Hugh Benson's "mainstream" novels, The Coward, first published in 1912, may have been the most shocking to the upper class sensibilities of Benson's day. A young man is faced with challenges and manages to fail at every step. He becomes convinced he is an irredeemable coward - and only then begins to find courage. In a damning indictment of close-minded Edwardian society, a supreme act of courage on the young man's part is mistaken for yet one more craven act. The Coward takes on the soul-destroying tendency to adhere unthinkingly to social conventions.

As creeping secularism and godless humanism triumph over traditional morality, it creates a world that has been divided into three powerblocks, where religious doctrine is not tolerated and euthanasia is practiced widely. In Britain, the Royal Family has been deposed; institutions of higher learning have been closed, and a politician intent on power in the name of peace is intent on the destruction of religion. The world now has only three main religious forces: Catholicism, Secular Humanism, and "the Eastern religions." As a shrinking Church stands resolutely against him, laws are passed which require all the world's people to formally disavow the existence of God or be executed without trial.

Supernatural stories from R. H. Benson's The Light Invisible, and A Mirror of Shalott.

Contains the outline and chapters 1, 3 and 4 of a novel "woven around the historical fabric of St. Thomas of Canterbury ... Nothing is known of this collaboration beyond Benson's chapter IV"--Introduction.

Each letter of the alphabet is matched with a brief rhyming tale of a saint.