Sermons of the Rev. Francis A. Baker, Priest of the Congregation of St. Paul / With a Memoir of His Life

Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1865
By A. F. Hewit, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

In offering the Memoir and Sermons of this volume to the friends of F. Baker, and to the public, propriety requires of me a few words of explanation. The number of those who have been more or less interested in the events touched upon in the sketch of his life and labors is very great, and composed of many different classes of persons in various places, and of more than one religious communion. I cannot suppose that all of them will read these pages, but it is likely that many will; and therefore a word is due to those who are more particularly interested, as well as to the general class of readers. I have to ask the indulgence of all my readers for having interwoven so much of my own history and my own reflections on the topics and events of the period included within the limits of the narrative. They have woven themselves in spontaneously, without any intention on my part, and on account of the close connexion between myself and the one whose career I have been describing; and I have been unable to unravel them from the texture of the narrative without breaking its threads.

I have simply transferred to paper that picture of the past, long forgotten amid the occupations of an active life, which came up again, unbidden and with great vividness, before the eye of memory, during the hours while the remains of my brother and dearest friend lay robed in violet, waiting for the last solemn rites of the requiem to be fulfilled. If I have succeeded, I cannot but think that the picture will have something of the same interest for others that it has for myself. Those who knew and loved the original, will, I hope, prize it for his sake; and their own recollections will diffuse the coloring and animation of life over that which in itself is but a pale and indistinct sketch. For their sakes chiefly I have prepared it, so far as the mere personal motive of perpetuating the memory of a revered and beloved individual is concerned. But I have had a higher motive as my chief reason for undertaking the task: a desire to promote the glory of God, by preserving and extending the memory of the graces and virtues with which He adorned one of His most faithful children. I have wished to place before the world the example of one of the most signal conversions to the Catholic faith which has taken place in our country, as a lesson to all to imitate the pure and disinterested devotion to truth and conscience which it presents to them.