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About Brother Lawrence
Nicholas Herman of Lorraine (c. 1611–1691), known in religion as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, was a lay brother of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris. After service as a soldier and a footman, he entered the monastery in 1666 and spent years at kitchen work and other ordinary tasks. He became known for a simple, continual practice of turning the heart toward God in the midst of daily labor. He wrote little himself. After his death in 1691, Joseph de Beaufort gathered notes of conversations and a small collection of letters and published them in French in 1692 as La pratique de la présence de Dieu.
About this text
This Web Book follows the historic English edition issued by the Fleming H. Revell Company (New York, Chicago, Toronto) under the title The Practice of the Presence of God the Best Rule of a Holy Life: Being Conversations and Letters of Nicholas Herman, of Lorraine (Brother Lawrence). Translated from the French. The translator is unnamed in that edition. The reading text was prepared from the public-domain transcription published as Project Gutenberg eBook #13871 (released 26 October 2004). Chapter order and wording follow that source: the preface, four conversations, and fifteen letters, with the four brief source notes retained at the points where they appear.
The original French work belongs to the late seventeenth century. Brother Lawrence died in 1691; the compilation was published in 1692. The Revell English translation was published in the United States in the nineteenth century and is in the public domain. UECF.NET has not modernized, paraphrased, or abridged the translation. Typographic quotation marks are used for on-screen reading, and a small number of unmistakable biblical allusions and the edition’s own Scripture footnotes have been linked to the UECF.NET NKJV Bible. Ambiguous references were left as plain text.
The Internet Archive item supplied as a starting point, BrotherLawrenceThePracticeOfThePresenceOfGod, is an audio recording identified on the Archive as The Practice of the Presence of God: Pure Gold Audio Classics. It contains no usable public-domain text file. Because that recording is a modern commercial audiobook, UECF.NET does not host or reproduce it. A 2002 Lightheart edition circulated as Project Gutenberg eBook #5657 remains under that editor’s copyright notice and is not used here.
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The Imitation of Christ · The Confessions of Saint Augustine · Absolute Surrender · NKJV Bible · Christian Books Library
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