"This book is not specifically addressed to Christians who are firmly established in their faith and have nothing more to learn about its beliefs. It… - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"This book is not specifically addressed to Christians who are firmly established in their faith and have nothing more to learn about its beliefs. It is written for the waverers, both inside and outside; that is to say for those who, instead of giving themselves wholly to the Church, either hesitate on its threshold or turn away in the hope of going beyond it.

As a result of changes which, over the last century, have modified our empirically based pictures of the world and hence the moral value of many of its elements, the "human religious ideal" inclines to stress certain tendencies and to express itself in terms which seem, at first sight, no longer to coincide with the "christian religious ideal."

Thus it is that those whose education or instinct leads them to listen primarily to the voices of the earth, have a certain fear that they must be false to themselves or diminish themselves if they follow the Gospel path.

So the purpose of this essay — on life or on inward vision — is to prove by a sort of tangible confirmation that this fear is unfounded, since the most traditional Christianity, expressed in Baptism, the Cross and the Eucharist, can be interpreted so as to embrace all that is best in the aspirations peculiar to our times."