• This edition includes the following editor’s introduction: Who was Hall Caine? A successful figure essential to understanding British literature.

Originally published in 1897, “The Christian” is considered Hall Caine’s masterpiece and most popular novel.
“The Christian” is a wonderful, well-written thrilling and vigorous novel set in the late nineteenth century. It tells the story of a young Anglican clergyman, John Stors, who tries to live in the twentieth century in strict imitation of the life of Christ (believing that in the literal interpretation of his teaching lies the only salvation of the world) and is broken to pieces, both from within and from without, by his love of a woman and by the hard facts of modern existence.
The author claimed to portray in ‘The Christian’ ‘
however imperfectly, the types of mind and character, of creed and culture, of social effort and religious purpose which I think I see in the life of England and America…’