Cailliet tells his famous "conversion" story, and provides a delightful erudite homile on Power and Prayer. He was born in a small French town, received an education that "was naturalistic to the core," and grew up a pagan. He did not lay eyes on a Bible until he was 23 years old. As a lad of 20, he fought on the front lines of World War I and saw a friend killed in mid-conversation. At war, he remained an atheist. .

A bullet shattered his arm, but an American field ambulance crew saved his life. His shattered arm was fully restored during a 9 month hospital stay. While recovering, he married a Scotch-Irish lass he had met in Germany just before the war. She was a deeply committed Christian. He speaks of her compliant nature as expected of a wife.

Emile told his wife that no Bible would ever be allowed in their home. And yet, he found himself longing for meaning in life. In his reading -- and he was a voracious reader -- he went through everything he could find to satisfy the yearnings of his heart and soul. He said, "I had been longing for a book that would understand me."

Cailliet decided to compile such a book on his own. Over the next few years, he filled a leatherbound pocket book with significant quotations he discovered in his reading. "The quotations, which I numbered in red ink for easier reference, would mead me as it were from fear and anguish, through a variety of intervening stages, to supreme utterances of release and jubilation."

Finally, the day arrived when Emile Cailliet put the finishing touches on his book, the "book that would understand me." He walked outside the house, sat down under a tree, looked around at the bright blue sky, and opened his precious anthology. This was going to be a great experience.

"As I went on reading, however, a growing disappointment came over me." Far from adding meaning to his life, the various quotations simply reminded Cailliet of their context, of where he had found them, and nothing more.

"I knew then that the whole undertaking would not work, simply because it was of my own making." Dejected, he put the book back in his pocket. At the same moment, he recounts, his wife was pushing a carriage into an unfamiliar street and came upon a hidden Huegenot chapel. The door was open, she saw a pastor, and asked him for a Bible. He smiled and gave her one. She brought it home and was about to apologize to Emile. He told her not to mind, but seized the Bible and immediately rushed to his private study, and opened it the "the beatitudes". How he knew them by that name -- either Matthew 5:3-12, or Luke 6:20-22 -- is not explained.

He felt the arrival of the Bible placed in his hand contrary to his instructions by his obedient wife was an answer to prayer, and "its pages were animated by the Presence of the Living God and the Power of His mighty acts". [18] Prayer, Power, and Presence are themes in this book and his subsequent evangelical work and teachings.

Like Tillich, Emile tries not to "take sides" on what a religion is. However, it adheres to a concept of "magnetic poles" governing the "naturalistic and the theistic". [28] The ventilation of these poles is a pleasant romp through Brunner, Bergson, Hocking and even Gandhi. He touches upon the Timaeus, Homeric epics, the dramas of Sophocles, and the Orphism of the Pythagoreans, and noting Aristotle's Metaphysics, "the most restrained yet the most moving hymn ever dedicated by the Greek mind to the One who moves all things through Love". [33]

Emile describes the end of "naturalistic religion" as evoked in the 8th canto of Dante's Pergatory. "At sunset the souls in the Valley of the Kings devoutly join in their evening hymn. Looking to heaven at this quiet hour of prayer and meditation, Dante notes that the four stars representing the moral virtues have vanished behind the mountain, and the three stars that symbolize the theorlogical virtues have taken their place". [33] Christian theism had triumphed over the religious naturalism of ancient Greece. In his City of God, Augstine would give scope to the implications. Emile points out that the ancient world needed salvation from its naturalist point of view. The fatal necessity of the Eumenides.

Emile proceeds into the maelstrom of consciousness, lifted on inumerable references to medieval friars, modern anthropologists, Freud, secular humanists, and other theologians. He devotes relatively more time to the "realistic humanist" with his breakthrough experience, Blaise Pascal. (Emile overlooks his law suits, his usurpation of his sister's inheritance.) Much is made of the "Memorial" manuscript found sewed into clothing on his death, passing over the fact that it is senseless drivel in French, and cannot be translated into English. Emile regards Pascal as having triumphed at last -- "a heroic life".

Emile continues to invoke Power and Prayer. But he does not pretend to any Pascalian or Burning Bush lights, or any magisterial visitations. There is no illustration to illuminate what he means by "power", or an example of the efficacy of Prayer. The ending of the work concludes with Baudelaire's dedication to the Reader of his Flowers of Evil -- "To thee, hypocrite, my fellow-creature, my brother!". He notes that our Lord never reproaches us for having caused his blood to be shed, or for doing evil. He only offers an invitation to take his broken body and the cup of his blood. "May we then be granted the grace to discern in His words of institution the gentle understatement of the Love 'which moves the Sun and the other stars'."