For someone who goes so far wrong sometimes (and he really does), when a Kempis gets things right, he hits the nail dead on the head. There were definitely things that I didn't agree with in this book, but the main, overarching themes -- the supreme importance of God, dying to self, not attaching oneself to earthly things, not pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake -- are absolute, incontrovertible truth. These ideas can certainly be wrongly applied, and he did definitely stray too far in the direction of asceticism and dualism, but he's still absolutely right when he says, "Help me to know continually that there can be no true happiness, no fulfilling of thy purpose for me, apart from a life lived in and for the Son of thy love." All in all, this was an incredibly helpful and timely book to me, in reminding me where my priorities and affections need to be, and on Whom my security/stability needs to be founded. In spite of its flaws (I won't even get into his ideas about the Eucharist), it spoke to me where I was at, and the Lord used it to solidify some very important lessons in my mind. You just have to chew the meat and spit out the bones -- and after all, that's going to be true of even the best books by the most orthodox authors.

"Oh, if men bestowed as much labor in the rooting out of vices and planting of virtues as they do in proposing questions, there would neither be such great evils and slanders in the world, nor so much looseness among us. Truly, when the day of judgment comes, we shall not be examined as to what we have read, but what we have done (Matt. 25); not how well we have spoken, but how we have lived."