"The King's good servant - but God's first."

With these imperishable words, Thomas More mounted the scaffold and rendered to God the things that are God's. He had not courted martyrdom, had in fact taken every honorable means to avoid it. But More had become, with Cardinal John Fisher, the symbol of Catholic England's resistance to Henry VIII. And so he had to go.

Few martyrs have had to give up so much. He had a large and devoted family, a home that Erasmus likened to Plato's Academy - but Christian. He was a lawyer and judge of the first rank, prosperous, and the first layman to be named Chancellor of England. All Europe held him in renown as the author of the provocative Utopia and as the exemplar of the best in Renaissance learning. Henry himself delighted in his company and selected him for many a key mission. Personally he was the ideal friend and a charming companion, brilliant, urbane, witty, considerate. Here, certainly, was a man of many parts. Yet in the unlikely garb of the complete man of the world there dwelt - a saint.

The great merit of this biography by E.E. Reynolds is that it vividly portrays the whole More, his spiritual life as well as his court, family, social, and intellectual activity. He is the ideal saint for the modern layman, and in these pages we see why. He lived the Faith - before dying for it.