The Printer to the Fair-Minded Reader, Hearty Greetings

The Concinian Compendium, so greatly approved by the wisest of men and by the cultivators of the safer doctrine, we set before you once again, friendly Reader. You have here a theologian who is assuredly grave, eloquent, vehement, wondrously inflamed with zeal for Truth and for Religion — one, namely, who devoted himself wholly to this: that he might weigh his opinions most rigorously in the evangelical balance, and strengthen them with the suffrage of the holy Fathers, above all of Augustine and of Thomas Aquinas. And how manfully the most illustrious Concina discharged this office, no one is so much a stranger to theological matters as to be able to be wholly ignorant of it. This indeed is the judgment, this the contention, of nearly all the most learned men.

But how humbly he thought of himself, though endowed with so great a light of judgment and of doctrine, is evident both from very many passages and above all from that Declaration which he himself, after his Christian Theology had been published at Rome, made public at the urging of Benedict XIV, Supreme Pontiff. The candor of the man, his probity, his moderation, his excellent good will were able sufficiently to wash away and wipe out every mark of censure, if any there was. This above all he wished the whole world to know and to be persuaded of: that he had always judged and pronounced concerning the men of every Institute with the respect and charity that was fitting, and that whatever he had written, he had written struck by no hatred, breathed upon by no envy, carried away by no party spirit. Since these things are so, what forbids us from prefixing the praiseworthy sentiments of this most pious Author to this posthumous Compendium of his Theology? Nothing, assuredly, do we judge that we shall do more pleasing to Concina himself than if we should in some manner make offering to his memory with this monument of his integrity, and should, after his death, expressly repeat what he declared while he lived.