Book excerpt: This volume presents a critical edition of the immensely influential and popular first version of The Christian Directory, by the notorious Elizabethan Jesuit leader, Robert Persons. It was written during and immediately after the English Mission of 1580-1, which ended with the martyrdom of his companion Edmund Campion. Persons's work, originally entitled The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, appertayning to Resolution, attempts to persuade the reader to be resolved in the service of God. It deals with the motives and obstacles to such resolution. This edition includes a full apparatus of the alterations made to Persons's work by the Edmund Bunny, whose Protestant edition became an Elizabethan bestseller. It will be particularly useful to historians of the Catholic reformation and students of early modern English prose.