It is generaly admitted that far too many modern books on prayer and The spiritual life are of little value. Such books often enough claim to belong to the tradition of the Church, depending upon and being continuous with the great figures of the past such as St Bernard and St John of the Cross, but in fact this dependence is merely superficial, there being a fundamental break in a process of transmission which must be essentially organic, with its roots in the past and its life in the present—that surely is the significance of tradition.

To claim that our thought about the nature of prayer should be up to date is not to claim that it should dissociate itself from the past—far from it. The very nature of Christian speculation is that it must give full value to and appreciate language and thought-form in which the Church has given expression to her consciousness of the life of Christ within her throughout her history and particularly as witnessed to by the great patristic figures and doctors of the Church.