We must leave to him all our anxieties—the loved one whose faith seems almost to have failed, and be certain that love is in his heart still and that all will come right. You will not be afraid to live, for ‘neither breadth, nor length, nor height, nor depth, nor things present, nor things to come’, can separate you from the love of Christ. You will not be afraid to live, nor when the hour comes, to go down with him into the Valley of Shadow. How should you be afraid, for you can only say ‘I live: now not I, but Christ liveth in me’.

The author of the article on Mysticism in the Dictionnaire de Thèologie Catholique bases his study on the idea of the experimental knowledge of God. It is an idea that anyone wanting to treat the problem by the inductive and psychological method would be bound to arrive at. The theologian tries to confine this field of enquiry within concepts and laws, and he will define mysticism as the predominant influence of the gifts of the Holy Ghost in a Christian life. This is the standpoint we must take up if we want to discover St Thomas's attitude, and in the end our problem will amount to this: what place have the theology and the activity of the gifts of the Holy Ghost in the organism of the life of grace? Both, in fact, depend on those attributes that enrich and transform human nature, attributes called, in a word, the supernatural life.

Unless the spiritual life is based on a sound psychology it will never be secure from illusion and misspent energy. Those for example who fancy the soul to be some strange spark burning within the massy flesh, which threatens to extinguish the fire by the melting of excessive fat, will plunge into mortification of the flesh with the ardour and the malpractice of a manichee. Those who think the soul is exclusively mind will turn to education and culture as to infallible ways of salvation. The concentration of interest upon the soul alone leads to the unbalanced self-consciousness which we have already considered. Hilton's skilful balance between the subjective and the objective, the self-knowing and the God-knowing in the spiritual life guarantees that the foundation of his scale is perfectly sound; and if we look more closely into his subjective doctrine we shall find how happily he holds the balance.

For as mickle as the apostle says that without faith and true belief it is impossible to please God, therefore is it that our old enemy the fiend enforceth him night and day through false incastings of errors and false engines and imaginations and other such manner of wonderful devises, for to destroy and let our belief and our faith which is the groundstone of all holy kirk and beginner of all virtues. And them that he sees he may not cast down utterly from stabilness of this belief, he ceaseth not to cast them down by other diverse manner of ways (through his quantise and his wiles and his temptations). Wherefore we shall warily and ghostly withstand his wiles on this wise.

The word recent is hardly applicable to the first of the works here under review, La Voix Vivante de l'Evangile au Debut die l'Eglise (Casterman, Tournail & Paris), by M. Le Chanoine Cerfaux of Louvain. It is three years since the Collection Lovanium published this excellent little study of the origin and character of the Gospels. In that collection it finds itself in somewhat strange company with works on genetics, archaeology, law, the atom bomb, and even on the tendencies of modern English democracy. But the series claims to be a collection of studies on general culture, and no one can claim to be cultured who is ignorant of the Gospels. It may be said without hesitation that this book provides a useful course of introduction for the student of the New Testament, showing him his way about in the maze of difficulties he will meet. Readers of the book already familiar with the teaching of the venerable Père Lagrange will not fail to recognise how copiously the author has drawn from that admirable source.