It is a strange fact of history that the Church does not escape some loss when she has to engage in doctrinal controversy. So much has been gained, such steps forward; in the clarification of doctrine made, that it is only after a period of years that the suspicion grows that the whole truth has not yet been said. Yet closer analysis of the nature of 'controversial theology' shows how inevitable this must be. From the first the Catholic protagonist suffers the disavantage of being forced to fight on ground chosen by his adversary. If he is able, he will seize his opponent's weapons and turn them against their owner. But what has happened? He is left victorious in a field not of his own choosing and with weapons not of his own making, effective though they were in the historical context of the controversy.

Recent discussion has led to a recognition Christian mysticism differs fundamentally from that of the non-christian religions. It was necessary, first of all, in face of the historical positivists to show where this difference lies. The answers so far proposed indicate at least that this is to be sought in the trinitarian structure of our theism. It is remarkable how little this has been taken into account by the theologians of the last centuries, and how little influence it has had on Christian life. In theory the West has never lost sight of the unique nature of christian, i.e. trinitarian, theism, but in practice the Christian and non-Christian mystic differ less markedly. We do not account for this difference simply by saying that the revelation of the Trinity and the substitution of trinitarian forms for mono-theistic characterise Christian mysticism, for this would be to beg the question which is precisely how this reference to the Trinity makes Christian mysticism so unique a thing.

Although the doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul is perhaps more widely appreciated than formerly, it may be doubted Whether the same can be said of that of the Holy Spirit lying and operating in the Church as a whole. Sometimes we are so preoccupied with human failings in the Church's members that we tend to forget the intimate presence in the Church of the Divine Guest whose gifts show her to be an opus plane divinum, as Pope Leo XIII called her. We tend to forget that the Church is a theophany, that the ‘Trinity in which Unity is apparent in the unity of the Church—the Father, as the principle to which we are united, the Son as the milieu in which we are united, the Holy Spirit as the tie by which we are united: and all is one'. (Bossuet: Lettre sur l'Unité de l'Eglise.)

Although the early Church was by no means exclusively composed of holy and perfect members, there was in those days, one may think, a more widespread realisation of God's presence in the Church, specially attributed to the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.

Acertain man made a supper, a great evening meal. If you entertain in the morning, you invite all sorts of people, but in the evening you ask important people, people dear to you and your close friends.

Today Christians keep the feast of the supper which our Lord prepared for his disciples, his close friends, when he gave them his holy body to be their food. This is its first meaning. But the supper has yet another meaning. Morning and noonday must pass before evening comes. God's light breaks into the soul, morning dawns there, and in this light the soul soars up into the high zenith of its noonday. And thereafter it is evening. And there is yet a third meaning to this idea of the evening. When the light fades, it is evening; when the glamour of the whole world fades in the soul, it is evening there and the soul finds peace.

This is simply an attempt to suggest some of the main ideas inspiring the common life of early Christians. There are several difficulties in the way of such an attempt. There is, for example, the common temptation to paint a sharp contrast between a golden age of the primitive Church and a cold and dismal present. Such a contrast is unreal. The virtues found in primitive Christian communities can be found in any of our modern parishes. The faults which appear in the modern community have their parallel in our Lord's own days. There were pride and jealousy, lying and treachery, among the Apostles; schism and heresy were a problem before the New Testament was all written. A romantic view is, therefore, unfounded, although we may recognise that pressure of hostile forces probably eliminated from the earliest Christian communities considerable numbers of people who would have existed in more peaceful times as a large body of lukewarm, conventional Christians.

If we consider the ideas of St Thomas and Dame Julian on divine charity we find that there are similarities and differences. As might be expected, St Thomas is more analytical; however, Dame Julian has some ideas the sources of which may perhaps be found in her contemporary European mystics. Whereas St Thomas works out his ideas from his theology and on a developed plan, Dame Julian's thoughts are the result of her visions and come in the order of their occurrence.

St Thomas writes: ‘God's love as a divine gift is eternal and immutable, yet as regards the effect it imprints upon us it may at times be interrupted in so far as we at times fall away from him and again return to him. Now the effect of the divine love in us—which is taken away by sin—is grace whereby a man becomes worthy of eternal life; from this, however, sin shuts him out.’ (I-II, 113.)

‘On mount Calvary the side of the divine Saviour was transfixed. From that gaping wound blood gushed out, like a torrent, bounding forward over time, cleansing men's souls, expiating their sins, and lavishing upon them the riches of salvation.’ These words written by Pope Pius XII recall his famous encyclical in which he wrote, ‘on the Cross the Church like a new Eve, or mother of all the living, was born from the Saviour's side. Thus St Ambrose, speaking of the pierced side of Christ, says, “Now it is built, now it is formed; now … it is fashioned; now it is created. Now the spiritual house is erected into a holy priesthood.” … By the blood which he shed on the Cross he removed the obstacle of the divine wrath and enabled all the heavenly gifts … to flow forth from the fountains of the Saviour for the salvation of men, and especially of the faithful. It was on the tree of the Cross, finally, that he purchased his Church.’

The unequivocal command to continual prayer so clearly expressed by Christ in the Gospels is by no means so clearly understood by the average christian of today. That everybody should pray the sincere Christian will readily admit, but it is the element of eternity that is either glossed over or assumed to refer only to those who have received a special call to a life of contemplation in the cloister. The fact plainly is that it is a call to all who Pretend to follow Christ, and we are bound to pray always. There is no doubt an unconscious prejudice based on a misconception of the meaning of prayer. The reasons for this Prejudice may be said to be two which are very closely allied, one being in a sense the cause of the other.

Christianity comes to us with the claim to be the revelation of a mystery. Our Lord in the gospel speaks of the ‘mystery of the Kingdom of God': and declares that this has been made known to his disciples (Mark 4, 11). St Paul speaks of the gospel as a ‘revelation of the mystery, which in ages past was kept secret, but now has been made manifest and through the writings of the prophets has by the command of the everlasting God been made known to all the nations’ (Rom. 1, 4). Elsewhere he speaks of ‘the mystery which has been hidden from former ages and generations, but now has been made manifest’ (Col. i, 26): and again of ‘publishing to the world the plan of the mystery, which had been kept hidden from the beginning of time in the all-creating mind of God’ (Eph. 3,6). What, then, are we to understand by this mystery, and in what does its revelation consist?

Pondering the mystery of God taking flesh, we ought to notice that everything which acts intelligently acts through an idea, a verbum, formed in its intellect. This we see in a builder or any craftsman producing an article according to the plan which his mind has conceived. Now because the Son of God is the divine Verbum, it follows that God has made everything through the Son. further, the maker of anything is the one to repair it; if a house falls down the architect who built it should be consulted.

Amongst the creatures created by God through his Word, rational beings hold pride of place since all else seem to be arranged for their service. This is understandable because rational beings have control of their actions through their freedom of choice, whereas the others are motivated by the force of nature and not by deliberate judgment.

Corruptio Optimi Pessima—yes, but few of us can rise to the best, and consequently few of us descend to the depths. Corruptio melioris pejor Would be a maxim more suited to us, and we could translate rt: The corruption of the rather better produces the rather worse. That is the habitual danger which most Christians and especially most Catholics run. It is that ‘rather worse’ which interests me, and another way of putting it would be that Catholics run their own particular danger of being vulgar.

The word ‘vulgar’ is interesting because it carries within itself, as it were, the story of its own corruption. Its true meaning is something to do with the common people, that is, those least in danger of being vulgar in the modern sense, for the common people largely bound in mind and behaviour by God-made conditions of life are in least danger of falling from the rather better to the rather worse.

The Church of Christ is our mother: the true mother of the living. It is through her that we have life, it is she who nourishes life within us, it is she who gives us access to the living God. None the less, concerning this Mother for whom we should have only love, how many temptations beset us! Some of them are fierce, yet recognisable others are obscure, hence more insidious. Some temptations are perennial and others are peculiar to our age. They are too many-faced, indeed, even mutually contradictory, to allow any of us to feel safe from their threat.

There will always be some individuals who perfectly identify their own cause with that of the Church and end by subordinating, in good faith, the Church's cause to their own. In their desire to serve the Church they actually put her to work for themselves: ‘a dialectical turn about', which changes friend into foe, and takes place with as much ease as subtlety. For them the Church is, in fact, a certain familiar social order to which they belong.

We know exactly as much as we have suffered; neither more, nor less. If it were not possible to suffer with, and even for other people, what follows would not follow, since it is these to whom it is addressed who are suffering directly. But !if these lines contain any value it is only in so far as the writer has been able to suffer with, and for, those suffering directly, who are in need of sympathy and comfort. Should they, in fact, be born of illusion and shallow sentiment they are worthless and will fail to stir any deep longings, in which case may they at least do no harm.

Easter Sunday is not a feast day standing by itself. It is the culmination of a celebration which may be said to begin on Palm Sunday and which continues through Low Sunday and beyond to Ascension Day, and even to Whit Sunday and its octave. All this is the Pasch or Passover, which we call Easter. It is the Spring Festival, in a sense the New Year—the New Year not of our arbitrary calendars but of nature and of life, vegetable, animal, human and divine.

Easter is the centre and climax of the whole Christian year. But in a sense it is not only a Christian feast, nor does it originate with Christ or in Christendom. We know that the word Pasch or Passover is not a Christian name, nor originally it was a Christian feast: it is a Jewish name and a Jewish feast. By the time of Christ it had come to mean for the Jews principally a commemoration of their passage from the slavery of Egypt to the Promised Land ‘flowing with milk and honey'.

In the prayer composed by Pope Pius XII for the Jubilee Year of 1950, there is one petition that comes strikingly back to my mind as I am invited to write on the subject of the Holy Ghost. It is: ‘grant unto orphans, affectionate protection'; and it is particularly by the gift of the Holy Spirit that God answers such a petition. Indeed it Would be better to say that it is with no less a gift than that of the Holy Spirit that the prayer is answered. We who are ‘orphans’ as far as the lives of our spirit are concerned, have ourselves to blame if we do not benefit always by that affectionate protection with the giving of which the mission of the Holy Ghost is concerned.

In the Encyclical ‘Divinum Illud’ (9 May, 1897), specially devoted to the Holy Ghost, Leo XIII deplored the fact that the third Person of the Trinity is so little known and his divine mission so little appreciated by us.

The first and last of man's needs is his need of another person. Man and woman, child and mother, the simple fact of friendship—we are made that way; we are made for other persons. We are made for a life that is meant to be shared. It is not good for man to be alone.

And the pain of loneliness is more than an ache in your hand: something that hurts, but it will pass, it is not all of you. Loneliness is a hurt in the centre of your self: you are alone, and you long for another to share your need.

Man is made for another: but in the end that other is Cod. All love asks to be shared (that is what love means: a sharing, a giving-and- taking). And a selfish love is no love at all. So it is that God (who is love) supremely asks to be shared.

St Thomas puts very briefly the difference between a free-man and a slave, when he says: ‘a free-man is one who is the cause of what is his, but a slave owes everything he has to another'. (De Reg. Prin. I, i.) Thus in a sense we are all the slaves of God. Our Lord brought friendship into that relation; yet for all that, we did not cease to be God's servants. Terms like ‘military service', ‘civil service’ and ‘foreign service’ are apt to create the impression that ‘divine service’ is likewise limited to a particular kind of work, such as going to church on Sundays. It is easy to miss the real meaning of what Christ said— ‘You cannot serve two masters', or of what St Paul said— ‘All whatsoever you do in word or in work do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him'. (Col. 3.)