We begin the new liturgical year looking forward to the coming of one whose name is hidden from us, but gradually revealed in the course of Advent. This name ‘comes from afar', it comes indeed from the heart of God, from the mind of the Father, because it is the name of his Word, his only-begotten and well-beloved Son. But as yet it is to us a deep mystery. We are gazing at this profound mystery from a great distance, and because of the immense abyss which separates us from God, our sight is blurred. In our state of fallen human nature, our gaze is darkened because of original sin and our own personal sins and therefore we need the brightness, the shining clarity of this name to fill the whole earth. It must fill our minds because the truth of God is for us so obscure.

It has been concluded, on the evidence of the verses that Suger wrote to celebrate his new basilica, that he looked upon it mainly as a monument to his own greatness. But although one admits that he was not without his streak of vanity, this particular manifestation of what at first glance appears to be mere complacency is worth examining more closely. His verses are not simply tombstone bombast; on the contrary, each one has a definite message to convey. It becomes clear that they were written for a purpose more interesting than that of Suger's selfaggrandizement. They were meant, in fact, to provide a commentary on the whole conception and undertaking of the new St Denis, his opus nobile, as he calls it.

It is, of course, not easy for us to imagine why Gothic architecture and traditional Christian iconography should require any explanation. It requires a real effort to imagine St Denis making the sort of impact on Suger's contemporaries that Ronchamp makes on ours.

Professor David Knowles, when still a young Downside monk, published in 1927 a short survey, The English Mystics,which workers in this field have used and quoted and respected as one of the first appraisals to be both popular and scholarly, free alike from prejudice and enthusiasm, of the reputations of some spiritual writers of later mediaeval England. In that same year, Hope Allen produced her vast study, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and since then much else has been accomplished. She assisted in the sensational discovery and the publication of the Book of Margery Kempe; and although most of us have come to deplore her methods, her ebullience and many of her contentions, we who have followed her have all learned and profited much from Hope Allen's tireless devotion to her subject. Professor Arnould's text of Rolle's Melos, Professor Hodgson's critical editions of The Cloud of Unknowing and the allied treatises, Dr Helen Gardner's studies in the text of the Cloud and The Scale of Perfection, and the edition of The Chastising of God's Children in which Miss Joyce Bazire and the present writer collaborated, are all works which could not have begun where they did, had it not been for the pioneering of Miss Allen.

Let us proceed, in a very humdrum way, from the general to the particular. A word first, then about what virtue is. It is a perfection of our nature. It means, literally, strength. The Latin word virtus comes from vir, a man, and the basic idea is one of manliness or manhood, if the ladies will pardon so masculine an attitude; but manliness not so much distinguished from womanliness as from childishness. Virtue is the proper characteristic of the adult. The virtues are firmly rooted dispositions or habits or attitudes by which our faculties are given a bias towards the performance of good actions instead of bad actions—the faculties we are concerned with in the moral life being the will and the sense appetites, not the mind, except for the key virtue of prudence, of which more anon. Left to themselves the other faculties lack direction, and just dissipate their energies aimlessly.

Psychologists, especially Jungians, have drawn our attention to the fact that in the myths and legends of the ancient world, and in the rites and ceremonies of primitive peoples, there is a recurrent pattern, varying in the arrangement of the pieces, but always conveying the same idea. There is a hero who challenges darkness, dragons, or deep waters, is slain, and rises, communicating new life to all his fellows. The hero-victim is more strong and glorious after his conquest, the light shines more brightly after its conflict with darkness, and the waters that close over the victim's head become the womb from which he is re-born, a man more complete and perfect than he was before.

The pattern is deeper down in the universe than the myths that express it. The earth itself subsists by a process of decay and renewal, of species striving after perfection, and the vegetable world repeats almost monotonously its theme of seed-time and harvest, fall, and winter sleep. Probably the scientist sees a repetition of the same design in the miniature worlds his microscope reveals.

‘People buy the Bible in such quantities as to make it a best-seller. But they do not read it very much and they understand it less’. So says Fr N. J. McEleney, c.s.p., general editor of the Pamphlet Bible Series, which is being published by the Paulist Press, New York, at 75 cents a number. The series is the most effective thing that has yet appeared to help ordinary people of general education to read the Bible and understand what they read. A short notice of the first four pamphlets appeared in Life of the Spirit in May 1960. Up to the present (January 1961) twelve pamphlets have appeared, bringing the series up to the book of Judges. No. 1 is an introduction to the Pentateuch; then follow two each for Genesis and Exodus, one for Leviticus, two each for Numbers and Deuteronomy, one each for Josue and Judges.

They help the ordinary reader first of all by their covers, which are bright, light, and modern. “Whether their general décor meets with your artistic approval or not, there is no doubt that it catches your eye and arouses interest.

And how should Aeneas Sylvius not be the first to beckon’ When on die opening page of that bulky folio (Bale 1551) there is a formula so close to us: that one should be grown up at twenty, prudent at thirty, rich at forty? Measure that formula against Dante, or even Petrarch (whom it might fit, yet who could not have uttered it), and you will see why Aeneas Sylvius claims kinship forward, more than back. The quality of his mind was also therefore sceptical, as witness that little anecdote on Scotland. ‘I had heard once there was a tree in Scotland which growing on the river bank produced fruits in the shape of duckings; and these when they reach maturity fall of their own accord, some on the land, some in the water; and those that fall on the ground rot, but those falling in the water soon come to life and straight away fly up into the air with wings and feathers.

Like many other members of the Catholic gentry in penal times, Margaret Ward had to earn a livelihood in domestic service. She was born in Cheshire at Congleton and went to live in London with another gentlewoman named Mrs Whitall, probably in the capacity of companion or housekeeper.

The Catholics of the district around Bridewell, where she lived, were much agitated by the plight of a secular priest named Richard Watson who was imprisoned in the gaol there. Margaret would hear his story, how during his first imprisonment he had been so weakened by starvation, vermin and close confinement in the fetid atmosphere of the place, that he had renounced his faith and attended a Protestant service.

Afterwards, his conscience becoming a greater misery than all he had endured in the gaol, nothing would satisfy him but to go to confession and be reconciled.

These words, used by more than one contemporary of Blessed Richard Reynolds, suggest at once light, purity, strength; a gaze turned ever to truth, that ‘otherness’ which we associate with the life of the angels and which makes them so ready to give help to sinful mortals.

For what will be said about one of our proto-martyrs in this short account, I have had to rely on the research of the late Dom Adam Hamilton, O.S.B., of Buckfast Abbey in his book, now out of print, called The Angel of Syon (published by Sands & Co.), and on a shorter work by Dom Ernest Graf, published in 1934 for the fourth centenary of the martyrdom.

The birthplace, family and exact date of birth of our subject still evade us, but it seems to be more or less accepted that he was born at Pinhoe, near Exeter, in 1488 or 1489.

The Canticle of Canticles of our Douay version very literally represents a Hebrew superlative. We could translate it ‘the most lovely song’ or the ‘fairest of songs'. Over the centuries innumerable books have been written about this great poem. There has been, and there still is, much disagreement about its interpretation; there is no disagreement about its consummate beauty. But there is far more than beauty, for the book is part of scripture and as such is inspired or has a divine character. The more central Hebrew tradition was firm about this. Rabbi Akibah, about A.D. 130, wrote: ‘No one in Israel has ever questioned the Canticle's divine character; indeed the whole world is not worth the day on which the Canticle of Canticles was bestowed upon Israel. All the books of scripture are holy, but the Canticles most holy.’ (Yadaim 3, 5.) The Church teaches that Canticles is part of scripture, and that teaching can be traced to the list of scripture compiled by St Cyril of Jerusalem, when Canticles is explicitly mentioned.

A lay organization whose major work is the giving of closed retreats is exceptional enough to be interesting. Such is the Banyakaroli movement to be found in parts of Tanganyika. This organization has changed somewhat during its existence but only in the sense that as a need was found the movement adapted itself to meet it.

The story began in 1941 when a Father Heise was at Kashozi, Tanganyika. This priest examined the local Catholic Action organization critically and decided that it had no influence in the parish, that its members were all getting on in years, their zeal had diminished and they were unable to adapt themselves to the problems of the younger generation. Considering that a complete renewal was necessary Father Heise selected three young married men to be the core of a new movement and sent them out to the villages to gain recruits. The nucleus were trained through a monthly day of recollection, observed in complete silence and followed by an instruction.

I Have imposed rather narrow limits on the scope of this short article, to make possible a close examination of a few poems, rather than deal in a more general way with the subject. I have chosen to examine some examples of Middle English lyric poetry written between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth century. My selection has been confined to the religious lyrics, omitting the secular lyrics of the period. This choice may of course reflect a personal preference, but it should not, I think, misplace the correct emphasis, since most of the lyrics extant from this period are religious: for every one secular lyric there are three or four religious lyrics, and moreover the religious lyric has been neglected to some extent in favour of the secular love-lyric, as many of these are among the more obviously attractive features of Middle English literature. The secular lyrics are nevertheless highly conventional, and, especially in the thirteenth century, lean heavily upon French tradition.

Born at Trawsfynydd, a remote lake-side village in North Wales, in the year 1577, John Roberts was, in the words of T. P. Ellis, ‘heir of a thousand years of “Welsh history and Welsh Catholicism'. The awareness of historical continuity displayed by the martyr at his death sprang, no doubt, from the impressions made upon the child John, not only by the stories he must have heard of the kings and princes of whom he was a direct descendant, of the saints who had sprung from the same line as himself, but also from the history implicit in the country-side around him, from the nearby and ruined abbey, and from the desecrated altars of the parish church. Thehistory of Trawsfynydd, a village bearing one of the Welsh names for the cross, embodies in itself the whole history of Wales.

St Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was convicted about the year A.D. no of being a Christian and sentenced to be taken to Rome, there to be thrown to the lions. Accordingly in the custody often Roman soldiers he travelled from Antioch to Smyrna, where he was entertained hospitably by St Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and the members of his congregation. There too he met sympathetic delegations from most of the Churches belonging to places on his route to Rome. From Smyrna he proceeded to Troas, where he wrote his letter to St Polycarp to thank him for his hospitality and to advise him on his duties as a bishop. The tone of his advice is that of a forthright zealous elder to a much younger man, of whose devotion to God he was well assured, but whose character may have seemed not forcible enough to enable him to master the material and spiritual difficulties that would surely arise.

When Edmund Campion after long temporizing finally broke from the allurements of his humanist's life at Oxford and retired abroad, Cecil observed of him: ‘It is a very great pity to see so notable a man leave his country, tor he was one of the diamonds of England’. Four years earlier, in 1566, when Queen Elizabeth visited Oxford, her chief minister nad applauded the eloquence and personal charm of the rising reilow of St John's college. On that occasion Campion had delivered orations in the name of the university before Elizabeth, as thirteen years earlier, representing London schoolboys, he had spoken his address to Queen Mary. Approbation, popularity and honour continued to follow him: he was made proctor and public orator, the highest posts compatible with his standing in the university. Then he tore the net which Anglicanism was throwing round him, withdrew to Ireland, was hunted thence because he lived as a Catholic and took refuge in Douai, 1571.

Not much of a Red Sea, a mere smudge of holy-water dabbed at in the porch, but in the moment that it takes we have left Egypt, the door has closed behind us like the pillar of cloud and we set out on our journey up the aisle into the domain of the holy, to the mountain of God. The Sinaitic fire burns in sanctuary lamp and candle-flame; the limit of approach is fixed. ‘Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy’. To say that is to accept the responsibility of being God's holy people. Far from being merely a self-righteous expression of religious apartheid, it is an appeal to God to implement his choice, to give us the grace to fulfil the priestly purpose of the making of the nation. ‘Send forth thy light and thy truth … And I will go unto the altar of God’. To be ‘distinguished’ in this way by God's choice of us in baptism is to enter into the creative pattern, the opus divisionis; land emerging from the abyss; light separated from darkness; a separation not destructive but creative.