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.

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.

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.

I can never quite forgive St Jerome for being so cutting about St Ambrose's Latin. It seems to my ignorant mind that his Latin is only the shell of the kernel of the good nut within. Take at random, the homily for the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, almost at once, one finds this: ‘The food of heavenly grace is given, not to the idle, not in the city or to those accustomed to worldly dignity, but in desert places, to those who seek Christ. For Christ receives the humble, and the word of God speaks with them, not of worldly things, but of the kingdom of God.'

How wonderful is the next passage as a preparation for confession, for communion, or for, perhaps, a near-convert on the threshold of the Church: ‘None receives the food of Christ unless he be first healed, and those who are invited are healed by the ‘ very call.

The purpose of this article is to see with St Thomas some aspects of the moral movement of man towards his creator, those aspects namely that have to do with his teliow travellers on the way to God, man's positive contribution to human social living. And this human social life, being human, should be rational; yet, as St Francis of Sales observes in his Introduction to the Devout Life, seldom do we meet rational animals who are reasonable! There is so much injustice in the world, in spite of reason's dictating to us that the good things of this world should be evenly distributed according to each one's need and place in society. Millions of our fellow men struggle to keep alive at bare subsistance level. The more one studies history, the more one sees it as continual warfare, cynics would say a losing battle, to obtain justice.

It is in the stillness of our hearts and in the stillness of our minds, in a perfect presence to ourselves, that we rise up—not of ourselves, but through him to whom alone we say, ‘Raise us, Lord, that we may see’. This rise of ours is ‘offering’, achieved in understanding and in loving; we do not rise in any simple way outside our normal selves, but remaining within and yet increasing, growing, rise up upon ourselves to know and see, as yet however darkly, God present in our souls, from whom we have our all; our being, life and understanding; our own true actuality.

If, then, we recognize the tumult of the shifting nature of our thoughts, the milling crowds of our conflicting fantasies, by calming and by ordering these which hold us down we may proceed and may attain to that pure silence of the spirit, where in the rise upon itself of understanding we will see and know and feel, though fleetingly, the presence of him alone who is. ‘Be still and know that I am God.’