When our Lord addressed these and similar words to the Jews, he was contradicted and attacked by his hearers. They said, he is a Samaritan, he has a devil. In today's Gospel, on the contrary, it is recorded that after our Lord had miraculously fed the crowd with five loaves and two fishes, he was surrounded by the Jews who were enraptured with the great miracle, and they said: ‘This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world'.

It has seemed to us opportune to speak briefly of that light which our Lord claimed to be. That light has enlightened all created lights. The sun, moon, stars, man's bodily senses, the intellectual light of reasonable creatures, in other words reason and intelligence draw their brilliance from it; by that light, all creatures are led and brought back to their origin. And if they did not. return to it, considered on their own without this true and essential light, they would assuredly be but thick darkness. Again our Lord said to every faithful soul: Give up your own light for my sake; compared to my light it is but darkness, the very opposite of my splendour.

While the active life is the life of the soul acting as the form of the body (that is, the life of the individual as a member of the human race), the contemplative life is the life of the soul in its purely spiritual reality,, the life of the person, the complete being, the ‘whole'. For by definition the ‘whole’ suffices to itself. It has all. It lacks nothing. The contemplative life is the perfect life: in itself it has neediof no assistance. It can be entirely solitary.

But, it being granted that the human person is a person created, a part of the divine ‘whole'; it being granted also that it has been multiplied by the Creator, are we not going to discover that the nature of the person implies an ‘order’ or organisation, a ‘spiritual society'? It is certainly true that there exists an ‘order’ of persons, and even an order of creatures purely spiritual—the angelic hierarchies. But it is only a question there of a ‘communicatio in forma', an analogical similitude, in the fact that all these creatures possess an intelligence which has for its final perfection the contemplation of God.

Beres Universorum’ occurs in the accusative case in the first sentence of the Epistle to the Hebrews. St Paul is intensely conscious that Christ's coming is the summing up of the past, the completion of an immense cycle, the climax of a great series of stupendous events, the crowning act of a drama, the final interference of God in his own creation. Not only that; Christ's ‘coming, for St Paul, gathered up all the past, gave it shape and substance, explained it, since all things pointed to or prepared for him. He was the heir of all things. In this title we have a glimpse of the Augustinian vision that history was summed up in Christ, that all the golden threads in pagan life and worship led ultimately to heredem universorum Christum. Thus there are two lines of thought: Christ heir to the Jewish tradition, and Christ heir to the pagan tradition.

Man's soul is so wonderfully elevated above the condition of the body that it might be said to approximate more closely to the God who made it than to the body to which it is attached, and it is true that in the soul, alone of all created things, can be traced certain traits and lineaments of God's perfections. It is spiritual like God, and like God it is incorruptible and everlasting. It is free, it is able to foresee and provide, it has its will of which it disposes. Does it not appear to enjoy the privileges of eternity, when it looks into the future, makes the past live again and disposes of the present?

But never does it seem more like to God than when, soaring above all that is created it loses itself in the vast abyss of his infinite perfections, and, realising that it cannot comprehend them, is content to remain lost in them forever with no desire to return.

Just as any person's career becomes more individual and outside species and classes the more developed and specialised he becomes, so in the spiritual life the holier a man becomes the less easily will he fall into any preconceived categories. The first stages of the life of the spirit are easier to follow, just as a man's career begins with his schooling when he learns the same subjects and undergoes the same discipline as all his schoolfellows. When he has left school or university and has begun to live his own life, then he should tend towards uniqueness until, rising in his profession, he has fewer and fewer men with whom he may be identified. So as the soul rises from the schooling of the purgative way and the night of the senses she begins to live the divine life in her own unique way, until passing into the night of the spirit she emerges into the unitive way where only the most general characteristics are shared with others who are yet in the same ‘way'. ‘Star differeth from star’ among the saints as well as among the angels.

As the first, original sin was committed through the sinful mediation of a woman, so it was through a woman's consent and just mediation that we were redeemed from the guilt of this sin. Conceived without the stain of original sin, our Lady was the second Eve. She was the perfect tabernacle of God, simply the mother of Jesus, because she was utterly selfless, because in an old metaphor of the Fathers revived in a recent book, she was like a pipe which waits for the air to blow through it to make music, the Reed of God.

Our Lady was the throne of Wisdom because she can be perfectly described as the Woman who was poor. Here at last was the complete gift of self, the unconditional sacrifice of the creature which God looked for in Adam and Eve, and looked for in vain. So our Lady became infinitely rich, Sedes Sapientiae, and entered upon the earthly motherhood with that perfection which she carried on to her eternal motherhood wherein she dispenses to man the same Wisdom whom she mothered in Palestine.

Here is a man, forty years old, with a mother whom he respects and venerates. In spite of his own absorbing occupations, he visits her every day for exactly half an hour. He talks as a son should about this and that, always going away at the same hour and returning the next day at the stroke of the clock. More cannot be demanded of him, and from a mother's point of view one could wish that all men did at least as much.

That is a picture of the beginning of the life of prayer—each day the Christian making his or her meditation, and following a method point by point—this is necessary at the beginning. It is already something, but that something is only a beginning, although there are those who think they are doing wonders with their fine thoughts and meditations.

Let us suppose then that the person remains faithful, and that God increases his grace. Oh, how young the soul becomes! It is no longer like a man of forty giving just half-an-hour each day to his mother.

Judged in the light of human standards the answer to this question may well be in the negative. But it is unsatisfactory to measure the value of human life simply by natural standards, since the standards set by God for man are supernatural. The real, true end of man is supernatural, that is, beyond his natural reach, and the means thereto must needs be supernatural. To be raised above one's nature signifies to be elevated beyond one's natural capacity. In a sin-laden world and in a nature broken by a fall, man cannot be lifted up into a realm that is not his, into God's own kingdom, without grace bestowed out of the divine bounty, which is both life-giving and healing. Even so the downward drag and fret are so great in making the ascent that no one can scale the heights without intensive effort of his own and more than his own.

When God gives his graces to a soul, these graces are never restricted exclusively to the individual. They are bestowed also on the whole Body of Christ. No one can hope to receive graces selfishly, nor can he ascend the Scale of Perfection alone. He may look only towards God and seek him alone, as the three kings journeying to Bethlehem following the beam of the star. But when they have reached their goal and have held the Lord of the whole world in their embrace, they may not stay there alone with him. They are sent back to their country by another way. They return transformed, carrying back what they have received to their own kith and kin. When the soul has reached the heights of perfection, she may not rest there; in one way or another she is sent back to her own folk but to take up a new position, as mediator of the grace she has received.

One of the more important aspects of the growth of the spiritual life is the way in which the higher stages, far from leaving the lower entirely behind, do in fact reproduce the earlier virtues and activities in a new milieu; a higher synthesis is reached. Thus it would be a mistake to imagine that merely because progress in grace means first the predominance of the moral virtues and then the theological, that therefore such virtues as religion, obedience and various forms of asceticism fade away in the wings as faith, hope and charity take the stage. There are some who consider that they have reached a degree of perfection where obedience hardly applies; love predominates so that they are free from the hindrance of the moral virtues, particularly from the inconvenience of having to do what with other men they are told. They feel themselves above the law.

But in fact these ascetic virtues are raised to a far more perfect and instinctive mode hy the grace of unitive prayer and the flowering of the gifts of the Holy Ghost.

The author of the Acts of the Apostles tells how one day Philip the deacon was travelling south on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He caught up with an Ethiopian eunuch driving along the same way in his chariot, and, as he did so, he overheard him reading aloud to himself the prophecies of Isaias. Philip asked him whether he understood what he was reading, and the Ethiopian replied: ‘How could I understand unless someone tells me what it is all about?’ He had got as far as: ‘He was led away like a sheep to be slaughtered, like a lamb that is dumb before its shearer, he would not open his mouth. He was brought low and all his rights taken away; who shall tell the story of his age? His life is being cut off from the earth.’ Said the eunuch: ‘Who is the prophet speaking of here? himself, or someone else?’ Philip answered by telling him all about Jesus.

In his Summa Theologica (II-II, 81, 7) St Thomas Aquinas lays clown a principle which is fundamental for both the theory and the practice of divine worship: ‘We show reverence and honour to God not for his own sake—for he is himself full of glory, and to that glory nothing can be added by any creature: but for our own sake, in as much as by the very fact that we worship and honour God, our minds are put into subjection to him. And in this consists their own fulfilment, for everything attains its fulfilment by being subject to that which is above it: thus the body attains its fulfilment by being made alive by the soul, and the atmosphere by being lit up by the sun …’

Live according to thy calling’ is the advice given in the 2nd chapter of the Cloud of Unknowing, which is devoted to ‘a short stirring to meekness'. And in this the author sets the tone of the whole book, introducing in the firstplace this virtue of humility and leading thence to the full ‘noughting’ of oneself before God. For those accustomed to spiritual reading and spiritual exercises it is easy to spend time in considering what God is doing to the soul and so to begin to count his blessings and graces in prayer. This opens the door to a smugness and pride, which may well captivate anyone who is endeavouring to follow the instructions of The Cloud. So, he says, if the reader take the book seriously he must concentrate on the call, on that towards which he is progressing. If a man lives according to his calling he will begin to find the virtue of humility, for his eyes will never linger on himself except in seeing his tragic poverty, his wants and his needs: Look now forwards and let the backwards be.

Dear Friend,—Know thou well that the end and the height of perfection lieth in a true union of God with the soul of man in utter love. This end, then, is verily achieved when the powers of the soul are reformed by grace to the dignity and condition of their first state, that is, when the mind is firmly fixed in God and in spiritual things without shifting or wandering away and when the reason is cleared of all worldly and fleshly contemplations or imaginings and of the figures and fantasies of men and is illumined with grace to behold God and spiritual things, and when the will and the affection are purified and cleansed of all fleshly desires, natural and worldly loves, and are inflamed with burning love for the Holy Ghost. But this marvellous union may not be perfectly and continually and wholly reached in this life, by reason of the corruption of the flesh, but only in the joy of heaven. Nevertheless, the nearer that a soul can come to this union in this life, the more perfect that soul is.

It is a deplorable loss to Catholic reading that ‘The Library of the Fathers', the classic series of translations edited by Pusey, Keble and Newman should have been allowed to remain unfinished and long out of print. Moreover, it is already more than a century since these vernacular versions first appeared, and they have never been surpassed: fine scholarship and loving care alike went to their making, and when we pray for England's return to the Faith, the re-availability in our language of that patristic literature whose istudy birmght the greatest of English converts into the Church should be covered by our intention.

Among the first members of the series, in 1839 to be exact, there appeared the ‘Treatises of Saint Cyprian' the third-century bishop and martyr of Carthage, to be followed in due course by the companion volume of his Epistles.

I am convinced that a life lived together with others is much more profitable than the life of a solitary. In the first place, we are none of us self-sufficient as regards the needs of the body, but depend on each other for its necessities. For just as the foot possesses one capacity but not another, and cannot exercise its own office without the help of the other members of the body, nor supply what it lacks out of its own resources—so also in the solitary life even what we have becomes useless, because what we lack becomes unobtainable. For God the Creator has ordained that we should have need of one another as it is written, therefore we are closely linked to each other.

But apart from that, the love of Christ itself does not suffer that each of us should look only to himself. Charity, as St Paul says, seeketh not its own. The eremitical life, however, aims precisely at this, that everyone should look after his own needs. This, however, clearly militates against the law of charity which the Apostle himself fulfilled, who did not seek his own profit, but the salvation of many.

It all begins with a conversion; properly speaking with a second or re-conversion.

This applies to cradle Catholics and converts alike, at least to average normal people. The normal born Catholic is usually well content to use up the spiritual capital of baptism, as it were, and make his religion a reflex action rather than a conscious effort. This is not criticism but a statement of observable fact. To become active, to awaken to the possibilities and responsibilities of the religion he practises, a further jolt of some kind is needed, whether from within or from without. It is the same with converts. It does happen that entry into the Church will coincide with or cause the beginning of an intense and active spiritual life; but these cases are rare. (We speak in general terms and not of special cases, such as direct conversion to the religious life, which have nothing to do with the life of the laity—our subject here—and so are outside our scope.)

From our own experiences and from those we have been privileged to hear of, it seems that this second conversion is necessary.

During the 14th century, several books on the interior life were written in England. The most useful of these is, perhaps, the Scale of Perfection, composed by Water Hilton, a Canon of the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire.

It is as fresh in manner as though it had been written yesterday. We feel, while reading it, as though we were learning from some wise spiritual director of our own time. The style is easy, the sentences simple in construction. There is little that we may regard as archaic; the book is as applicable to any century as is the Imitation. The guidance along the road of the spiritual life is just that which we would hear today from an experienced confessor, or the skilled conductor of a Retreat. It is eminently practical Charity and humility are the two virtues on which men should build the structure of the contemplative life. The chief study and reading should be that of Holy Writ.

A rule was written at the very end of the twelfth century for two or three sisters, anchoresses, and was designed to train its readers in the more perfect life of contemplation. But it treats of the first stages of the spiritual life, and, as we have seen, it only rises above the humdrum of the I purgative way in its final section. Now we are to consider the doctrine of a woman who had no doubt been trained by that or a simi:ar ‘Eiwle', and had so far profited by it as to have first been favoured by a series of visions in which she was passive in her acceptance of the ‘Eevelations', and finally, to have reached the highest forms of prayer. We are thus given the opportunity of studying the effects of the Ancren Riwle in their perfect stages; we are here taught the outcome of tne natural growth of the spirit if it follows the straight lines of an authorised rule.