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.

Holiness on the heroic scale is sufficiently rare in itself, or so we believe; in conjunction with a profound and passionate love for a human being we believe it rarer still, almost a contradiction in terms. In our own times one whom, from the standpoint of our colder, more tepid lives, we may well consider a saint, has shown us the ways of sanctity, of active zeal so constant as to constitute heroism, and of human love, all united in a short life. This human and divine lover was Mario Chiri, one of the pioneers of Catholic Action which in Italy has produced an astounding crop of young men and young women of outstanding holiness; Mario Chiri is, humanly speaking, one of the most attractive of them.

Among the ways of Providence which may seem to our presumption least comprehensible is the early dying of men and women whose influence for good we feel has been abruptly extinguished. The simple answer is that death'does not end influence; on the contrary it often extends it; the radiation, more or less restricted, may by death become world-wide.

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.

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.

Job is not a witness to God by the same title and in the same way as Abraham, David, Isaias or St Paul, for Job is a poetic creation like Oedipus or King Lear. Job did perhaps exist, just as did many of Sophocles's or Shakespeare's characters. But of the man Job, of the old Edomite sheik who lived at the time of the Patriarchs, the Bible tells us almost nothing.

Job comes into the sacred books as the creature of imagination and of a poet's dream. The man whose voice is heard behind the voice of the hero is the author. For Job is not only the fictitious character of a drama, he is witness to a religious crisis in the Jewish, soul. He utters the believer's cry of confidence in God. What he says is inspired by God. As such his grandiose figure, even though it be imaginary, which bears within itself the secrets of one of the.noblest of Jewish, minds, ought to find a place amid the Saints, Prophets and Sages who constitute the company of God's witnesses.

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.

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.

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.

As early as the Second, or the June, Apparition, our Blessed Lady said to Lucia, ‘Jesus wishes to make use of you to have me acknowledged and loved. He wishes to establish in the world the devotion to my Immaculate Heart'. She added, later in the interview, ‘Don't be discouraged. I will never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the road that will lead you to God'. In Dr Marchi's account, he writes, ‘With these last words she opened her hands, as she had on the previous occasion, and again communicated to them the light that streamed in two rays from her palms, enveloping the children in its heavenly radiance'.

In her Memoir (IV) Lucia records: ‘Before the palm of the right hand of our Lady was a heart encircled by thorns which seemed to have pierced it like nails'.

The ‘Science of the Cross’ could never be an easy discipline, for each stage of learning brings us face to face with a demand which seems more impossible than the last. One of these lessons is repeated so insistently and frequently that we should become weary of it, did we not acknowledge in the depths of our heart that-we had never really learnt it; it is that which teaches us our uselessness. There are always a certain number of ardent souls who surrender themselves so fervently to the ‘Science of the Cross’ that their own uselessness is quickly made clear to them; they gladly give back their whole personality and their gifts to God, confident that he will use them in his good time and in his way; faced with the choice of ‘all or nothing’ they choose nothingness and receive all. Two such heroes of the spiritual life were Pere Jacques de Jésus, a French Carmelite, and Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a Carmelite from Eegina Pacis Carmel in Cologne, stories of whose martyrdom, movingly told by members of their communities, have now been published

Alpha and Omega—these, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, are used to signify that Christ include within himself all. He is the beginning and the end, the sum total of all things, from which all creatures derive, to whom they all tend. This title is true of Christ because he is God from whom all creatures derive and towards whom they all tend. God is the sum total, the beginning and the end. But he is not the sum total or the beginning and the end in the Eastern sense that creatures are an emanation from God, that history is the slow return into God of all that came out.

We all derive from God as things made from nothing by the act of his power, we tend towards him as creatures who behave as he designed us to behave, and as godlike men with grace who will see God as he is in himself.

Love of Christ, like all other love, tends toward union, onlymore powerfully since the spring of it is grace and is the perfection and summit of love. This is the mysterious fact, mysterious in its manner rather than in its accomplishment. In the Mahayana form of Buddhism all men are supposed to be called to a kind of union which merges their whole personality into the divine being, a kind of union which goes even beyond the hypostatic union in which the manhood of Christ was united to God in the divine Person of the Son. This Eastern conception has great attraction to some Western minds as an interpretation of Christ's personality and our uplifting. They say he acquired unity with God at the Baptism in Jordan, as though a man became God, and not God became man; that we too in our measure could be caught up into this unity. But this is heresy.

We claim to take for granted in the purposes of this essay the central facts of Christ, his reality in history, his verifiable effect, and the chief truths of his life, as they were preserved at least till a generation ago among the divided sects in the break-up of Christendom, and as they are now, and for ever will be preserved, only by the Catholic Church. Thus the divinity of Christ is here assumed, and the doctrine of divine grace and merit which lie poured out upon mankind by his death; his identity with his mystical Body, the Church whose life is but an extension through time and space of his own Incarnate Being; and chiefly here the thesis of his vivifying and redemptive work in the minds and wills of the men who decisively accept his Church.

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.

The small local train from Lucerne winds its way up the wooded mountains to the famous medieval shrine of our Lady of Einsiedeln. There is no official pilgrimage going on at the moment, only a few peasants and hikers. The pilgrim from England looks out of the window at the grandiose lines of the mountains, with the Itigi in the distance, and wonders what he will find at this sanctuary of our Lady, once as renowned throughout Europe as Lourdes is today. Now the abbey comes into view; and at once the note is struck that will sound again and again during these thirty-six-hours; the note of contrast, of dissonance: the rich, overladen baroque building set within the wondrous simplicity of the Alpine scenery, a strange encounter between the pretentious architecture of self-centred Eenaissance man and the glory of the mountains made by the Lord.

At 4.15 next morning the pilgrim is woken up by a tremendous noise—the bells of Einsiedeln, as powerful as the surrounding mountains, calling all the neighbourhood to Mass.

How I should like to deepen my spiritual life by more prayer and reading; but I simply haven't the time—this complaint can often be heard from many who earnestly desire a more intimate relationship with God and feel that what prevents them from achieving it is mainly lack of that minimum of leisure which is indispensable for an intense life of prayer. Yet, if we look at the Saints we shall discover the paradoxical phenomenon that the more they prayed the more time they seemed to have for their apostolic work. Whether we take St Dominic or St Teresa, St Bernard or St Catherine of Siena, we are confronted with the fact that they accomplished in a very short time tasks sufficient for several ordinary long human lives, and in addition gave what seems to us a disproportionate amount of time to prayer. It looks, indeed, as if our Lord's promise that to those who seek first the Kingdom of God all else will be added includes also time. If we give time to him he will give it back to us with interest.

In entering a dark and strange room we have to depend upon external direction to find our way about it. We need some other person to speak and tell us where we are, or someone to lead us by the hand. We can rely only very meagrely upon our own powers of discretion. On entering the Cloud of Unknowing the soul needs the clear voice of some spirit other than its own to tell it where it is and whither going. There must be some interpreter near at hand to declare what the darkness means and to read the signs which appear in the experience of the soul. The minor works of the author of the Cloud are mainly concerned with the discernment of spirits, for it is the Spirit of God who is the principal interpreter while a director, such as the author, is needed to assure the soul when the Paraclete interprets and when the human or the evil spirit deceives.

In general the higher reaches of the spiritual life are characterised by a method in prayer of praying without a method. Human methods are human activities. In the passive type of prayer the activity is divine so that the method is God's method, the plan of which the soul can only guess. At the same time spiritual guides must give some indication as to the best way of co-operating in this divine method, and The Cloud of Unknowing as well as teaching the soul how to ‘nought’ itself in order to allow God to work freely, also suggests the type of human co-operation which is least likely to hinder the divine work. This may be called the method of prayer inculcated by The Cloud. It amounts to the reduction of all prayers to the most comprehensive and the least articulated. The long ex tempore monologues in which some people indulge while on their knees, a monologue which considers all the various attributes of God and his wonderful deeds and activities, has to be undertaken for the sake of instruction in faith.

The contemplative life is of its nature a hidden life. It is often a reproach levelled at contemplatives that they separate themselves, not only materially, but also spiritually from the life of those living in the world. That the world of sin which the contemplative has quitted and that of grace where he intends to live, are opposed one to the other, is a fact. But that this includes an opposition between those who abide in the love of God either in the world or in the enclosure is not true.

The soul of the contemplative becomes the rendezvous of humanity and God, for she belongs to both. As he prays silently or chants the Divine Office his prayer and praise are the voice of the-world. When he suffers and offers himself in sacrifice he is a token for the expiation of the world's sins and shares in the sufferings of his brethren. He is ever in the presence of God, and within his soul Life itself is buried—hidden like the seed—in order to bring forth fruit and be communicated to others.

Radicate et fundati in cantate as an ideal for the religious life is not older than the New Testament, but since that time it has been the inspiration of all religion. Each succeeding age has attempted to interpret it according to the spirit of its time, but no comprehensive interpretation has yet been achieved and one wonders what depths of meaning are still to be revealed. Like a jewel flashed in the sun it is continually revealing facets of scintillating beauty, and while one is paralysed by the beauty one now beholds, the beauty of yore is dimmed bub not diminished. Man's mind is finite and awaits the ultimate judgment, or appreciation of God, but our faith in the maturing life of the Church moves Us to hope that our interpretation of beauty, or charity, is the highest yet known to man. Other men may say ‘the old is better': other men have a right to their opinion. It is the Catholic Church.

In our own day a new congregation, with a new spirit and a new asceticism, is discovering a new application of this ideal of the religious life.