[According to the traditional legend, based on the Narrationes de caede Manachorum (J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca lxxix, col. 583-694) St Nilus was the descendant of a noble family of Constantinople and eparch of that city under Theodosius the Great (379-395 A.D.). In his later years he left his wife and daughter and, together with his son, became a monk on Mount Sinai. When the community was attacked by hordes of barbarians he escaped, and, after many adventures, was reunited to his son, who had been taken prisoner.

But since the Narrationes have been proved spurious this story is no longer accepted. Moreover, the large collection of his Letters (Ibid. col. 81-581) show him as an experienced Superior and Novice Master of a monastery at Ancyra in Galatia, which he seems to bave entered c. 390. He was probably a personal disciple of St John Chrysostom, whose sufferings he followed with deep sympathy. He died c. 430.—H. C. Graef.]

Blessed Angela Of Foligno, born about 1249, lived a very worldly and culpable life till she was about forty years jid. Then she was suddenly converted—in what way we do not know—became a tertiary of St Francis, and was apparently almost from the beginning favoured with high graces. From that time onwards her mystical life is richly documented owing to the care of her confessor, who wrote down in Latin what she dictated to him in the vernacular. Her life seems truly an illustration of St Bonaventure's saying that God takes not into account what a man has once been—his grace can raise even the greatest sinner to the heights of the mystical life, provided he responds to the divine call with sufficient generosity.

There is, however, a mark which ordinarily distinguishes the mystic who is a penitent from the one who has never lost his baptismal innocence.

[Honorius of Autun c. 1125, a contemporary and fellow-countryman of Saint Bernard, calls himself ‘ecclesiae presbyter et scholastious’. A seventeenth-century editor of his work ‘Inevitabile’ prefaces it with the following eulogy:

'About the one thousand and eighty-seventh year from the passing of Christ our Saviour from this world to the Father, there flourished in the duchy of Burgundy a certain priest Honorius, worthy indeed to be crowned with glory and honour, and shining among the clergy as a planet among stars.

‘He was deeply versed in the Sacred Scriptures and most learned in secular knowledge; a man deeply erudite, subtle of mind, lucid in speech, one who had attained the rank of Scholasticus in Autun, the former capital and see of that region of Burgundy (Aeduorum), and who showed himself by his works and life to be a true Doctor and Luminary of the Church.

On the Tuesday in Easter week, April 12th, 1594, St Francis de Sales preached a short but very beautiful homily on the theological virtues. He draws from the appearance of our Lord related in the Gospel of the day a charming description of the virtues of jaith, hope and charity, and shows how fittingly each one is connected with the risen Christ.

Our authority for dating this sermon is the edition of 1643, which the recent Annecy Edition preserves. The 1643 edition was the first to give it as being preached on Easter Tuesday; it has no title in the edition of 1641. Certain analogies of style between the following sermon and those of the first period of the Saint's life justify this attribution.

It was only after her fortieth year that Battista Vernazza began to write her spiritual experiences—the special interior graces conferred on her from time to time; it has been thought wonderful that she could find time for this in the midst of the many exterior duties her new office implied, but it may well be that the very fact of their distracting nature made her the more anxious to refresh her soul by this spiritual work. She continued to write during the rest of her life in spite of other absorbing offices, for she was only relieved of the Procuratorship to become successively Mother Vicaress and Abbess. Her writings fill six large volumes and consist of colloquies, spiritual treatises and disserations—notably one on the Pater Noster and (for she retained her love for poetry) twelve Spiritual Canticles treating of the mystery of our Lord's life and four on divine love, also five sonnets; and to these must be added her letters.

He who undertakes to write upon the spirituality of St Philip Neri is by his very task pledged to avoid ponderosity, yet the writer of these few lines does not know how to escape the need for some kind of introduction to his remarks. The need arises, not from the nature of his subject but from the fact of the appearance of his essay in a periodical devoted expressly to spirituality'. For we who here write could not be comfortable in saying what we want to say and propose to say unless first we made clear that throughout we shall have in mind two presuppositions. The former of these is that the very function of a journal of spirituality is to present to its readers in toto all the various ramifications and different types of Christian sanctity and ascetic which are approved by the Church, in order that its readers may discover, learn, assimilate, or on the other hand set aside what they find, according to their their own own needs,

[The fifty homilies printed in Migne's Patrologia Graece, vol. 34. have until recently been attributed to St Macarius, an Egyptian monk of the fourth century whose miracles are told in Palladius's Lausiac History and Rufinus's History of the Monks. But this authorship has lately been seriously questioned; for some of the teaching contained in the Homilies bears a certain resemblance to the tenets of the heretical sect of the Messalians or Euchites, condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 481. G. L. Marriott, in an article on ‘The Messalians and the Discovery of their Ascetic Book (Harvard Theological Review, vol. xix, No. 2) claims to find most of the eighteen Messalian propositions reproduced in St John of Damascus's De Haeresibus in the Macarian Homilies; but on closer inspection almost all the passages adduced from the latter are capable of a perfectly orthodox interpretation, whereas the condemned propositions are a crude and one-sided exaggeration of their teaching.