We have read the Bible together (children of both sexes, now 8-17 years old) for about six years, every evening, in principal as part of a very informal sort of family prayers. We have read about a chapter at a time, reading always one of the gospels between Christmas and Easter, but otherwise usually reading straight on till we came to this annual, or some other natural or enforced break. So we have read from Genesis to the end of Job, Daniel, Jonas and parts of Isaiah, Ezechiel and Jeremiah, Machabees, the Acts, three Pauline epistles and the Apocalypse; some books once, most two or three times. One wonders what difference it makes to the minds of children growing up in the modern mental chaos, this ordinary Bible-reading’ which has in so many centuries been the ground of Christian education, but which is, I fancy, rather rare among Catholics today. Of course the children cannot tell one.

A priest of my acquaintance once told me that when he was a young religious, he had had a great devotion to the divine office. In order to get the best out of it, he decided to make a careful study of the psalms. So he got out the best commentaries and studied their meaning in Latin and Hebrew; and when he had finished, he found that the psalms had ceased to have any meaning to him as prayer at all. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it illustrates a fact of great importance, namely, that prayer is not necessarily an exercise of discursive thought, and that study of a certain kind can be an obstacle rather than an assistance to prayer.

There is no doubt that for a great many priests and religious, if not the majority, the divine office is not a congenial method of prayer. It is a duty which has to be performed, which has its own special grace and virtue, but it is not generally felt as a personal method of prayer and approach to God.

The year 1885 saw the passing of one of the great spiritual figures of that century: Mother Thérèse Couderc, Cofoundress of the Cenacle. Her contemporaries witness that at her death ‘there passed away a glory from the earth'—and Holy Church, agreeing with their verdict, will shortly proclaim her Blessed—a model of holiness for the whole world. How did she arrive at that shining sanctity which became so transparently evident as her long life drew to a closee It was simply by being a true Christian—through a complete surrender of herself into the hands of God, allowing him to do with her exactly as he pleased She was a woman of clear supernatural vision and good judgment. But at the age of thirty-three she was subjected to a series of misunderstandings, deposed from her office of Superior, deprived little by little of her title of Co-foundress, and she endured not only personal humiliation of the most painful kind, but the far greater agony of seeing the Cenacle pulled out of its right context and governed by one who possessed neither vision nor judgment.

Readers of this review will already be familiar with the name of Edith Stein—or Sister Benedicta, as we prefer to call her (cf. the May 1949, February and April 1950 issues of Life of the Spirit). Of her life something has been said, and the translation of her biography should soon be available in English. We are now able to enter more deeply into her thought through die publication of her works. In 1949 Schnell and Steiner Verlag of Munich published some of her essays on woman's vocation under the title Frauenbildung und Frauenberufe. Meanwhile Dr Gelber of Louvain and Fr Romaeus Leuven, O.C.D., have been preparing an edition of her complete works, which are being published jointly by Herder Verlag of Freiburg and Nauwelaerts of Louvain. Some eight volumes are envisaged of which two have appeared in 1950. The second, Kreuzeswissenschaft ('The Science of the Cross’), can be described here along with the earlier work on Roman's vocation.

A correct view about the purpose of the Missions must determine the qualities needed in a missionary. The first requisite is adaptability: he has to form new Christians, and has to adjust himself to a new and foreign outlook and way of life. While the development of communications and health services has rendered the possession of exceptionally strong bodily qualities generally unnecessary to-day, and the variety and extent of mission work gives an opportunity for almost all kinds of talents and types of mind, there are certain general qualities which are still necessary for all engaged in mission work.

Pope Pius XI stressed especially the dangers of nationalism among missionaries, and these are obvious, though nowadays such tendencies are less than formerly. Yet they are not entirely gone, and Pope Pius XII urges the missionary to make of his Mission a second fatherland, an adaptation not possible to some characters.

Here beginneth a sermon of Saint Austin how a man is made to the image and likeness of God his maker, of naught. How great is the dignity of man's making it is known, that not by word alone of God's bidding, man is made of naught, as other works of six days, but in counsel of the Holy Trinity and work of God's majesty, that he should know of the honour of his first making, how much he owed to his maker. The which his maker gave to him so great privilege of dignity anon in his making, that by so much he should love more brenningly his maker, by how much he understood himself made of him more wonderly. He saith: ‘make we man to our image and likeness', not for this thing only, that by counsel of the Holy Trinity man is so made of the excellence of his maker, but that the maker of all things, of nought, made man of nought to his image and likeness, which thing he gave to none other creatures. Which image is to be beholden diligently by nobleness of the inner man, that is the soul.

In Newman's beautiful words: ‘two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator', the believer recognises these as the real terms united by religion. Religion is the sacred, unutterable intercourse between a limited, sinful creature and Being and Holiness. Between the living God, as the Scriptures so often call him, and his living image, there is a personal and dramatic relationship, in which dread and tenderness, awe and love, hope and anxiety are mingled.

The ideas of the psychologist on a mysterious experience of this sort are very often perplexing to the theologian or the lay Christian. To do justice to psychological works on religion, one must bear in mind the various levels at which religious phenomena can be viewed. Empirical methods of psychology cannot alter a metaphysical truth, still less supernatural faith. They are unable to prove or disprove the validity of religious belief. But morality, religion, faith are lived by means of human acts which are partially subjected to psychology