The first conversion has been accomplished and grace begins its gradual work of supernaturalizing the whole man. In this way a man begins to lead an upright life, upright because directed at last towards his true and last end; his life is now straightened out. This is what Scripture means by the word ‘righteousness’. The righteous man is the upright man; he is not bent away from God. He is ‘plumb’. This plumbness begins with the spiritual life of grace. But to build ‘plumb’, a man must have a plumb-line; he must have a measure. Rightness, rectitude, demands a rule, and the righteous man is a man who lives according to rule. St Thomas contrasts this rectitude of moral life with that of justice which deals with external goods, and he says, ‘This type of rectitude which implies the order towards a fitting end and the divine law which is the rule of the human will is common to every virtue’ (I-II, lv, 4 ad 4). To live uprightly is to live virtuously, according to rule, the straight rule of reason coming out from the divine Reason and the divine law.

Is there be any need to defend the introduction of William Langland into a treatise on English mysticism and the spiritual life we may refer the reader to Christopher Dawson’s brilliant essay in The English Way. “This popular tradition of English religion’, he writes of Fox, Bunyan and Blake, ‘which was divorced from Catholic unity and even from the national unity after the 17th century already exists in its purest and most unadulterated form in the work of Langland. He shows us what English religion might have been if it had not been broken by schism and narrowed by sectarianism and heresy’. And again: ‘Langland embodies the spiritual unity of the English people at the very moment when religion in England stood at the parting of the ways’. Piers Plowman, the virile and powerful poem of the English people, provides a solid basis for a truly English type of spirituality.

In speaking of that personal side that should be in our love and service of God it should be taken for granted that the life of service implies a certain growth in knowledge and love, and the service which after all is only an expression of that knowledge and love should also increase and grow. In all living things there is an ebb and flow this is found in the spiritual life in very great measure. The growth is not necessarily maintained for long, it has setbacks. It is not necessary that one should notice growth. “The Kingdom of God cometh not by observation’. We may notice it or we may not. In the lives of the saints from their own words it would seem they were often not conscious of it, did not seem to themselves to have seen any improvement, sometimes quite the reverse. St Francis of Assisi says many things that suggest that he saw no increase in his knowledge or love. So to notice the growth is not necessary to us; that other people should notice it—yes, but that we should—no. It is not ordinarily evident to the individual himself.

Through the door of conversion we step out on to the way of perfection opening out before us like a rugged path leading up a steep hillside in some enchanted island. Looking up we see the way as strenuous but of incredible beauty. The brilliant greens of the hillside conceal some soft and smelly quagmires on either side of the path, but from the open door the vision appears stimulating and invigorating. The first view is of the general life of the Church, the island populated by a community all working together, helping each other up the side of the bill, marking out the waterlogged patches, stumbling here and slipping there, but not alone, as many helping hands stretch out to pick up the stumbler. They sing, too, and recite as they work together a common song and a common poem of praise to the Lord on the heighte. There are many choruses. Some of these men and women have cracked and harsh voices; but they all sing as they go. The door has opened into the liturgical life of the Church.

No one but a saint should attempt to write about a saint. This is less evidently so in the case of active saints or martyrs, those whose external actions, whose whole lives are in themselves striking or edifying; then a biography can be of interest in the same way as it would be of any other outstanding personality; but of the contemplative saint, the mystic, there is often little to recount in the medium of time and place; very often they are monks or nuns whose entire lives have passed in uneventful routine of religious duties; the drama is interior and hidden.

It is true that St Teresa founded convents, that St John of the Cross was for a time in prison, that St Bernard and St Catherine intervened in the political crises of their times. But these are not the important things about them; these actions, however useful and successful, are accidental, and sorry to the true significance of their lives—the union of their souls with God in love, and even in the more specific sense, union through the interior way of contemplation.

The Holy Gospel according to St Matthew, chapter 22 ‘...And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying, “What think ye of Christ: whose son is he?” They say to him, David’s”.’

I Have to speak to you tonight about the holy Rosary. There are, of course, ten thousand things to be said about it, the least of which is a glorious battle on which probably depended the civilisation of the world; but I am going to allow a little child to lead me and you into the Rosary.

There are not many trees in London streets, but there are a great number of children—better than trees of course—and God, in his goodness, often allows little children to hail me. The other day I was passing through one of our streets, close at hand, made beautiful with the feet of little children and their gambols, and two little ones I found suddenly by my side. I think they must have crossed the little narrow street; I don’t know. I only know that suddenly I found two little ones by my side. I think their aggregate age would be about six.

Since the Ancren Riwle was written for realuses of a solitary and strict type we might suppose it to contain either the bare bones of a very strict rule of life—horary, penances and prayers—or the highest form of spiritual teaching designed for the well-nigh perfect. When we remember that Mother Julian was an anchoress at Norwich we may expect to find a rule, designed for such as her, to contain deep mystical doctrine. It is probably for reasons of this nature that so few people open this straightforward and normal book of sound spiritual advice. In effect the Riwle is an ascetical work designed to instruct beginners in their first retirement from the world. Although he is evidently writing for contemplatives, the author scarcely mentions ‘mental prayer’ or its equivalent and passes in silence all mystical experience. Indeed he expressly states that he is writing for those who belong to the ‘Order of St James’, by which he does not mean, as some have supposed, a special religious order of that name.

Of all the titles of Jesus this is the most mysterious, yet also it was the one most used by him, the title of his predilection.

Christ is called Son of Mary; and that is not difficult to understand. She gave him as much as any mother ever gives her child, his body, his features, temperament maybe. Mary must have given all these, for there was no human father. Thus Nestorius was indeed wrong-headed when he refused her the title of Mother of God. We do not say of our mothers ‘That is the mother of Charles’s body’, but ‘that is Charles’s mother’, i.e., the person Charles; so Mary is the mother of the Person Christ, and the Person is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Son of David, likewise we can understand; though even this is not simple, for he was not so by direct male descent. Still, he was sufficiently descended by blood through Mary, and far more deeply so by inheriting the kingdom; and yet again, not the kingdom of the earthly Jerusalem, but that of the spiritual Jerusalem.

There are mystics who seem very remote from our turbulent times, those who retire into the desert or behind the walls of convents to live their lives of contemplation apart from the world and its cares. And there are others who carry their lives of union with God straight into the world, like a leaven spreading through the lump of indifference and sin. Of these is St Catherine of Siena, the dyer’s daughter, who made her way from the plain little room in her parents’ house to the palace of the popes in Avignon, who braved revolutionary crowds and wrote letters to cardinals and kings, and all through her life preserved her uninterrupted union with God in times perhaps as unsettled as our own. What was it that made such a life possible; what were the doctrines on which it was built? She herself has given us the answer in her Dialogue and Letters, which contain a wealth of mystical thought from which a few gleanings may serve to show whence she derived that extraordinary force that made her one of the most powerful women in history.

The time is ripe for reintroducing readers of English to the growth of the spiritual life according to an English idiom coined from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. This idiom has largely been lost to the English tongue through the deservedly victorious attack of the Spanish and French “spiritualities” which have carried the day since the counter-reformation. St Teresa, St John of the Cross, St Francis de Sales and the vast horde of spiritual writers thrown together by the French controversies, Jansenism and Quietism, these have soaked into English writing on the same topic and the healthy, robust, if a trifle easy-going, spiritual writings of Rolle, Mother Julian, Hilton and the Cloud have been left to the academic scholars of middle English and to the rising tide of dabblers in “mysticism.” In view of the multiplicity of men who have become interested in this exotic-sounding subject, it is imperative to publish some form of introduction to the English Mystics if they are to be used as spiritual guides.

The thirteenth century is universally recognized as the peak of the later medieval period; by the middle of the fourteenth Christendom was well on in the decline which led to the Renaissance and the Reformation. There are many causes of the decline and amid the mounting miseries of war, pestilence, and corruption it is often difficult to distinguish cause trom effect. The tale is well known: the Black Death carried off the flower of Europe as no war could have done. The Hundred Years War began towards the middle of the century and brought with it increasing desolation and poverty to the lower classes. In England the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 revealed the unhappy state of the populace, and similar disturbances occurred in France, Germany, and other European countries. The common people, then as now, had to bear the brunt of the wars, and, then as now, it led to a great deal of unrest and impatience both with Church and State.

Catholic teaching on prayer and methods of prayer seems sometimes to neglect the sacramental system of the Church. Great emphasis is necessarily laid on the personal activities of the Catholic who sets out to lead a life based on communion with God; still greater emphasis is rightly laid on the part played by God directly on the soul in this communion, as the soul grows passive under the divine influence; but little is said of the divine activity through the sacraments in relation to this life of prayer, which after all is the final purpose of every influx of grace. These divinely given means of receiving grace work ex opere operato and do not depend merely on the subjective use made of them by the recipient. Therefore as means of prayer they should contribute to a new power, independent in some manner of the personal spiritual exercises of the individual. If a man desires to pray he adopts a method in addition to the ordinary daily exercises of morning and night prayers.

A natural division in the purgative way arises from the two types of purification which the soul must undergo before it is ready for its second conversion and entry into illumination. These are first the active and then the passive purifications. The beginner on entry into the way of perfection has the relics of past sin hanging about him like so many rags and pieces of knotted cord. He has to struggle to shake himself free of this foul heritage. The ascetic moral virtues must be brought particularly into play. He must burn away the dross from his senses and his emotions, He must practise, above all, temperance and justice—the caustic virtues that will cleane him thoroughly if he fears no personal suffering. It is precisely here that a rule plays its first part. The soul needs guidance and also the virtue of obedience, which lies at the root of all sacrifice and of every moral virtue insofar as the virtuous actions are performed, because they are known as God's will. After this active following of a rule and its ascetic influence, God himself begins to apply the knife to the diseases which pass unnoticed in the general bustle of the active life.

Langland has vividly portrayed the life of sin in the world. From the realm of vice, social as well as individual, the soul steps into the realm of grace through what is known as the first conversion. By this act the dead is quite literally raised to life; it is quite literally an event of a standing with the raising of Lazarus—a miracle. As with all miracles, the act can be examined on the purely natural plane; the psychologist can describe what he discovers on the human side of the process. It is well to look at conversion in these test tubes first, even if it comes to be regarded in the partial light simply as a process of unification or of a vital synthesis.

Conversion has been described as the shifting of the centre of gravity of the inner self, a psychological phenomenon common to science, art, letters… as well as to religion. The individual's ideas are first of all grouped in bunches, more or less isolated and independent like the amoeba in a very low form of life.

There only remains to apply this doctrine to the two great questions of religious life, which seem to constitute the chief problem for modern souls, namely, the question of observances and of religious obedience.

In the widest sense, we mean by observances the obligations of a religious rule; in a narrower sense they are penitential and restrictive practices. Père Lemonnyer called them, ‘The means of the means, and, according to St. Thomas, they are subordinate to the vows. It must be admitted, however, that monastic tradition has given them a capital importance and they formed an essential part of all ancient rules. The religious leaves the world to do penance and, in the course of time, three things have come to be considered as essential among the various obligations of religious life, namely, poverty, chastity, and obedience, and to form the direct subject of the vows; perhaps the reason why there is no explicit vow of penance is because its subject matter would be too vague, and, in any case, it is enough to have promised obedience to a penitential rule.

We know Christ was to have been a king, because for one thing he was to sit on the throne of David his father. Pilate, when he said provokingly, ‘Art thou a king then?’ spoke more truly than he was aware. The populace that haunted Jesus’s footsteps, that followed, followed for the sake of a miracle, it too was convinced that Jesus was the king who was to come. On one occasion they went so far as to attempt force in order to have their way with him; but he fled to the mountains alone.

It was certainly this riotous and revolutionary attitude of the crowd that made our Lord, not disown the title, but avoid it. Nevertheless on two great occasions he bore it publicly, and once he suffered it, when mockingly acknowledged, in silence.

The first occasion was Palm Sunday. Of all the scenes in the New Testament, that is one of the most strange. Christ had implied he would not go up to Jerusalem at that time, but he had gone up alone.

Fray Louis of Leon has already treated of this title, but his book is little known and less read—more’s the pity—and I have felt justified in treating of it for that reason.

We know that it is a title of Christ because St John the Baptist gave it him when they met, for the first time in early manhood, on the banks of Jordan. It may seem strange that St. John, when pointing out ‘him that was to come to his followers, should from all his titles choose this one: ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ (John i, 29.) Why did St John think ‘the Lamb’ the title most fitted for the occasion? We can but surmise, yet such surmise may give us insight into the meaning of this title, even if we cannot be sure that all was present to the mind of St John himself or of his hearers.

There was an ancient story told of the father of their race, Abraham, that one day there was demanded of him a sign of real belief in his God and in his God’s promises. It took the form of God telling Abraham to kill his only son Isaac in sacrifice.

Siena may be called the city of unusual vocations. There is St Catherine, who brought back the Pope from Avignon and was espoused to our Lord; St Bernardine, ardent Apostle of the Name of Jesus, and, very near our own time, Bl. Anna Maria Taigi, mother of a large family, mystic and confidante of Popes. She was born in the same year as Napoleon (1769) with whose family she was later brought into close relation. Unlike in this to her great compatriot, she gave no early signs of future sanctity. She was the daughter of an apothecary, a spendthrift who went to Rome with his family when Anne was six. She was sent to a convent school where she learned embroidery and afterwards her father found her a job as housemaid with a rich lady of doubtful reputation. In her house she spent three years, learning all the secrets of female vanity and becoming conscious of her own attraction for men. It was a perilous position for a poor and pretty young girl, and the dangers were not altogether removed even when, in 1790, she married Domenico Taigi, a valet in the Palazzo Chigi, considerably older than herself.