Every Catholic knows, dearly beloved, that today's feast is among the greatest of the year; none doubts how muck reverence is due to that day which the Holy Spirit sealed with the miracle of his gift. Today is the tenth day since the Lord ascended above all heavens to sit at the right hand of God the Father, and the fiftieth since his resurrection; and in it is contained a great mystery comprising God's saving acts both old and new. For as on the fiftieth day after the sacrifice of the passover lamb the law was given on Sinai to the Hebrews who had escaped from Egypt, so after the passion of Christ, in which the true Lamb of God was sacrificed, and fifty days from his resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and the gathering of the faithful.

The present article continues the study begun in the May number of The Life Of The Spirit under the title of our Lady in Tradition. In that article there was occasion to remark on the benign and gratifying way in which the great organs of the secular press have reported the events connected with the centenary celebrations of the apparitions of our Lady at Lourdes. But I went on to say that this seemed too good to last, and that the year would not pass without a resurrection of the old threadbare objections to Catholic doctrine and devotion concerning the Mother of God. We have not had long to wait. In a recent review of the new book on Cardinal Newman by the French Oratorian, Père Bouyer, we are treated to such judgments as the following:

It is an age-old commonplace of spiritual writers that God is mysteriously nearer to those who would flee ‘the world’ and seek him alone in solitude. Such writers can justifiably point to the orgins of monastic life in the deserts of Egypt, as also to the constant renewal of a monastic ideal by a return to the desert as can be seen in Cîteaux's efforts. In our own day a Père de Foucauld lived and died like an eremite of old; and that precious life and death would seem to have begotten a thriving new spiritual movement in the Church. That solitudes and deserts can foster and nurture spiritual realities is certainly a traditional and valid theme. We can always retain the doggerel-like text ‘O beata solitudo, O sola beatitudo’ ('Blest solitude, our solitary bliss’).