The possession of an immortal soul opens up such wonderful possibilities to man that a thinker, over- whelmed by the greatness of life, once exclaimed: ‘However great things a man would say about the meaning of life, he would always say too little.’

These marvellous possibilities begin to be realized as soon as a soul is received into the bosom of the Church. ‘O marvel of Baptism', a convert joyfully exclaims. ‘If only we had faith, we should be wrapped in joy whenever we assist at a Baptism, if we remember the spiritual greatness of the neophyte, who becomes the living tabernacle of the Holy Ghost.’

All without exception can happily become temples of the Divine Spirit; in everyone the consoling word of Christ can be fulfilled: The Father and I will come and take up our abode in him.’

When St Dominic's successor, Blessed Jordan of Saxony, a man remarkable for shrewd common sense, was asked which was better, studying the Scriptures or praying, he replied: You might as well ask me which is better, eating or drinking. A meticulous critic might argue that liquid nourishment is even more indispensable than solid, that no man can be saved without prayer, that prayer can save those ignorant of the Scriptures. In the concrete, however, for ourselves, Scripture and prayer, like eating and drinking, are indispensable.

Must they however be wholly separated? Can they not be, to a considerable extent at least, combined? They can, because they are.

The liturgy—Mass and Divine Office—is largely (the Office mostly) prayer in the words of Scripture, and both Mass and Office provide lessons from Scripture. The liturgical Gospels cover the greater part of the Fourth Gospel, and for a rough guess two-thirds of St Matthew and a half of St Luke.

By this shall all men know you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.’ Such was our Lord's last exhortation to his disciples. He insists on mutual charity, love; because when we put that into practice it brings all the rest in its train. Charity is patient, kind, charity envieth not; it calls for forgiveness of trespasses, offences, debts. ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us’ gives the Our Father a touch of meanig quite different from our ordinary language. To what do I commit myself when I say this? I acknowledge that I am a sinner: ‘All we like sheep have gone astray'; like silly sheep. The gates are open, but do we go through them? No! We are stupid, silly sheep gone astray, just following our own way.

Don't let us make any mistake: we are ordered to make this prayer of petition. Go to God as to your absolute All—your father, brother, creator. I must turn to him as the lover of souls—as one who loves me beyond the dreams of imagination; who has only one care for me, that the best may be mine; who longs for me. ‘As the hart panteth’ (I am not afraid to put that the other way round) so does God long for me. People complain ‘I can't meditate I can't pray'. That is often another way of saying ‘I’m not interested enough'. Is it possible that I have not got enough interest in it? Am I sure that I really want it enough?

The early Church, all over the world, in perfect agreement, always greeted God's Mother in this angelic manner: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace'. And our Rarest ancestors, following in pious harmony the hallowed tashion of their forefathers, sang the ‘Hail Mary’ everywhere and at all times. They thought by reverently honouring his Mother to make themselves very pleasing to the heavenly King. They knew no more fitting way of paying her this honour than Stating the respect and distinctions decreed and bestowed upon her according to his good pleasure by God himself. This was to do her honour on the day that his divine Majesty wished so greatly to honour the rest of mankind this Virgin as to become man himself. Holy greeting! Genuine praises! Splendid and unique homage! The great God inspired them; a great angel pronounced them; a great evangelist recorded them; the earliest ages have used them; our forefathers have taught them to us.

The psalmists were the singers of Israel; daily they magnified the name of the Lord, crying Hosanna!, Hosanna! … Today the crooner has become one of those psalmists. By means of the microphone, to a billion families and homes, he sends the same message—I believe, I believe. … His has become the voice of Sunday morning religion. His Nicene Creed is a short catalogue—a simple reverence of Nature's holiness, a worshipping of trees and stars and clouds, a palpitating delight in the first cries of newborn babes. Doubtless such sentiments are easy to ridicule; they can be dismissed as clichèd or Pantheistic—or even if they are conceded to have a Christian note of optimism, then the Christianity which they celebrate may be considered rather wishy-washy. Nor is it hard for those who argue thus to add examples.

The Lord is my Light.’ These words from the psalm form the device of our senior University. Come back with me a moment to the early years Of the twelfth century. Come to Oxford, to the vicinity of St Mary the Virgin's Church in the High Street. A certain Theobald, a master from Normandy, arrives here with his own group of disciples. Later his place is taken by Robert Pullen and Vacarius of Bologna.

In the second half of the century, there comes a whole migration of masters and disciples, driven back from Paris because of discrimination against their countrymen. Oxford was then an island town, surrounded by marshland and rivers, at the spot where the Cherwell joins the Isis or Thames: an important river crossing with easy access to London. The food supply was good, and it was in the centre of England's population.

The following pages merely give a few glimpses of the spiritual teaching of Blessed Angela of Foligno. Apart from her Instructions and Letters we owe what we have to a certain friar Arnaldo. He was, it seems, her cousin; and he appears first, in anything but an appreciative mood, on the occasion of Angela's mystical experience in the church of San Francesco at Assisi. Fortunately he was spiritual enough to see beneath the surface, which appeared mere hysteria to others, and to appreciate Angela's genuine holiness. Later on, as director and secretary, he drew from her an account of her spiritual experiences and thoughts, and set them down; but not in the contemporary Tuscan that Angela would have used, but in Latin. His task was no easy one. Much of what Angela spoke must have been hard to grasp in any case—she once told him she could not recognise what he had written down as hers—and everything had to be done rapidly.

Isn't it pleasing to God that my prayer should be just simply Thy Will be done'? But our Lord did not only tell us to treat God like a father who will change his mind; he emphasized it by the story of a woman who asked for bread and was refused, and went on asking, and at last, because she went on asking, she got it. Of course God does not change his mind; but there is something in us that corresponds to that. Every time you pray to God for something, you are equivalently asking him to change his mind.

Ask yourselves, would it really be pleasing to a father or mother if their children never asked them for anything? They want to be asked! Otherwise it would seem their children were lacking in affection for them. I expect it is the perpetual burden of mothers’ and fathers’ lives to be asked again and again. Well! God, Var Father, wants to be asked.

I Need first of all to explain my title. The images which I want to think about are primarily images in the mind rather than actual pictures, statues, or such like; or rather I want to think about actual pictures from the point of view of the image which they evoke, and leave behind in the memory, which may live and grow there, and become part—a vital part—of that stock of symbols which in some sense or other exists in all our minds. Because it is in this way that images are part of the life of the Spirit. Or to put it in another way, the activity of the imagination is or should be part of religion—like every other human activity—and needs therefore to be trained and fed. The Church has, we all know, always believed in images; but it is so often thought today that the nature of the image does not matter, provided that it promotes devotion.

That there is a connection between the Old Testament and Modern Psychology may seem a farfetched idea which has no foundation in fact, but both are related in Judaic roots.

The Old Testament is a divinely inspired book written by Jews about Jews, whilst psychology is the science based on the ideas of a Jew—Sigmund Freud. Freud, who is generally accepted as the father of modern psychology, found recognition first among Jews, but when his method— psychoanalysis—proved to be successful in the treatment of nervous disorders, it spread beyond the small group of Jewish enthusiasts into the circles of Christian psychologists.

It is no mere coincidence that a Jew realized the importance of psychological problems in the present world. Centuries of ghetto life had made the Jews extremely sensitive in their reactions to people who lived in freedom. The enforced isolation shaped their mentality into a set pattern different from that of the surrounding European world which was developing its own particular culture.

For the last twelve years there has been increasingly engaged in France a great new labour-a gigantic labour, indeed, to make both more human and more holy the great, grey, hidden world of the chronically ill or disabled. It began very simply in 1942 when a group of invalid girls met a certain invalid priest at another girl's bedside. There indeed was the archetypal idea, the gathering together in charity and friendliness of the isolated sick, with the hope of priestly instruction in their common and difficult vocation.

The movement of the Catholic Fellowship of the Sick is now fully organized in several dioceses and has the full and formal approval of the hierarchy. Its manifesto is apparently the little book of Fr Thierry-d'Argenlieu, O.P., who, chronically ill himself, is one of the leader of the movement.

There exists an enormous new world of the sick, declares Fr d'Argenlieu, partly as a result of war conditions and poor housing, but more due to the advance of medicine. ‘A heild has been brought into being', he says, ‘that used not to exist when both people's vitality was greater and when mortality was higher, too.'

The Virgin enjoys, like her Son, a position of unique pre-eminence in Islamic legend in general and the Koran in particular. Many of the traits with which the story of her life is embellished derive from apocryphal sources, but are nevertheless of the utmost interest in filling in the gaps in the canonical narrative of the Blessed Virgin's life.

In the Koranic version of the angel's salutation, the superiority of Mary (Arabic, 'Mariam'), whom God had 'chosen and purified, over all the women of mankind' (3, 42) is proclaimed. She is even made to share with her Son the singular distinction of being a 'divine sign unto the generations' (21, 91). In popular legend, however, this preminent position of the Virgin is sometimes disputed and so she is made to share this honour with four other women, who include the two favourite wives of Muhammad and his dearest daughter, Fatimah, from whom the 'noble House of the Prophet' descends.

This is no learned dissertation, in spite of the appearance in the title of the word ‘exegesis’ which is so often associated with the minutiae of textual and historical criticism. The word in question, however, seems properly to bear no less restricted a meaning than that of interpretation, and in that wide sense it is here employed. The paragraphs which follow reflect merely the attitude of a life-long reader of the inspired volume who has never been unconscious of ‘Scripture difficulties’ or of the main results and findings of modern research, but in the light of papal admonitions and with the aid of such theological authors as he was able to consult, has arrived at certain conclusions which he thought might be worth passing on to others, at least for their consideration. Here one point only is dealt with.

Inuk is from several different points of view a work of remarkable interest. It is in the first place the story of the fifteen years spent by a French priest as a missionary among the Eskimos; it is in addition a commentary of considerable value on the habits and way of life of a remote and little-known people, and it is also a study in the propagation of the Faith under exceptionally unfavourable conditions.

Father Buliard, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate, went to work among the ‘copper’ Eskimos (the least developed section of this very primitive race) in 1934 only twenty years after the murder of two of his predecessors in the same territory. In the intervening years the work of evangelising the copper Eskimos had been carried on by seven Oblate Fathers working two or three at a time under conditions of physical hardship which are probably unique even in the annals of the Church's foreign missions.