“As verily as God is our Bather, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed he in all, and especially in the sweet words where he said: I it am”. (Mother Julian, Revelations of Divine Love, c.59).

St. Thomas states (1,47,1; 111,23, 2 ad 3) that the things which are in time are meant to be but manifestations of those which are from eternity; i.e. of God himself, of the eternal self- subsistent life of the Blessed Trinity, the nature ofwhich was revealed to Moses when the Lord spoke to him out of the burning bush: “I AM WHO AM . . . Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS hath sent me to you” (Exodus, 3, 14). The Fulness of Being, the Plentitude of Life—such is God’s own description of himself; and when S. John, who had learnt the secrets of the divine life as he lay on the bosom of the Incarnate Word, declared that ‘God is Love’, he was only expressing the same truth from a different point of view. For love is only the ‘affluence’, the diffusion, the self-donation of being. So that Being at its source must also be love at its source (cf. Maritain, Introduction to Metaphysics, 4, 7-8).

The doctrine of spiritual childhood is sometimes regarded as the Little Flower’s peculiar contribution to the spiritual life of the Church, yet in The Revelations of Divine Love it is fully described and practised by an English Mystic living five centuries before the Saint of Lisieux. St. Therese did not so much discover as reinstate in its true, paramount position, a truth of the spiritual life which had been obscured and almost forgotten under the weight of Renaissance Humanism and Jansenistic rigorism. For, so long as man’s life and way of looking at life were essentially God-centred and supernatural, the God whom he knew and loved and tried to serve was the God of revelation, the God who has declared himself to be our heavenly Father, and who has raised us to the adoption of sons in his only-begotten Son, Christ our Lord. Consequently a spirit of childlike love and simplicity characterised the piety of both great and small, from Doctors of the Church like S. Thomas Aquinas, S. Albert the Great, and the other theologians to whom heaven was always ‘patria’ “our father’s country”, down to “a simple creature who could no letter”, such as Mother Julian. But once man had fixed his eyes not on God but on himself, then he tended to regard his Maker not as the Father but as the Creator, the Lawgiver, the Master, the just, avenging Judge sternly demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; the God of Sinai rather than of the Gospel.

Father Dominic Barberi’s name is always associated particularly with that of Newman because it was he who received Newman’s submission at Littlemore in October 1845. He arrived there (apparently by accident but actually as the result of years of constant vigilance and sympathetic correspondence) just at the moment when Newman had decided to take the final step but knew no Catholic priest in England to whom he could turn without feeling tongue-tied. But although the immediate reason for the recent petitions to Rome to hasten the cause of Father Dominic’s beatification is his connection with Newman’s conversion, it is probable that Father Dominic’s preaching as a missionary pioneer in England will be the chief subject of interest to the authorities in Rome. Undoubtedly it was his missionary labours in the English towns that made Newman regard him with so much personal veneration both before and after their first meeting. For it was he who first provided the convincing answer to that challenge which Newman had unconsciously formulated when he wrote to Ambrose Phillips nearly five years before he became a Catholic. At that time Newman was still convinced that the Catholic Church did not possess the marks of sanctity by which the true Church was to be recognised.

“This I feel most strongly and cannot conceal it,” Newman had written, to warn off Ambrose Phillips at the beginning of 1841, when Phillips desired to meet him in Oxford to discuss the, possibilities of union between the Church of England and Rome, “that while Rome is what she is, union is impossible.

Though many writers have studied the Cluniac achievement from the ecclesiastical, the economic and even the political point of view, none of the standard books on the history of spirituality seems concerned to trace the growth of Cluniac spirituality. Indeed, it seems taken for granted on all sides that Cluny has no spirituality worth mentioning. An elaborate ceremonial, a devotion to the splendours of the Liturgy, accompanied by an easy asceticism, this is the impression that most people have received of it: an impression based solely on a few isolated facts culled from the third century of Cluny’s existence. It may be useful, therefore, to outline a few of the principal ideas that dominated Cluny’s spirituality during the course of its history from its foundation to the time of Peter the Venerable.

When Berno left the Abbey of Baume in A.D. 910 to accept part of the estate of the Duke of Aquitaine for his foundation at Cluny, monastic life was at a low ebb. For sixty years the Normans had ravaged a country already torn by internecine war. Towns and villages had been depopulated, monasteries had been sacked and destroyed, and the few refugees who had settled in ruinous buildings to restore a semblance of monastic life were undistinguished both for religion and discipline. Berno little realised the magnitude of his undertaking, for his own ambitions were surprisingly modest. He simply aimed at establishing the pure Benedictine tradition, and envisaged nothing more exalted than the literal fulfilment of the Rule.

You who are reborn into a new life and so are called babes; you most of all who in this way see what these things mean for you, listen. Listen too, you the faithful, who are used to seeing: it is good to commemorate lest oblivion obliterate. What you see on theLord’s table, as far as the appearance of the things themselves is concerned, you are used to seeing on your own tables: it isthe same sight but not the same virtue. And you too are the very same men that you were: for you have not produced new looks for us. And yet you are new: you are old in bodily appearance but new in the grace of holiness, as this thing, too, is new. It is still, indeed, the bread and wine which you now see: the holy power has come and the bread will be the Body of Christ and the wine will be theBlood of Christ. The name of Christ does this, the grace of Christ does this, that it may seem that same thing that it seemed and yet may not have the same efficacy that it had. For before, if it were eaten, the stomach was filled up, now when it is eaten the mind is built up. Now just as we spoke to you on Saturday when you were baptised, or rather before you were baptised, about the sacrament of the font in which you were to be plunged and told you, which I believe you will not have forgotten, that this was, or rather is, the power of baptism.

Though some writers have tried to prove that Newman was at heart a scholastic, perhaps even a Thomist, the tendency of Newman critics at one time was to go to the opposite extreme and put him forward as the founder of a new philosophy which might even supplant the traditional philosophy of the Church. This idea was behind some of the attempts of Modernists to put Newman forward as the prophet of modern Christian thought and apologetics. Neither of these contentions is justified. Newman was not a Thomist. He had on his shelves the Summa Contra Gentiles, but it is doubtful whether he studied St. Thomas, except in the quotations of modern scholastic writers. When he did read the scholastics, his mind was already formed, and Newman was not the man to take up a fundamentally new position in late life. But it was even more true that Newman was not a propounder of a philosophical system in opposition to any other philosophy, either ancient or modern. Though one does find a certain amount of even deep metaphysical thought, particularly in some of his many unpublished opuscula, yet metaphysics was at no time Newman’s principal interest. In his early days, he does from time to time hint at a sympathy with idealistic metaphysics. But he never commits himself to a single definite statement in its favour, still less an argument. He admits in a very early work a sympathy for the platonism of the Alexandrian Fathers; but he makes it quite clear that it is the Alexandrian Fathers which interest him much more than their platonism.

In the royal palace within the Tower of London, Queen Philippa of Hainault, the wife of King Edward III, gave birth to a daughter in March, 1342, and called her Blanche. But soon joy was turned to sorrow, for within the month the baby died, and was buried with pomp in Westminster Abbey, where her effigy in alabaster lies near that of her brother Prince William of Windsor in St. Edmund’s Chapel.

The following year the queen was consoled by the birth of another girl-child and the expenses of “Queen Philippa’s uprising at the Tower’’ are mentioned on 26th April, 1343 (Issue Roll 17 Edward III). This daughter was also named Blanche, in memory of the little one she had lost. Now the only other mention to be found of this “Lady Blanche” is in the Wardrobe account of 19th. Edward III at the date November 13th, 1345; after that she disappears from English history and appears in the history of the Dominican Order under the name of Blessed Euphemia of England.

How much of her story is historical fact and how much is legend it would be difficult to say. We give the account as it has come down to us.

“The living mirror of virtue, grace and beauty,” so her biographer tells us, “the Princess was early enamoured of heavenly things.” She sought advice on prayer and the spiritual life from “certain religious at the court of her father.”

At this time her father’s confessor was Fr. John Woodrowe, O.P., who was engaged during these years with the preparations for the inundation of Dartford Priory, the charter for which had been signed by King Edward in the year 1346.

A recent correspondence in a Catholic weekly newspaper on the subject of the vernacular in the public worship of the Church showed that there is some feeling on this topic among a certain section of the faithful. The correspondence was noteworthy for it broughtout clearly two things which should prove useful in the future: the unsuitability of newspaper columns for the discussion of such a question, and the strange ideas that exist among many as to the proper function of the public worship of the Church in the spirituallife of the faithful—the strange ideas, be it said, were not confined to the laity.

For some years now, throughout the West, we have been in the throes of what has come to be known as the Liturgical Movement; here in England we have, in manyways, felt its effects in lesser degree perhaps than in some other countries. On account of the war, which has brought about a grea shifting of population, in many parts of the country one has been able to obtain a rough but certainly interesting estimate of the advance of the liturgical movement. In the majority of cases indeed that evidence has pointed to a lamentable lack of penetration of those ideas for which the movement stands, and the present time of upheaval seems hardly propitious for their further intensive propagation. On the other hand the actual state of ferment of ideas provides certainly a suitable moment for sowing useful seeds. If in the past there have been mistakes, and serious mistakes, in presentation, on account of which many people have a wrong idea, and themajority perhaps no idea at all, of what the liturgical movement is, surely now is the time to seek the reason for so sorry a condition of affairs.

St. Paul supplies us with an answer to this ever recurrent question with a phrase which gives us at once a definition and a goal. To the thinking Catholic the process of growing up can never be a haphazard one for it is founded upon settled laws, directed by an established method, inspired by an ideal made concrete in the person of Christ Himself.

Now, it is of the very nature of the living being to wish to attain to maturity and the rational being strives towards that maturity not by a blind urge but with philosophic and selective apprehension. The social being, “Man-in-Society”, sees maturity not as his own isolated development, but as the widening, deepening and raising of the life, both natural and supernatural, of the society in which he lives.

Viewed in this light, the question of education cannot be narrowed into the confines of the School-system, the examination-syllabus, the University programme. It cannot be conceived, merely, as a branch of politics. On the contrary, the term must be made to embrace the whole of life and society, with every human being as its subject; while for its object we envisaged the rational, harmonious use of all created things. The field is vast, certainly, and by its demands for comprehensive thinking this vastness often frightens away the student. Nevertheless, it is only when viewed in its totality that the question of Education can be made to yield its full fruit of human interest and creative power.

“Perfection is one … All men are obliged to tend to perfection, to the one and the same kind of Christian perfection, but each one according to his vocation, state in life, grace of God, personal fervour”. The unity in diversity of the spiritual life could not be stated more forcefully than in this quotation from the new book by the American scholar Pascal P. Parente Divine grace, the foundation and sap of the spiritual life, is one—but men are different, and as grace does not destroy, but perfects, nature, its workings will differ according to the different individuals on which it acts. Yet, the Divine Author of nature and grace never works haphazardly. His creation is ruled by Law, a law which has nothing to do with the modern passion for planning, coercion, and equality, but which is an organic order, in which each being is governed according to its nature. Therefore the spiritual life is governed by its own laws. These are, however, more difficult to discover, especially as they, also, have their exceptions, which are always more striking than the normal developments. The subject becomes even more complicated if we consider that, in the spiritual life, the normal term of development, viz., heroic sanctity, is so comparatively rare that it appears almost abnormal. Yet our Lord Himself has made perfection the aim to which all ought to tend: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Heavenly Father is perfect!” From this tremendous command—and it is a command, addressed to all, not a counsel, envisaging only the few—there is no escape.

Nicholas Postgate was born in 1596, in the parish of Egton, some miles from Whitby, in the North Biding of Yorkshire. In a Recusant List of 1604, of Egton, is mentioned the martyr’s mother . . . “All Recusants (that is, all these who are mentioned in this list as given) for eight years past,” says the entry. A further note adds: “Jane Postgate widowe, doth keep in her house William Postgate, her father, a Recusant who teacheth children”. Again another note: “Jane Postgate, widowe. . . (and others) have had children baptised privately of late years.”

Probably, then, Nicholas Postgate was one of these children, most carefully sealed to God by some zealous priest working secretly, since twenty of the sixty Recusants returned on Egton’s list had been so named since Lady Day in 1603. This bitter year would allow of none but secret work. Perhaps the risks run by this and other priests were the seed of the glorious harvest the little Nicholas was one day to gather for God. His family name is usually said POSKITT or POSKETT, and is not uncommon in Yorkshire. His father seems to have been one William Postgate, of a Kirkedale House estate, and his mother a Watson. Later, Fr. Postgate was to use her maiden name as an alias, stating that he was “of that kindred.” No doubt his boyhood was familiar with hunted Catholicity, with details of recusancy, and that staunch Yorkshire resistance to all forms of persecution, which helped to breed in him the stuff of which all the Martyrs were made.

A recent reading of the reviews of Wilfrid Ward's Life of Cardinal Newman in 1912 has deepened a long-harboured suspicion that appreciation of Newman is very much a moral matter. Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, you will never do him justice until you yourself begin to feel some spark of his deep and self-disregarding love of truth. Just acknowledgements have yet to be made by the literary spokesmen of England to the titanic genius of this great Englishman; but the failure, if failure it can be shown to be, is mainly a moral one.

When his biography appeared in 1912 it was met by a cautious but unmistakable disparagement of the Cardinal’s intellect. None of the writers indeed stooped so low as some of those of the generation before, when Carlyle, with shattering imperceptiveness, had described him as possessing “the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit’’. Lord Morley too, more sweetly but with hardly less critical obtuseness, had written: “Mill had none of the incomparably winning graces by which Newman made mere syren style (italics mine) do duty for exact, penetrating and coherent thought: by which moreover he actually raised his church to what would not so long before have seemed a strange and inconceivable rank in the mind of Protestant England. Style has worked many a miracle before now, but none more wonderful than Newman’s.” To trace the Catholic Revival in England to Newman’s style needs nerve enough. But only the conviction that his readers knew the writings of Newman as little as he, could have steeled honest John Morley to accuse the author of The Grammar of Assent of abandoning exact, penetrating and coherent thought for mere honeyed words.

John Bridgewater, the martyrologist, writing in 1588, makes the interesting statement that the Dominican convent at Dartford numbered in its ranks not only a sister of St John Fisher, but also some sisters of the Carthusian martyrs. He is enumerating those Catholic women who had suffered persecution under Elizabeth, among whom Elizabeth Cressner, the Prioress of Dartford and her nuns occupy a rightful place. The passage in question is contained in an appendix at the end of the Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae, published at Trier in 1588. This book being rare, we give the extract as it stands:—“Elizabetha Chresnera Priorissa monialium D. Dominici cum toto conventu, in quo erat soror Sanctissimi Martyris Ioannis Roffensis Episcopi et sorores aliquot Carthusianorum martyrum”

That St John Fisher had a sister in this convent (a royal foundation by Edward the third) is fairly well known; but that there were sisters of the Carthusian martyrs in the community is less so. On checking up on Bridgewater’s assertions we have found that no less than eight of the nuns were related to martyrs of Henry the Eighth in one way or another—a fact which, no doubt, goes far to explain their subsequent heroic history.

As Bridgewater himself was ordained priest in Queen Mary’s reign and left England in 1576, he could hardly fail to know something of the Dartford nuns who were refounded under her and afterwards, like him, went into exile for the Faith. But a study of the list of nuns who received pensions at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 amply bears ‘ out his statement.

Modern devotion to the Sacred Heart is closely associated with the name of St. Margaret Mary and popular practices such as the Nine Fridays and the Holy Hour, and its beginnings are not so well known. Yet it originated not at Paray-le-Monial but in the centres of medieval contemplative life, especially in the Benedictine, Cistercian and Carthusian monasteries. St. Gertrude, the famous mystic of Helfta, is perhaps its most striking representative.

Little is known of her outward life, which is not surprising, for she entered her convent at the age of five, never to leave it. She was long regarded as its abbess, and most pictures still represent her assuch. But, according to modern scholars, this view was based on an erroneous identification of her with her namesake, Gertrude of Hackeborn, who governed the monastery during the Saint’s lifetime. It is even doubtful whether she was a Cistercian or a Benedictine. The main source of our knowledge of her are her Revelations, written in Latin, which, after her death, remained hidden for a long time. One manuscript, however, seems to have been in the possession of Master Eckhart, and the Dominicans were the first to defend her doctrine, and translated her works in 1505. Their devotion was shared by the Carthusians, especially by Justus Lanspergius, who, attracted by her cult of the Sacred Heart, became one of her most ardent disciples.

Of the five books of her Legatus Divinae Pietatis, to give it its Latin title, only the second is written by herself, the remaining four are compiled from her notes by one of her nuns.