And the Word was made flesh. No Catholic worthy of the name can stand outside the realities of faith and of grace, and seek to live his life as one alien, aloof and “secularized”; at best he can only detach himself by taking up hypothetical attitudes of mind. The Incarnation means that a new world, transcending the limits of time and touch, is flung open to him; and he is necessarily of it and in it, inextricably caught up, so that the only “escape” is no escape but death of the soul. “All things betray thee who betrayest Me.” He must live and move and have his being in an atmosphere saturated by grace. He must experience at once the exhilaration and crucifixion of having mind and will set heavenwards, for our citizenship is in heaven, and of still living amidst the world’s realities, very much a man among men, with no right to be estranged from human interests. Further, there must be growth in the life of grace; and this necessary growth entails deeper appreciation, more vivid realization of what the Incarnation means, of what grace means, of the supreme reality of the Mystical Body—all this and more must play upon his whole being in all its complexity, and not least upon his mind; for his mind looks out upon a world leavened by grace, wholly centred in, and only fully knowable in terms of, the Incarnation. A glance over the course of history shows a tangled skein, hard to unravel; yet the Catholic can be conscious of the extension of the Incarnation in time, of the mysterious life of the Church, and can say “Vicisti Galilaee,” for the Incarnation means Redemption and therefore hope.