The keyword of our generation is “Life.” The pathos of this will to live occasionally electrifies cafes and dance halls in the hysteria of an adolescent or middle-aged woman. By typography and photography the Press galvanizes its dead news to an artificial life. The educator no longer sells the corpse of knowledge with copy-book slogans like “Knowledge is power,” but alike for adult and child baits the powder with the jam of “vital interest.” A radio or a dance band resurrects from the dead our animal appetite for food. That our will to life is the drowning hope of a bankrupt age in despair, that is the diagnosis of our critics, and I for one do not deny its truth. But the bankruptcy of life is a bankruptcy of love. The Waste Land is our legacy from the nineteenth century humanists and humanitarians, who taught us to love our neighbour because we can only be certain of ourselves. How repulsive is that ingrown love with all the neuroses it breeds in us! And so, certain workers and certain bourgeois find that hate at least is healthy and primitive and radical in human nature. The nineteenth century did not, however understand the nature of love. Love desires something else; it wishes to explore and penetrate other things for their own sake. No man can lead a human life who rejects this interpretation: life is destitution itself if love has no way out to other things and other people. The human unit of grace and nature is disorganized and the heart indulges in orgies of self-pity to the detriment of the mind. The only exit from self is in sentimentality—love directed to the unreal.

When Liturgical Prayer is spoken of as an excellent and perfect prayer, as an exercise in meditation and even as a source of contemplation, two common objections are raised:

(1) that it is purely vocal and too much a matter of words;

(2) that it is too impersonal and not easily adaptable to individual needs. Let it be said at once that these objections are not serious. We may readily admit a certain incompatibility between private vocal prayer and meditation; but it is quite a different matter when Liturgical Prayer is in question. The Divine Office, even when celebrated with the joyous briskness of Dominican custom, leaves ample scope and full play for mental activity, in whatever direction that activity may tend. Besides, the divine praise—through the consideration of created things—goes straight to God: it fixes the attention firmly on the Supreme Object of all prayer. It is GOD we are concerned with, not the words, which are but the vehicle of our prayer. Thus, the Liturgy makes it easier to transcend the facts and circumstances of our earthly condition; it enlarges the field of vision; it leads per ea quae facta sunt to the invisibilia Dei.

The term “social reconstruction” has almost of late years become a pass word assuring admission into the House of Commons. Perhaps by design it is nebulous in meaning and the more capable of adjustment to varied contexts. In common usage an idea is enshrined expressive of consorted endeavour to marshal forces within society with a view to economic needs. With this ill-defined campaign, peace conferences and international treaties may well harmonize. Assurance is given, by an elegant gesture, of every type of worldly gain and to the best advantage. The fulcrum of world leverage is money made productive by wealth. So now peace itself is converted into a commodity on the world market for sale at the costly price of armaments. But here, too, moral values are involved and though disguised as national “interests” cannot be weighed in material scales. The bodies and souls of men are incapable of adjustment to a gold standard. The moral worth indeed of human enterprises is accorded to them by ethical sanctions in regard to which they are deserving of praise or blame.

Civil society has as its worthy aims felicity and prosperity in common, yet to make these aims exclusive is to unsettle the balance of power and to leave standing a tottering ruin. A polarizing of society by the decentralisation of its moral units must inevitably lead to social unbalance. Over-much indulgence to the freedom of disorderly and shattered instincts cannot result in anything harmonious within the social group. Under pain of social anarchy self-realization must be allied in partnership with self-restraint. Social reformers have not been unaware of the unhappy path which events have taken, and have adopted various methods to avert the threatened destruction.

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.

The theory of contemplative prayer put forward in Abbot Chapman’s Letters was examined in the June, 1935, issue of Blackfriars, but since then certain passages in the letters themselves have been the subject of controversy. The question of the soundness of a widely read book of spiritual instruction is obviously an important one, and it merits some further consideration. One learned writer has recently suggested that, since we have nothing but incidental phrases by which to judge the Abbot's correctness in stating the problem of contemplation, it is unnecessary to assume that he intended to express general principles in the passages that have caused misgivings. This view does not accord with the fact that one of the published letters, dated as early as 6th April, 1913, explains fully the theory of mysticism which the Abbot had worked out for himself. The same theory appears in his article on Catholic Mysticism in the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, published in 1917, and it is further elaborated and defended in the Downside Review article of 1928, which is reprinted as an appendix to the Letters. This theory, then, and its practical implications must claim attention.

The Church has had no occasion to make a solemn judgment on the nature of contemplative prayer, but two pronouncements of her ordinary magisterium require careful consideration by anyone who would study the subject. The first is the Encyclical Letter Divinum illud of Pope Leo XIII (9th May, 1897), a document that was clearly inspired by, and well sums up, St. Thomas’s general teaching on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, as indeed the teaching of St. Thomas sums up and explains the Catholic tradition, scriptural, patristic and liturgical.

The Montessori Method of Education may be said to be based on the twin principles of “Freedom” and “Prepared Environment.” This is an inadequate definition, but it will suffice for our present purpose.

It is now over twenty years since the first “Casa dei Bambini” was opened in Rome, and hundreds of visitors came from every quarter of the globe to observe the behaviour of those small slum children from the tenement houses. During this time the Method has spread to the most distant corners of the world—not only amongst Europeans, but also amongst Indians, Chinese, Africans, South Sea Islanders and many others. The results have been always the same, and can be summed up in a sentence. The Montessori Method has proved beyond a doubt that the child loves work.