The word ‘myth’ has fallen on evil days so far at least as common speech goes. We say that something is a mere myth, an old wives’ tale, or else that it is primitive, interesting enough for the anthropologist, but from the sophisticated point of view only a fable. The word carries with it the suggestion that something untrue is being asserted in a specious and attractive way. A lie is clothed with all the charm of a story for children.

So far as this sense goes we are all, rightly, children of the Enlightenment. The myth story is no substitute for science. The myth is not, in any of its forms, verifiable in the same manner as is the scientific proposition, but it does not follow that mythological statements are untrue or unimportant. To assert this a priori is simply to restrict one's notion of verification to an admittedly useful technique, which quite clearly fails to test the whole content of experience.

He was a little below medium height and lightly built, but his erect carriage and fine head made him stand out in company. His complexion was fresh, his hair dark chestnut, his eyes greyish-blue, probably, and very brilliant. The long curved nose, strong jaw and full lips are familiar to us from portraits; not so the charm of expression, the noble grace of bearing and gesture that impressed and attracted his contemporaries. We imagine Savonarola grim; as fierce as his terrible sermons; but his nature, all the evidence shows, was warmly affectionate and even gentle. He won the Florentines, especially the young and the poor, by so evidently loving them. An early writer says that he had about him ‘una’ certa humanità humile et urbana', and dilates on the beauty of his hands, so clear-skinned and spare that the light seemed to show through them. We are told that his rough habit was always neat and—a remarkable thing in that climate—never soiled with sweat.

Corruptio Optimi Pessima—yes, but few of us can rise to the best, and consequently few of us descend to the depths. Corruptio melioris pejor Would be a maxim more suited to us, and we could translate rt: The corruption of the rather better produces the rather worse. That is the habitual danger which most Christians and especially most Catholics run. It is that ‘rather worse’ which interests me, and another way of putting it would be that Catholics run their own particular danger of being vulgar.

The word ‘vulgar’ is interesting because it carries within itself, as it were, the story of its own corruption. Its true meaning is something to do with the common people, that is, those least in danger of being vulgar in the modern sense, for the common people largely bound in mind and behaviour by God-made conditions of life are in least danger of falling from the rather better to the rather worse.

At a time when an anthology such as ‘The Pleasures of Poverty’ is published, for one thing perhaps to help stiffen the economic morale of the general public, it may be instructive and even interesting to learn how one of the Church's great women personalities reacted to the problem of material security.

Julie (now Saint Marie Madeleine) Postel might never have become so interested in the question of poverty had she not lived in the second half of the eighteenth century, in a France which was rapidly heading for economic disaster. She herself, belonging to good middle-class country stock, had always known a fair measure of security. But that was an exceptional experience in a country, where, for all but a privileged few, misery haointed the land in the form of famine and squalor.

With the publication in America of the translation of Father Arintero's great work on Mystical Development in the life of the Church and of Dr Greenstock's work on Christian perfection (both from the Herder Book Company of St Louis) a very important and decisive stage in the journey towards the more realistic attitude to the study of mystical theology has been reached. Father Arintero died, a very holy man, in 1928 in Madrid; yet it is, perhaps, only at this point in the development of the study of mystical theology that his full significance can really be understood. It is therefore fortunate that through the devoted labours of Father Jordan Aumann, O.P., this very useful and accurate English translation of Father Arintero's major work has appeared.