In speaking today of those in heaven who are interested in us we realise something at least of what St Paul meant when he said he was indebted to the whole world. In the sweep of his vision he meant Christ and all the saints—St Stephen whose persecutors' garments he had held. And so we owe much to all sorts of people, known and unknown. How much we owe to our blessed Lady herself. We think of and speak of her under many titles and invocations, but one title strange though it sounds at first shows more than any other the perfect balance of her character. ‘Tower of Ivory’. We remember how one of the Jewish kings built a palace of ivory for himself, what ever that may mean, probably something we do not know.

His story reminds one of the finest pages of the Golden Legend; and like the lives of so many saints, is hardly credible. Modern man, used to psychological and other methods, may find it offensive: might we call it a challenge to human reason? Where shall we draw the line between the marvellous and the absurd? Certainly we prefer stories that we can measure against our own limited standard. But, God is not logic. He is not (so St Teresa says) even reasonable. And the saint, every saint, always remains unfathomed—a sort of walking scandal, a challenge hurled at reason, a wager. The Creator's imagination infinitely surpasses the cleverest of those who ape him, romancers and poets, and the improbable is the natural habitat of his masterpieces, the Saints. That is why they bewilder us and lay hold of us: does it not prove, in a tangible way, that man is made to surpass himself and that true sanctity scorns to be stereotyped?

No study of English medieval spirituality would be complete without a treatise on Walter Hilton. That is patently true. It is also clear that he should come at the conclusion of such a study for he is at once the most learned and the most analytical of all these writers. He is a man of wide experience both in his life of prayer and in his direction of contemplative, religious, and he is a man who has studied in the Schools with greater patience than Eolle and with a tidier mind than the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.

The short pieces of English devotional literature recently printed in the LIFE OF THE SPIRIT are examples from a class of writing not yet fully investigated either by the students of Middle English literature or by the lovers of Middle English devotion. Before the days of printing priests were obliged to write, translate or copy matter for the instruction of their penitents, where the possibilities of preaching were insufficient. Thus it comes about that the MSS of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are full of long and short pieces, often without attribution of authorship or with fictitious attribution. Anonymity was a virtue in those days—a sure refuge in time of trouble. The major works of English doctrinal, devotional and mystical literature have been or will be dealt with by Conrad Pepler, O.P. They came to printed sooner or later, but a great number of secondary works have not yet seen the light. Of the complete ones many are of such uneven quality and of such great length that one could hardly encourage their publication in these days. Such is the Chastising of God's Children, a long treatise on the nature of and remedies for spiritual temptations not reprinted since Caxton's edition of 1492.

This is the day, my dear friends, when the Holy Spirit, so long promised, was sent from heaven to the holy Apostles and to all who were living in the love of God. Again this is the day when, by the divine mercy was restored to us the precious and priceless treasure that we had lost of old in the earthly paradise, by the devil's instigation and human weakness. Doubtless the manner of the Holy Ghost's visible descent upon the disciples was marvellous, but what happened interiorly was of another and different beauty: beyond the understanding of reason, intelligence or feeling.

Among the new forms of religious life which now seem to be a characteristic of this present age is that lived by the Daughters of the Church in their monastery at Bruges. Their ideal is both contemplative and active To a casual visitor to the Béguinage—for the 'Monastère de la Vigne' occupies the 700 years old Béguinage, which was dying out for want of subjects, with a new monastic cloister, refectory and cells built out at the back of one the old Béguine's cottages—the life may seem almost wholly contemplative. What is most apparent as one crosses the quadrangle, whether by day or, if one is privileged to be a guest in the house, under a clear, bright winter's moon as one makes one's way to the church for Matins, is the almost palpable sense of the presence of God, of the nearness of the supernatural, of silence, of recollection, of a life lived on another plane or in another dimension caught up in God.