The parish church is the place of God's meeting with his children. God's house is the Christian's home, and home is the place to which you return.

The life of grace is for the members of Christ a common life, whose redemptive source is one, whose end is one. Its unity is symbolised by, indeed is effected on, that altarstone of sacrifice which gives to the church its meaning and reveals to the people of God their destiny.

Within the single circle of Christian life there are infinite varieties of Christian living. Each soul unique: but for all alike the need and fact of redemption, of incorporation in Christ the Lord of all. The irony is that the life of the Spirit, which is primarily the common life of unity, of being made one with and through Christ our Lord, should so largely be considered in terms of individual perfection.

Christ's message, being for every man, is for the large body of unthinking as well as the more intellectual. In these days it must be admitted that the average man is not disposed to reason much; he prefers to accept mental fare that is given him without examining too closely its quality. He does not necessarily accept the conclusions of others, but that is because he has not troubled to make judgments about them. His mental attitude is more that of one who is willing to be entertained as an observer at an intellectual feast, and with a pronounced respect for the dictum of the expert. There is a general mental laziness making for mass-passivity, which provides the grand opportunity for the demagogue and dictator.

The unresponsiveness of the man in the street to a message that. demands mental exercise on his part has led us, in our campaign for the conversion of others to the Faith, to appeal more particularly to the intellectual.

Holiness on the heroic scale is sufficiently rare in itself, or so we believe; in conjunction with a profound and passionate love for a human being we believe it rarer still, almost a contradiction in terms. In our own times one whom, from the standpoint of our colder, more tepid lives, we may well consider a saint, has shown us the ways of sanctity, of active zeal so constant as to constitute heroism, and of human love, all united in a short life. This human and divine lover was Mario Chiri, one of the pioneers of Catholic Action which in Italy has produced an astounding crop of young men and young women of outstanding holiness; Mario Chiri is, humanly speaking, one of the most attractive of them.

Among the ways of Providence which may seem to our presumption least comprehensible is the early dying of men and women whose influence for good we feel has been abruptly extinguished. The simple answer is that death'does not end influence; on the contrary it often extends it; the radiation, more or less restricted, may by death become world-wide.

Love of Christ, like all other love, tends toward union, onlymore powerfully since the spring of it is grace and is the perfection and summit of love. This is the mysterious fact, mysterious in its manner rather than in its accomplishment. In the Mahayana form of Buddhism all men are supposed to be called to a kind of union which merges their whole personality into the divine being, a kind of union which goes even beyond the hypostatic union in which the manhood of Christ was united to God in the divine Person of the Son. This Eastern conception has great attraction to some Western minds as an interpretation of Christ's personality and our uplifting. They say he acquired unity with God at the Baptism in Jordan, as though a man became God, and not God became man; that we too in our measure could be caught up into this unity. But this is heresy.

If we compare ‘The Cloud’ with Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection or any other of the spiritual writings contemporary with that classic we shall be struck by the impersonal character of The Cloud. The Scale refers constantly to Jesus, the person, to whom everything returns in contemplation, and even a writer like St John of the Cross is really none the less personal in his approach to the source of faith and love. The Cloud does not often use the holy Name in spite of the great popularity of the devotion in those days; it is far more abstract and philosophical in tone. Struck by this difference we might be tempted to say that this latter was a natural, a metaphysician's, approach. A great deal of emphasis is laid on a quasi-metaphysical apprehension of Being as such, which might seem to depend on the personal exercise of the worshipper.

Thanks’ to the preservation of an exceptionally detailed and graphic journal, kept by a certain German Dominican for the entertainment and edification of his brethren, it is possible to form a clear idea of what seafaring conditions were like on the Mediterranean towards the close of the fifteenth century. What is more, we learn that the spiritual welfare of both passengers and crews was not neglected, at least in ships carrying pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Brother Felix Fabri was a member of the community of the Dominican Priory at Ulm. In 1480 he managed to obtain permission from the Master General of the Friars Preachers to make a pilgrimage to Palestine. Four years later he repeated this journey. His travel diaries are remarkable for their wealth of topographical detail, but even more for the subtle humour that creeps in on every page.