When your chaplain asked me whether I should like to talk to you on the morality of war, I had to tell him that there was nothing I should like to talk about less. I can think of no less cosy subject for a Sunday morning chat in this year of grace 1949.

The trouble, of course, is not just that it is such a complex moral issue in the abstract, but rather because war is so real, so imminent, so possible, so probable.

Callup polls, research, techniques and investigations of all kinds appear nowadays as an essential preliminary to action. Case histories, clinical fashion, illustrate all sorts of books. So long as excessive importance is not attached to the results obtained, and a cross-section of opinion is not made to stand for the whole truth, such a method is of value for it can uncover facts and tendencies that are otherwise little suspected, or if known but hardly realised.

Brother, if thou desire to have the homely presence of our Lord Jesus Christ ghostly in thy soul in feeling, but how the blessed presence of Jesus is felt, it may better be known by experience than by any writing, for it is the life and the love, the might and the light, the joy and the rest of a chosen soul. And therefore he that once hath soothfastly felt it, he may not forbear it without pain, he must needs desire it, it is so good in itself and so comfortable. What is more comfortable to a soul here than for to be drawn out through grace from the vile noise of worldly business and filth of desires and from vain affection of all creatures into rest and safeness of ghostly love, privily perceiving the gracious presence of Jesus, fully fed with favour of his unseeable blessed face?

To bridge then the abyss between human and divine, it is necessary to find within the created nature of man some kind oi ledge, or base, or some point d'appui, where the grace of God could alight, and there infuse life. Or, to vary the metaphor (and the use of metaphor is our only way of stating these truths), there must be within the creature a ground or soil in which God could plant a seed, an embryo of his own life of grace. In the first days of preaching the Gospel of Christ, his apostles made use of the metaphor of engrafting, a figure of speech as suggestive and accurate as human words could well be; and by this was intended the implanting of a new growth or life upon some different trunk, which was already in its own order alive.

Most of those trying to lead a life of Christian perfection in the world model their spiritual life on one or other of the religious Orders, following its spirit and finding in the ideals of the religious family to which they have attached themselves, if only by ties of affection and reverence, an encouragement, an inspiration and a spiritual strength. It is, then, in no Way surprising that the new lay institutes, brought into being in their present form by the Apostolic Constitution Provida Mater published in March, 1947, should in some cases grow up under the aegis and protection of one of the older monastic Orders.

When I was told I should have the honour of speaking to you today I thought I would like to submit for your consideration some thoughts on the spirit that animated St Vincent de Paul and inspired the works associated with his name. He was, as you know, proclaimed to be, and constituted, the patron of all Catholic associations of charity throughout the world by Pope Leo XIII. But he is, I venture to think, in a special way your patron. Tt is not perhaps generally known that, when he instituted the Confraternities of Charity, he established them for both men and women. The ladies of 17th-century France seem to have had both more energy and independence than the men, for, whilst their confraternities flourished and still flourish, those of the men were soon absorbed into a body that came to be known as the Company of the Blessed Sacrament which, a few years after St Vincent's death, was suppressed, on alleged political grounds, by Mazarin.