It hardly needs saying that it is not easy to about the Trinity, at Least if one aims at being intelligible as well as verbally accurate. Yet this mysterious doctrine is certainly not of merely intellectual or speculative interest, with nobearing on practice. Quite the contrary. The fascination it has for the greatest Christian minds—St Augustine's for example or St Thomas's—has not been primarily the fascination of a more problem. These saints, in their endeavour to see as clearly as possible into the mystery of the three Persons, and even while they were perfectly aware that the reasoning that this effort entailed was too subtle to be followed by the majority of believers, never thought of themselves as engaged in a merely theoretical enquiry. They reasoned about the mystery as masters of Christian doctrine, but the mystery itself they knew as intimately involved in their own moral and religious lives, in their daily communion with Christ.

Orate fratres, say the priest — ‘Pray brethren, that this sacrifice which is Mine and your my be acceptable'. So the congregation is offering the Sacrifice of the mass with the priest. We are not simply there, we are taking part. Our part is subsidiary, certainly, but it is not just a fiction or a facade, it is real. Therefore, we should think about it and utter ow. thoughts. We have a subsidiary part in the offering, we should make our subsidiary contribution to the discussion of the mass which is now everywhere being carried on. We have been co-offering, sub offering, for nineteen hundred years. I have sometimes asked myself ‘Doesn't anybody wonder what we think?’ And now an editor has asked me.

It may seem surprising that the liturgical education of my childhood was as good as it was—for my first eleven years belong to that very unliturgical period, the nineteenth century.

For Daniel, a pilgrim from Kiev, the journey to Jerusalem began with a cruise among the islands that was in itself full of interest. At Petal, for instance, there were the asphalt deposits on the water that were piously believed to be an oil distilled from the bodies of drowned martyrs. Gallipoli, Abydos, Crete, and Tenedos in sight of Troy, all had something to offer. On Mytilene there was a shrine to St Georage,and on Chios another to St Isidore. Ephesus was full of recollections of St John and the seven sleepers, and at Cyprus of the twenty bishoprics, the pilgrims climbed the mountain where Helena had had a shrine built for the holy cross. Daniel makes no mention of the time the journey took, such a question having no importance for him whatsoever. But he does keep a note of the distances he covers.

The Lamentations of Jeremiah is a book with which the old Tenebree Office for Holy Week gave many people at least a nodding acquaintance. Not infrequently, however, the much admired musical settings tended to detract from the attention given to the words themselves, a fact noticed by Mendelssohn, who remarked that the most powerful music was usually expended on the mere rubrics, the alephs beths, and incipits. That Lamentations does repay, both for theological and for literary content, a careful study, will I hope emerge from this article. But before we speak of content, we should say a word or two about the structure and authorship of the book.

The book consists of five poems, corresponding to its five chapters of which the first four are abecedarian in structure (which is to say that each stanza begins with a fresh letter of the Hebrew alphabet and each line of the stanza begins with the same letter as the first line)

If so many modern forms of apostolate require their members to make an annual retreat, or even a monthly day of recollection, I am inclined to think it is far less a case of their organizers including something from the familiar Catholic stock-in-trade than one of needing to satisfy a real want. It really is an impressive feature of the twentieth-century apostolate and goes a long way to prove its authenticity. As long as apostles—actionists—realize they have nothing to give without first finding it in prayer and seclusion we can trust their work to be truly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The first rousers of conscience among the Catholics of France and Belgim were the Abbé Cardijn and later the Abbé Godin, creating The Young Christian Workers to redeem an entire class; not a remote dusky jungle-dwelling race, but a nation of neighbours, living in the closed World of factories and workshops, who had become alienated from the Church.