The object of our creation is union with God and that is the sole reason that justifies our being here. God's creation of us is a very great mystery; we cannot understand how this union can possibly be. God's infinite perfection, our imperfection; God in his splendour, we in our misery. And yet we believe, and the bridge that unites us is our blessed Lord. We must ask ourselves how it is possible that God can be united to such, worthless human beings. We could understand union as a reward to chosen spirits, faithful, undeviating, precious souls, but that we should be of that company seems astonishing. If it were a reward for heroic sanctity; but just ordinary souls…. And yet we realise that. Union is not easier between precious things, but between yielding things. It is impossible to mix diamonds with anything. It may be our very worthlessness that makes union possible.

The renewed interest in prayer and mystical theology has so far given insufficient attention to the writings of one who, if not actually at the fountainhead of such speculation, at least hold a position very near the source. We mean the writer known to tradition as Denys the Areopagite. So solid and forthright a personage as Ullathorne was able to describe his writings as ‘theology in its purest form, divested of controversy and written as if by a spirit with a pen of light'; and to declare that the study of these writings had ‘formed a real epoch in the history of his mind'. This small collection of treatises has, in fact, exerted a regular, uniform influence on spiritual writers throughout the Middle Ages down to modern times, and this particularly in England.

X is usually taken as the symbol of the unknown in modern thought. If a man wishes to discover an unknown figure or fact, he begins by positing ‘X’ as the object of his enquiry and then he proceeds to argue in such a way as to reveal the nature of that unknown. In the ‘argument’ of the spiritual life the process is largely reversed. Having begun with a ‘clear idea’ of God, derived partly from reason and partly from faith, the Christian gradually ascends the holy mount until this sun disappears behind the luminous cloud and he finds himself surrounded thickly on all sides by the Unknown. It is in many ways the conclusion of his search.

But having become aware that he is enveloped in this cloud of unknowing, the Christian may well take the opportunity to run over in his mind the way he came into this place and the means he had taken to ensure that he should ascend at every pace.

Job is not a witness to God by the same title and in the same way as Abraham, David, Isaias or St Paul, for Job is a poetic creation like Oedipus or King Lear. Job did perhaps exist, just as did many of Sophocles's or Shakespeare's characters. But of the man Job, of the old Edomite sheik who lived at the time of the Patriarchs, the Bible tells us almost nothing.

Job comes into the sacred books as the creature of imagination and of a poet's dream. The man whose voice is heard behind the voice of the hero is the author. For Job is not only the fictitious character of a drama, he is witness to a religious crisis in the Jewish, soul. He utters the believer's cry of confidence in God. What he says is inspired by God. As such his grandiose figure, even though it be imaginary, which bears within itself the secrets of one of the.noblest of Jewish, minds, ought to find a place amid the Saints, Prophets and Sages who constitute the company of God's witnesses.

As early as the Second, or the June, Apparition, our Blessed Lady said to Lucia, ‘Jesus wishes to make use of you to have me acknowledged and loved. He wishes to establish in the world the devotion to my Immaculate Heart'. She added, later in the interview, ‘Don't be discouraged. I will never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the road that will lead you to God'. In Dr Marchi's account, he writes, ‘With these last words she opened her hands, as she had on the previous occasion, and again communicated to them the light that streamed in two rays from her palms, enveloping the children in its heavenly radiance'.

In her Memoir (IV) Lucia records: ‘Before the palm of the right hand of our Lady was a heart encircled by thorns which seemed to have pierced it like nails'.

New ventures in religious life are b'eing called forth by the Holy Spirit within the Church. Among these the religious communities for the sick which have come into being during the past few years in Prance are not the least interesting.

At a time when illness has become to a great extent a social phenomenon—and paradoxically this is bound up with the great progress of medicine in prolonging the life of the sick —in a country which counts at least five hundred thousand tubercular cases, a very great number of cardiac cases, and more than a hundred thousand cases of paralysis; at a time, too, when great national movements for their protection and help are being organised, it is fitting that those for whom suffering and illness have a significance in the Cross of Christ should be united and brought together.