We all of us realise that our supreme purpose in God. We have no other end; this is our natural end, our purpose, why we exist—union with God. It is the only thing we are here for. Also we believe that the union begun here is only fully got at seross death—attained on the sher side of dust. Union with God is reached when we reach him is heaven—then only. We live by faith, we don’t know here, we do hereafter. We cannot help the sought sometimes, ‘supposing it isn’t true! Only the dead know—se live by faith.

God is our purpose. It is our one business to get nearer to God. You know yourself, don’t you? Your insufficiency, temptations, sina. You have examined your conscience, unfessed your sins of com ission and perhaps greater sine still of omission, you know what you could and should have done, the great gulf that separates and shrouds God—God in his wisdom, God in his beauty, God in his love. And yet you have got to meet—you and God. Absolute Truth with your miserable untruth, Wisdom with your blindness, Strength with your winning and shrinking, Generosity with your desperate selfielt.

In leaving the life of sin the ‘convert’ now enters the service of God. Eventually he aspires to the embrace of God through love, but his immediate concern is to become an obedient servant. He seeks to render what is due to his Lord, to recognise the worth of his Lord, to perform his religious worth-ship. All worship is service; it falls short of the perfect virtues, the so-called theological virtues, which thrust their points straight into the heart of the Godhead. Religious worship is the concern of a moral virtue; the creature as a creature in face of his Creator behaves as he should, as a dependent, one of God’s dependents. Prayer, adoration, sacrifice, all these activities are activities of dependents, they ure part of their tribute, their service. Later the religious service begins to become absorbed by the broader virtue of love which pervades every action and gradually comes to predominate. At that time the Lord will say, ‘I no longer call you servants but friends, as he said to the apostles after the first part of their apprenticeship had been fulfilled.

There are mystics who seem very remote from our turbulent times, those who retire into the desert or behind the walls of convents to live their lives of contemplation apart from the world and its cares. And there are others who carry their lives of union with God straight into the world, like a leaven spreading through the lump of indifference and sin. Of these is St Catherine of Siena, the dyer’s daughter, who made her way from the plain little room in her parents’ house to the palace of the popes in Avignon, who braved revolutionary crowds and wrote letters to cardinals and kings, and all through her life preserved her uninterrupted union with God in times perhaps as unsettled as our own. What was it that made such a life possible; what were the doctrines on which it was built? She herself has given us the answer in her Dialogue and Letters, which contain a wealth of mystical thought from which a few gleanings may serve to show whence she derived that extraordinary force that made her one of the most powerful women in history.

‘Secular Tertiaries’, says Canon Law, ‘are those who in the world under the jurisdiction and the influence of a Religious Order try to tend to Christian perfection according to a rule adapted to their secular state of life and approved by the Apostolic See, It is necessary to bear this definition in mind in reading what follows.

The thirteenth century was a period of great expansion for the hermits who had come from Mount Carmel to Europe, but if in the same way as the Dominicans and Franciscans they attracted layfolk to them in an organized Third Order little evidence of it has survived. That some people went to live near Carmelite houses as recluses we know, but this was entirely separate from the Tertiary movement. On the other hand recently discovered documents have shown that there was some sort of fraternity at Venice in existence between the years 1280 and 1208 with regular monthly meetings, the saying of Office in common, the wearing of a habit and the rest. More research is needed to establish whether such a state of things was general.

Two lives are set before us in the Lord’s passion and resurrection: the life that we now endure and that for which we long. For he who deigned to endure this life, is well able to give us that other life. Indeed by this he shows us how much he loves us, and how he wishes us to believe that there we shall be given the good things that belong by right to him who willed to share in our ills. We are born, he is born; because we shall die, he has died. These two we have known in this life of ours—the beginning and the end, being born and dying: in being born, the beginning of labour; in dying, a passage to uncertainty. These two we have known, to be born and to die: this abounds in our land. Our land, the earth: the land of the angels, heaven. And so our Lord came to this our land out of that other: to the land of death from the land of life; to the land of toil from the land of bliss. He came bringing us his own bounty, and patiently he bore our ills.