The first Carthusian saint to be formally canonized by the Holy See was not their founder St Bruno but our own St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln from 1186 till 1200. His achievements as a bishop and the historical importance of his resistance to kings have sometimes led writers to underemphasize the fact that he owed to his monastery the training which made him what he was—a saint whose austere and fearless strength was tempered by a gentleness which is one of the finest fruits of charity. The life written shortly after his death by his chaplain, the Benedictine work Adam of Eynsham, does justice to this fact, and, in spite of its omissions, it is one of the most accurate and detail portraits in existence of a medieval saint.

Born in 1140 of a noble family at Avalon near Grenoble, Hugh was neither an Englishman nor a Frenchman by birth, but Empire man. He was brought up from childhood after his mother's death in a neighbouring house of canons at Villarbenoit, where his father had retired to dedicate his last years to Religious Life.

Dear Fellow Convert, I am writing this letter at the request of the Prior of Park minster. He seems to think that because I ‘went over to Rome’ more than forty years ago and decided that I had a Carthusian vocation even before I ceased to be in communion with Canterbury, I might be able to explain to you, better then he can do, why all converts, especially recent ones, should recognize that the Carthusian life is in the literal sense an extraordinary and abnormal one; and whilst it is most admirable to fall in love with the golden heights, no one dare take this thing to himself unless God calls him. This is just common-sense. God does not Call the world as a whole by abnormal ways. Few men have the vocation to climb Mount Everest. Perhaps it has never struck you that at the present time there are less than six hundred Carthusian monks in the whole world, of which the Catholic population is reckoned to be about 423,000,000? These figures are enough to Prove that a Carthusian vocation is only granted to a tiny elite.

The power of the writer is a transforming power. It is in operation from the day he weaves fables round the play-things of his nursery, and it is the power which vitally penetrates, his world which re-incarnates the raw material of his world. And his world is that small part of creation which he knows, and which, in knowing, he manages to love. Today, as he looks out upon the expanding universe which science has prepared for him, he has to find a centre in himself round which he can wrap his belief in human values. Facing him is a world living numbly, automatically, on the sanitary, progressive, anti-theistic, hence antihuman, thinking of the recent scientific past. It is upon this massproduced, disinfected world that the writer is called to exercise his transforming power. Here, amid the disguised cruelty of routine he must kindle the spark of life. Here, though every day he watches ‘the dwarfing of man’ in the perspective of machinery and light years, he must, no matter what his religion, affirm his faith in the uniqueness of man, ‘heir to all the ages'.

The examination we have made of each of the three vows reveals at least in principle the various domains where — problems of adaptation might be, and in fact are, posed, aat we have noticed is sufficient to indicate in what directions their possible solutions lie.

Nevertheless, before concluding it would be interesting to consider certain of the most important dimensions of the religious life. As we have already spoken of observances in dealing with virginity, it will be enough to consider rapidly three kinds of cases Particularly instructive: first of all prayer and silence; in the second place formation and intellectual work; and finally questions of hierarchy and government. Prayer And Silence In all that concerns prayer and silence, it is clear that the life of the ancelles, or of any nun more or less involved in the world, as also the life of sisters in a secular institute, does not profit by the guarantees offered by a stable existence in a convent.