Young enthusiasts for the life of prayer cannot be too frequently reminded of the danger of applying directly to their own persons the doctrines they read about. As they grow older they often become so self-conscious or introspective that they cannot read the lives of saints or descriptions of mystic states without discovering parallels in their own interior lives. This is a weakness not confined to spiritual matters for we remember the hero of Three Men in a Boat who began reading a medical handbook and soon decided that he had the symptoms of all the diseases therein described except ‘housemaid's knee’. This is typical of those who read spiritual or physical medicine. It is necessary to repeat the warning against this form of introspection before beginning to discuss in detail the more passive forms of prayer and the higher states of the spiritual life.

The spiritual life is the life we live in Christ. We are alive in him because he is the head of the body of which we are living members. From him we get light, life, movement, His ceaseless graces flow from the sacraments, those living streams circulating within the veins of his mystical body. Chief among these graces are the Church's teaching, the Liturgy, and then the words and living example of the saints who share with us membership of the same body which is Christ.

The Church is alive and life-giving and makes alive all those who are its living members: the branches live in and by the life of the true Vine. All the mysterious and wonderful influences that flood the Christian soul have their source in Christ now gloriously alive in heaven. From the heart of his divinity he sends us the Holy Ghost, given to us as an abounding personal gift.

Pride was the cause of the sin of our first parents. The particular part of their nature of which they were thus proud was the intellect; it was and is the most wonderful of the faculties with which God has endowed man's soul. It was with the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge that man, in his pride, desired to glorify his intellect. ‘With this knowledge of the Gods', suggested the Devil, ‘man will really be able to glory in his own nature for he will be the equal to God. The Devil made the false suggestion that knowledge of good and evil would give, would in fact be, a divine wisdom.

But God had not created man so that he should glory in his own created human nature, but only in God's creative nature, his uncreated infinity.

Such customs as that of fixing plaques or statues of our Lady on oak-trees, or of giving these shrines titles of ‘Our Lady of the Oak', were both widespread and ancient. There was a famous Virgin of the Oak in Norwich and, according to tradition, our Lady of Penrhys, burned at Chelsea with our Lady of Willesden and our Lady of Walsingham, was found by shepherds hanging on the trunk of an oak on the summit of a mountain at the head of the Rhondda Valley. There is reason, too, to suppose that our Lady of Willesden may have been yet another instance of what was originally an oak-tree sanctuary.

By far the most important shrine, however, of this particular cultus of our Lady still survives in Central Italy, in the Shrine of St Maria della Quercia (Oak-tree), just outside the Porta Santa Lucia at Viterbo, on the road to Bagnaia.

The popular notion of Jeremy (otherwise known as Jeremias) is that of a gaunt, sorrow-seared figure thundering the wrath of God through the desolate ruins of Jerusalem. He is the prophet of grief, his message and his life full of warning and a submission that in its vehemence seems to be despair. Perhaps it is because the only quotation from his teachings used in the New Testament is: ‘A voice was heard on high of lamentation, of great mourning and weeping, of Eachel keeping for her children and refusing to be comforted for them for they are not'. ‘Refusing to be comforted'; Jeremy would allow no mitigation. In days of great violence he was a compelling character, he would not suffer his burning message to be quenched by the evil of those who were called the chosen of God.

[According to the traditional legend, based on the Narrationes de caede Manachorum (J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca lxxix, col. 583-694) St Nilus was the descendant of a noble family of Constantinople and eparch of that city under Theodosius the Great (379-395 A.D.). In his later years he left his wife and daughter and, together with his son, became a monk on Mount Sinai. When the community was attacked by hordes of barbarians he escaped, and, after many adventures, was reunited to his son, who had been taken prisoner.

But since the Narrationes have been proved spurious this story is no longer accepted. Moreover, the large collection of his Letters (Ibid. col. 81-581) show him as an experienced Superior and Novice Master of a monastery at Ancyra in Galatia, which he seems to bave entered c. 390. He was probably a personal disciple of St John Chrysostom, whose sufferings he followed with deep sympathy. He died c. 430.—H. C. Graef.]