In giving us the way in which we should serve God, our blessed Lord laid down a principle that the disciple is not above the master and that presumably no one should be surprised if they found that a way of life good enough for the Son of God was good enough for them, and so he effectually put a stop to any complaint on our part. The highest way of life is the way of the Master; there is none higher. By such a standing only are we to judge our own lives. We talk of the success and of the failure of our life or of the lives of others; we are accustomed to speak of one life as happy, of another as full of tragedy.

The supreme ideal of Christian life was the Master’s; would the people of his own time have said that his life was a failure or a success as they stood on Calvary? Why !—a failure, of course. Even those in sympathy lost all hope. We have women coming to anoint the dead body with no thought whatever of the risen life.

The first conversion has been accomplished and grace begins its gradual work of supernaturalizing the whole man. In this way a man begins to lead an upright life, upright because directed at last towards his true and last end; his life is now straightened out. This is what Scripture means by the word ‘righteousness’. The righteous man is the upright man; he is not bent away from God. He is ‘plumb’. This plumbness begins with the spiritual life of grace. But to build ‘plumb’, a man must have a plumb-line; he must have a measure. Rightness, rectitude, demands a rule, and the righteous man is a man who lives according to rule. St Thomas contrasts this rectitude of moral life with that of justice which deals with external goods, and he says, ‘This type of rectitude which implies the order towards a fitting end and the divine law which is the rule of the human will is common to every virtue’ (I-II, lv, 4 ad 4). To live uprightly is to live virtuously, according to rule, the straight rule of reason coming out from the divine Reason and the divine law.

No one but a saint should attempt to write about a saint. This is less evidently so in the case of active saints or martyrs, those whose external actions, whose whole lives are in themselves striking or edifying; then a biography can be of interest in the same way as it would be of any other outstanding personality; but of the contemplative saint, the mystic, there is often little to recount in the medium of time and place; very often they are monks or nuns whose entire lives have passed in uneventful routine of religious duties; the drama is interior and hidden.

It is true that St Teresa founded convents, that St John of the Cross was for a time in prison, that St Bernard and St Catherine intervened in the political crises of their times. But these are not the important things about them; these actions, however useful and successful, are accidental, and sorry to the true significance of their lives—the union of their souls with God in love, and even in the more specific sense, union through the interior way of contemplation.

Fray Louis of Leon has already treated of this title, but his book is little known and less read—more’s the pity—and I have felt justified in treating of it for that reason.

We know that it is a title of Christ because St John the Baptist gave it him when they met, for the first time in early manhood, on the banks of Jordan. It may seem strange that St. John, when pointing out ‘him that was to come to his followers, should from all his titles choose this one: ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ (John i, 29.) Why did St John think ‘the Lamb’ the title most fitted for the occasion? We can but surmise, yet such surmise may give us insight into the meaning of this title, even if we cannot be sure that all was present to the mind of St John himself or of his hearers.

There was an ancient story told of the father of their race, Abraham, that one day there was demanded of him a sign of real belief in his God and in his God’s promises. It took the form of God telling Abraham to kill his only son Isaac in sacrifice.

[Blessed Jordan of Saxony, first Master General after St Dominic, entered the Dominican Order in 1220. Among his many labours he had the care of the Convent of St Agnes at Bologna, and when he was prevented by the duties of his office from visiting the Sisters, he wrote letters to them which embodied his teaching. In the original Latin the letters to Blessed Diana (the Prioress) and the other nuns read quite freshly after a lapse of seven centuries. Their spiritual teaching is as important now as then. A very small selection is here given in translation.]

Brother Jordan, useless servant of the Order of Preachers, to his dear daughters in Christ the Sisters of St Agnes at Bologna: seek and receive Christ Jesus.

When I see you so much of one mind and so eager in walking with the Lord, and when I find that you seek nothing except him who alone is able you, and without whom whatever (else) you have is not riches indeed but poverty, it is a comfort to me, dear daughters, to think about you.

On St David’s Day Welshmen are apt to make speeches. For once in the year the virtue of speaking Welsh is generally conceded. One of the objections to giving much time to Welsh in the schools used to be its lack of ‘commercial value’: Welsh, it was argued reasonably enough, brought no dividends. John Capgrave, in his Legenda Nova Historiæ Angliæ, tells a story which suggests that Welsh may be very useful indeed:

‘A certain Welshman coming from the diocese of Menevia was captured by the Saracens, and was put in chains together with a German. The Welshman cried aloud day and night in his own language to St David, “Dewi, wared!”, which is to say, “David, come to my aid!” And, wonderful to relate, he suddenly found himself restored to his own country. Making this known to Gervase, at that time the bishop of those parts, he was taken into the dwelling of the latter on account of so notable a miracle. But his companion the German, considered to be privy to what had happened, was submitted to beatings and placed in even stricter custody.