Beautifully written MS. of the end of fourteenth century, MS. Douce 114, takes for its the phrase used by its anonymous author in a general description of its subject. The author, probably a Benedictine, writing for a ‘religious sister’ also in Benedictine convent, finding that the community” knowledge of the doctrine of penance was both insufficient and confused, and considering the complexities of the available Latin ‘penitentials’, proposes to reduce into a vernacular compilation of three parts all the necessary instruction on contrition, confession and satisfaction. He writes: ‘Also seldom have they little comfort of their confessors to teach them that speedft” … and needful were of the sacrament of penance … at their’ request and because ye have none other understanding of other manner of Scripture than of such as is written in your mother tongue, I will etc’ The three parts are divided into seven chapters each, and though long it is a simple straightforward and useful piece of work, full of homely illustrations, and must have been a great comfort to the nuns and their superiors.

Nothing in this world is necessary to God or can rouse his desire. I am mistaken: there is one thing only that God desires ardently. He does everything to obtain it. What he wants is to find in the heart of man a centre always ready, that is to say, void of all else, so that he can accomplish in it and perfect in it his own work. Doubtless he rules with full authority over heaven and earth: nothing can resist his will; yet he seems to knock powerlessly because he is unable to carry out in the soul the work that he so loves and desires.

The tram-car, fuller than any English tram would dare to be, went jangling and clanging through the streets of Rome, out beyond the walls, on the Grottaferrata; we dismounted, directed by eager and friendly voices, near the convent of the Cistercian nuns where we were to be guests. The fact had impressed those whom we had told of our intended visit. ‘What! You are going to stay with the Seplote Vive? Do they take guests? You're not thinking of taking the veil, are you? How on earth have you managed that?’

On the eve of the feast of St Peter's Chair at Eornswhen the octave of prayers for Christian unity begins, I am reminded of our Lord's prayer, I recorded only by St John, perhaps because he was leaning on his Master's breast at the last Supper, where he could hear every word. That strange, mystic prayer asked for a stupendous privilege for his loved ones. And these loved ones were not only the apostles, for our Lord said that he prayed not only for these, but ‘for them also who through their word, shall believe in me’.

‘I perceive’, said the Countess, ‘that philosophy is now become very mechanical.’ ‘So mechanical’, said I, ‘that I fear we shall quickly be ashamed of it: they will have the World to be in great what a watch is in little; which is very regular and depends only upon the just disposing of the several parts of the movement. But pray tell me, Madam, had you not formerly a more sublime Idea of the Universe?’ We have now passed the mechanical phase of religious teaching and are come to a time when it is easy to be ashamed or at least timid about religion. And the one leads to the other. So soon as religion is reduced to a code of rules and embargoes adherence to any religious sect ceases to have any more significance than affiliation to a golf club.

There are, broadly speaking, an netive and a contemplative life. Are there, perhaps, correspondingly also a contemplative and an active art? By this is meant an art born of, and again conducive to, contemplation, and, on the other hand, an art reflecting the active temperament of an epoch or an artist. Or, expressed differently, an art that is nourished by the contemplation of the Divine, of the eternal; an art that is, therefore, itself objective, timeless, expressing Being in so far as it can be expressed by human media; and, again, an art that observes the fleeting moment, the actual and temporal, and which, therefore, is itself subjective, timebound, expressing Becoming. Take the Gregorian plain chant and Bach's Mass in B Minor, take the ‘Madonna of St Luke’ in Santa Maria Maggiore and, say, the Sistine Madonna, take any mosaic executed between the 5th and the 12th centuries and any fresco painting of the Renaissance, and you have the two kinds of art that might be distinguished as ‘contemplative’ and active’.

Some confusion seems to exist on the subject of contemplation and the contemplative life—if we may judge from the correspondence in THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT. The point is one of great importance and the confusion extends to a great number of people to judge by the quotation made in the December issue from Cross and Crown. It may therefore be of some use to offer one or two distinctions which may at least form a basis for further discussion and elucidation.