Our frequent salutation of the Blessed Virgin as Mother of Good Counsel in the Litany of Loreto makes us familiar with the above title, even if we are not acquainted with the picture which goes by the name of our Lady of Good Counsel. This ancient painting has been eloquently described as ‘exquisitely humane and tender … the small Child has his right arm round his Mother's neck, his left hand catches at the edge of her dress. His little face is turned upwards towards her; he is certainly whispering to her—but, asking her something? Telling ker some small childish sentence, or even word, or not even so much as a formed word, if you think of him as still too tiny a babe to make a whole word? … Anyhow, a mother's instinct always understands what her baby means, and often, what her grown son means, better even than his father does… .

Keep the good thing committed to thy trust by the Holy Ghost who dwelleth in us, so St Paul brings out two sides of a relationship. First, ourselves who are told to keep the good thing, literally the deposit granted to us that we ourselves ftiay render it to God; second, the indwelling Spirit, the Gift himself present in person. Correspondingly we may consider a double movement in prayer, the ascent of the mind and heart to god, which is what we do from grace and the virtue of religion, and the coming down of the Spirit who breathes through us so that we are rather acted upon than acting, who himself giveth testimony to our spirit that we are the sons of God. It is with the first we are engaged in this article, reserving the second until later.

Prayer means turning our hearts and minds to God. No two persons converse with him in identical ways; even in corporate prayer we each infuse the same words with our individual needs and aspirations, and private prayer, whether vocal or meditative, is essentially personal. But we all have hearts and minds and, broadly speaking, the same problems: and the greatest of these is aridity. No one has ever advanced in the spiritual life without experiencing times when devotion seems non-existent, prayer distasteful or humiliatingly difficult, meditation moribund and discouragement an ever-present temptation, but though our books warn us of these trials our own experiences are different from anything we expect to undergo.

‘Coming to the second element of a religious and priestly vocation, we learn from the Roman Catechism that those have a divine vocation who are called by the legitimate ministers of the Church. This in no way contradicts what we have said about the divine call; rather it is very closely connected with it. For the divine calling of a man to the religious and priestly state destines him to a life in public of holiness and to the exercise of a hierarchic ministry, in the visible, hierarchic society of the Church; consequently such calling ought to have also the confirmation, admission and guidance of those hierarchic rulers to whose administration the Church has been committed by God.’

In these words the Holy Father makes it clear that there would be a kind of contradiction in a vocation to the religious life of priesthood that came simply from God and did not have besides the approval of the Church, that is, of responsible ecclesiastical superiors.