The difficulty becomes more acute in certain minds, and the pain more excruciating when it seems that despite all conceivable efforts at adaptation, fof reasons which render all initiative helpless, the action of the Church is far from being efficacious. Far from continually advancing, she seems to be slipping backwards. This is true even in lands where she appears to be reigning, even in places where her influence is acknowledged and supported, she does not make the gospel reign around her and the social order is not transformed by its principles. But should not a tree be judged by its fruits? Is not one, henceforth, justified in thinking that the Church will never be able to realise, more than in symbol, what others boast of bringing to actuality? Consequently, should not one transfer to these others the faith which he had once vowed to her?

In the Our Father we have not merely a plan for addressing God, a formula of prayer, but a command: ‘Thus shalt thou pray'. Prayer is the expression of our attitude towards God. Our Lord says, ‘This is the way you've got to ask God for things—this is the way you've got to think of God and address him; the way I wish you to approach him.'

Take the Lord's Prayer in that sense. ‘What is God to you?’ says our Lord; and he begins ‘Father'.

St Thomas says that we are entitled to take as intended for us every meaning of our Lord's words and actions which they will legitimately bear. Therefore we must take God as an ideal Father. ‘I am your Father, I want you to think of me as your Father; and not merely to think of me but to know that I am your Father.’ Look at a little child and his father; he receives all he has and is from his parents, but quite soon goes on independently of them.

Our chief concern, brethren (sisters), is the love of God; and after this the love of our neighbour, for these are the two greatest commandments. To these ends we give the following directions for the regulation of monastic life.

The first aim of community life is the ideal of unity in community—all our thoughts and desires united and centred on God.

The following pages merely give a few glimpses of the spiritual teaching of Blessed Angela of Foligno. Apart from her Instructions and Letters we owe what we have to a certain friar Arnaldo. He was, it seems, her cousin; and he appears first, in anything but an appreciative mood, on the occasion of Angela's mystical experience in the church of San Francesco at Assisi. Fortunately he was spiritual enough to see beneath the surface, which appeared mere hysteria to others, and to appreciate Angela's genuine holiness. Later on, as director and secretary, he drew from her an account of her spiritual experiences and thoughts, and set them down; but not in the contemporary Tuscan that Angela would have used, but in Latin. His task was no easy one. Much of what Angela spoke must have been hard to grasp in any case—she once told him she could not recognise what he had written down as hers—and everything had to be done rapidly.

Inuk is from several different points of view a work of remarkable interest. It is in the first place the story of the fifteen years spent by a French priest as a missionary among the Eskimos; it is in addition a commentary of considerable value on the habits and way of life of a remote and little-known people, and it is also a study in the propagation of the Faith under exceptionally unfavourable conditions.

Father Buliard, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate, went to work among the ‘copper’ Eskimos (the least developed section of this very primitive race) in 1934 only twenty years after the murder of two of his predecessors in the same territory. In the intervening years the work of evangelising the copper Eskimos had been carried on by seven Oblate Fathers working two or three at a time under conditions of physical hardship which are probably unique even in the annals of the Church's foreign missions.