In addition to the kind of mental prayer we have already considered, there is another which usually goes by the name of Meditation. We have already spoken of vocal prayers in which set words precede and circumscribe the thought. In the mental prayer called Meditation on the other hand it is the thought which precedes and elicits the words or spontaneous acts. There is sufficient truth in the aphorism ‘Vocal prayer is meaning what we say, but meditation is saying what we mean’ to distinguish between these approaches.

In general, we may say of meditation that the closer the soul draws to God through habitual collaboration with his Will, the more ardently will it desire God in time of prayer and the less will it rely on preliminary meditation. This need for meditation varies also with disposition, Penpenient and many other factors. St Teresa of Avila, for instance, found great difficulty in collecting her thoughts and for many years used a book to start her prayer. ‘I could not meditate without a book’, she says. This does not mean she made formal meditation.

Is there be any need to defend the introduction of William Langland into a treatise on English mysticism and the spiritual life we may refer the reader to Christopher Dawson’s brilliant essay in The English Way. “This popular tradition of English religion’, he writes of Fox, Bunyan and Blake, ‘which was divorced from Catholic unity and even from the national unity after the 17th century already exists in its purest and most unadulterated form in the work of Langland. He shows us what English religion might have been if it had not been broken by schism and narrowed by sectarianism and heresy’. And again: ‘Langland embodies the spiritual unity of the English people at the very moment when religion in England stood at the parting of the ways’. Piers Plowman, the virile and powerful poem of the English people, provides a solid basis for a truly English type of spirituality.

The Holy Gospel according to St Matthew, chapter 22 ‘...And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying, “What think ye of Christ: whose son is he?” They say to him, David’s”.’

I Have to speak to you tonight about the holy Rosary. There are, of course, ten thousand things to be said about it, the least of which is a glorious battle on which probably depended the civilisation of the world; but I am going to allow a little child to lead me and you into the Rosary.

There are not many trees in London streets, but there are a great number of children—better than trees of course—and God, in his goodness, often allows little children to hail me. The other day I was passing through one of our streets, close at hand, made beautiful with the feet of little children and their gambols, and two little ones I found suddenly by my side. I think they must have crossed the little narrow street; I don’t know. I only know that suddenly I found two little ones by my side. I think their aggregate age would be about six.

We know Christ was to have been a king, because for one thing he was to sit on the throne of David his father. Pilate, when he said provokingly, ‘Art thou a king then?’ spoke more truly than he was aware. The populace that haunted Jesus’s footsteps, that followed, followed for the sake of a miracle, it too was convinced that Jesus was the king who was to come. On one occasion they went so far as to attempt force in order to have their way with him; but he fled to the mountains alone.

It was certainly this riotous and revolutionary attitude of the crowd that made our Lord, not disown the title, but avoid it. Nevertheless on two great occasions he bore it publicly, and once he suffered it, when mockingly acknowledged, in silence.

The first occasion was Palm Sunday. Of all the scenes in the New Testament, that is one of the most strange. Christ had implied he would not go up to Jerusalem at that time, but he had gone up alone.

Readers of the Life of the Spirit have good reason to be grateful to Père M. J. Nicolas, O.P. for his fine exposition of ‘The True Basis of Religious Life’. At the beginning of his article he raises one of the most difficult problems facing religious orders at the present day. He is acutely conscious of the difficulties that modern temperaments have in adapting themselves to the traditional system of religious life with its discipline and restraints, particularly in the older and the strictly enclosed Orders. With great sympathy and frankness he recognises that these difficulties have to be faced both from the point of view of aspirants themselves and that of Superiors who try to help them.

Père Nicolas considers the problem first as one of health. Since the Editor has invited discussion, perhaps some comments may be permitted from a medical and especially a psychological point of view.

Health, in its narrowest sense, is not in question; freedom from serious bodily and mental disease is of course essential. It is rather a question of temperament, character and psychophysical constitution.

Though perhaps most people who are at all familiar with them appreciate the writings of St Augustine, comparatively few feel any attraction for those of St Jerome who, unlike St Augustine, has left us no sermons or devotional treatises, his work consisting for the most part of technical Commentaries and minute disquisitions on difficult passages of Holy Scripture.

Both Saints have left us a vast correspondence. But how their letters differ! If we except Augustine’s earlier ones, his philosophical discussions during his first days as a Christian, the remainder are for the most part the outpourings of a shepherd of souls; the same is true of his sermons which lend themselves to quotation at every turn and wherein the devout can always find food for their souls. St Jerome, too, has left us many spiritual letters. But we get the impression that such letters were not his life’s work; he writes them almost under protest as though feeling that they are stealing time from the real work to which God has called him, that of translating and commenting on the Bible.