It is the seraphim alone who can utter the name of God: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord Uod of Hosts; all the earth is full of his glory'. Before him no man can come face to face and live. The divine mystery is first of all God himself: infinite unutterable, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Yet it is God, whom no man has seen at any time, who has become man, manifesting in his human flesh the divinity that is hidden from our eyes. It is in Christ that the divine mystery is revealed. His suffering and death, his resurrection and his ascension, are not only truths to be believed: they mark the salvific work of Christ in which we are to be incorporated. For to me to live is Christ'. And the mystery of Christ is dispensed now by the Church that is his Body. Christ lives in the Church: redemption is re-enacted in the Church's worship, and pre-eminently in the sacrifice of the Mass. So it is that St Ambrose can say: In tuis te invenio sacramentis. We find Christ in the mysteries of the Church, the sacraments.

The human body formed by the Holy Ghost in the chaste womb of the Virgin Mother, and the mystical body which she brought forth by her travail on Calvary are both alike the body of the Incarnate Word. Indeed, one may say in a sense that the human body was assumed for the sake of the mystical body so that the mystical body could also be formed; just as, according to St Thomas, the first effect of the Sacrament of the holy Eucharist, of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ on the altar, is the unity of the mystical body. Therefore the members of the mystical body are likened to the members of Christ's physical body, his hands and feet, etc. and therefore they must serve his purposes, be used in his work in the same way, and, if completely united to him, to the same extent as were his other members.

The proper sphere of a Catholic craftsman who is responsive to the appeal of the liturgical movement is to translate its doctrine into terms of form and colour, and so help in presenting it to his fellow men through the medium of the senses. Let us be quite clear about this. His work is not that of a teacher, but of a translator of others’ teaching. His normal function is to get on with the job without explaining what he is doing or why he is doing it.

He may well consider the job important enough in itself, if he accepts the definition of Catholic philosophy that all truth has to pass through the senses before reaching the understanding. Nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu. And of these senses he may well recognise the eye as affording a more direct avenue than the ear, if he agrees with Horace:

A thing when heard, remember, strikes less keen
On the spectator's mind than when ‘tis seen.

Only recently the liturgy has recognised this title by a votive Mass in honour of the Priesthood of Christ. One of the oldest of his titles, its origins stretch back not only through the history of the Jewish people but through the history of the whole world.

Jesus our brother, Jesus the Man, the Everlasting Man, Jesus the representative of our race before the throne of God, his and our Father, stood and stands before that throne in the character of priest. Chosen by God he was, before ages began, a worthy representative, performing the supreme act of a priest: sacrifice.

The Jewish priesthood was a confined thing. A symbol, may be, of things to come, yet so much a symbol, so much a superficial creation, as not to merit, at least in its decrepitude, much honour. This fact of its passingness, its shadow-character, was even admitted in the Old Covenant.

In discussing the purification of the exterior senses the Ancren Riwle naturally goes into the matter of the mortification of hearing. We may well anticipate that silence should play a large part in the life of a recluse, both as a mortification and penance in itself, and as a way to the full flowering of the love of God. For though it be only a means, and a negative one at that, silence does in fact lead the soul forward to contemplation in a very direct way, so direct that it provides a special foundation for the theological virtue of hope:

For prayer is the breath of hope, and it is impossible to ask God for anything or to raise the mind to him without this theological virtue.

Blessed Angela Of Foligno, born about 1249, lived a very worldly and culpable life till she was about forty years jid. Then she was suddenly converted—in what way we do not know—became a tertiary of St Francis, and was apparently almost from the beginning favoured with high graces. From that time onwards her mystical life is richly documented owing to the care of her confessor, who wrote down in Latin what she dictated to him in the vernacular. Her life seems truly an illustration of St Bonaventure's saying that God takes not into account what a man has once been—his grace can raise even the greatest sinner to the heights of the mystical life, provided he responds to the divine call with sufficient generosity.

There is, however, a mark which ordinarily distinguishes the mystic who is a penitent from the one who has never lost his baptismal innocence.