In the last issue of The Life we had occasion to point to the importance of the changes in the Holy Week liturgy in that the Holy See has in these changes insisted on the liturgy becoming once more the primary method of prayer for every member of the Mystical Body. By now the liturgy has ceased to be the preserve of the aesthetes and cranks who decried all popular devotions in such a way as to antagonize the people whose principal source of communal prayer was the non-liturgical service ‘devotions'. The trouble with the specialists was that they sank into a morass of historical facts and conjectures. They were so intent on looking backwards that they missed the path of prayer altogether and disappeared into this historical bog. The services they enjoyed were not liturgy, for liturgy is the public work worshipping God, a public work that is alive today, drawing its vitality from the spiritual life of the people who take part in it. The worship practised by the specialists was drawn from the dead pages of manuscripts and books.

I once had the good fortune to attend a small chapel for Mass where children were no problem. There were always lots of them, from babies upwards, and they loved to go because they were not restrained, scolded, or made to feel out of place. Toddlers staggered up and down the short aisle, babies climbed on the chairs and cooed, older children watched attentively, moving forward to see more easily what was happening. If a child came too near the priest he was gently moved out the way by a parent or the server, but they often sat on the altar steps, and no one bothered them. The result of all this was that they seldom gave trouble, and if a baby did cry its mother took it outside for a minute without being made to feel that she was a criminal for having brought it at all. Parents could come to Mass together, and the children learnt to love the House of God because they were made to feel at home there.

Richard Challoner was a man of varied an great achievement, but two tilings stand out in their significant for all English-speaking Catholics. The first was his revision of the Rheims-Douay English version of the Bible. This revision almost amounted to a new translation; till recently it was the only Bible current among Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland, and was used almost as exclusively in the United States (cf. the preface to the Confraternity New Testament). The second was his compilation and writing of a prayer-book, The Garden of the Soul, which was first published in 1740. This book has since gone through countless editions, and is still the best-known Catholic prayer-book in the English language. So great has been its influence that, in the form in which it left the hands of the, author, it has given rise to the term ‘Garden-of-the-Soul Catholic‘ to designate one of solid unostentatious piety (combined perhaps with a certain lack of imagination). I do not know, but I suppose that its influence has been scarcely less in America, at any rate for a considerable time.

In his book, The High Church Tradition, Canon G. W. O. Addleshaw makes an unfavourable comparison between the scholastic theologians of the Counter-Reformation and the seventeenth century Anglican divines. ‘The theology of the Tridentine divines is embalmed in scientific treatises; the High, Churchmen were content to expound theirs in sermons delivered to ordinary congregations.' Men like Suarez and Bellamine when they wrote as technical theologians, were not, however, trying to do the same sort of thing as the Caroline divines, and the comparison is hardly a valid one. The men' who should be set beside John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, or Jeremy Taylor are writers, preachers and priests like Bérulle and Olier, Bossuet, Bourdaloue and Fénelon. Dislike of our scholasticism and legalism is one of the commonplaces of the Anglican critique of Rome; we may think that others see over-clearly in us those things on which they lay least stress. We have our great men in the fields which the Church of England has most cultivated, and would like to set them confidently beside theirs in what the Abbé Couturier called émulation spirituelle, that friendly rivalry in the race which we all run for the same prize.

As for the means employed by classical yoga there can be no question of reviewing them here. We must, to begin with, insist on their extreme seriousness, which gives food for thought.

At their basis are ‘curbs’ and ‘disciplines’ such as non-violence (ahimsa) and chastity. In the logical scheme of yoga these are only the preliminary dispositions for entry upon the Royal Way itself. It is generally said of them that they are not peculiar to yoga but common to all spiritual codes of conduct, that the equivalent is to be found in Christian asceticism. This is certainly true in principle. But why is it that, except for rare exceptions, they can scarcely be said to transform man in our Christian West, whereas they seem in general much more effective among the Indian adepts of yoga? It is to these simple ‘curbs’ and ‘disciplines that classical doctrine attributes the most extraordinary ‘powers ‘. For instance the normal effect, perhaps topical enough, of ahimsa is to make a man so peaceful that animals, instead of running away from him or attacking him, feel the radiance of his goodwill and gentleness and come to him; the true practitioner of non-violence meditates quietly in the jungle.