The Church, the Bride of Christ, from the very beginnings of its history has by repeated acts and indications shewn its sense of esteem and tender, maternal love for those virgins who are dedicated to God: and this regard has been plainly confirmed in documents. Small wonder, since Christian virgins, ‘the more illustrious part of Christ's flock', stimulated by charity and spurning all alien worldly cares, have overcome the easy and danger-fraught division of the heart, and have vowed themselves wholly to Christ as to the Bridegroom of souls, and Permanently enlisted their entire lives, decked as they are with the Jewels of all the Christian virtues, under the banner of Christ our Lord and the Church.

A convenient text for these notes is provided by ‘A Challenge from the Cloister', printed in the May issue of the Life of the Spirit. It begins: ‘A Carmelite life in the world does not seem to be really possible'. There is much confusion of mind implicit in this statement, but its elucidation does not call for any profound analysis of the nature of man or the nature of grace. The whole matter is stated quite simply and explicitly by St Thomas, in the Summa, not as a personal and novel view. What is found there is the traditional teaching of the Church.

'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart.’ The perfection of the Christian life is the perfection of charity. And this perfection is the highest possible; no one can do better than have perfect charity. Furthermore, perfect charity is the vocation of all, without exception.

In the May issue of Life Of The Spirit, ‘A Challenge from inside the Cloister’ by a Carmelite nun denied with considerable force that there could be any real contemplative life in the world—mainly ‘because the essential “stripping” could never be accomplished outside Enclosure or the Rule nor could it be born', (p. 556.) It is true that the writer says that it is ‘A Carmelite life in the world’ that does not seem possible, but she goes on to say: ‘May I suggest that it is a great pity so much is made of “contemplative fife” in the world now'; so that evidently it is not only the Carmelite form of that life which is considered impossible outside the cloister.

This ‘challenge’ has given rise to a series of replies—some of which have appeared in the following numbers of Life Of The Spirit—all of which have protested quite decidedly against the theory expressed in the ‘challenge'.

In order to see the modern needs of religious men and women in perspective we should sometimes look across the Christian monastic scene back to the natural origins of religious life in primitive and pre-Christian religions. These origins, although they do not include the supernatural vitality of a life dedicated to the following of Christ, have yet a fundamental bearing on the way religious behave throughout the ages. Grace builds on nature, and there are natural origins even for religious life, which thus has a specifically human character as well as a divine. After many hundreds of years’ progress in ways of life and of culture, there almost inevitably arises a threat of dislocation, when those living the traditional culture are severed from its roots. In the case of Monastic life (just as on a wider field of the whole Christian way of living), the many centuries of existence have led to a tremendous elaboration which can become in part artificial and with little natural support.

Nobody who passes by that shabby little house in a back street in the poorest quarter of the fishing port of Concarneau would suspect that two rooms on its first floor make up the ‘monastery’ of a small contemplative religious community. None of the many summer visitors to what is also a popular Breton holiday resort would ever guess that the four young men, garbed as labourers or fishermen, who might be Noticed entering or leaving this house are professed religious, following a rule of life which, in its own way, is as strict as and perhaps harder than that of Carthusian or Cistercian monks.

One of these Little Brothers of Jesus was waiting for me at the barrier of Concarneau station when I arrived there on a July evening this summer. I managed to spot him in the crowd because of a small badge, composed of a red cross and heart, pinned on to the much washed open-necked khaki shirt he was wearing.