Fifty years ago, as September was giving place to October, Sister Thérèse Martin, a Carmelite of Lisieux, gave up her soul to God. Only twenty-seven years later she was raised to the altars of the Church as Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus. The speed with which she was canonized was indicative of some special mission given to her by God in the work of salvation of souls, a mission which has been increasingly revealed in this last half-century. For by God's grace this saint has carried out a great apostolate and has raised innumerable Catholics up to a level of true prayer and holiness.

In this latter work of a guide to the interior life she has been almost unique. Many modern saints have been pointed out to us by the process of canonization for our veneration and inspiration; but for the most part they represent a practical and active form of spiritual life, concerned mainly with the poor, the sick, the uneducated. It is clear that the present age is not an age of what we might call ‘mystical saints'.

There can be few saints more unlike at first sight than St Teresa of the Child Jesus and St John of the Cross. Their personalities, their ‘ways’ of perfection, their appeal, are outwardly at the poles of recognised Christian spirituality. And this first impression seems confirmed by a glance at their respective cults, the extreme difference of their ‘clientèle'. How few, how very few, of the real devotees of either saint extend at all the same devotion to the other!

Yet both were contemplatives, both Carmelites and, more than that, the teaching of St John of the Cross was formative in a special degree, explicitly, in the spiritual life of the ‘little’ St Teresa.

He who called himself the Light of the World said to those who followed him: ‘So let your light shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven'—and from that day to this the light has been shining in the hearts of men.

What exactly is this light that shines in the disciples of our Lord, that, very near our own time, shone with such splendour in the great little saint of Lisieux? Though Jesus calls it your light', it is not a light that is ours by the very fact that we are human beings, as is our memory, our reason or our will; it is something that we have received in a very special way, for it is the divine gift of faith. And this light of faith that is in us our Lord bids us not to hide under a bushel but to let it shine.

Contemplative life produces an all-embracing love of God and our neighbour. We see this in a study of the Carmelite Rule and in a reading of the great Carmelite mystics. ‘To love’, says Saint John of the Cross, is to labour to divest ourselves and to detach ourselves from all that is not God. (Ascent, 2). We are to be detached from ourselves, from self-love, thus only shall we come to love God, and to love our neighbour for his sake. A Carmelite writer tells us. ‘Saint John is the Doctor of the Cross because he is the Doctor of Love. It is a cross radiating love, a tremendous love of God, and of man and of all the beauty that God has created. The same writer continues: Throughout his works John of the Cross has sung of the depths of beauty, the demands, the sufferings, the triumphs of love'.

Zacharias, in the most ‘Christian’ passage of his prophecy, describing the Orient who is to come to cleanse sins, says, 'Behold the stone that I have laid before Jesus: upon one stone there are seven eyes: behold I will grave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts; and I will take away the iniquity of that land in one day (3, 9). The prophet is describing the rock of Christ and his saving graces, and he puts before us the principal Remedy for sin in a way which we may find echoed in the Ancren Riwle. After analysing the deadly sins and having realised their proximity to the very core of our being, we may be easily carried away into a negative war against vice, wholly human in its inspiration and, in consequence, Stoic in its effects. We must strive to overcome the evil tendencies of nature, certainly, and we must use to intensity the ascetic practices of mortification, specially designed for the overcoming of the flesh. These are particularly to be looked for in the first way of purgation, which is par excellence the ascetic way. But such activities are primarily penalties for past sins.

I suppose one of the things the importance of which seems to be everywhere recognised is the extraordinary way in which human beings are subject to their environments, are influenced and affected by them. Some sort of subconscious power registers all sorts of details which we didn't know we had even noticed and years after some insignificant act or word comes to life. A name in a newspaper brings back an old world, just the chance hearing of a name and back out of the past springs vividly to our imagination just a scene, and we realise from that how very much we are under the spell of circumstances. At times it would seem that we owe to heredity all that we are, not necessarily to our immediate parents but to our ancestors in the past, a throw back, and now all that idea is given up and what people do think a great deal of is surroundings, the lines in which our lives are cast.

It was in the late afternoon of a perfect summer's day that we set out from the Slipper Chapel with cross-bearer and acolytes to meet the pilgrims of the Cross. We had to hurry as we were rather late. We had arranged to meet the Cross at Barsham, but as we reached the brow of the hill that looks down upon the old manor, we saw the pilgrims marching towards us like a small compact battalion in battle array. We waited for them to reach us. They came as conquerors without slacking speed as they climbed the stiff hill. When they reached us, the Cross was erected and the Chaplain of the Slipper Chapel sprinkled it with holy water. Not a word was spoken; the Cross spoke for itself for it had come into its own. The last rays of the setting sun shone upon the white beams of ash. The pilgrims then went through the normal hourly routine of the stations of the Cross.

[The fifty homilies printed in Migne's Patrologia Graece, vol. 34. have until recently been attributed to St Macarius, an Egyptian monk of the fourth century whose miracles are told in Palladius's Lausiac History and Rufinus's History of the Monks. But this authorship has lately been seriously questioned; for some of the teaching contained in the Homilies bears a certain resemblance to the tenets of the heretical sect of the Messalians or Euchites, condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 481. G. L. Marriott, in an article on ‘The Messalians and the Discovery of their Ascetic Book (Harvard Theological Review, vol. xix, No. 2) claims to find most of the eighteen Messalian propositions reproduced in St John of Damascus's De Haeresibus in the Macarian Homilies; but on closer inspection almost all the passages adduced from the latter are capable of a perfectly orthodox interpretation, whereas the condemned propositions are a crude and one-sided exaggeration of their teaching.

From the earliest history of monasticism in Europe religious houses, both of men and women, received children for education. Anglo-Saxon girls were not only sent to the monasteries of their own country but also to famous centres of learning abroad such as the great monastery founded by St Cesarius of Arles where the holy bishop wished his nuns to devote themselves not only to the study of the Scriptures and the Fathers but to all learning-omnes litora. St Gertrude of Nivelles, desirous of securing the best teachers for her monastic school, sent for them to Ireland, then the great home of learning. The love of learning was not contined to the daughters of nobles. Thomas of Cantempré, O.P. tells of a Brabant peasant girl who was welcomed by her richer sisters when she longed to learn to read her psalter.