In the beginning was the Word… (St John I. 1.) Unfortunately in the world today there are a great number of words. There are so many words that you do not know how to escape them. We have however the power to choose the best—we should not choose the second best. They who have the Word of Christ our Lord must choose the best WORD. Listen to his words—make them your own. How glad I should be if I could impress on you some little word, make you take it for your own and think about it. There are some people who listen to the Gospel, but they do not really hold that Jesus Christ is God. They do not take the word of Eternal Life, When you find a great deal of decay in the Church and in religious life, it is because our Lord's words have not been accepted. The words of the holy Gospels—that is TRUTH. Let us have the TRUTH.

He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father; and I will love him and will manifest myself to him.—John 14, 21.

The feast of the Nativity is the feast of the birth of the Word; his eternal generation in the bosom of the Father, his temporal birth; and his mystical birth in the souls of men, in which is involved their birth to divine life.

The Christmas liturgy is at different times concerned with each of these aspects of the Mystery.

Dominus dixit ad me. Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te, is the triumphal Introit to Midnight Mass.

1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. The Word of the Father uttered from all eternity. Adore him in the bosom of the Father. rejoice and exult in his infinite perfections, thank him that he is himself…. Humble ourselves and be glad that our poor, puny minds cannot comprehend him…. Love him with the love of the Father and the Holy Ghost. 'The Word is in your heart-he deigns to make his heaven within us. The generation of the Word is going on in our souls at this very moment. What a stupendous thought! Ask him to let us think of nothing else. care for nothing else, and to make our souls truly his heaven.

It is not unreasonable to try to discover why St John chose the Greek word ‘logos’ in describing the second person of the blessed Trinity to Greek-speaking converts. The only way to discover why is to see just what meaning it had in current speech to induce him to consider it suitable for his purpose; and to see secondly what modification or modifications he had to introduce into its meaning so that it really would fulfil its function as a key word in Trinitarian doctrine. We may find that its chief virtue was that it was, of all the terms to hand, least likely to be misunderstood.

The word ‘logos’ was used by Plato, the Stoics, Philo and Plutarch. It was current coinage in Greek thought, one of those words whose meaning was fluid enough, somewhat as democracy or liberty are in our politically-minded age. But at the back of all these interpretations or uses and shades of meaning of ‘logos', there still remained one which may be summed up in another: reason.

Richard Rolle has been called ‘The Father of English Mysticism and it is to him we turn for the first introduction to mysticism in its strict sense among English writers. He was born some hundred years after the Ancren Riwle was written, and yet he is historically the first of the group of English mystics who experienced and wrote about the higher degrees of mystical prayer. Perhaps the greatest era of English sanctity had already passed when he was born in the last decade of the 13th century. There had been a succession of men and women from the time of Venerable Bede who had been led by the Spirit of God to transports of divine love and wisdom. But they had not been reflective in the way that the men of the 14th century were reflective so that the description of their lives does not enlighten later generations as to the nature of their prayer or their manner of reaching high degrees of contemplation. Rolle, amidst a profusion of Latin and English writings, did proclaim these hidden experiences, and his message was received with enthusiasm.

A child in trouble or in disgrace goes first to its mother for comfort and forgiveness. When in fear of its father's anger it hopes for its mother's help in turning anger aside. It is not surprising that after a long period of self-sufficient rationalism, in a time of widespread misery and persecution, men should begin to show a new appreciation of their own sinfulness and weakness and their dependence on God by turning first of all to our Lady, God's Mother and ours. Unlike ours, her heart has never faltered for one moment in its love of God and its love of mankind. All its desire has been for God and the showing of his glory among men. Her heart has never lacked courage or patience; it has been always what our hearts should be and are not. Thinking of it we see our own shortcoming; we see, too, a source of sympathy and help. Our Lady is the first, most perfect, fruit of Christ's redeeming work and cooperates with him in the rescue of sinners and the perfecting of his Church.

The prince of the world holds all men captive by earthly things, which he uses to agitate and frighten them. He causes them to stumble through vain thoughts, shameful desires and worldly ties, with which he ever allures and captivates all the sinful race of Adam. For the word that the Creator spoke to Cain: ‘A fugitive and vagabond shalt thou be upon the earth', has become the type and image of all sinners. After the Fall, Adam's race bore this image within: they were perpetually agitated by imaginations, fears, and all sorts of perturbations, desires and lusts. For the prince of this world tosses about every soul that is not born of God. For as out of the one Adam the whole human race spread over the earth, so the one evil of the passions has submerged this whole sinful race, so that the prince of evil can easily sift every one of them through their material, material, vain and exciting imaginations.

He who undertakes to write upon the spirituality of St Philip Neri is by his very task pledged to avoid ponderosity, yet the writer of these few lines does not know how to escape the need for some kind of introduction to his remarks. The need arises, not from the nature of his subject but from the fact of the appearance of his essay in a periodical devoted expressly to spirituality'. For we who here write could not be comfortable in saying what we want to say and propose to say unless first we made clear that throughout we shall have in mind two presuppositions. The former of these is that the very function of a journal of spirituality is to present to its readers in toto all the various ramifications and different types of Christian sanctity and ascetic which are approved by the Church, in order that its readers may discover, learn, assimilate, or on the other hand set aside what they find, according to their their own own needs,