The ancient cry that there is nothing new under the sun seems often justified in the mind of the student pondering on the history of the devotional spirit. Perhaps nowhere, however, is the truth which underlies the apparently hyperbolic character of this dictum less understood than in the minds of those zealous for this or that movement or cause which powerfully appeals to them.

There can be few saints of the late Middle Ages whose lives are so richly documented or so curiously varied as that of St Bridget of Sweden. A contemporary ot St Catherine of Siena, she lived in Italy for a quarter of a century and played politics almost identical with those of Catherine, yet the two women never met; but their lives resemble each otne at many points. Both of them were in their lifetime openly venerated as saints, a circumstance which must have been a further affliction to women each of a profound humility. Both of them were surrounded by ‘families'; and in either case it appears that only the family's devotion to its mother held it together. Just as Catherine Benincasa seems to have given most of her trust to the English friar-hermit, William Flete, so the favoured son St Bridget's largely Swedish ‘family’ was a Spaniard, the hermit ex-bishop Alphonse of Pecha; and Alphonse seems after Bridget's death to have suffered some of William Flete's neglect at hands of the other devotees.

Before Sennacherib, that new and still more powerful king, the policy of Judah fluctuated between restless schemes for alliances, especially with Egypt, and the firm independence of all but the power of God which Isaias taught, and which ultimately prevailed. It was then that he saw with clarity the mystery of creation, and was enabled to vest with reality in his mind that which faith, without sight, imposes. He expresses it under the humble image of a potter making pots as he will; the analogy becomes a permanent tradition in the Scriptures. It has a triple significance. It shows the emergence into the certitudes of the reason of the fact of substance, the independence of one's existence of any but the divine Being. Substance is the immediate term of creation, upon which all else in the creature as being accident depends mediately.

Before the first world war, there was in Germany no talk of refusing to serve in war. True, we heard that in England and America there were a few sects that refused war services or military service even during peace time. But they were considered strange people; mentally and morally not quite sound!

During the four years of the first world war, we became more thoughtful. Afterwards there was an upsurge of the anti-war movement, but it was suppressed by the Nazis. The second world war, stretching over five years, was so horrible that probably the majority of all Germans came to appreciate the point ot Conscientious Objection. Indeed, an interior objection, a protest of the moral sense, gripped them. But exteriorly they did not dare to come forward. In fact, their political and military though, the legacy of centuries, held that there were moral objections against open resistance to directives issued by legitimate authority.

As a result, the Germans as a whole not only did not refuse their services in the war unleashed by Hitler, but most of them, even most of the Christians, expressed serious religious doubts, whenever this or that individual consistently and bravely answered ‘no’ to his draft call.

The power of the writer is a transforming power. It is in operation from the day he weaves fables round the play-things of his nursery, and it is the power which vitally penetrates, his world which re-incarnates the raw material of his world. And his world is that small part of creation which he knows, and which, in knowing, he manages to love. Today, as he looks out upon the expanding universe which science has prepared for him, he has to find a centre in himself round which he can wrap his belief in human values. Facing him is a world living numbly, automatically, on the sanitary, progressive, anti-theistic, hence antihuman, thinking of the recent scientific past. It is upon this massproduced, disinfected world that the writer is called to exercise his transforming power. Here, amid the disguised cruelty of routine he must kindle the spark of life. Here, though every day he watches ‘the dwarfing of man’ in the perspective of machinery and light years, he must, no matter what his religion, affirm his faith in the uniqueness of man, ‘heir to all the ages'.

One of the points most strongly emphasized in the two great encyclicals of Pius XI on Christian Marriage (Casti Connubii) and The Christian Education of Youth (Divini Illius Magistri) is that the foundation of true education is the family. That is where education begins and where the ground of human personality is first prepared for its full growth to maturity. If this basic education is missing or defective all further education is liable to be like building an elaborate superstructure on faulty and insecure foundations or trying to cultivate plants in poisoned or exhausted soil.

Unfortunately there seems to be a growing tendency, even among practising Catholics, to shift the responsibility for the basic education of the young from the family circle to the school. A tendency to imagine that the good nuns or other teachers from the infant school onwards, will do all that is necessary in the way of teaching religion. It is almost taken for granted in consequence that the father and mother, and elder brothers and sisters, have no immediate concern with the religious atmosphere in which the younger children are growing up.

Isaias was a member of a junior clan of the house of David, dwelling in Jerusalem in the age when the ferocious imperialism of Assyria overwhelmed first the north, then the centre of the Israelite peoples, and menaced little Judah when it remained the sole remnant of the tribes that Moses had led out of Egypt. His work was to be the spiritual guide and prophet of its survival; to be ascribed solely to deep faith in God, at the same time as he announced the doctrine of the Incarnation to men. But his prophetic office also involved a spiritual development in his own soul, which can here be traced as far as the records permit.

In a famous picture of the Crucifixion the Cross is depicted soaring against a dark background of cloud, over the quiet waters of Genesareth—it recalls that moment when the Lord awakened from slumber in the heart of the storm and spoke the words … ‘peace, be still’ … and immediately there was a great calm.

It may have happened to many of you, as it happened to the disciples on Peter's ship, to undergo a moment of great physical distress, to be lost in the cloud or the desert, to have the sea raging about you, to see no way out from a lingering disease. Such moments of physical imprisonment are paralleled by spiritual distress, the soul in a state of utter loneliness and desolation … ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ There is no harbour visible, no landmark, no sense of direction; only barren snow or solitary sand, indifferent glances, the howling of air or sea.

The book Franz Reinisch, ein Martyrer unserer Zeit, by Heinrich Kreutzberg, published recently in Germany, contains a remarkable tale. It depicts vividly and impressively the life and suffering of the Pallottine priest Franz Reinisch, who was condemned to death on July 7th, 1942, and executed in Brandenburg on August 21st, 1942, at the age of thirty-nine. Called up for army service, he had firmly refused, for reasons of conscience, to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. He knew, of course, that many others in the same situation thought and acted differently. That gave him reason for reflection. But with all consideration and prayer, he remained ever more confirmed in the decision to make a visible protest against the unjust government then in power and its ‘leader’ by refusing to take the military oath. He was unwilling to swear fidelity. Moreover, as a native Austrian, he viewed Hitler as a usurper in that country, and denied all duty of obedience to him.

The scientist is first of all a person, set in the framework of family and society. The problems arising from his own make-up, and from the current social scene with its special stresses, will often bulk much larger in his life than anything concerned with science. However, there are some aspects of a scientist's life that mould his general approach to Christ, whether he is aware of them or not. The work of the physical scientist, for instance, is concerned with nature, regarded as a closed system—not with God, nor even with human persons as persons. He abstracts from the Cause of nature, and from human causes, and concentrates on the relations between natural facts. This, again, commits him to an interest in the minutiae of sense knowledge which would not be in place in other studies. Philosophers indeed are interested in nature, as well as scientists, but from a different point of view; they ask different questions about nature.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Christian life is seen in terms of the biblical theme of exodus or migration. It is a theme recalling the life of the patriarchs and the generation contemporary with Moses in the desert. The spirituality of the Psalms is steeped in it. The life of the pious Jew is an upward movement towards him who is pre-eminently ‘the Holy One', ‘the Holy One of Israel'. The first stage in this upward movement is marked by God's revelation of himself. This gives rise to faith, the initial movement towards the Most High. Faith calls for faithfulness, which is impossible without renunciation and which will improve in quality and merit with resistance to trials. The man who is not put out or discouraged by these will be confirmed in his faith and faithfulness.

The examination we have made of each of the three vows reveals at least in principle the various domains where — problems of adaptation might be, and in fact are, posed, aat we have noticed is sufficient to indicate in what directions their possible solutions lie.

Nevertheless, before concluding it would be interesting to consider certain of the most important dimensions of the religious life. As we have already spoken of observances in dealing with virginity, it will be enough to consider rapidly three kinds of cases Particularly instructive: first of all prayer and silence; in the second place formation and intellectual work; and finally questions of hierarchy and government. Prayer And Silence In all that concerns prayer and silence, it is clear that the life of the ancelles, or of any nun more or less involved in the world, as also the life of sisters in a secular institute, does not profit by the guarantees offered by a stable existence in a convent.

Since the religious life consists essentially in seeking the perfection of charity, by following the evangelical counsel, through the practice of the three great vows, and of certain observances, it is clear that vows and observances provide a convenient framework for assembling the facts and experiences conditioning the adaptation we wish to discuss. Although this may seem a little artificial, we will nevertheless consider in succession: Obedience, Poverty, Virginity, and several of the major observances which accompany all religious life, and indeed every authentic striving towards God: silence, prayer, enclosure study and government.

The collect for the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, having recalled the legend of the saint's body carried to Mount Sinai by angels, asks that we, by her intercession, may come to the mountain which is Christ. It is a symbol presented with the suddenness of mist clearing from a rocky summit, a dramatic image that brings one back to a consideration of the immense richness of mountain symbolism in liturgy and scripture.

It may well be that the mountain is the easiest of the great symbols of the Church for us to understand today, easier than water or fire, for instance. The townsman is too used to think of water in terms of turning on the tap, of heat and light in terms of pressing switches, but with the hills, he returns to reality; in increasing numbers more and more people are discovering the fascination of mountaineering.

The translation of two sections of the Gospel which is given below is an experiment of a sort that seems quite popular nowadays. Its purpose is to make the Gospel strike the English reader with the same kind of impact, the same force and freshness, that it would have had upon the Greek-speakers for whom it was immediately written. It is an attempt to clear the incense-laden air of nineteen centuries, to find the Gospels unembalmed, unritualized; yes, unconsecrated and stripped of the sacred vestments with which every generation has adorned them. Not that this solemnizing process is in any way to be regretted, or that the versions which it has influenced are bad versions. They are signs of a proper reverence for what is holy.

In October 1950, the Holy Father, addressing a Congress of Religious, explained the positions of religious and seculars, especially religious and secular clergy, in the Church. One sentence in the important and far-reaching document is the following: ‘It is of divine institution that clergy should be distinct from lay-people. Between these two grades is the state of the religious life, of ecclesiastical origin.’ ‘Inter’ duos hos grains religiosae vitae status intericitur … ecclesiastica origine dejluens… .’ (A.A.S., 1951, p. 27). Many of us then received a first impression that the Pope was reversing a teaching which we had regarded as traditional, and with some the impression seems to have lingered. The purpose of this article is to enquire whether it is true in any sense that Christ founded the religious life and what Pius XII really said in 1950.

Peace be upon you.’ Our Lord's greeting to his disciples after his resurrection from the dead is one of peace: for a new life has begun for all who believe in him, a life , peace. The old conflicts are over, the war is won; man is restored to God's friendship, he is reconciled, redeemed. And this is to work of Christ our Lord: he has triumphed over sin and death through his own dying, and the barriers that separated men from God are broken down, the barriers of sin which no merely human power could ever destroy. And peace begins: the peace of Christ himself communicated now to all whom he has redeemed.

But the peace that our Lord brings to man is very different from the peace that is so often on men's lips, the peace that is simply the absence of conflict, an interval between wars. His peace, he tells us, is his legacy to those who believe in him—'My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you…. But not as the world gives …'.

On August ist, 1855, when the riots which had greeted the restoration of the Hierarchy in England were still a lively memory, a middle-class boarding school for boys Was opened at Netherton House, Clapham. The needs of its four Pupils were catered for by a Community of nine Religious, three of whom were already teaching in the primary school attached to the Redemptorist church. All nine of them were French, Brothers of the Christian Schools, an Institute founded by St John Baptist de La Salle in the seventeenth century and now making its first English foundation. The renting of the house on Lady Day seemed to augur well for the future of this initiative in the land that had once been Mary's Dowry. And so it proved. In May this year, 1955, some 250 Brothers and nearly 7,000 Pupils in thirty-one educational establishments in England and scotland, not to mention innumerable past pupils, relations and friends will be celebrating the centenary of that event.

Christian spirituality and ethics, when most closely linked with the central affirmations of the Faith, have been traditionally expounded in terms of the ‘imitation of Christ’, This it is which has given them distinctively Christian ‘shape’, and secured that the Christian life is conceived as a possibility only because of the saving acts of God in Christ upon which as it depends. To describe the Christian life as the ‘imitation of Christ’ is not to present it, however, as a bare literal mimicry, but to stress that, in fact, the life of the Christian man is fundamentally the life of our Lord himself which he lives out in us in the sacramental life of the Church, if we will to have it so. The matter is already seen in this light in New Testament times, in, for example, St Paul's ‘Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies’ (2 Cor. 4, 10) or ‘I have been concrucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal. 2, 20).