Under this title a representative group of clergy and laity gathered for a two-day conference at Hawkesyard Priory, in Staffordshire, from 3rd to the 5th October. It was the first Life of the Spirit Conference, and because it was the first the subject was rather wide and the final result perhaps lacked the concrete conclusiveness that might be desired of such a meeting. But it showed that in future more specific meetings would be valuable because of the problems raised and the opportunities realised for discussions and for ‘contacts'.

The purpose of the conference was twofold. Firstly in the minds of the conveners has long been fear of beating the air with the words thrown out from Life of the Spirit without reaching real men and women of today. It is necessary for a review of this Nature to keep very closely in touch with the lives of real people in order to help to supply some of their spiritual needs.

It is three o'clock, Good Friday afternoon. Coaches and cars, cyclists and hikers, pour from the cities into the countryside; it is the first day of the holidays. Within the cities it is a nondescript sort of day; the shops, theatres, cinemas are closed, but (such at least are the mores of the British), there are crowds at the football grounds and the ‘dogs'.

There are unusually large crowds in the Catholic churches too. one wonders what has brought them. This is no day of ‘obligation’ ; absence from this service will bring no reproach and incur no guilt. Yet, besides the regular congregation, there are rows of unfamiliar faces; faces one seldom or never sees at Sunday Mass.

If we ask ourselves what is the place of the liturgy in a Christian life, we can only find an answer by going back to the origins of both. The origin of the liturgy is to be found in the Last Supper. Whether or not this was strictly a Paschal meal, as it would appear to be, there is no doubt that it was one of those sacred ceremonial meals which were customary among the Jews, at which certain ritual blessings were given, a ritual offering was made, and prayers and hymns were sung. We have here clearly all the elements of a liturgy. If we want to see what was the place of this liturgy in the early Church we cannot do better than turn to the Acts of the Apostles, where we read that after Pentecost, the disciples ‘occupied themselves continually with the Apostles ’teaching. their fellowship in the breaking of bread and the fixed Ries of prayer’ (Acts, 2, 42). So Mgr Knox: but another reading of the Greek gives an even better sense.

What are the differentia of distinctively Christian mysticism ? This is a question which poses itself with especial urgency at the present time, for two reasons. There is first the strong polemic against mysticism in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Emil Brunner—'anglo-saxon’ and continental’ theology agreeing, for the moment, on this point— and second the fascination for some literary figures of an orientalised gnostic type of mysticism (Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, etc.). Niebuhr and Brunner make no attempt to distinguish between the various types of mysticism; for them its only authentic form would seem to be the nonhistorical, non-incarnational ‘vedantic’ mysticism which attracts Huxley. Mysticism, for Brunner, means Eckhart; the mystic, he Writes, is always to be linked with ‘his revered Meister Eckhart and his Indian and Chinese prototypes'.

The Hebrew Psalter became and has been for centuries the great hymn-book of the Church. The wonder of this book of ‘Praises’ has, very rightly, been made manifest through its long history. Very closely akin are the Canticles in St Luke's Gospel. These represent a genre of their own: we might say, New Testament ideas in Old Testament dress. Thus the Magnificat of our Lady is modelled on the Canticle of Anna (I Sam. 2, 1-10) and recalls the Song of Miriam (Exod. 15, 1-21), the Benedictus echoes the language of psalms and prophecies, and the Nunc Dimittis is redolent of passages in Isaiah.

Alongside the more hebraic traditions of prayer and praise we can discern the beginnings of more specifically Christian, and indeed Christological, hymns.

According to a recent enquiry there is reason to believe that perhaps as few as five per cent of Catholics in this country can be said to relate their religion to their lives.

I am not altogether certain about what is meant by the relation between religion and life in this context. I presume what people have in mind is the type of regular church-goer whose ordinary business and home life shows no outward sign of Catholic activity or whose behaviour is even known to be lax and irregular. Yet of course, it may be that there is real spiritual life unperceived by the observer, and it may also be that the irregularity and sin stimulate an intense, if painful, spiritual preoccupation. On the other hand, constant church activity with membership of many a society and sodality is compatible with a life, both in its religious and secular outlook, that is spiritually very shallow. It is always yery hard to judge what is really going on between God and any individual soul.

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.

Perfection consists in the love of God, and this is independent of any particular way of life, and can reach the highest degrees where there is nothing demanding or compelling great perfection, through the subjective love which is put into the most ordinary everyday actions. But there is also an objective perfection, a life which, by its obligations and the activities it entails, of its nature requires a high degree of perfection; and where such a life is embraced by a solemn and perpetual obligation, it places a person in a state of perfection. While the Spirit breathes where it wills, and the subjective degree of love of God depends chiefly on individual grace, the objective means of perfection (namely, good works which, so to say, compel the exercise of a high degree of love of God and other virtues which accompany it) can be studied as a pattern of perfection, and organised as a means of perfection.

Students of primitive religions have revealed some very important aspects of the natural response of man to the Creator, aspects which have sometimes become overlaid by the more sophisticated types of cultured religion. One of the differences between that natural response and the educated worship of classical times may be seen in the theory and practice of purification, and the comparison between the two bears remarkably on the modern Christian's attitude to mortification.

The almost universal conception of purity and impurity is that of the unmixed and the mixed. The pure note sounds without admixture of over- or under-tones, or of any other sound but its simple music; pure milk has no foreign germ, no water mixed with it. And among the primitive peoples the brand of impurity or defilement arose from the mixture of races, of sexes, of seasons. Men have to keep their weapons and implements apart from the Women's household utensils.

“Christian Platonism”, if we propose to take the expression seriously, is nothing less than a contradiction in terms'… ‘the discrepancies between Platonism and Christianity, when we get down to first principles, are so radical that only by complete misunderstanding or wilful blindness is it possible to profess allegiance to both.’ These unambiguous declarations on page 55 of the late W. H. V. Reade's Christian Challenge to Philosophy (S.P.C.K., 1951, pp. v-xiii, 1-194; 13s. 6d.) presents us with the central thesis of a brilliantly written book, one which breathes the wisdom of a fine intellect inspired by a lifetime's meditation upon the great tradition of European thought. The book will prove of most interest, no doubt, to the philosophers. Many of them will find points for disagreement as they follow the author along the European tradition from Plato to the positivists. Many, indeed, will rightly challenge his own exclusion of Platonists from Christianity; for there are of course good Christians who do understand Plato and yet prefer his ideas as a means of stating the faith.

At this period of the year, as the earth swings in its orbit from aphelion to perihelion and brings the tree to bud and leaf again, Holy Church, by some ancient sortilege of Epacts and Indictions, Concurrences and Golden Numbers, fixes in that orbit a point that shall be Easter Day. Thereby she also fixes the days that immediately precede Easter. So nature and supernature, the universe and the universal Church, confront us year by year on Good Friday with that leafless and essential tree, the Cross.

Let us, today, go back to the first Good Friday, and take our stand where the Cross is to be erected. We are just outside the gates of Jerusalem, on the refuse-dump, the place of execution where the city eliminates its most hateful objects, the men whom it can no longer stomach within it. Look down from the little hill upon the great city.

The last part of a book that an author writes is the Introduction, and usually it is read to the best advantage at the end of the text. A well-known Professor of Serif ture in Rome used to advise his audience to study Biblical Introduction after one had acquired a working knowledge of the Biblical text itself.

Not by their own choosing but by force of circumstances ove the last fifty years Professors of Scripture have had to concentrate on Biblical Introduction. Rationalists and Modernists were attacking the very nature of the Bible as the Word of God, afl. the Higher Critics were elaborating theories about the origins of movements among the Israelites and about the origin of the particular Books of the Bible, and the Church had to give guidance. This has not always had its desired affect; for good people went away with the impression that the less they had to do with the Bible the safer they would be, and those whose calling demand study of the Bible used to remark that they learned a great deal about Wellhausen and the Documentary Theory but knew very little about the text of the Pentateuch, and apparently were not eager to make up the deficiency.

In recent years the study of the Scriptures has tended to be subordinated to other interests. These interests, often of great value in themselves, have begun to dictate the way in which the Scriptures were read and thus have provided various ways of looking at the Scriptures which amount to complete interpretations. We are all familiar with the ‘source book’ view of the Bible, with the Christianity-not-mysterious standpoint, and more recently with an apocalyptic interpretation which owes as much to a temperamental dislike of Hegel as it does to Scriptural sources. One grants that it is inevitable—since the Bible is addressed to all in every age—that each of us should respond to it in our own distinctive way. It is not suggested that each of the movements in modern Biblical study—in spite of their patent exaggeration—has not contributed something to our understanding of the Bible. What is suggested is that contemporary views of the Scriptures rest on theories about the Scriptures rather than on the Scriptures themselves, and that these theories often rest on premises which are not derived from the Scriptures, but are themselves the products of a non-Scriptural world view.

If the chief agony of death is caused by hanging on to life, the worst thing about going blind is the way you chng to light, follow it even in your dark dreams. (Some dreams blaze with light and everything is seen with crystal clarity. Then waking up is frightful) But I am thinking about real objective light, especially daylight. I hate the night now as much as I did when I was a child. I stay's up, dozing or trying to get some wireless station somewhere to that hasn't gone dead, often not turning out the lamp till I hear the first birds. Thatis about four a.m.—just now! Then I let up the blind and the grey light comes into the room and gets warmer and warmer. I can sleep then, feeling happier, just as when, as a child, I always felt safer after I had heard them opening the bakehouse doors in Church Street and knew that it was morning. That, too, used to be at about four o'clock

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.

I imagine a priest-worker gathering his friends together in his shabby little room in the industrial slum: the day's work is over; he is going to say Mass, but first he will talk to them: what might he say; Perhaps something like this:

If you look out of the window there, you can see nothing but factory and tenement buildings; down there in the grey street there are children who have never heard the chuckle of a brook o r seen a meadow filled with buttercups or felt the clean wind peeping across the hills; all around us there are men and women who have grown up like that, and who have lost touch with reality because they are severed from their roots: almost, you could say, they have ceased to be part of the universe, and when a m a n ceases to be that he ceases to be a human being in any full Sense. Modern man has used his intellect, his reason, to great effect within certain narrow limits; but he has lost the instinctive life the intuitive life: he has no symbols.