When your chaplain asked me whether I should like to talk to you on the morality of war, I had to tell him that there was nothing I should like to talk about less. I can think of no less cosy subject for a Sunday morning chat in this year of grace 1949.

The trouble, of course, is not just that it is such a complex moral issue in the abstract, but rather because war is so real, so imminent, so possible, so probable.

The more we fall back on God the more he will support us. Under us are Everlasting Arms. Into thy hands, O Lord, I come. Our hands are put together, clasped, when dying and when dead. A sign of complete dependence on him. Let us recognise now, before we are dead, that he is master. Do we fear death? We must comfort ourselves with the thought that he rules all the world—death is only the veil torn saunder—death lifts the veil and shows what has been there all the time. As though we passed through a strange country while we slept the darkness and woke at dawn and saw wide stretches of wonder and beauty, close to us all the time, but unseen, unsuspected. Just so will death wake us—and we shall see.

Christian life is a life of friendship with God, ‘I have called you friends’ (John 15, 5). More, we are called to share the divine life itself in fellowship with Christ and as members of God's family; ‘God is faithful, by whom you are called unto the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord’ (1 Cor. 1, 9). He is our elder brother, ‘the firstborn among many brethren’ (Rom. 8, 29); we receive the spirit of adoption of sons, and are joint heirs with Christ (Rom. 8, 15-7).

In speaking today of those in heaven who are interested in us we realise something at least of what St Paul meant when he said he was indebted to the whole world. In the sweep of his vision he meant Christ and all the saints—St Stephen whose persecutors' garments he had held. And so we owe much to all sorts of people, known and unknown. How much we owe to our blessed Lady herself. We think of and speak of her under many titles and invocations, but one title strange though it sounds at first shows more than any other the perfect balance of her character. ‘Tower of Ivory’. We remember how one of the Jewish kings built a palace of ivory for himself, what ever that may mean, probably something we do not know.

Centenaries are interesting events for they show that, if we give time time, it performs a double function. In the first place, the lapse of a lengthy period acts like a sieve, eliminating the dross and allowing only the finest to survive. Then a distance of time acts also like a distance in space; it enables us to view in perspective that which is too big to be seen close up.

For the proper appreciation of a man like St De La Salle, a hundred years was a minimum. In fact, it is only now, as the tercentenary of his birth approaches, that he is really coming into his own. The cloud of brilliant nonentities who crowded the forefront of the stage in his day has disappeared, and he is beginning to emerge so that we can see him in his true proportions.

Death! What is death but home? ‘At the hour of death call me.’ That is the prayer that we have put on our lips by the Church. One of those old prayers, prayers that endure, solid prayers, no nonsense about it, one of those prayers that carries with it a fortifying power. People are sometimes frightened of talking of death; we shrink from death naturally, rightly, it is the breaking up of all we know, it is the putting away of familiar things, it is venturing into a strange country; about it there must be a certain strangeness and fear and sense of disaster—and yet, why? ‘At the hour of death call me.’ That is all death ever is—just a voice calling.

We must often have found comfort in that frequent image of the Psalms, that of the mother-bird sheltering her young ones under her wings: ‘He shall cover thee with his pinions and under his wings shalt thou shelter’. We should perhaps find even greater comfort in that image in the realisation that it connotes especially the abiding presence in the tabernacle. For that image came from the tabernacle of the desert. It was there that it originated. It was suggested by God himself when he bade Moses to remind the Israelites how he delivered them from Egypt, and walked with them, led them, carried them through the wilderness as an eagle carries her eaglets: ‘Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob…: You have seen what I have done to the Egyptians, how I have carried you upon the wings of eagles and have taken. you to myself’ (Exod. 19).

While the basic and traditional lines of the spiritual life are unalterable, being the fruit of the thought of theologians and the experience of souls, there is room for development in method and indeed, granted changing circumstances, the possibility of completely new methods. Of course the dictum Nil innovetur nisi traditum est is as true here as elsewhere, and new methods can never mean more than a new approach or a new combination of traditional methods. This present age is one in which circumstances would seem to demand such a new approach. It is an age which has seen the growth and development of a deeper appreciation of the place of the laity in the missionary activity of the Church.

His story reminds one of the finest pages of the Golden Legend; and like the lives of so many saints, is hardly credible. Modern man, used to psychological and other methods, may find it offensive: might we call it a challenge to human reason? Where shall we draw the line between the marvellous and the absurd? Certainly we prefer stories that we can measure against our own limited standard. But, God is not logic. He is not (so St Teresa says) even reasonable. And the saint, every saint, always remains unfathomed—a sort of walking scandal, a challenge hurled at reason, a wager. The Creator's imagination infinitely surpasses the cleverest of those who ape him, romancers and poets, and the improbable is the natural habitat of his masterpieces, the Saints. That is why they bewilder us and lay hold of us: does it not prove, in a tangible way, that man is made to surpass himself and that true sanctity scorns to be stereotyped?

It is now time to consider certain charges of unorthodoxy which have been levelled against Mother Julian of Norwich. In the question of sin and the salvation of the elect both David Knowles and Roger Hudleston accuse her of unorthodoxy. They do not of course suggest that her doctrine in general is suspect, but rather that she has fallen briefly and inconsistently into an unorthodox view. The point arises out of her solution of her ‘great difficulty’ (p. 127) that all can be well and yet men can sin and send themselves to hell. She appears to restrict her understanding of this intuition of all being well simply to the elect, to the predestined who are to be fully graced in the end.

Beautifully written MS. of the end of fourteenth century, MS. Douce 114, takes for its the phrase used by its anonymous author in a general description of its subject. The author, probably a Benedictine, writing for a ‘religious sister’ also in Benedictine convent, finding that the community” knowledge of the doctrine of penance was both insufficient and confused, and considering the complexities of the available Latin ‘penitentials’, proposes to reduce into a vernacular compilation of three parts all the necessary instruction on contrition, confession and satisfaction. He writes: ‘Also seldom have they little comfort of their confessors to teach them that speedft” … and needful were of the sacrament of penance … at their’ request and because ye have none other understanding of other manner of Scripture than of such as is written in your mother tongue, I will etc’ The three parts are divided into seven chapters each, and though long it is a simple straightforward and useful piece of work, full of homely illustrations, and must have been a great comfort to the nuns and their superiors.

When a soul beginneth to feel grace work in him, he waxeth then sorry for his sin, and remembreth his great unkindness done against God and in what peril his soul is in; he weepeth and waileth his offence and with great sorrow and lamentation crieth and calleth to God for mercy. Then thus continuing he getteth him to religion, or at leastwise to confession, there purging himself clean from all rust of sin by contrition and penance doing. Anon he feeleth him clean in body and soul and delivered from gnawing of conscience, which is the greatest pain on earth. Then continently he feeleth great sweetness both in reading and prayer and sermons hearing, thinking that this doth all worldly solace exceed, and great comfort he feeleth in that which not long before was full tedious and painful to him.

The following prayer is taken from the Bodleian MS. Lat. th. d. 15, foll. 115 sqq, being a collection made by Eobert Parkin of Erdwioke le Skete near Doncaster. The MS. is in Parkin's own hand and he entitles this prayer ‘Prayers of Sir Thomas More’ and concludes it with the words ‘Compiled by Sir Thomas More sometime Chancellor of England with these additions following’—and he includes various other prayers, all of which have since been published. This beautiful prayer has apparently not yet been printed or at least is unfamiliar to the general public. The spelling has been slightly modernised.