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.

In appraising the order and internal correspondence of the faith and human reason, St Augustine had used a phrase, in epigrammatic summary, which not only described his personal discovery and that of every convert to the Church, but also correctly stated the right causal sequence of these correlatives, Faith and Reason in their continuous development: per fidem venitur ad cognitionem. The phrase may even provide some explanation how philosophy even within its own sphere, needs and may receive assistance from the supernatural truths revealed by God. The student of Aristotle's metaphysics is often tempted to wonder why it was that the philosopher, who so clearly understood the first principles of reason and causality, and so explicitly deduced from them the existence of the First Mover and the Primal Intellect.

One day at Segovia a picture of Christ spoke to St John of the Cross. ‘“Brother John, ask me for what you wish, and I will give it you for the service you have done me”. And I said to him: “Lord, what I wish you to give me are sufferings to be borne for your sake, and that I may be despised and regarded as worthless”.’

Gardeners sometimes say that a certain degree of drought strengthens the roots of plants. The grass of a newly growing lawn finding no moisture above the ground in the light and heat of the sun thrusts its roots deeper and deeper into the soil in search of life-giving refreshment. Similarly the soul which is left by God in a dry and waste land abandons the hope of refreshment in the external life of experience and the senses and begins to sink more completely into the reality of God, but in the darkness of the lower soil, in the darkness of faith as opposed to the distinctness of emotional experience.

Renewed interest in the problem of God's vocation has recently been awakened by the autobiographical sketch of a woman who lived as a nun but ‘without a vocation’ for twenty-eight years before metaphorically ‘leaping over the wall’ to return to the world. Many individuals have experienced the problem for themselves in trying to find out what it is that God wants them to do. ‘What is my vocation?’ a young man or woman will ask, and he will spend many months investigating avenues which may be according to the divine plan which is so very difficult to discern. The difficulty is often based on a false interpretation of a true doctrine.

In a lecture attempting to draw a picture of woman's soul as it should be in accordance with her eternal vocatio11 the following attributes were used: wide, silent, empv of self, warm, clear. The question arose of how these qualities are to be obtained.

There is no doubt that of the many methods of prayer which the Church has placed in the hands of the faithful for their sanctification, the holy Rosary is among the surest and best. It is a well of grace whose source is the God-Man himself; not above even the least of his little ones drawing therefrom the sweet, fresh waters of everlasting life; inexhaustible to the most profound intellects, a summa theologica of the Catholic Faith. It is safe and sure because it is sound theology, and assures to prayer that objectivity which it should possess if it is to avoid the easy pitfalls of idle dreaming and speculation, and it fixes the gaze of the mind and the aspirations of the heart on the precious mysteries of our Lord's life, rather than a barren and too often harmful preoccupation with our own interior life, which is so characteristic of this age of amateur psycho-analysts and morbid introspection.

Nothing in this world is necessary to God or can rouse his desire. I am mistaken: there is one thing only that God desires ardently. He does everything to obtain it. What he wants is to find in the heart of man a centre always ready, that is to say, void of all else, so that he can accomplish in it and perfect in it his own work. Doubtless he rules with full authority over heaven and earth: nothing can resist his will; yet he seems to knock powerlessly because he is unable to carry out in the soul the work that he so loves and desires.

Callup polls, research, techniques and investigations of all kinds appear nowadays as an essential preliminary to action. Case histories, clinical fashion, illustrate all sorts of books. So long as excessive importance is not attached to the results obtained, and a cross-section of opinion is not made to stand for the whole truth, such a method is of value for it can uncover facts and tendencies that are otherwise little suspected, or if known but hardly realised.

No study of English medieval spirituality would be complete without a treatise on Walter Hilton. That is patently true. It is also clear that he should come at the conclusion of such a study for he is at once the most learned and the most analytical of all these writers. He is a man of wide experience both in his life of prayer and in his direction of contemplative, religious, and he is a man who has studied in the Schools with greater patience than Eolle and with a tidier mind than the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.

Today, my beloved children, we are celebrating the first fruits of the coming of our Lord. For the Church, there is no more desirable period than this one. It is the time when she gives us the most magnificent pages to read, when she sings her most beautiful hymns. Just as spring is of all seasons of the year the gladdest and sweetest, so of all solemnities the most touching and the holiest is this time of Advent. This is the time for which the patriarchs of the Old Testament sighed with such ardent longing, as did all the holy souls who succeeded them for nearly five thousand years. They cried out for it with all their hearts: ‘Lord, oh, that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down.’ (Is. 64, 1.) ‘To enlighten them that sit in darkness and ill the shadow of death.’ (Luke 1, 79.) All the happenings, all the types of the Old Testament had no other object but to proclaim the greatness and excellence of the one that they were always desiring and whose coming we are now about to greet.

The sacred food of the holy Eucharist was pretigured for us in olden times by a heavenly bread called Manna, which God rained down upon our forefathers. This heavenly food had six characteristic qualities or properties, all of which are also present spiritually in our eucharistic food.

The first characteristic of the heavenly bread was that God caused it to drop down from Heaven in a marvellous manner, contrary to the laws of nature. Concerning this God said to our forefathers: It will rain down bread from heaven, for when they arose each morning it lay everywhere on the ground outside their tents, like newly fallen snow. Of this same Manna the prophet says: 'God opened the gates of Heaven and rained down Manna. In like fashion our Lord gives us the bread of his Body in marvellous manner, contrary to the laws of nature, and comes down to us from heaven. Thus God says: I am the living bread that comes from heaven'.

However gladly I have accepted this invitation to lead you back to the well-springs of the intensely Catholic tradition enshrined within this Priory, I confess my shortcomings and would, in all sincerity, beg your indulgence whilst I ask you to praise and bless and proclaim a simple fact—the fact that our Father, Dominic, was not imprisoned in his own century, but lives for every century; that his mission was not temporary but eternal; that he represents a Catholic inspiration, simple and inexhaustible. In that fact I see the whole raison d'étre of this Feast.

The short pieces of English devotional literature recently printed in the LIFE OF THE SPIRIT are examples from a class of writing not yet fully investigated either by the students of Middle English literature or by the lovers of Middle English devotion. Before the days of printing priests were obliged to write, translate or copy matter for the instruction of their penitents, where the possibilities of preaching were insufficient. Thus it comes about that the MSS of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are full of long and short pieces, often without attribution of authorship or with fictitious attribution. Anonymity was a virtue in those days—a sure refuge in time of trouble. The major works of English doctrinal, devotional and mystical literature have been or will be dealt with by Conrad Pepler, O.P. They came to printed sooner or later, but a great number of secondary works have not yet seen the light. Of the complete ones many are of such uneven quality and of such great length that one could hardly encourage their publication in these days. Such is the Chastising of God's Children, a long treatise on the nature of and remedies for spiritual temptations not reprinted since Caxton's edition of 1492.

The first and most pressing application of the principles at issue described in the preceding section, must be concerned with that assent of the human mind which is claimed for the truths revealed. The Catholic Church has always been explicit in affirming that the truths of Christ were dogmas to be accepted by faith. She has consistently corrected those of her members who have ventured to maintain that these dogmas lay within reach of unaided reason. They are to be received by faith, and faith was to be defined as an assent of the mind, not based upon the intrinsic evidence of the truth accepted, but based upon the word of an authority revealing. It was said to Nicodemus: ‘I Say to thee that we speak what we know, and we testify what we nave seen, and you receive not our testimony. If I have spoken to you earthly things and you believe not, how will you believe, if I shall speak to you heavenly things?’ (John 3, 11-2).

We have seen that all true prayer is in Christ and is in the form of petition or desire, the ‘ground of our beseeching’ being the Incarnate Word who is semper interpellans pro nobis, making unceasing petition on our behalf. In order to recognise the full import of this healing doctrine we must go deeper to discover the ground of the whole spiritual life, particularly the ground of the full Christian life of union. And when we come to consider this ground we have always to insist on its subjective element. Of course the ground of the Christian life is Christ, of course it is life per Christum in Trinitate; and yet it is possible even with this realisation to be carried away into a misty conception of the spiritual life which is really no more than some high poetic, or perhaps neo-platonic, yearning for the One, the super-essential Being in whom we live and move and have our own being. Therefore it is necessary to purify this objective conception of the Christian life of union with the subjective: in other words the ground of all Christian life and all Christian experience and perception is the Faith. Nothing. neither visions nor experiences, neither the gifts nor the heights of prayer, can supersede in this life the faith which alone puts us in direct relationship with the intimate life of the Godhead.