We walked steadily down the long, straight road, a Roman road no doubt, from La Pommeray where we had been to attend the 'peasants Mass' at the little hamlet in the apple country up above Lisieux. We had heard the new vernacular messe des Paysans sung by the J.A.C. (Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne—Young Catholic Farmers). Only the creed was in Latin. At the offertory we saw a procession such as is suggested in Pius XII's encyclical Mediator Dei. A young man came in with a cross made up from ears of freshly harvested wheat (it was Sunday, August 7th, and the patronal feast of this church of St Lawrence was being kept), then another followed with a model of a chalice and hosts outlined upon it, then a third came in with a bunch of grapes in a bag.

There are, broadly speaking, an netive and a contemplative life. Are there, perhaps, correspondingly also a contemplative and an active art? By this is meant an art born of, and again conducive to, contemplation, and, on the other hand, an art reflecting the active temperament of an epoch or an artist. Or, expressed differently, an art that is nourished by the contemplation of the Divine, of the eternal; an art that is, therefore, itself objective, timeless, expressing Being in so far as it can be expressed by human media; and, again, an art that observes the fleeting moment, the actual and temporal, and which, therefore, is itself subjective, timebound, expressing Becoming. Take the Gregorian plain chant and Bach's Mass in B Minor, take the ‘Madonna of St Luke’ in Santa Maria Maggiore and, say, the Sistine Madonna, take any mosaic executed between the 5th and the 12th centuries and any fresco painting of the Renaissance, and you have the two kinds of art that might be distinguished as ‘contemplative’ and active’.

Some confusion seems to exist on the subject of contemplation and the contemplative life—if we may judge from the correspondence in THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT. The point is one of great importance and the confusion extends to a great number of people to judge by the quotation made in the December issue from Cross and Crown. It may therefore be of some use to offer one or two distinctions which may at least form a basis for further discussion and elucidation.