My Lord and My God: this is the summing up by St Thomas the doubter after he had seen the Christ risen from the dead. It is the challenge every man since has had to face: is Christ God?

The following is not going to be an exhaustive analysis of the evidence, nor is it to be written in an apologetic spirit. My aim is to state the position as I see it.

The Catholic Church today holds as its basic object of belief the fact that Christ is God. The Protestants wobble, some do believe, some do not. The Eastern Churches, until their contact with moderniam, held the Catholic faith. It was this foot—that Christ, is God and Man—that was worked out in the first six councils of the Church between the 4th and 6th centuries.

Nicaea: ‘We believe… in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made.…’

These words were written in the fourteenth century, when Europe and Christendom were still synonymous terms. They speak of a state of mind and soul almost unknown in our modern world save to the few who profess to lead the contemplative life. Yet this state, which is called recollection, or the ‘gathering together’ of one’s thoughts and desires, is perhaps more necessary now than in other times, for it is the one means by which our age can be restored to sanity.

‘Secular Tertiaries’, says Canon Law, ‘are those who in the world under the jurisdiction and the influence of a Religious Order try to tend to Christian perfection according to a rule adapted to their secular state of life and approved by the Apostolic See, It is necessary to bear this definition in mind in reading what follows.

The thirteenth century was a period of great expansion for the hermits who had come from Mount Carmel to Europe, but if in the same way as the Dominicans and Franciscans they attracted layfolk to them in an organized Third Order little evidence of it has survived. That some people went to live near Carmelite houses as recluses we know, but this was entirely separate from the Tertiary movement. On the other hand recently discovered documents have shown that there was some sort of fraternity at Venice in existence between the years 1280 and 1208 with regular monthly meetings, the saying of Office in common, the wearing of a habit and the rest. More research is needed to establish whether such a state of things was general.

A certain uneasiness is felt, at the present day, on the subject of religious life. I am not referring to the criticism of unbelievers, but to the doubts, more or less openly expressed, even in the most religious circles, as to its actual value and its methods.

Young Catholic men and women continue to be profoundly attracted to it and vocations among them are numerous, but the temperaments and even the virtues of today find difficulty in adapting themselves to a system of life which was accepted unquestioningly by former generations.

The most immediate and most general problem is that of health. The great Orders, and the austere cloistered Orders in particular, are somewhat anxious. Their Rule, which represented a minimum nearly always overstepped by generous souls, tends to become a maximum only attained with difficulty by the boldest or the most robust.

Those who have an inside view of these things; those who have the training of young religious, are even more troubled to see that certain methods of formation, apparently essential to the system of religious life, have become less efficacious and are no longer inspiring to a great number of their most ardent recruits.

One evening in summer on the rocky slopes overlooking the Sea of Galilee from the north, Jesus had fed five thousand people with a few pieces of bread. Next day these same people and Jesus were crowded into the synagogue in Capharnaum. Our Lord was speaking to them: ‘I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the desert and are dead. This is the bread that comes down from heaven that if any man eat of it, he may not die…. I am the living bread which came down from heaven…. If any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever. And the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world’ (John 6, 48-52).

Unlike all other great spiritual teachers Christ claimed not only to lead and point to a better life, he made the astonishing claim that he was that life. Further, he put it in the form that he was also the instrument by means of which we acquired this life, he said he was the ‘Bread of Life’. This bread, or food, was in fact to be, as he promised, his flesh.

Charles de Foucauld’s silent death at Tamanrasset on December 1st, 1916, was the crowning proof, in a life full of them, of the falsity of that remark of an Arab’s to Ernest Paichari: Oui, vous autres français, vous avez le royaume de la terre; nous, les Maures, nous avons le royaume du ciel. The kingdom of heaven was surely opened to this Frenchman who had lived prepared for such a death; for in one of his notebooks, found after his death, was discovered this sentence, written at the head of the page: Vivre comme si tu devain mourir martyr aujourd’hui.

His life is too well known for it to be recounted once again; but it is useful for many reasons to attempt an estimate of the influence of that life, and to try and fathom to some degree Père Charles’s intentions and motives, to seek, even, an interpretation of that living martyrdom that was his life.

He died to all outward seeming a failure; yet how often is that. the lot of the saints. His diaries, his letters, all record his great desire for some companions to share his solitude.

It is a commonplace to talk of death as the Great Change, but even men who revert quite often to the life of the spirit may sometimes realise with a kind of mild shock how utterly spiritual our lives must then become. We have before us an altogether unique experience, and it is natural enough that we should await its inevitable advent with interest and curiosity.

Yet the liveliest imagination will not help us in a matter so completely beyond the veil of the senses. In Paradise Lost Milton uses all the mighty imagery of a great poet to depict the war of the angels, and yet leaves us with a profound sense of unreality. We find ourselves in the position of being able to imagine almost any set of circumstances on this side of the grave, and yet quite unable to use such power to illumine conditions on the other, simply because it is a realm of the spirit. Neither does it help us to reflect upon our entry into this world, for that was the beginning of life and thought itself.

[Blessed Jordan of Saxony, first Master General after St Dominic, entered the Dominican Order in 1220. Among his many labours he had the care of the Convent of St Agnes at Bologna, and when he was prevented by the duties of his office from visiting the Sisters, he wrote letters to them which embodied his teaching. In the original Latin the letters to Blessed Diana (the Prioress) and the other nuns read quite freshly after a lapse of seven centuries. Their spiritual teaching is as important now as then. A very small selection is here given in translation.]

Brother Jordan, useless servant of the Order of Preachers, to his dear daughters in Christ the Sisters of St Agnes at Bologna: seek and receive Christ Jesus.

When I see you so much of one mind and so eager in walking with the Lord, and when I find that you seek nothing except him who alone is able you, and without whom whatever (else) you have is not riches indeed but poverty, it is a comfort to me, dear daughters, to think about you.

After our Lord's ascension the Apostles were separated and went to preach in different countries. Andrew went to preach the Gospel in Scythia. From there he came into Europe and preached in Epirus and in Thrace, and after that in Achaia which is a part of Greece. There he converted many people and established churches. Among those whom he converted was Maximilla, the wife of Aegeas, who was governor of that part and chief judge. Aegeas was angry when he found that his wife had become a Christian and began to try to force Christians to sacrifice to the heathen gods. Then St Andrew went to him in the city of Patras, and said:

'You who are a judge should know your own judge, who is in heaven. Knowing him you should worship him and withdraw your support from false gods'.

Aegeas answered: ‘You must be Andrew, who preach the false law which the princes of Rome have ordered to be destroyed'.

“The princes of Rome', said Andrew, ‘have not known how the Son of God came and taught that idols are devilry, and support of them an offence against God. Those who cling to idols will be left by God.

All those who would re-enter Paradise must first be tried by fire’, says St Ambrose. Thus the soul which aspires to the earthly Paradise of union with God in contemplation must necessarily be purified, for only the pure of heart can see God. Thus purification both of the senses and of the mind, says Père Garrigou-Lagrange, is caused by a special breathing of the Holy Spirit whose working here becomes manifest in the Gifts of knowledge, Filial Fear and Fortitude for the purification of the senses, and the Gift of Understanding for the purification of the mind.

Knowledge shows experimentally the nothingness of creatures, both within and outside ourselves. It differs from Wisdom in that we see created things in their proximate cause (i.e., failures and imperfections) and not in the Supreme Cause. This Knowledge of the nothingness of created things is meant to lead us to the desire of God alone.

Filial Fear is the Gift which inspires the soul with the fear of being unfaithful, and in spite of the sensitive nature being greatly depressed, weak and sluggish in good works by reason of the lack of attraction, the spirit is ready and strong.

The subject of Liturgy is so vast that only a few can command a deep knowledge of its history, but there is one aspect which does not call for high scholarship, and that is the pastoral—the Liturgy as its affects the average Catholic, especially as his normal means of instruction.

By general agreement these days in which we live have witnessed a general falling away from Bible reading amongst non-Catholics, whilst that practice has not been a strong point amongst English Catholics; then, too, only a small fraction of our people ever hear a sermon, for most come only once to church on a Sunday, and then to a Low Mass, at which they hear only the usual notices. Few in proportion to the sum total study Catholic books on religion, and so thousands have starved minds, a condition responsible in large measure for so much apathy. Apathy is the inevitable prostration of will which follows on after a long period of mental starvation. Now, in the Liturgy, and I am here using that term as equalling the Mass, we have an unequalled book of instruction, and the finest comment ever produced on the meaning of Holy Scripture.

St Thomas did not write a special treatise on mystical theology. In the golden age of Scholasticism there were no hard and fast divisions between systematic, moral, ascetical and mystical theology; but systematic theology furnished the rules by which to deal with the practical questions of the spiritual life. And so the Angelic Doctor gives us the principles of mystical theology, embedded in the Prima Secundæ of his Summa Theologica, which deals with man, made in the image of God, and with his virtues and vices in general (especially question 68, on the Gifts of the Holy Ghost) and in the Secunda Secundæ, which treats of particular virtues and states of life (especially questions 180 to 182, on the Contemplative and Active Life) and in his whole teaching on Grace and the Virtues.

The mystical life is nothing less than the life of grace lived at its highest level.

To understand this term ‘word’ we should note that, as Aristotle teaches, vocal sounds are signs of movements within the soul. In Scripture, of course, it is usual for things signified to be called by the names of the signs, as in 1 Cor. 11: ‘But the rock was Christ’. But it is necessary that what is within our soul and expressed by our spoken word, should itself be called word. Whether the term word belongs first to what is uttered by the voice, or to the concept within the soul, is not immediately relevant. It is none the less clear that what exists within the mind and is expressed by the sound is prior to the word uttered by the voice, since it is its cause. If therefore we wish to know what is the word within the soul, let us see what is meant by what is uttered by the exterior vocal sound.

Do you not say: There are yet four months and then the harvest cometh? Behold I say to you, lift up your eyes and see the countries, for they are white already to the harvest. (John 4:35).

We are living in the days of a great harvest. As I travelled here this afternoon, I looked out on the fields of standing corn, and my thoughts turned to our soldiers fighting today in the wheatfields of Normandy, the vineyards of Provence and the olive trees of Tuscany, where the corn, the grapes and the olives are ready to yield their harvest of wheat and wine and oil. A fructu frumenti, vini et olei sui multiplicati sunt, as the Psalmist sang so long ago, ‘of the fruit of their corn and wine and oil have they been given increase.“

These soldiers of ours in the armoured vehicles of modern battle, as they pass the peasant toiling at his harvest, are themselves reaping today the relentless harvest of war that has at last been made possible by the work of shipyard, foundry and factory, and months of hard training and exercise.

If Thomas à Kempis, in his Life of Gerard Groote, can speak of the world of his day as ‘ever turning to yet more evil courses’, John Busch, the Chronicler of Windesheim, and, like à Kempis, one of the earliest members of that Congregation, says, with his characteristic bluntness of speech, that it was ‘set already upon the way which leadeth down to Hell’. For it was in 1340 that ‘God, looking upon the world with the eye of Fatherly goodness and merey, saw fit to make ready a light to enlighten the eyes of men and a lamp to show the way to Christ our Lord. This light was that reverend man of God, Gerard the Great, or, in the vulgar tongue, Groote, an inhabitant of Deventer in the diocese of Utrecht’. Endowed with ‘wealth, honour, learning and high place’, he passed, after brilliant school studies at home, first to Aachen and then to the Sorbonne, where he graduated in medicine and theology, as well as in law. He then returned home and was appointed Teacher in the Chapter School of Deventer, where he soon noquired a reputation as an educator and a leader of youth.

Readers of the Life of the Spirit have good reason to be grateful to Père M. J. Nicolas, O.P. for his fine exposition of ‘The True Basis of Religious Life’. At the beginning of his article he raises one of the most difficult problems facing religious orders at the present day. He is acutely conscious of the difficulties that modern temperaments have in adapting themselves to the traditional system of religious life with its discipline and restraints, particularly in the older and the strictly enclosed Orders. With great sympathy and frankness he recognises that these difficulties have to be faced both from the point of view of aspirants themselves and that of Superiors who try to help them.

Père Nicolas considers the problem first as one of health. Since the Editor has invited discussion, perhaps some comments may be permitted from a medical and especially a psychological point of view.

Health, in its narrowest sense, is not in question; freedom from serious bodily and mental disease is of course essential. It is rather a question of temperament, character and psychophysical constitution.

Blessed Nicolaus was a hermit, respected and beloved not only by his contemporaries, but to this day in his native land of Switzerland, in his great shrine in Sachsen, and in several chapels as well as his own memorial chapel at Ranft.

The Swiss believe that it was owing to his prayers and protection that their country was immune in the 1914-18 war and in this one; and the gratitude of the nation has shown itself in a large fresco painted in his memorial church at Ranft, showing Switzerland as a sort of island, upheld by Blessed Nicolaus, amidst the general welter of slaughter and suffering of the rest of Europe. He is considered one of the nation’s heroes, indeed, had it not been for his prophetic vision and wisdom Switzerland might never have become a country at all.

Nicolaus had many visions, but in the first great vision he suffered pains; for God, in one moment, freed his body from the bands of necessities such as other men are heir to; the piercing light raised him from the ground, and taught him he was to seek all in God.