Nature abhors a vacuum: and terrible things can happen to a man with an empty heart. That is one reason why it can be more difficult for a priest or a religious to be a good Christian, living a really vital Christian life, than for happily-married lay people. The latter can without too much difficulty integrate their love of each other into their shared love of God, sanctifying the one and deepening the other. What of the priest and the religious?

One sometimes meets among lay people a dangerously romanticised idea of this vocation. For them, these are men and women set apart, dedicated, living in the sanctuary, their whole lives are spent close to God, their minds and hearts filled with God, and with a charity which causes them to think of all other human beings as ‘souls’ to be served and saved. And to move the more sentimental, there is that appalling painting of the young monk with cowled head gazing wistfully through the narrow gothic windows of his tiny cell at the world he has lost for ever…

Those chosen to judge the ‘Political Prisoner’ competition in London disagreed about the respective merits of the different entries. But on one point they were unanimous: that merely factual models (of prisoners looking out from behind barbed wire, for instance) are quite inadequate; and that only something symbolic is capable of re-presenting the reality of the political prisoner situation. Their insistence that it requires a symbol, not a mere photographic reproduction or sign, to re-present reality is but one example of that search for adequate symbols in which the most sensitive minds of our times are engaged. The number of those engaged in this search, and the intensity of their efforts, is easily under-estimated because the persons concerned do not fall into the customary political, religious or artistic categories; and so one fails to observe what they have in common until one becomes aware oneself of the search that is on.

Three books have emerged from France-one already courageously translated into English, the second in process of translation, and the third inviting such a process-which between them mark the path of man from the depths of automatism to the heights of freedom. The flash title of the Etudes Carmélitaines—'du Robot au Martyr'— gives a fair indication of the theme treated in diverse ways by all the many contributors to the three volumes.

We live in a Robot age in so many directions that the modern moralist is confronted with a vast set of problems of conditioned, mechanical human actions with which he has hardly begun to grapple. How is he to judge of the culpability or the praiseworthiness of actions that are largely conditioned by interior, psychological or external, social compulsion? The widespread, unnatural and solitary vice among the young may be judged objectively as a serious sin.

Both under the Old Dispensation and under the New, God has often used the scourge of war, exile and captivity to summon his people to a renewal of faith, to call them to repentance and conversion. Christians have had to undergo this experience in our own times in Europe and Asia, and accounts of their witness to their faith are reaching us from many quarters. What grace and profit may accrue to the Church from their fidelity and their sufferings we cannot tell: that is in God's hands. But might it not be, also, that in his providential plan for us there is a place for the published records of such experiences, many of them by our separated brethren, which we have not yet learnt to appreciate sufficiently? Perhaps, in one sense, it is too easy to be impressed by the courageous stand of a Faulhaber or a Niemöller; perhaps we are too readily moved by the joy and serenity in the letters of a von Moltke, written from prison, awaiting execution, condemned for the sole reason that he had confessed to placing loyalty to God above that to his Führer.

To say that Dom Rembert Sorg's Holy Work disappoints the hopes it arouses, is not to deny that it was an essay well worth writing. It attempts to show the relevance of the monastic tradition concerning manual labour not only for the rejuvenation of the monastic life itself but also for the solution of the problems of Christian labour in a pagan society. Let it be said at once that its claim to present a theological rather than an historical justification of its approach is somewhat exaggerated. It assembles a number of reflections which have a theological bearing, but they are not built into a cumulative and cogent argument, a weakness which reveals itself clearly in the important final chapter on the laity. To those not already favour. ably disposed to the author's thesis, its presentation will seem uncomfortably divided between two methods, neither of which is adequately used for it dispenses with a detailed historical treatment without compensating for it by a sufficiently judicious theoretical one.

Prologue: While I was yet a boy at school and took great delight in the company of my fellows, in the midst of the habits and vices with which that period of life is usually beset, my energy was wholly given to affection and devoted to love; so that nothing seemed to me more pleasing, nothing more joyful, nothing more useful, than to be loved and to love. So, fluctuating between diverse loves and friendships, my mind was dragged hither and thither, and being ignorant of the law of true friendship, was often deceived by its mere image. At length there came into my hands Cicero's book on friendship, which immediately presented itself to me as useful by the sanity of its opinions and as enjoyable by its perfection of style. And although I did not see myself fit for such friendship, I rejoiced at having found some rule of friendship to which I could conform the course of my loves and affections.