I Suppose the thing that strikes one most forcibly about St Augustine's Confessions is the astonishing power of introspection which they reveal. Rarely can there have been a man aware of himself and his experience with such ruthless clarity. The result is that all Augustine's theological thought is an experience-theology. it is never abstract, uncommitted, or impersonal. But this is not to say that his mind remained enclosed in his own personal world. He was not only a person of unusual self-awareness, he was also, if we can so put it, an unusually public person, Because he could look at himself so shrewdly and objectively, he was able to develop his experience into ideas of universal validity. It is with such a development of his experience of conversion that we are here concerned; not with the personal voyage of discovery described in the Confessions’, but with the geographical charts which came of that voyage, and which he unfolds in his De Tnnitate.

ST HYACINTH MARISCOTTI could be called the patron of back-sliders or the saint of the second chance. A study of her life would do much to ‘confirm the weak knees’ of all those of us who are so prone to say, ‘Sanctity is not for me'. Born at Vignarello in the papal states, of a noble and wealthy family, in the early seventeenth century, young Clarice Mariscotti was sent to Viterbo to be educated in the Franciscan convent. She was not remarkable for her piety and probably suffered from having a sister who was a nun in the same convent. Doubtless the sister also suffered, and one can readily imagine that the friction between the reproachful piety of the one and the misdemeanours of the other may have had unfortunate repercussions on a difficult temperament, giving rise to Clarice's later behaviour.

You would hardly expect to find any remains of the effigies of the Dominican saints in England today, after the great clearance made at the time of the Reformation, From 1221, the year St Dominic died, until the end of Mary's reign in 1558, or for three hundred years, there had been a continuous Dominican life throughout the kingdom.

It is amazing how quickly it spread and took root in most of the principal towns of England and Wales. In no other country were so many priories founded in so short a space of time. At the suppression, there were over a hundred, with an estimated number of nearly two thousand friars.

The eastern counties seem to have been the stronghold, and it is here that relics—strange as it may seem—have survived to the present day, in stone, alabaster, wood and glass.

Serlo was Abbot of Savigny in Normandy from 1139 to 1153 when he retired to Clairvaux; he died in 1158. He was a contemporary and admirer of StBernard; and it was no doubt largely owing to St Bernard's influence that in 1147 Serb submitted the whole group of Savigniac houses to the Cistercian Order. Among these were several in England, including Buckfast and Quarr. Serb had a reputation as a preacher. Of his thirty-four sermons known to survive—not all of them, however, are complete—the greater part were included in the sixth volume of the Bibliotheca patrum Cisterciensium, edited by Tissier in 1664. The rest remain apparently still in manuscript. An exception is that translated here, which was published by Dom Wilmart in the Revue Mabillon, tome XII (1922), pp. 26-3 8. The following is a rather free rendering of the Latin. A third section on prayer seems to be wanting. Perhaps time ran out and it was never delivered.

This article is concerned with the spiritual life of a mission, and. not with the spiritual life of a missionary. That is a different matter. A man may be a saint but yet unsuited to missionary work, as a good concert singer may be unsuited to opera. If the missionary can be both saint and missionary, well and good, but the essential thing is that he be a good missionary, understanding the technique of the work.

What is the root purpose of missionary work? The answer is simple: it is not merely to convert a number of people, to build a school, to teach the children to sing hymns—and wear European clothes?—but to plant the Church. The spiritual life of a mission means the spiritual life of the mystical body, lived by the people there. It means the Church as she is in herself, as the popes have written about her in encyclicals, as the great ages of the Church have known her, and as history has revealed her.

In a jotting he made in 1821J. H. Newman wrote: ‘I speak of conversion with great diffidence, being obliged to adopt the language of books. For my feelings, as far as I remember, were so different from any account I have ever read, that I dare not go by what may be an individual case.'

The abbé Huvelin, who was to be God's principal instrument in the conversion of Charles de Foucauld, felt the same difficulty. 'The story of a conversion', he wrote, ‘even of one's own, is something that can never be fully understood. You can see the stages that have led up to it, but that is all. Our Lord acts in such a variety of ways.’ In this article we will sketch the story of such stages, and investigate as delicately as possible their convergence on the focal-point which constitutes de Foucauld's conversion.

ONE of the most enterprising ventures in the gramophonerecord market of recent months has been the issue of several notable items from the German catalogue of Cantate, available through the firm of Novello, 160 Wardour St, W.i. These records provide authentic and often outstanding performances of organ and choral music ancient and modern.

Robert Kobler's account of some preludes on the chorale Da Jesus an dem Kreuze Stand by Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654.) is mainly for the specialist and is played on the eighteenth-century organ at Herford Minster. The sleeve-jacket accompanying the disc (T71880F) carries a specification of the instrument. This is music not usually included in the programmes of British players and, on this account alone, deserves consideration.

Heinz Wunderlich's persuasive account of Bach's D Minor Trio- Sonata (T71876F which, like the Kobler record, is a 45-r.p.m., 7-inch), will be greeted by all students and teachers.