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.

BY contemplation here I am not referring to any merely natural operation of the intellect, however sublime it may be, but to an operation much more elusive, namely, supernatural contemplation, called also mysticism. It may be defined as an immediate or experimental knowledge of God. Our ordinary knowledge of God, of his existence and. of his nature, comes to us not immediately but only mediately, that is through intellectual concepts or ideas in the mind derived from reason and faith. By our natural reason it is possible to know of God's existence and to some extent his attributes, but only by faith can “we know his inner nature, for example, his threefold personality. But mysticism, or mystical knowledge of God which is supernatural contemplation, is something quite different. This is immediate knowledge of God and experience of his presence through union with him by charity.

Christianity has produced without any doubt men and women who have fulfilled in themselves the greatest potentiality of the human personality. In all the centuries of the Christian era there stand out men and women, and no small number of them, whom everyone felt were fully developed and integrated and whom mankind could take as patterns of the mature and develped personality. This has been more so than in any other period of history.

It is very true that it is the triumph of the life of Christ in these men and women that has brought them to holiness, maturity and integration; but in the process their psychological development has taken place. The life of grace does not by-pass nature but adds to it, and lifts it on to another plane.