Prayer means turning our hearts and minds to God. No two persons converse with him in identical ways; even in corporate prayer we each infuse the same words with our individual needs and aspirations, and private prayer, whether vocal or meditative, is essentially personal. But we all have hearts and minds and, broadly speaking, the same problems: and the greatest of these is aridity. No one has ever advanced in the spiritual life without experiencing times when devotion seems non-existent, prayer distasteful or humiliatingly difficult, meditation moribund and discouragement an ever-present temptation, but though our books warn us of these trials our own experiences are different from anything we expect to undergo.

Although religious instruction occupies a separate place in the curriculum of a Catholic school, and although we pay special attention to this class no one believes that religious instruction, and still less training, is finished when the religious knowledge period is over. Every practising Catholic in England must have heard, perhaps oftener than he cares to remember, the argument for staffing Catholic schools with Catholic teachers, that religion must penetrate all departments. It is a truth which, rightly, Catholics take for granted, and equally surely it is a principle which experienced Catholic teachers put into practice with little or no reflection and with a skill that sometimes seems infallible. As children reach the age of thirteen or fourteen this becomes a more important matter, for they are arriving at the critical years of change from childhood to manhood, and the Sacrament of Confirmation which they may have received recently or some years previously acquires considerable importance.

We publish this article, a paper from South Africa read by an Anglican religious, a member of the Society of the Sacred Mission—and a grateful reader of ‘The Life of the Spirit'—to a group of ministers of several Christian allegiances. In reading it we are listening in, so to speak, to a private conversation between some of our separated brethren, themselves separated from each other. Their language is not altogether ours, nor can we make our own some of their assumptions, but we can recognize at least one thing that we share wholly with them, a faith in and love for Christ Our Lord and a desire to be his disciples. To realise this and apprehend it more clearly is to take at least one step forward towards the unity of all Christian men in the One, True Church.

Time and again we have been urged, as individuals, in our homes, in our schools, and everywhere, to say the Rosary. Surely we must now begin to put the stress on praying the Rosary. We are concerned about the very soul of this devotion, and so about the immensely more important part of any Rosary. As the soul is always more important than the body, so too meditation of the Rosary should always have priority over any merely material recitation of the beads. This should be obvious to all. Yet how often do we slip into careless ways of talking. It is very easy for a priest to tell you, ‘for your penance, say a decade of the Rosary'. Or, perhaps, two friends may be passing a church, and one will say to the other: ‘Let's drop in and say a Rosary…’

Many of those who come to the Church after some years of the faithful service of God in one of the separated Churches express the hope that they will be able, from their knowledge and experience, to make a particular contribution to the re-union of Christendom. Since they know both the Church and one or other of the separated bodies more or less closely related to it, from the inside, they hope that they will be able to help forward the day of reconciliation between the two. How far are such hopes justified? Many of us know people who have had expectation such as these and who have been disappointed; and do are indeed some converts, well-known in the Church, who do not appear to have been able to work for the return of their former brethren in the way others, perhaps, imagined they would be able to do. Does being a convert necessarily imply usefulness in this field?

We are sometimes asked, and we sometimes ask ourselves, ‘What is Dominican education?’ It sounds a foolish and perhaps an arrogant question, as if Dominicans were supposed to possess a secret which made their teaching substantially different from everyone else's. That is not the idea at all. It is simply the question asked by an intelligent parent who is thinking of sending his child to a Dominican school. He knows what is meant by education; the process of equipping children with the means to know, love and serve God, and of developing their power to use these means. Education should produce wise men, naturally and supernaturally. There are many right but different ways of achieving this purpose, and to a great extent these different ways are represented by the different religious orders who teach.

My dear Fathers and Brothers, we have met here to discuss the relevance of Newman to the modern age, and we have prided ourselves, not without reason, that we have come to understand him better than many in the past. We have, however, been in some danger of forgetting what the essential aim of his life was, and what the fundamental lesson it teaches us. Yet these matters were thoroughly understood from the first, and clearly stated at the time of Newman's death, by two writers especially, neither of whom were Catholics.

The first biography to appear after Cardinal Newman died was that of R. H. Hutton, of The Spectator. It hailed him as the champion of revealed religion, and showed how this gave his life the wonderful unity which characterized it. Amid the many changes of his career, his one object, to which from the age of sixteen he was entirely devoted, was the promotion of faith in the Christian revelation. Certainly Hutton was right.

With a title of this nature the reader may perhaps expect an invitatory ‘In Praise of Printing’, followed by a bibliography of the various Missals in Latin and English designed for the laity, in prices ranging from the lowest for the poorest to the highest for those who are reputed to find it difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But not every enthusiast for the liturgy is now a strong supporter of the Missal for the laity; there have been in recent months refreshing criticisms of the use of this book from men rightly reputed for their support of the liturgicle revival. The Missal more often than not erects a barrier between the worshipper and the altar. In his enthusiasm to match his English with the Latin in the other column the missal-user may forget that he is taking part in an action and not in a linguistic exercise.

Noise and haste brand our times….’ No novel statement, this: we have all heard it in some form or other, and most people, at least in the Western world, surely agree. We are slaves—the very watch on our wrist a sign of servitude—we have ‘no time', ‘no rest'; ‘Angina Temporis’ (as Dr Bramesfeld terms it) is a common disease. It is a fact that, even if a few free days do come our way, we are no longer caplable of relaxing; restless activity holds us entirely in its power. Man, his nerves tense and his mind fuddled, finds no shelter of peace awaiting him when he is ejected nightly from office or factory; wearily he reaches home, only to plunge himself into so-called amusements. His money is taken from him and in return he becomes momentarily intoxicated with unhealthy, forced excitment, but there is neither peace nor lasting satisfaction in it.

One does not need to be a snob to be interested in, or even to admit the existence of, people's different social background or family origins. Moreover, it is even customary to give special credit to the distinguished person who succeeded in spite of“a ‘bad start', to the field-marshal who began in the backstreet and not on the playing-fields of Eton, or to the business magnate who graduated in the cycle-shop and not at the university. Of course all this may have little or nothing to do with sanctity, but when we are considering Dominican Saints (and Beati), in an order where a certain level of education is required in its subjects, to carry out the order's aim, the matter of childhood opportunities does have a certain relevance. The same may be said to some extent of the priesthood in general.

This question covers a wide, largely unexplored field. It will not be easy to draw parallels before we know what to choose as a type for comparison in the synagogal liturgy on the one hand, and in the wealth of Christian liturgies On the other. Jewish prayers comprise not only those which were codified and organized as such and may be termed liturgy proper, but also an abundance of another type of prayer which is not official, but where we may yet find traces of the early Jewish prayer. In the Christian liturgy the best witness will not be the Roman, but some of the Eastern rites, especially the Coptic and Syriac.

Again similarities with the synagogal prayer will be found more easily in the Divine Office than in the Mass. Although we know very little about the origins of the breviary and how it was constituted, one notices a convergence of private and monastic piety, as well as liturgical tradition, part of the latter going back to the Synagogue.

‘Coming to the second element of a religious and priestly vocation, we learn from the Roman Catechism that those have a divine vocation who are called by the legitimate ministers of the Church. This in no way contradicts what we have said about the divine call; rather it is very closely connected with it. For the divine calling of a man to the religious and priestly state destines him to a life in public of holiness and to the exercise of a hierarchic ministry, in the visible, hierarchic society of the Church; consequently such calling ought to have also the confirmation, admission and guidance of those hierarchic rulers to whose administration the Church has been committed by God.’

In these words the Holy Father makes it clear that there would be a kind of contradiction in a vocation to the religious life of priesthood that came simply from God and did not have besides the approval of the Church, that is, of responsible ecclesiastical superiors.

It is undoubtedly one of the glories of our English language that normal usage, both in speech and in writing, is so frequently in debt to the text of the Bible. It is probably true that the speech of civilised man has for centuries everywhere been greatly influenced by the words of Scripture, but it may perhaps be claimed that this is particularly true of the speech of Englishmen. Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly quoting Scripture, or using phrases or metaphors coming directly from the Bible. Often enough we are unaware that we are quoting the Sermon on the Mount, when we describe someone as the ‘salt of the earth’ (Matt. 5, 13) or ‘a wolf in sheep's clothing’ (7, 15), when we speak of ‘blowing one's own trumpet’ (6, 2), not caring a ‘jot’ or ‘iota’ (5, 18), putting a light ‘under a bushel’ (5, 15), or serving ‘God and mammon’ (6, 24).

Worship is the outcome of living faith, the expression of a sincere conviction in some external and visible form. There is innate in every society and individual the urge to communicate and share conviction. Good naturally spreads itself in companionship. The Church is a society both human and divine; divine in its origin and support and human in its composition. It gives effect to this urge in two main streams, the liturgy and private devotion. As a society its worship is found in the liturgy, but the individual members of that society express themselves in a variety of private devotions. These two streams are nevertheless vitally connected. The liturgy of its very nature and because it is the official and common worship of the body, politic remains somewhat static and is carefully prescribed ano ruled by laws.

Robert Grosseteste, one of the greatest men of the thirteenth centurf England and bishop of Lincoln from 1235-1253, was in frequent contact with the numerous religious houses in his diocese. Often his high-handed but probably necessary actions as Visitor were not appreciated by the communities which experienced them. His correspondence moreover shows him complaining to the abbot of Fleury about the irregular lives of some of his monks belonging to cells in his diocese, and giving sarcastic advice to the canons of Missenden on the choice of their future superior. But the present letter to the monks of Bury St Edmunds is witness to do much more cordial feeling, and shows the bishop's deep esteem for the life led by these monks in accordance with ideals which he shared.

To Peter, these things spake the Lord in prophecy and command: Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build my Church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it: Feed thou my sheep: As my Father sent me, so I send you. Thus upon Unity, was the beginning made and the words fulfilled of the Song of Songs where, in the Person of Christ, the Holy Spirit declared: My Dove, my spotless one is but one. She is the only child of her Mother, the Chosen of her that bare her.

If a man, then, stands not by this Unity of the Church, thinks he to hold the Faith? Can he who strives against the Church be yet within it; Even so taught the Apostle Paul: There is One Body and One Spirit even as ye are called in One Hope of your calling; One Lord, One Faith.

Christian art in its broad sense is generally taken to mean. any creative work done by an artist who is a ticul professing Christian. Today I wish to consider a particular aspect of Christian art, that is work carried out for, and applied to churches, chapels, or schools, with particular reference to images of the Saints.

In the first place let us consider the attitude of mind the artist should have in his approach to the problems of ecclesiastical art. It almost goes without saying that the Christian artist should have a sound knowledge of his Faith, and that he should be to some extent aware of contemporary Christian life and thought. In fact the visual arts must be part of this ever developing and active intellectual life of the Church, if they are to rise above the general level of the stagnant trade tawdriness of the work in many of our churches.

How is a mime made? Surely the methods must be as varied as the makers, so that any description will to some extent, be personal.

First, the choosing of a theme. Mime is essentially simple: in its action, in its presentation, in its appeal, and to derive full value from it, the underlying idea needs to be simple too; simple because it is basic, a statement of fact, which is not to deny that it may be profound. Indeed, it is through the simple straight forward movements of mime that some of the deepest mysteries of our faith may be illustrated.

The theme of this mime was to be twofold: the linking thread was to be that of the angels, whose name both in Hebrew and Greek means ‘a messenger’, and it was in this manner that they were to be shown, as God’s messengers to man.