The week of prayer for the reunion of Christians reminds us that all baptized, people, at present divided from each other, are called to be one.

Throughout the world, from Protestant as well as Catholic, from Orthodox as well as Anglican, will rise the prayer of all who know how painful and how evil are the divisions among Christians.

Nine centuries have passed since the greater part of the Christian East separated from Rome. It is over four hundred years since the Reformation.

And the mass of hundreds of millions of Catholic, Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox believers live to a greater or less degree in a state of indifference to each other.

About 2,400 millions are living on the earth, half in Asia. Nominally, about 400 million are Catholic; 200 million are Orthodox; 175 million are Protestant; and 50 million are Anglican.

This is the account of an experiment. While the need for the teaching of the Old Testament in Catholic schools is gradually becoming more widely recognized, our children do not, in general, have that familiarity with the language of the Old Testament which is so often found among Christians brought up in other surroundings. While this is neither the time nor the place to discuss the pros and cons of a vernacular liturgy, it is obvious that a child who hears some portion of the Scriptures read at the daily Assembly will acquire a familiarity with the language and images employed therein. To attempt to teach the New Testament without a good grounding in the Old, is to deprive it of considerable significance, and it is in the Junior School that such a foundation can be laid.

While there are many collections of Bible stories (and nowadays even strip-cartoons) for children, the real value of all these attractive aids should be to lead the child to a desire for the real thing: the inspired word of God.

Prayer in its specialized sense means turning our hearts and minds to God. Prayer in its widest sense means directing our whole lives to God. Everything falls under this definition: work, play, joy, sorrow, health, sickness, our whole selves and the circumstances in which we live. But if we are to direct our lives to God we must see life as it really is—God's plan to enable us to know, love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him for ever in heaven. Any conflict in our minds here is fatal. “We need to see life as a whole, not divided into watertight compartments of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ or ‘indifferent', but as God's will being worked out by us, here and now, in everything. It means co-ordinating the bits and pieces that make up everyday lite into one harmonious whole, knit together by the simple desire of pleasing God at all times and seeing his hand in all things.

Stories told to illustrate the different spirits prevailing in Religious Orders are legion. One, that must have many variations, jibes at the Order of St Dominic for being coldly intellectual. Whatever foundation in fact can be discovered for these diverting little legends, it must be admitted that the founder of the Order himself was anything but cold. There is an abundance of detail from eye-witness accounts which glows with warmth—a warmth which proves, if any proof were needed, that if an intense intellectual activity dries up the heart it need not necessarily do so. The Lessons for the Commemoration of St Dominic in Suriano, for example, must make surprising reading for those for whom the name of St Dominic conjures up visions of a heartless inquisitor or even an absent-minded if holy professor. The people who knew him and indeed had to live with him, tell us a very different story, a story that is not a vague eulogizing, but one that is alive with human interest: that relates little incidents from personal reminiscence.

We have a first-hand account of the sufferings oj these martyrs in a letter which the Christians of Lyons, in the south of France, wrote to the churches of Asia Minor, with whom they had historical connections. The letter was quoted at length by the Church historian Eusebius in the fourth century, and a translation of it as he gives it is here presented. The reader will notice that the word ‘confession occurs very often. It is always used in the sense of a confession of faith, and never in the sense of a confession of sins. Besides describing the gruesome torments which the martyrs endured, the writer constantly refers to them in terms from the athletic world. One such phrase which he uses has become a commonplace of Christian language, the phrase ‘a martyr's crown. Nowadays we think of a crown as a king's head’ dress, made of gold and precious stones.

An article on ‘The Divine Office as a Method of Prayer’ in The Life of the Spirit, August 1951, by Dom Bede Griffiths, impressed me as having much to say that is of use to all Christians both lay and religious, especially in these times when a slow but deep-seated revolution in spirituality is taking place. Perhaps, however, the most significant sentence of all comes in the opening paragraph. After telling the story of the young priest who studied the psalms so carefully that to him they ceased to be prayers at all, the writer says:

Christ teacheth that we should work for ourselves and, going without much, become content with little. Thus for Himself, He cut down even of necessities, using no beast to bear Him, but walking such distances that He became weary with His journey Wherefore, said He: ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head:’ and of His days and nights, too, He spent most on the mountains and in the deserts. And of Him did David foretell: ‘He shall drink of the Evangelist in the way.’ So then at the Well of Sychar doth John the Evangelist shew the Lord to be careless of food, treating the matter as of little import; and thus were the disciples taught, taking with them no provisions for the road. Different indeed from us, who rising from our beds are soon calling for provisions, and with earnestness, concerning ourselves with cooks and caterers.