Many people have a genuine desire for perfection and consistently strive to become better. Apart from the small failings which are inevitable, they keep up a constant and generous effort with a view to their spiritual progress. Good will is the last thing they lack. It is all the more important, then, that such people should not find that they have made a mistake as to the fundamental direction of their effort. In exhorting them to become increasingly more generous, one has not even begun to tackle the problem, for what they need is not exhortation so touch as direction. We should like to indicate here the main lines along which the spiritual life develops in accordance with prudence, in contradistinction to notions which are perhaps currently admitted, but which, in our opinion, have been insufficiently, examined.

The sacraments, and baptism first of all, are the means by which Christ unites us to the Church which is his body. Yet we may well wonder how the pouring of a little water, the brief statement of the priest, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’, can effect so great a change of course it is possible simply to reply ‘because God wills it to be so’, and perhaps ultimately there is nothing more to be said, but it is still open to us to explore the meaning of such mysteries as far as we can. The truths revealed by God and handed on to us by the Church are indeed mysteries, acceptable only to those who have received the grace of faith, but faith is given to our minds and needs to be thought about.

One of the early names for Baptism was the ‘Sacrament of Faith', and those who were baptized became the ‘enlightened'. To think of this Sacrament simply as an fitiation rite, performed once and then left in the background as one would walk through the front door of a house and shut it before settling down in the drawing room to be comfortably at home; to think of it simply as the formal entry into the Church is to miss its constant power to raise the Christian to the heights holiness. The earlier Christian understood that it brought an entirely new light into the newly baptized's life and that light shone and transformed everything so that as his eyes grew accustomed to its power they could eventually perceive the glory of God, and sustained by baptismal grace reach to the heights of the Christian union with God.

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.

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.