In Writing of marriage and prayer I am writing of normal, happy marriage. In a marriage which is unhappy for physical, mental, or spiritual reasons, through the fault of either partner, or both, or neither, there may be great holiness, but this holiness will not be according to the pattern of sanctity which God designs for marriage. It is of the life of prayer within pattern that I want to write, using the word ‘prayer‘ in its widest sense of the whole relationship of the dedicated soul with God. It is a pity that the saints are so little help in this matter. Most married saints either lost their partners early, or struggled towards sanctity through the suffering caused by an unhappy marriage. There are exceptions: St Margaret of Scotland and St Elizabeth of Hungary are great examples, but we know so little of their private lives that for practical purposes they are not much help. St Thomas More's first marriage seems to have been happy, but his young wife died early, and his second wife was never more than a well-loved house-keeper, whom he seems to have found on occasion rather irritating.

If we look at contemporary society, we are struck immediately by its obsession with sex, with sexual desire and its results. Marriage, divorce and sexual aberration are always news. The politician, the police, the social planner, the psychogist, the moralist, are concerned with population figures, juvenile delinquency, family planning, unmarried mothers, and sexual neurosis, resulting sometimes in complete inhibition, sometimes in complete promiscuity. They are all concerned with the family, and with what is happening at the root of the family, with the relationship between husband and wife. If we look at Christianity we find at its centre a doctrine of love, a sacramental doctrine which has its common realization in marriage; we find the sacrament of the family with its root in the relationship between husband and wife.

The most publicized aspect of the relationship between husband and wife today is the control of the number of children born to them. Various methods are used to prevent conception ensuing from intercourse. The most frequently heard aspect of the relationship from the Catholic point of view concerns the same subject.

One of the points most strongly emphasized in the two great encyclicals of Pius XI on Christian Marriage (Casti Connubii) and The Christian Education of Youth (Divini Illius Magistri) is that the foundation of true education is the family. That is where education begins and where the ground of human personality is first prepared for its full growth to maturity. If this basic education is missing or defective all further education is liable to be like building an elaborate superstructure on faulty and insecure foundations or trying to cultivate plants in poisoned or exhausted soil.

Unfortunately there seems to be a growing tendency, even among practising Catholics, to shift the responsibility for the basic education of the young from the family circle to the school. A tendency to imagine that the good nuns or other teachers from the infant school onwards, will do all that is necessary in the way of teaching religion. It is almost taken for granted in consequence that the father and mother, and elder brothers and sisters, have no immediate concern with the religious atmosphere in which the younger children are growing up.

Peace be upon you.’ Our Lord's greeting to his disciples after his resurrection from the dead is one of peace: for a new life has begun for all who believe in him, a life , peace. The old conflicts are over, the war is won; man is restored to God's friendship, he is reconciled, redeemed. And this is to work of Christ our Lord: he has triumphed over sin and death through his own dying, and the barriers that separated men from God are broken down, the barriers of sin which no merely human power could ever destroy. And peace begins: the peace of Christ himself communicated now to all whom he has redeemed.

But the peace that our Lord brings to man is very different from the peace that is so often on men's lips, the peace that is simply the absence of conflict, an interval between wars. His peace, he tells us, is his legacy to those who believe in him—'My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you…. But not as the world gives …'.

The Home, the Christian home based on the sacramental grace of matrimony, was the theme of one of the last series of sermons preached by Fr Bede Jarrett, O.P., in America. That was in 1929, only a few months before Pius XI's great encyclical on Christian marriage delivered in Rome. Twenty-five years have passed since these sermons were first published and the welcome new edition of the book gives us an opportunity to look back over this epoch which has been characterized by so much discussion and theologizing on the of marriage. With the attack on marriage and the home to such intensity during this century it was inevitable that the Christian should have to think out his position anew in his defence of an intitution so central to his life as a human being and as a sharer in the life of God. During these last twenty-five years in particular there have been many theories which seemed to place the love and companionship of the married couple above that of the family, that is of the children.