October is the month which the Church has dedicated to the angels, and it is also the month in which the daily public recitation of the rosary before the Blessed Sacrament is obligatory in all churches. A coincidence? Perhaps; but a coincidence, whatever the word may mean, which is worth looking into.

Supposing our own recitation of the rosary has suffered some check, or has through our own fault become stale and wearisome like the prophet's valley of dry bones, then a consideration of the mysteries via the angels will perhaps breathe new life there too, as in the Mass, and prove a starting point for the quickened appreciation of our beads. For after the Mass, the rosary is the most important Catholic devotion, and if it is being neglected, then all is not well with us. The rosary has been called ‘the people's liturgy’—and that is the real answer to those unfortunate people who are irritated and distressed, and whose prayer seems to be altogether disturbed by the sight of the Mass-goer who is fingering his beads instead of turning the pages of the missal.

With the last war fresh in our minds, we are accustomed to think of prisoners as harshly treated victims of international disorder or unwilling captives of social justice. But here in St Paul we find a famous preacher rejoicing in his bonds, glad to be fettered since these chains set free the Word of God. Because he is in captivity other apostles have gone forth with greater boldness to proclaim the Gospel, while from the fertile mind and burning heart of the imprisoned apostle issue the glowing words of some of his finest epistles. Even today there are many who are willing to be prisoners for God, to 'wear chains in the Lord's service' (Eph. 4, 1. Knox version). Urged by their love of God and of souls, contemplative religious gladly disappear behind the bars in an enclosed Order. Captives indeed in a material sense, spiritually bound yet further by their three solemn vows, they experience the true freedom of the children ot God. The willing holocaust of their lives can be seen as reparation for the atrocities, committed against the unwilling victims of modern warfare and those bound under the tyranny of totalitarian rule. The glory of their lives is best described by St Thomas in the second part of the Summa: 'Those are called religious … who give themselves up entirely to the divine service as offering a holocaust to God'. 'Now the perfection of man consists & adhering wholly to God' (Ila-IIae, 187, 1).

Isaias was a member of a junior clan of the house of David, dwelling in Jerusalem in the age when the ferocious imperialism of Assyria overwhelmed first the north, then the centre of the Israelite peoples, and menaced little Judah when it remained the sole remnant of the tribes that Moses had led out of Egypt. His work was to be the spiritual guide and prophet of its survival; to be ascribed solely to deep faith in God, at the same time as he announced the doctrine of the Incarnation to men. But his prophetic office also involved a spiritual development in his own soul, which can here be traced as far as the records permit.

Christian spirituality and ethics, when most closely linked with the central affirmations of the Faith, have been traditionally expounded in terms of the ‘imitation of Christ’, This it is which has given them distinctively Christian ‘shape’, and secured that the Christian life is conceived as a possibility only because of the saving acts of God in Christ upon which as it depends. To describe the Christian life as the ‘imitation of Christ’ is not to present it, however, as a bare literal mimicry, but to stress that, in fact, the life of the Christian man is fundamentally the life of our Lord himself which he lives out in us in the sacramental life of the Church, if we will to have it so. The matter is already seen in this light in New Testament times, in, for example, St Paul's ‘Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies’ (2 Cor. 4, 10) or ‘I have been concrucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal. 2, 20).

The things I am going to write about are very ordinary; the framework of my life is very like that of millions of other women. A lot of people think it is dull, and so it might be except that the very dullness of it is a means of grace, and therefore no longer dull. So this is all I can write about— some of the ordinary events, thoughts, problems, prayers of an ordinary day; one of those days which seem so monotonous from outside, but into each of which is poured all the riches of God's grace, if only I have eyes clear enough to see it and a heart brave enough to accept it.

It is appropriate that the centenary of the Order and the establishment of an English noviciate should be hailed by such an excellent publication as The Society of Marie Auxiliatrice. Many people are now acquainted with the life of Blessed Marie Thérèse de Soubiran who died an exile from the Order she had founded, and many believe that this last sad phase of her life laid the foundations of that deep and tender charity for the poor and displaced which now marks her Order. This admirable book captures that spirit and lays it before us in a concise letterpress and numerous excellent pictures reproduced in France by the new heliograph process. After a preface containing extracts from the Holy Father's own address to the nuns of the Society on the occasion of the beatification of their foundress we are given a brief history of the Order.