The onlookers were amazed after the Apostles were filled with the Holy Ghost; they wondered, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine. With the commonsense answer, These are not drunk as you suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day, St Peter went on to give his hearers a dogmatic discourse on the incarnation: it was not an uplift exhortation about moral values nor a fine frenzy, but a down-to-the-earth statement of historic fact, followed by the uncompromising advice, Do penance, ana be baptized every one of you. Then, he added, yon shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.There could be no more fitting preface to a series of studies, of which this is the first, on the seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost in the light of scientific Christian theology.

Baptism joins us to Christ and allows us to share his divine life. It is the Holy Spirit who brings this new life to a Christian—'if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his’ (Rom. 8, 9). This close relationship between baptism and the gift of the Spirit was indicated by our Lord, who coming up out of the Jordan waters ‘saw the heavens opened and the Spirit as a dove descending and remaining on him’ (Mark 1, 10). The Spirit which filled Christ fills us too when we are baptized, and unites us as members of Christ to our head: ‘as the body is one and has many members … so also is Christ. For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free’ (1 Cor. 12, 12-13).

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.