We must often have found comfort in that frequent image of the Psalms, that of the mother-bird sheltering her young ones under her wings: ‘He shall cover thee with his pinions and under his wings shalt thou shelter’. We should perhaps find even greater comfort in that image in the realisation that it connotes especially the abiding presence in the tabernacle. For that image came from the tabernacle of the desert. It was there that it originated. It was suggested by God himself when he bade Moses to remind the Israelites how he delivered them from Egypt, and walked with them, led them, carried them through the wilderness as an eagle carries her eaglets: ‘Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob…: You have seen what I have done to the Egyptians, how I have carried you upon the wings of eagles and have taken. you to myself’ (Exod. 19).

It is now time to consider certain charges of unorthodoxy which have been levelled against Mother Julian of Norwich. In the question of sin and the salvation of the elect both David Knowles and Roger Hudleston accuse her of unorthodoxy. They do not of course suggest that her doctrine in general is suspect, but rather that she has fallen briefly and inconsistently into an unorthodox view. The point arises out of her solution of her ‘great difficulty’ (p. 127) that all can be well and yet men can sin and send themselves to hell. She appears to restrict her understanding of this intuition of all being well simply to the elect, to the predestined who are to be fully graced in the end.

However gladly I have accepted this invitation to lead you back to the well-springs of the intensely Catholic tradition enshrined within this Priory, I confess my shortcomings and would, in all sincerity, beg your indulgence whilst I ask you to praise and bless and proclaim a simple fact—the fact that our Father, Dominic, was not imprisoned in his own century, but lives for every century; that his mission was not temporary but eternal; that he represents a Catholic inspiration, simple and inexhaustible. In that fact I see the whole raison d'étre of this Feast.

Sigeid Undset's conversion in 1924 aroused something like consternation in Norway. There are few Catholics in the country—not quite three thousand— and there is much prejudice and accompanying ignorance of Catholic teaching. And yet her intimate friends and those who read her books carefully had long been aware of the trend of her thoughts. As far back as 1915 she wrote to a friend that ‘the Eoman Church has at least form and is not irritating to one's intelligence’. Later on she remarks that Eoper's life of his father-in-law, Thomas More, is one of the most beautiful things she has ever read; and her preoccupation with and widening knowledge of the middle ages, the ages of faith, in Preparation for the writing of her masterpiece, Kristin Lavransdatter, no doubt played a great part in enabling her to take the final step.

From the wider and more general considerations we may now presume to formulate in clearer and more precise terms what is here meant by the words Nature and Grace. In the modern vernacular they no longer at once offer to the mind the clear-cut idea they once represented when Catholic doctrine was more familar and more closely ingrained in the English mind. In the developing and perhaps changing philosophy of any given people, particular terms or words endure in current use; but gradually they are emptied of the significance that once charged them, and they are apt to become uncertain coin of exchange, particularly within the generation which marks the dissolution of a preceding era and the opening out upon new and uncertain adventures of the human spirit.

The following two short pieces have been commonly ascribed to St Basil the Great; since the Venice edition of 1535 they have been printed among his works (Anand: Revue bénédict., t. LVI, pp. 162 sq., nn. 7, 8). In the Maurist edition (Paris, 1721-30) they follow the Moralia, and immediately precede the Regulae fusius tractatae. This text, with the accont panying Latin translation, was reprinted at Paris in 1839 (S.P.N. Basilii … opera omnia, t. II, pp. 445-456), and less accurately by Migne (Patrol. Graeca, t. XXXI, col. 869-888). The Paris text of 1839 is here followed, though the division into short paragraphs, and their headings, are the translator's.