Of all the events of the Old Testament there is none which is of an importance comparable to the Exodus. It was the mighty Act of God, in the light of the whole history of Israel was given its meaning. By this act Israel had been delivered from bondage and formed into a people, it had been given a Law and made the subject of a Convenant; it had been guided through the desert and brought into the Promised Land. This was the pattern in which the Prophets saw the history of Israel. They looked back on it as the ‘time of her espousals', when Israel had been ‘holy to the Lord'. (Jer. 2, 2.) As time went on it was regarded more and more as the Golden Age, the period when God had been manifested to his people and they had walked in his light. But at the same time it was seen also as the ideal of the future.

Recent discussion has led to a recognition Christian mysticism differs fundamentally from that of the non-christian religions. It was necessary, first of all, in face of the historical positivists to show where this difference lies. The answers so far proposed indicate at least that this is to be sought in the trinitarian structure of our theism. It is remarkable how little this has been taken into account by the theologians of the last centuries, and how little influence it has had on Christian life. In theory the West has never lost sight of the unique nature of christian, i.e. trinitarian, theism, but in practice the Christian and non-Christian mystic differ less markedly. We do not account for this difference simply by saying that the revelation of the Trinity and the substitution of trinitarian forms for mono-theistic characterise Christian mysticism, for this would be to beg the question which is precisely how this reference to the Trinity makes Christian mysticism so unique a thing.

In the prayer composed by Pope Pius XII for the Jubilee Year of 1950, there is one petition that comes strikingly back to my mind as I am invited to write on the subject of the Holy Ghost. It is: ‘grant unto orphans, affectionate protection'; and it is particularly by the gift of the Holy Spirit that God answers such a petition. Indeed it Would be better to say that it is with no less a gift than that of the Holy Spirit that the prayer is answered. We who are ‘orphans’ as far as the lives of our spirit are concerned, have ourselves to blame if we do not benefit always by that affectionate protection with the giving of which the mission of the Holy Ghost is concerned.

In the Encyclical ‘Divinum Illud’ (9 May, 1897), specially devoted to the Holy Ghost, Leo XIII deplored the fact that the third Person of the Trinity is so little known and his divine mission so little appreciated by us.

The Forgotten Paraclete', the title of a small and now unobtainable book by a Catholic writer (Mgr Maurice Laudrieux), suggests that the ‘normal’ spirituality taught in seminaries and faithfully distributed to the Catholic flock since the seventeenth century has tended to ignore both the theology of the Holy Ghost and the necessary corollaries which should develop from it in daily Christian prayer and life.

This has not happened without some historically recognisable reason. Pére Congar, O.P., explains the situation when he writes: ‘Heresies always represent the erection into a system of undue or partial emphasis on a particular point of view…. In face of these one-sided deformations of truth the Church affirms indeed not only the particular truth which is perverted, but the whole corpus of truth which is above all partial statements…. It is quite impossible that apologists should not seek to re-establish the partially misunderstood truths, and that theologians should not devote themselves to more precise and detailed development of doctrine…. Wherever an erroneous emphasis or statement is made, the organism of the Church stiffens into concentrated resistance, with the result that since error is always partial, dogmatic truth runs the risk of appearing partial as well.’

On October 20th, 1946, Marie Thérèse de Soubiran was declared Blessed fifty-seven years after she had died a failure in the eyes of the world and of her rellow Christians. She was another Jeanne d'Arc in whom holiness looked like madness or stupidity and very unlike wholesomeness. Yet she had promised to be the most conventional of saints with breviary lessons written according to the book: she came of a comfortably placed French family with long traditions of piety and priests and nuns in the ancestral role; she was precocious in holiness and at the age of ten was put to direct the retreat of a young woman of twenty. Of the two the ten-year-old found it the greater humiliation. Her new foundation developed unobtrusively out of the sodality organised by her uncle, Canon de Soudan, and at the age of twenty-one she was the first Superior of the first regular community. Yet though the congregation grew steadily and Marie Thérèse duly became Superior .General, by the age of forty she was expelled, never to be Vindicated and to die in disgrace.

Interest in Saint Teresa of Avila is almost as inexhaustible as that in the little saint Thérèse. Publishers time and time again risk their money—and that is saying a lot these days—upon works dedicated to a study of some aspect of her life and works, and, having done so once, they do it again’ Here we have Messrs Burns and Oates, after recently publishing the Letters, now producing a life translated from the French of Marcelle Auclair. Faber and Faber have brought out a posthumous series of essays upon her, and other matters, by E. Allison Peers. Publishers are wise in their own generation. Why? Because Saint Teresa sells. There is that no sé qué about her which is everlastingly attractive. She is not a saint with a frown.

In the Allison Peers volume, St Teresa of Jesus and other Essays and Addresses, the other essays are by no means negligible. To begin with: the historical problem of Spanish Mysticism. Professor Peers asks the question: how account for the mystical eruption in the second half of the sixteenth century in Spain? He laboriously puts aside a number of partial answers.