I have been asked to speak to you about your spiritual responsibilities. Better than anyone you know the weight of them, and very specially at a time when the religious life is suSering from some disrepute, from reproaches, attacks, even from a recruiting crisis. The misunderstandings, the calumnies even, which circulate among people of the world, whether practising or not, are hardly worth considering. On the other hand, what does deserve attention is the opinion of those Christians, priasts or layfolk, who seem to be the active elements of what His Eminence Cardinal Suhard calls ‘the springtime of the Church'.

Increasingly nowadays priests, and holy priests of good judgment and experience, hesitate to recommend the religious life to their penitents. On their side, many young girls, apparently called to evangelical perfection, seek something other than the religious state, in so ‘far at least as they are able to know it.

As the first, original sin was committed through the sinful mediation of a woman, so it was through a woman's consent and just mediation that we were redeemed from the guilt of this sin. Conceived without the stain of original sin, our Lady was the second Eve. She was the perfect tabernacle of God, simply the mother of Jesus, because she was utterly selfless, because in an old metaphor of the Fathers revived in a recent book, she was like a pipe which waits for the air to blow through it to make music, the Reed of God.

Our Lady was the throne of Wisdom because she can be perfectly described as the Woman who was poor. Here at last was the complete gift of self, the unconditional sacrifice of the creature which God looked for in Adam and Eve, and looked for in vain. So our Lady became infinitely rich, Sedes Sapientiae, and entered upon the earthly motherhood with that perfection which she carried on to her eternal motherhood wherein she dispenses to man the same Wisdom whom she mothered in Palestine.

During the 14th century, several books on the interior life were written in England. The most useful of these is, perhaps, the Scale of Perfection, composed by Water Hilton, a Canon of the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire.

It is as fresh in manner as though it had been written yesterday. We feel, while reading it, as though we were learning from some wise spiritual director of our own time. The style is easy, the sentences simple in construction. There is little that we may regard as archaic; the book is as applicable to any century as is the Imitation. The guidance along the road of the spiritual life is just that which we would hear today from an experienced confessor, or the skilled conductor of a Retreat. It is eminently practical Charity and humility are the two virtues on which men should build the structure of the contemplative life. The chief study and reading should be that of Holy Writ.

How I should like to deepen my spiritual life by more prayer and reading; but I simply haven't the time—this complaint can often be heard from many who earnestly desire a more intimate relationship with God and feel that what prevents them from achieving it is mainly lack of that minimum of leisure which is indispensable for an intense life of prayer. Yet, if we look at the Saints we shall discover the paradoxical phenomenon that the more they prayed the more time they seemed to have for their apostolic work. Whether we take St Dominic or St Teresa, St Bernard or St Catherine of Siena, we are confronted with the fact that they accomplished in a very short time tasks sufficient for several ordinary long human lives, and in addition gave what seems to us a disproportionate amount of time to prayer. It looks, indeed, as if our Lord's promise that to those who seek first the Kingdom of God all else will be added includes also time. If we give time to him he will give it back to us with interest.

Numberless, my beloved children, are the tokens of love and of the infinite goodness of God in our regard. Wherever we turn we see in all directions signs of his protection and his tenderness; so much so that, ‘iSTo one can hide himself from his heat’ (Ps. 18). This immense goodness, in which no evil can have part, and which is not something added to God but his very nature and essence, this goodness, I say, what else can it desire but to love, to give Itself, to manifest Itself, to communicate and transmit Itself? All this It does as far as It can. without respite, with no respect of persons, with perfect justice. And so, there is no moment, or point of time however short, in which God does not will with all his strength to fill every reasonable soul with all good things, with all grace, all his gifts and all riches. There is no instant in which he does not desire to make his dwelling within her, to abide in her trustfully and with delight, to purify her and preserve her from all evil, to adorn her with virtues as with so many precious stones.