Blessed Virgin, Saint Mary, our Blessed Lady, the Mother of God, who with all the saints dost not cease to pray unto Almighty God in general I for succour in all distresses of the whole Catholic ‘Church, I beseech thee most humbly that as it hath both pleased thee of special favour to take upon thee the special protection of this realm of England thy Dower, so thou wilt vouchsafe by thy special prayers to thy sweet Son our Lord Jesus Christ, to prefer the same continually, and at this present, most instantly to deliver it from schism and heresy, and to restore it again to the unity of the holy Catholic Church, that all English people, above all other nations, may worthily from henceforth call thee blessed, and honour thy lame for ever, saying thus:

One might suspect a distrust towards marriage in the words of a recent statement in a publisher's blurb advertising a book upon saints who were I married. The blurb declares it the purpose of the book to show that ‘marriage is compatible with sanctity'. The force of the ‘compatible’ needs exact appreciation, and may be more easily gauged if one reads it as ‘a sacrament instituted by God (e.g., marriage, ordination, etc.) is compatible with sanctity'.

Yet the misconception lurking in the sentence does not so much arise from a false view of marriage as from a false view of sanctity; clearly it is referring to canonised sanctity and not to being a saint; one hopes that there are more saints than the canonised. And, indeed, the many attempts which have been made in the last few years to rescue the married from the limbo of half-hearted Christianity nearly all labour under the same misconception. In the many Continental reviews which have dealt with the subject one hears an appeal for the canonisation of more married saints.

St Bonaventure, who sees so clearly that theology has an object of its own—'the things we have to believe, when considered as such, pass into the class of things that can be grasped by the mind, and this because we now look at them from a second point of view’ (I Sent. I proem, q. 1.)—does not for all that think it anything but an instrument or stage in the movement towards Love. He states its aim like this: ‘Revelation turns us towards the affections', (loc. cit. q. 3, a. 1.) Albert the Great holds the same opinion: ‘Knowledge of truth is not sought through the intellect alone but through the affections and substance; hence it is not intellective but effective, for the intellect is directed towards the affections as towards it end'. (I Sent. d. 1, a. 4, ad 2m.)

This text lays bare the heart of the matter: the intellect is subordinate to the affectus. Cognitive activity, especially at the supernatural level, does not represent something autonomous, something with value in itself. To use Aristotelian terms, we have in theology not a speculative science but a practical one.

The following ideas are thrown out in the hope that they may be useful to those who are attracted to the contemplative life, and who are looking for some kind of groundwork or training for it, either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of religious life.

Ideas of apprenticeship—beginning at the beginning to master the first principles of a subject—are foreign to modern thought, but are nevertheless indispensable to the life of the spirit.

Throughout the centuries, solitude and corporal austerities have always gone hand in hand with the contemplative life. Physical solitude is, however, an impossibility for many, and is, in any case, only a means to acquire the necessary solitude of heart—the precursor of contemplation, while corporal austerities do not cover the whole field of asceticism, and may leave untouched the riot of confusion and disorder within the soul itself. Something more inclusive and positive in the way of preparation and training would seem to be needed to counteract the modern indiscipline of emotion and thought with its curious disdain of the ‘grammar’ of spirituality.

We have come together, by the grace of God, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, we who have set before us one and the same end of religious life. And it is plain that you on your part are longing to learn something of that which concerns salvation. I therefore for my part am bound to declare God's righteous acts, since night and day there runs in my mind what the Apostle says: ‘For three years by night and day I did not cease to admonish every one of you with tears’ (Acts 20, 31). Since also the present time is very favourable, and this place provides quiet and complete freedom from the tumults without, let us unite our prayers, that while we give to our fellow-servants their measure of corn in season, you, like good ground, receiving the word, may, as Scripture says (Matt. 13, 23), yield a hundred-fold a perfect fruit in righteousness.

Saint Austin says, then are holy men most speedfully heard of God, when he gives them not that that they covet (but after that he knows the best for them). God gives unto some men sweetness of devotion in the beginining of their turning for to (draw them out from the love I of worldly things) and for to make them sad and stable in his love. Which sweetness afterward he withdraws that they should get them more meed and higher to be crowned (in the bliss of heaven). For since virtues, as says the philosopher, stands in that thing that a man may not come to (without strength and hardness), therefore that this is most hard to get is most of virtue when it is gotten. [But to be stable and lasting in the love of God and soothfast belief, in time of temptation and withdrawing of all actual and sensible devotion, is more hard than it is when a man feels sweetness and devotion and therefore it is more needful.]

In this passage our Lord promises the disciples understanding of his teaching, through the Holy Spirit whom he is soon to give them, saying, 'But the Paraclete . . . will teach you all things'.

Three points are made about the Holy Spirit. Our Lord first describes the Spirit, secondly his mission, thirdly his effect. Our Lord further describes the Holy Spirit himself in many ways, as the Paraclete, a Spirit and Holy.

The work of the Church is a work of reconciliation, of restoring men to God, by whom they were made and to whom they must return. It is the work of Christ, ‘for he is our peace, who hath made both one … breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh’ (Eph. 2, 14). He came into the world that he might redeem it; he died for the world that it might live for God.

And through the centuries the Church, which is the Body of Christ, continues his work of healing: bringing back the alien to the household of God, forgiving his sins, feeding his soul, teaching him the truth that alone can set him free, and at last preparing him for the destiny of heaven. And of all the evils which pervert that work of healing, heresy, the choice of a lie instead of the redemptive truth of Christ, is the deepest and most dangerous. For it is at last the choice of slavery, the return to the desert of alienation: and its fruits we know.