Of how one should seek and find the spiritual nativity in the light of grace, by self-effacement and the suppression of all natural light.

Of the price of sufferings and afflictions, and in particular of the three offerings of the Magi.

We are come indeed to adore him and to offer him our mystical gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. The reasonable soul, by its natural light alone, comes to the knowledge of the existence of God. But what is he? Who is he? Where is he? So many questions to which she gives no answer and of which she ignores the solution. Hence, for the holy and religious soul, arises a loving desire to seek God with ardent solicitude. She wants to know what he is, who is this hidden and unknown Being.

Then, in this laborious searching, suddenly there appears a star, and this is nothing but a ray of heavenly grace, a divine light which seems to say interiorly to the soul: he is born! At the same time this light leads the soul to the place of his birth which no natural light could have pointed out to her. And so we see that all who seek for this nativity by the light of reason alone do not arrive there: they stray and lose their way, they make no progress in virtue.

It may fairly be said that in ancient Hebrew poetry suffering holds the place reserved for love in the lyrical compositions of the literature of the West. It is, moreover, under the pressure of tragic events that suffering has become the leitmotiv of the latter part of the Bible in which the book of Job occurs.

It is true that there is very little mention of suffering in the accounts of the Thorah. Not a few massacres are there related– without any pity for the victims. The reason is that at the time of the conquest of Palestine and during the beginnings of the Monarchy the Hebrews were still an insensitive and uncivilised people. They were a young and conquering race. Their will to power was intact. The sages of the court of Solomon or of Jeroboam II were the diplomats or poets of a tiny nation possessed with the certitude that it would endure and conquer.

There are three places in Lima intimately associated with St Rose: St Dominic's Church, where she is buried and where she habitually prayed during her lifetime; St Catherine's Convent, built on the site of the house where she died, where are. preserved many relics of her life; and the Church of St Rose, the first ever to be dedicated to her, built beside the site of her parents’ home and garden, which are still preserved. This church and adjoining garden and buildings contain all the most important places and objects associated with her.

The convent is an enclosed one, and the chapel installed in the room where S't Rose died, in which are preserved all the mementoes connected with her, is not open to the public. It is important, however, because it was there that the Spanish Dominican scholar, Fr Luis Alonso Getino, discovered in 1923 the sheets on which the saint had recorded, in a most original form, the mystical graces which she had been granted; this record completely alters our ideas of her character and mentality. I believe they are still unknown to the English reader.

No one who has any acquaintance with modern ‘mystical’ I writings which come from the pens of such as Aldous Huxley or Gerald Heard will be unaware of the existence of dangers in the doctrine put forward by The Cloud of Unknowing. This book has become so popular with people who are not specifically Christian and who think they find an identical teaching in Indian and Sufi writings that it is suspect by many devout Catholics who are yet seeking courageously for perfection and would find otherwise much assistance in its pages. It is easy to point to its strong Dionysian origins, reaching this East Anglian spiritual director through the Victorines and stretching back through the Pseudo-Dionysius to Neoplatonic philosophy. So with a careful choice of texts a student could work out a detailed, parallelism between the pagan writings of Plotinus and Proclus and the Christian author of The Cloud.

A few months ago we promised to provide some regular contributions for religious men and women. It has proved a surprisingly difficult task to discover writers willing to undertake this responsible work. However we are fortunate to have secured from the posthumous papers of the late Very Eeverend Father Austin Barker, O.P., S.T.M., a profound and thorough treatment of the foundation of religious life. In his essay on obedience the author, who was Professor of Metaphysics at the English Dominican House of Philosophy, takes the opportunity of showing the natural basis for the complete self-dedication of the vow of obedience, so that his words do in fact provide wholesome doctrine for all readers, be they lay or religious. But the final chapters which, as we are publishing the essay serially, will only appear in The Life of The Spirit after several months, are concerned more exclusively with the vow of obedience and its implications. We publish below Father Barker's introduction to his essay under the title which he gave to the whole work.

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.

All over the world today Holy Church is celebrating the coming down of the Holy Ghost whom God sent visibly and with such glory to the apostles and chosen disciples. Of course it was necessary that those men, whose mission it was to be an example to the world and who were to lay down the way of perfection to all who should come after them, should themselves be enlightened and filled with the fervour of divine love, above all their contemporaries. It was only just that they should be consoled with a fuller grace of the Holy Spirit who had been deprived of all joy and altogether abandoned, left desolate within and without.

If we compare ‘The Cloud’ with Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection or any other of the spiritual writings contemporary with that classic we shall be struck by the impersonal character of The Cloud. The Scale refers constantly to Jesus, the person, to whom everything returns in contemplation, and even a writer like St John of the Cross is really none the less personal in his approach to the source of faith and love. The Cloud does not often use the holy Name in spite of the great popularity of the devotion in those days; it is far more abstract and philosophical in tone. Struck by this difference we might be tempted to say that this latter was a natural, a metaphysician's, approach. A great deal of emphasis is laid on a quasi-metaphysical apprehension of Being as such, which might seem to depend on the personal exercise of the worshipper.

The books of the Hebrew Bible may be divided into three groups: the Torah, the Prophets and the ‘Writings'. This latter part is made up of works composed, collected or published for the most part after the return from exile to Babylon. One of the books it contains has as its title the single word Job. It is the name of a person who from the very first lines is presented to us as a just man, a believer, one who is rich and fortunate in life. The reader then leaves earth to catch a glimpse of what is taking place in heaven. Job is accused by Satan of self-interest in his piety. Yahweh allows S'atan to afflict Job in the first instance in his material possessions, and his family. Job accepts this trial. Still sceptical in the face of this proof of disinterestedness, Satan obtains from Yahweh permission to strike Job in his person, by disease.

New ventures in religious life are b'eing called forth by the Holy Spirit within the Church. Among these the religious communities for the sick which have come into being during the past few years in Prance are not the least interesting.

At a time when illness has become to a great extent a social phenomenon—and paradoxically this is bound up with the great progress of medicine in prolonging the life of the sick —in a country which counts at least five hundred thousand tubercular cases, a very great number of cardiac cases, and more than a hundred thousand cases of paralysis; at a time, too, when great national movements for their protection and help are being organised, it is fitting that those for whom suffering and illness have a significance in the Cross of Christ should be united and brought together.

Thanks’ to the preservation of an exceptionally detailed and graphic journal, kept by a certain German Dominican for the entertainment and edification of his brethren, it is possible to form a clear idea of what seafaring conditions were like on the Mediterranean towards the close of the fifteenth century. What is more, we learn that the spiritual welfare of both passengers and crews was not neglected, at least in ships carrying pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Brother Felix Fabri was a member of the community of the Dominican Priory at Ulm. In 1480 he managed to obtain permission from the Master General of the Friars Preachers to make a pilgrimage to Palestine. Four years later he repeated this journey. His travel diaries are remarkable for their wealth of topographical detail, but even more for the subtle humour that creeps in on every page.

For silence will enable thee to subdue the uprisings of passion, for thou fightest from a height while they lie beneath thy feet. Therefore, possess silence, in the fear of God, and no weapons of the enemy shall harm thee. For silence joined to the fear of God is a fiery chariot which bears its possessor up to heaven. This doth urge upon thee the prophet Elias who, loving silence together with the fear of God, was taken up into heaven. silence, whereby the monk advances in perfection; ladder reaching to heaven; way of the kingdom of heaven. silence, mother of compunction, mirror of sins, in which man sees his transgressions. silence which hinderest not tears, mother of meekness, companion of humility. silence, spouse of humility and enlightenment of the mind. silence, searcher of thoughts and promoter of discernment. silence, mother of all good, support of temperance, and obstacle to gluttony.

Joy', wrote G. K. Chesterton on the last page of Orthodoxy, ‘is the gigantic secret of the Christian'. One of the greatest possessors of this secret was that gentle and genial bishop, St Francis de Sales. ‘God is the God of joy', he wrote; ‘the spirit of joy is the true spirit of devotion'.

The worldly connotation of devotion is a dismal one. The opening chapters of the Introduction to the Devout Life were intended to dispel that erroneous opinion. The way of the soul to God should be one of joy; indeed it can only be one of joy, for sadness and melancholy are diametrically opposed to the happiness that comes from drawing near to God. ‘I cannot conceive', Francis wrote to a saddened soul, ‘how you can let your heart be filled with such deep sorrow, considering you are a child of God, entrusted to his loving kindness, and consecrated to his love'.

The subject matter of this essay, in so far as it is concerned with what is called the Obediential Potency, naturally finds no exact place within a course of philosophy properly so-called, when later the student proceeds into formal theology, the divine science, it is customarily assumed that the matter has been already sufficiently studied in the preliminaries to theology. It finds its right place within the Science of fundamental theology, or Apologetics, which deals with the Praeambula Fidei, the motives of credibility and similar material. Sometimes, however, its central importance fails to receive adequate attention, and its essential significance, while not being entirely overlooked, rarely obtains the emphasis which is its due. The following pages are intended briefly to co-relate it with the growth of divine action in the soul, and to suggest that the endowment of divine grace progressively proceeds in correspondence with the development of the obediential capacity.