A recent Book with the sub-title of ‘Revelations of the Mystics’ gives us the opportunity of resuming the theme we opened in the August issue, the nature and meaning of mysticism. The book itself is a delight for anyone interested in spiritual literature; it contains many treasures, some familiar and many rare. The title of the book, The Spear of Gold, is taken from the exalted experience of St Teresa when the angel pierced her heart with a flaming spear of Love. The whole anthology, for such it is, is divided and subdivided so that it may Sead from the first leap of desire in the natural heart of man to these high transports of love. But the editory sets aside the usual treament according to the three stages of spiritual progress. He believes this treatment leads too steeply to the heights; but the result of his anthology is that its order is difficult to follow, and is more usefully used simply as an occasional book.

Fifty years ago, as September was giving place to October, Sister Thérèse Martin, a Carmelite of Lisieux, gave up her soul to God. Only twenty-seven years later she was raised to the altars of the Church as Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus. The speed with which she was canonized was indicative of some special mission given to her by God in the work of salvation of souls, a mission which has been increasingly revealed in this last half-century. For by God's grace this saint has carried out a great apostolate and has raised innumerable Catholics up to a level of true prayer and holiness.

In this latter work of a guide to the interior life she has been almost unique. Many modern saints have been pointed out to us by the process of canonization for our veneration and inspiration; but for the most part they represent a practical and active form of spiritual life, concerned mainly with the poor, the sick, the uneducated. It is clear that the present age is not an age of what we might call ‘mystical saints'.

It is with a consciousness of our own sins and failings that religious life makes its appeal to us. We enter the cloister because we are conscious of evil in our hearts. It is not indeed of itself a sufficient motive to force anyone into religious life far less to keep him there, this consciousness of sin, the mere sense of sin. We were drawn by the fact of positive love of God. It is not the mere escaping from danger. To look upon a cloister as a place from which is shut out temptation, a haven of rest, cannot be a motive. It does not take us long to find we cannot escape temptation as long as we have our own hearts, from them we cannot escape. A stricter relationship with the outside world may alter our temptations, that's all. We do not shut out the worst offender—ourselves.

The Feast of the Sacred Heart of our Lord sets before us clearly, and indeed vividly, the redemptive purpose and character of his incarnate life. The devotion itself finds its roots in the Middle Ages, in the writings of Saint Bernard for example, and later in those of Saint Catherine of Siena, as well as in one at least of the surviving works of the English mystical writers. The living tendrils of the devotion had already sought the light, when it received its final impetus from Saint Margaret Mary and Blessed Father Claude de la Colombière and was given full recognition by the establishment of the Feast as a part of the Liturgy of the Catholic Church.

The Feast itself takes the Sacred Heart of our Lord as the point of its adoration and as the object of our devotion; for the heart of Christ comprehends and draws within it all the love that animates the deep mystery of God's being, all the love that gave us his incarnate Son, all the love that raises us up by divine grace and quickens our own hearts in response.

In the beginning was the Word… (St John I. 1.) Unfortunately in the world today there are a great number of words. There are so many words that you do not know how to escape them. We have however the power to choose the best—we should not choose the second best. They who have the Word of Christ our Lord must choose the best WORD. Listen to his words—make them your own. How glad I should be if I could impress on you some little word, make you take it for your own and think about it. There are some people who listen to the Gospel, but they do not really hold that Jesus Christ is God. They do not take the word of Eternal Life, When you find a great deal of decay in the Church and in religious life, it is because our Lord's words have not been accepted. The words of the holy Gospels—that is TRUTH. Let us have the TRUTH.

A Simple statement of some elementary notions may fittingly accompany more learned essays on particular aspects of monasticism.

A Benedictine's aim is the common aim of all Christians. Only his method is, to some extent, peculiar to him. It may be succinctly described as ‘monastic obedience'.

The monastic vow of obedience seems to have been one of St Benedict's inventions. Before his time monks either lived apart and independently (as did St Benedict himself in his Subiaco days) or attached themselves by easily terminable engagements to a teacher or a series of teachers. Doubtless that often worked well, and the monk either persevered in his solitude or passed from teacher to teacher receiving from each some special lesson, some further benefit. But it obviously left the unstable soul without support and opened a fairly comfortable career to the work-shy. Indignant descriptions of some unsatisfactory typen maiven the first chapter of St Benedict's Rule.

One of the things we have learnt from the intense study of nature is that behind every desire of man and of all living things there is some justification and some fulfilment. That whatever men have persistently longed for and desired has some reality. Nature does nothing uselessly. God implants in human hearts no desire however fantastic that has not fulfilment. Dreams in one generation become commonplace realities in the next. Look back a thousand years and read the dreaming literature of that period and now we have got beyond the dreams and live in the reality. Man is never satisfied. As fast as one desire is satisfied new desires spring from our mind. Man has always desired to live; he naturally hates death. There is a sadness connected with the last time he does anything.

It is the seraphim alone who can utter the name of God: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord Uod of Hosts; all the earth is full of his glory'. Before him no man can come face to face and live. The divine mystery is first of all God himself: infinite unutterable, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Yet it is God, whom no man has seen at any time, who has become man, manifesting in his human flesh the divinity that is hidden from our eyes. It is in Christ that the divine mystery is revealed. His suffering and death, his resurrection and his ascension, are not only truths to be believed: they mark the salvific work of Christ in which we are to be incorporated. For to me to live is Christ'. And the mystery of Christ is dispensed now by the Church that is his Body. Christ lives in the Church: redemption is re-enacted in the Church's worship, and pre-eminently in the sacrifice of the Mass. So it is that St Ambrose can say: In tuis te invenio sacramentis. We find Christ in the mysteries of the Church, the sacraments.

He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father; and I will love him and will manifest myself to him.—John 14, 21.

The feast of the Nativity is the feast of the birth of the Word; his eternal generation in the bosom of the Father, his temporal birth; and his mystical birth in the souls of men, in which is involved their birth to divine life.

The Christmas liturgy is at different times concerned with each of these aspects of the Mystery.

Dominus dixit ad me. Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te, is the triumphal Introit to Midnight Mass.

Young enthusiasts for the life of prayer cannot be too frequently reminded of the danger of applying directly to their own persons the doctrines they read about. As they grow older they often become so self-conscious or introspective that they cannot read the lives of saints or descriptions of mystic states without discovering parallels in their own interior lives. This is a weakness not confined to spiritual matters for we remember the hero of Three Men in a Boat who began reading a medical handbook and soon decided that he had the symptoms of all the diseases therein described except ‘housemaid's knee’. This is typical of those who read spiritual or physical medicine. It is necessary to repeat the warning against this form of introspection before beginning to discuss in detail the more passive forms of prayer and the higher states of the spiritual life.

One of the curious things that you may sometimes hear nuns say is, I have no time for prayer', a curious thing for anyone to say. One would suppose that prayer were an exercise like eating, over and done with; as though prayer were an act that began and ended at a certain time. You hear too: ‘I didn't say my prayers this morning'. ‘No prayers?’ ‘Oh, yes, but not all. Curious, isn't it? I look on prayer as a duty to be portioned off. How can I say I haven't time for prayer? Haven't time to raise my mind and heart to God? They mean they haven't time to sit and do nothing else but pray. We have always got time for prayer. Constant prayer is the idea of the New Testament, Christ's teaching. Anything is prayer, prayer is anything. It is not an individual thing, it can speak all languages, it is us varied as our life. Prayer is natural to the soul. That we have no time for that is incredible, impossible.

All human misery comes from avarice: corporal misery from the refusal to give one's belongings; spiritual misery from the refusal to give one's time and one's heart.

All the sufferings, acute or dull, all the bitterness, the humiliations, all the grievances, the hatred and despair of this world, are an unsatisfied hunger. Hunger for bread, hunger for help, hunger for love.

From the little lad who heaves great sobs because his mother slaps him for no other reason than that her nerves are on edge, to the too old grandfather whom his grandchildren now always forget to kiss; from the plain young woman left alone in her corner, to the wife upon whom her husband no longer deigns to cast his eyes, to the abandoned woman who throws herself into the Seine; from the friend whose companion fails on purpose to keep his appointment to the twenty-year-old boy who dies alone at night in his hospital bed whilst the infirmarian is drinking coffee in the kitchen; from the small poor-law child to the man who is going to be executed, all have suffered from a penury, from a stinginess of love.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is perhaps the most popular devotion of modern times, and in its present form it may be said to date from the revelations made by our Lord to St Margaret Mary in the 17th century. But though so ‘modern’ it is as old as the Gospels. Our Lord himself taught the Apostles. Learn of me for I am meek and humble of heart', and when, after the Resurrection, he invited Thomas to put his hand into his side, the doubting Apostle must surely have felt there the beatings of the heart of whom he forthwith confessed to be his Lord and his God. St John, who leaned upon the Lord's breast at the Last Supper, and who has left us in his Gospel some account of the secrets he learned there, also describes how the soldier opened our Saviour's side as he hung dead on the cross, so that blood and water gushed forth, and it has always been the belief of saints and commentators that the lance pierced the heart too.

In dealing with our conscience we try to remind ourselves of the fact that it is almost impossible to be sure to what extent we are answerable for the evil of our lives. We never know with what bias or handicap we start life. God only knows. He knows what is beyond our personal control. We can't really tell—we may be worse than we think ourselves, we may be better. We can only make a shrewd guess with no certainty. We don't even know whether we are in a state of grace or not; we can't go by feeling—self-complacency—there are no internal or external signs. We can be pretty sure we are trying, but we don't know for certain.

It is best to leave it to our Blessed Lord. When he was asked whether a large proportion of people would be saved he said, ‘Strive thou to enter by the narrow gate'.