Across the fair landscape of the Church's life, and dimming the sunlight of her holiness, and casting a shadow over her beauty, is that heavy cloud, which surely grows no less in these days of unpeacefulness, that cloud of lapsed Catholics. This blot is ever present with us, marring the joy and triumph of the Church's life, staining the robe of her perfection. The faithful are always there, the sweet odour of their prayers and good works rising like clouds of incense, ceaselessly up to God. New converts are received; but still that ugly cloud remains to darken our sun, and wound anew the broken Heart of God. There are the ever moving, tragic figures of the once-faithful turning away, repudiating the Light, casting aside the outstretched wounded hand they once held, turning their backs upon the love of God.

It is not unreasonable to try to discover why St John chose the Greek word ‘logos’ in describing the second person of the blessed Trinity to Greek-speaking converts. The only way to discover why is to see just what meaning it had in current speech to induce him to consider it suitable for his purpose; and to see secondly what modification or modifications he had to introduce into its meaning so that it really would fulfil its function as a key word in Trinitarian doctrine. We may find that its chief virtue was that it was, of all the terms to hand, least likely to be misunderstood.

The word ‘logos’ was used by Plato, the Stoics, Philo and Plutarch. It was current coinage in Greek thought, one of those words whose meaning was fluid enough, somewhat as democracy or liberty are in our politically-minded age. But at the back of all these interpretations or uses and shades of meaning of ‘logos', there still remained one which may be summed up in another: reason.

Pride was the cause of the sin of our first parents. The particular part of their nature of which they were thus proud was the intellect; it was and is the most wonderful of the faculties with which God has endowed man's soul. It was with the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge that man, in his pride, desired to glorify his intellect. ‘With this knowledge of the Gods', suggested the Devil, ‘man will really be able to glory in his own nature for he will be the equal to God. The Devil made the false suggestion that knowledge of good and evil would give, would in fact be, a divine wisdom.

But God had not created man so that he should glory in his own created human nature, but only in God's creative nature, his uncreated infinity.

Contemplative life produces an all-embracing love of God and our neighbour. We see this in a study of the Carmelite Rule and in a reading of the great Carmelite mystics. ‘To love’, says Saint John of the Cross, is to labour to divest ourselves and to detach ourselves from all that is not God. (Ascent, 2). We are to be detached from ourselves, from self-love, thus only shall we come to love God, and to love our neighbour for his sake. A Carmelite writer tells us. ‘Saint John is the Doctor of the Cross because he is the Doctor of Love. It is a cross radiating love, a tremendous love of God, and of man and of all the beauty that God has created. The same writer continues: Throughout his works John of the Cross has sung of the depths of beauty, the demands, the sufferings, the triumphs of love'.

Richard Rolle has been called ‘The Father of English Mysticism and it is to him we turn for the first introduction to mysticism in its strict sense among English writers. He was born some hundred years after the Ancren Riwle was written, and yet he is historically the first of the group of English mystics who experienced and wrote about the higher degrees of mystical prayer. Perhaps the greatest era of English sanctity had already passed when he was born in the last decade of the 13th century. There had been a succession of men and women from the time of Venerable Bede who had been led by the Spirit of God to transports of divine love and wisdom. But they had not been reflective in the way that the men of the 14th century were reflective so that the description of their lives does not enlighten later generations as to the nature of their prayer or their manner of reaching high degrees of contemplation. Rolle, amidst a profusion of Latin and English writings, did proclaim these hidden experiences, and his message was received with enthusiasm.

We cannot take leave of Richard Rolle without listening to his principal message and the one which is the dominant theme of the illuminative way. His greatest work was on ‘The Fire of Love’, his most unique mystical experience was the burning of love in his breast, and his poetry which did more than anything else to spread his spirit among his contemporaries is concerned with the sweet love of Jesus, his Spouse. Love is thought, with great desire of a fair Loving.

The illumination as we have seen comes principally from the shining of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the beginning of infused contemplation. But this light cannot of course be separated from the Word whose function it is to enlighten the understanding. Indeed the activities of the second and third Persons of the Blessed Trinity in this respect cannot be separated; it is the one action of the Verbum spirans amorem.

The classical characterisation of this period of the beginner, or the purgative way, is given in the words of St Thomas: Primo incumbit homini studium principale ad recedendum a peccato et resistendum concupiscentiis ejus, quæ in contrarium caritatis movent: et hoc pertinet ad incipientes in quibus caritas est nutrienda, vel fovenda, ne corrumpatur. ‘At first it is incumbent on man to occupy himself chiefly with avoiding sin and resisting his concupiscences, which move him in opposition to charity: this concerns beginners, in whom charity has to be fed or fostered lest it be destroyed.’ (II-II, 24, 9.) This aspect of struggle against lower nature and the war against vice is therefore the depressing but dominant feature of the age; but this does not mean a purely stoical attitude to self-mastery—it is always that ‘charity may the more abound'.

It may be as well to begin, in the approved scholastic manner, by defining one's terms; or at least by delimiting the field of discussion-a very necessary step surely with a paper so ambiguously worded as this one! Orthodoxy, my Lord'. said Bishop Warburton, is my doxy-heterodoxy is another man's doxy'. No doubt we could improve on that and together hit upon a less question-begging statement of what we mean by ‘orthodoxy'. All the same, I must try not to confuse the issue by taking too much for granted. And what are we to understand by that indeterminate phrase ‘religious experience'? At the beginning of the century William James devoted a series of Gifford Lectures to The Varieties of Religious Experience-a work still being reprinted even in these days of paper shortage. James was, professedly an empiricist, with but a limited gift for philosophical generalisation, so that his collected data have both the interest and the tediousness of a case book'; but they serve to show how varied are the phenomena which have been placed-whether legitimately or not is another question!—in the category of ‘religious experience’.

Only recently the liturgy has recognised this title by a votive Mass in honour of the Priesthood of Christ. One of the oldest of his titles, its origins stretch back not only through the history of the Jewish people but through the history of the whole world.

Jesus our brother, Jesus the Man, the Everlasting Man, Jesus the representative of our race before the throne of God, his and our Father, stood and stands before that throne in the character of priest. Chosen by God he was, before ages began, a worthy representative, performing the supreme act of a priest: sacrifice.

The Jewish priesthood was a confined thing. A symbol, may be, of things to come, yet so much a symbol, so much a superficial creation, as not to merit, at least in its decrepitude, much honour. This fact of its passingness, its shadow-character, was even admitted in the Old Covenant.

Anyone who has reached the period of spiritual life known as the Night of the Senses will find that prayer has so changed its character as to be almost a new kind of human activity. Hitherto the time devoted to actual prayers will have been divided up between liturgical practices and private meditations. The Christian will have become accustomed, perhaps through the habits formed during many years, to set about these devotions in a methodical way, always bearing in mind the adage that if he wishes to prosper he must, while leaving all to God in his petitions, act as though all depended on himself. He will have learned a manner of assisting at Mass; he will have recited the same number of Paters and Aves, acts of contrition and charity, while he knelt beside his bed at morning and night; his rosary or ‘stations’ will be prominent in his regular horary; and finally his times of quiet at meditation will be organised by a method, interspersed with ‘acts’ and sometimes predominantly concerned with struggles against distractions and drowsiness.

Zacharias, in the most ‘Christian’ passage of his prophecy, describing the Orient who is to come to cleanse sins, says, 'Behold the stone that I have laid before Jesus: upon one stone there are seven eyes: behold I will grave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts; and I will take away the iniquity of that land in one day (3, 9). The prophet is describing the rock of Christ and his saving graces, and he puts before us the principal Remedy for sin in a way which we may find echoed in the Ancren Riwle. After analysing the deadly sins and having realised their proximity to the very core of our being, we may be easily carried away into a negative war against vice, wholly human in its inspiration and, in consequence, Stoic in its effects. We must strive to overcome the evil tendencies of nature, certainly, and we must use to intensity the ascetic practices of mortification, specially designed for the overcoming of the flesh. These are particularly to be looked for in the first way of purgation, which is par excellence the ascetic way. But such activities are primarily penalties for past sins.

The popularity of this prayer in the books of times earlier than ours is well shown in accounts of the lives and deaths of the English Martyrs, that is, of those saints who were put to death for their Faith between the years 1535 and 1681. In those days, when the alleged activities of the Stationers’ Company made all Catholic printing and book-selling contraband, we find repeatedly that ’Manuals of Devotion’ were found in the presses of the intrepid printers, or that in the search through their houses the pursuivants found ‘divers psalters’. So it was with Carter and Webley, with Collins and Duckett; all truly martyrs. The books were often proclaimed our Lady's psalters, meaning what were also called Books of Hours; perhaps because the new man-made religion so ignored our Lady that her faithful children were all the more dedicated to her service. Often too the books used by these hunted. Catholics had in them the Psalter of Jesus, in English as we have it now.

The period of ‘great business', described by Rolle in the Incendium Amoris as the purgative way to ‘sweetest rest', has passed, and the obscurity of the night of the senses leads the soul on to this more secure life in Christ. The hermit was perfectly aware of the difficulties of the first period and the progress the devout man had to make to reach this sweetness. For some the progress is rapid and often accompanied by special graces from God.

They that are sickerly ordained to holiness in the beginning of their turning, for dread of God, forsake sins and worldly vanities: and then they set their flesh under strait penance, afterwards setting Christ's love before all other, and feeling a delight in heavenly sweetness in devotion of mind they profit mickle.

Such customs as that of fixing plaques or statues of our Lady on oak-trees, or of giving these shrines titles of ‘Our Lady of the Oak', were both widespread and ancient. There was a famous Virgin of the Oak in Norwich and, according to tradition, our Lady of Penrhys, burned at Chelsea with our Lady of Willesden and our Lady of Walsingham, was found by shepherds hanging on the trunk of an oak on the summit of a mountain at the head of the Rhondda Valley. There is reason, too, to suppose that our Lady of Willesden may have been yet another instance of what was originally an oak-tree sanctuary.

By far the most important shrine, however, of this particular cultus of our Lady still survives in Central Italy, in the Shrine of St Maria della Quercia (Oak-tree), just outside the Porta Santa Lucia at Viterbo, on the road to Bagnaia.

Purification continues to be an unpleasant part of life up to the very last breath, however advanced in holiness a man may be. The first stage in the way of perfection is called ‘purgative’ or purifying only because that ascetic activity is the predominant one at the beginning. A man has to struggle to abandon vice when he turns to God and sincerely tries to follow him. And so he purifies himself and opens his heart to the purifying action of God in the ways already suggested in previous articles. God himself also cultivates the soul as the farmer first cultivates the soil with plough and harrow. But at the point we have reached we come to the first outstanding transformation; the Christian soul is about to be converted once more and to enter upon a new form of life, fuller and more fruitful. He begins to enter another kind of asceticism, asceticism, a a dark night of the senses in which the spirit becomes far freer than before.

I suppose one of the things the importance of which seems to be everywhere recognised is the extraordinary way in which human beings are subject to their environments, are influenced and affected by them. Some sort of subconscious power registers all sorts of details which we didn't know we had even noticed and years after some insignificant act or word comes to life. A name in a newspaper brings back an old world, just the chance hearing of a name and back out of the past springs vividly to our imagination just a scene, and we realise from that how very much we are under the spell of circumstances. At times it would seem that we owe to heredity all that we are, not necessarily to our immediate parents but to our ancestors in the past, a throw back, and now all that idea is given up and what people do think a great deal of is surroundings, the lines in which our lives are cast.

Any Catholic who takes his spiritual life seriously must A have echoed St Peter's words when the moment comes for leaving the divine presence after Mass or Benediction. Here he would remain, here he would always be. But for him, as for the chosen three, the bright cloud falls and he must descend the mount. He must go down into the everyday world, often like the apostles to find himself faced with an apparently insoluble problem, a demoniac child. This may be a personal grief or a realisation of the spiritual state of the world sharpened by contrast with the timeless peace from which he has freshly come.

Sunday, the day of joy, commemorates the cause of our joy and looks forward to its consummation in eternity. There can be no Christian life without Sunday, no Sunday without the Mass. Here is the setting of the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ, and its acceptance is the condition of any Christian recovery. Too often Sunday is confused with its secondary aspects: obligations, abstention from servile work, the merely natural rest in the cycle of time demanded by man's nature. But the first day of the week is the day of resurrection, far older as a feast than Easter. Its holiness enshrines the central mystery of Faith, and the Sabbath that marks the creative rest of God is transfigured now into the day of the new creation of grace.

Today when the world is shattering into splinters like glass to the blast of a bomb, it seems difficult to assume or profess that Christ has been the Light of the World. So many have never heard of him, so many have been snatched from his loving care—so it seems—by the wilful action of militant anti-Christian people, so many self-styled followers of Jesus seem to be following their own desires and not at all treading the path to Calvary, beyond whose brow is illumination and light.

No one will deny that in his teaching and in his life our Blessed Lord and Master has been a shining Light; he taught a way that shines with holiness and love, which could, if followed, lead to peace and joy. Indeed those who truly followed Christ, and follow him today, have been and are at peace and in joy, with a peace and joy beyond all others, and recognisably so even to those who refuse to follow this same light.

In discussing the purification of the exterior senses the Ancren Riwle naturally goes into the matter of the mortification of hearing. We may well anticipate that silence should play a large part in the life of a recluse, both as a mortification and penance in itself, and as a way to the full flowering of the love of God. For though it be only a means, and a negative one at that, silence does in fact lead the soul forward to contemplation in a very direct way, so direct that it provides a special foundation for the theological virtue of hope:

For prayer is the breath of hope, and it is impossible to ask God for anything or to raise the mind to him without this theological virtue.