It was only after her fortieth year that Battista Vernazza began to write her spiritual experiences—the special interior graces conferred on her from time to time; it has been thought wonderful that she could find time for this in the midst of the many exterior duties her new office implied, but it may well be that the very fact of their distracting nature made her the more anxious to refresh her soul by this spiritual work. She continued to write during the rest of her life in spite of other absorbing offices, for she was only relieved of the Procuratorship to become successively Mother Vicaress and Abbess. Her writings fill six large volumes and consist of colloquies, spiritual treatises and disserations—notably one on the Pater Noster and (for she retained her love for poetry) twelve Spiritual Canticles treating of the mystery of our Lord's life and four on divine love, also five sonnets; and to these must be added her letters.

He who undertakes to write upon the spirituality of St Philip Neri is by his very task pledged to avoid ponderosity, yet the writer of these few lines does not know how to escape the need for some kind of introduction to his remarks. The need arises, not from the nature of his subject but from the fact of the appearance of his essay in a periodical devoted expressly to spirituality'. For we who here write could not be comfortable in saying what we want to say and propose to say unless first we made clear that throughout we shall have in mind two presuppositions. The former of these is that the very function of a journal of spirituality is to present to its readers in toto all the various ramifications and different types of Christian sanctity and ascetic which are approved by the Church, in order that its readers may discover, learn, assimilate, or on the other hand set aside what they find, according to their their own own needs,

[The fifty homilies printed in Migne's Patrologia Graece, vol. 34. have until recently been attributed to St Macarius, an Egyptian monk of the fourth century whose miracles are told in Palladius's Lausiac History and Rufinus's History of the Monks. But this authorship has lately been seriously questioned; for some of the teaching contained in the Homilies bears a certain resemblance to the tenets of the heretical sect of the Messalians or Euchites, condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 481. G. L. Marriott, in an article on ‘The Messalians and the Discovery of their Ascetic Book (Harvard Theological Review, vol. xix, No. 2) claims to find most of the eighteen Messalian propositions reproduced in St John of Damascus's De Haeresibus in the Macarian Homilies; but on closer inspection almost all the passages adduced from the latter are capable of a perfectly orthodox interpretation, whereas the condemned propositions are a crude and one-sided exaggeration of their teaching.

From the earliest history of monasticism in Europe religious houses, both of men and women, received children for education. Anglo-Saxon girls were not only sent to the monasteries of their own country but also to famous centres of learning abroad such as the great monastery founded by St Cesarius of Arles where the holy bishop wished his nuns to devote themselves not only to the study of the Scriptures and the Fathers but to all learning-omnes litora. St Gertrude of Nivelles, desirous of securing the best teachers for her monastic school, sent for them to Ireland, then the great home of learning. The love of learning was not contined to the daughters of nobles. Thomas of Cantempré, O.P. tells of a Brabant peasant girl who was welcomed by her richer sisters when she longed to learn to read her psalter.