‘There is so much of excellence and beauty in the services of the Breviary, that were it skilfully set before the Protestant by Roman controversialists as the book of devotion received in their communion, it would undoubtedly raise a prejudice in their favour, if he were ignorant of the circumstances of the case, and but ordinarily candid and unprejudiced.’ Such are the opening words of No. 75 of Tracts for the Times, which was entitled The Roman Breviary as embodying the substance of the devotional services of the Church Catholic. It was published in 1838, and its author was John Henry Newman. After the title the following verse is printed. The words contain a deeper meaning today than when they were composed.

At every creed in the Mass we profess belief in God who spoke through the prophets. This in itself should spur us to reflection on the totality of the prophets' teachings, reflection too, in a spirit of great faith—fides quaerens intellectum—on the phenomenon of prophecy in general, and the mysterious facts relating to God's action in the world, the penetration of the divine and eternal into the world of sense and time. But our theology of prophecy must not be arbitrarily a priori; not need we be tempted to think that it is so in St Thomas's systematic treatises De Prophetia (de Veritate, 12; II-II, 171-174: Qdlbt 7, 14 ad 5. and 16). St Thomas was profoundly grounded in the Scriptures and more especially in the one thing necessary in Scriptural vestigation, that grasp of the doctrinal content of every book as of every word. We should strive to grasp a living, objective, reality: the utterance of God through the prophets, at a point in the history of the world, in and through contingent realities of flesh and blood.

The central act of the liturgy is the mass. It is an act in two senses, that of something done, and that of drama in the highest order. But despite the amount written round it in recent years, the idea of being a spectator only still infects many, perhaps the majority, of lay men and women. The mass remains a service which we attend, not a sacrifice which we offer. Some of this vagueness is due to the care necessary in separating the priest from the people, in that we say the priest alone has a priestly function, by ordination, while the people are in no way priests, even though they too share in the offering. This is inclined to cloud the part of the people, to obscure the public nature of the mass. For the mass is by nature public and social, whether it is said in the solitude of the Sahara by Charles de Foucauld or in the Piccadilly-Circus crowd of a London Midnight Mass. The priest offers sacrifice for the whole Church, for the living, for the dead.

As the hart yearneth to the wells of waters, so my soul yearneth to thee, God.

This psalm is of all perfect men that are burning widi the flame of Goo S love, and pass into contemplative life. And therefore it is sung in the office for die dead; for then have they that they yearned [for], that Is the sight of God. Therefore saith he, as the hart that has eaten the adder, greatly yearns to come to the wells of waters for to drink and wax young again, so when vices and uncleanness are destroyed in me, my soul desires with burning yearning to come to thee, God.

Nobody who passes by that shabby little house in a back street in the poorest quarter of the fishing port of Concarneau would suspect that two rooms on its first floor make up the ‘monastery’ of a small contemplative religious community. None of the many summer visitors to what is also a popular Breton holiday resort would ever guess that the four young men, garbed as labourers or fishermen, who might be Noticed entering or leaving this house are professed religious, following a rule of life which, in its own way, is as strict as and perhaps harder than that of Carthusian or Cistercian monks.

One of these Little Brothers of Jesus was waiting for me at the barrier of Concarneau station when I arrived there on a July evening this summer. I managed to spot him in the crowd because of a small badge, composed of a red cross and heart, pinned on to the much washed open-necked khaki shirt he was wearing.

The religion of thy father Dominic is a delightful garden, I broad, joyous and fragrant.’ Admirers of the spirit and A children of Saint Dominic would appreciate our Lord's word ‘broad’ when he spoke to Saint Catherine, for it is said that no two Dominicans are aHke. Whatever that means, something good or something dangerous, it is but one half of a story that is on the surface paradoxical. That St Dominic's spirit and sympathies were indeed broad can never be in doubt if we look at the characters of his first companions, a set of men at once entirely diverse and bending all their diverse talents to one purpose. For seven hundred years that spirit has grown stronger by the very diversity of its followers. Perhaps there has grown with it also a romantic aura that again is half good and hah0 dangerous. In the first flush of youth a young man may set out to follow St Dominic for motives that on the surface are indeed romantic.

A priest of my acquaintance once told me that when he was a young religious, he had had a great devotion to the divine office. In order to get the best out of it, he decided to make a careful study of the psalms. So he got out the best commentaries and studied their meaning in Latin and Hebrew; and when he had finished, he found that the psalms had ceased to have any meaning to him as prayer at all. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it illustrates a fact of great importance, namely, that prayer is not necessarily an exercise of discursive thought, and that study of a certain kind can be an obstacle rather than an assistance to prayer.

There is no doubt that for a great many priests and religious, if not the majority, the divine office is not a congenial method of prayer. It is a duty which has to be performed, which has its own special grace and virtue, but it is not generally felt as a personal method of prayer and approach to God.

We have read the Bible together (children of both sexes, now 8-17 years old) for about six years, every evening, in principal as part of a very informal sort of family prayers. We have read about a chapter at a time, reading always one of the gospels between Christmas and Easter, but otherwise usually reading straight on till we came to this annual, or some other natural or enforced break. So we have read from Genesis to the end of Job, Daniel, Jonas and parts of Isaiah, Ezechiel and Jeremiah, Machabees, the Acts, three Pauline epistles and the Apocalypse; some books once, most two or three times. One wonders what difference it makes to the minds of children growing up in the modern mental chaos, this ordinary Bible-reading’ which has in so many centuries been the ground of Christian education, but which is, I fancy, rather rare among Catholics today. Of course the children cannot tell one.

The year 1885 saw the passing of one of the great spiritual figures of that century: Mother Thérèse Couderc, Cofoundress of the Cenacle. Her contemporaries witness that at her death ‘there passed away a glory from the earth'—and Holy Church, agreeing with their verdict, will shortly proclaim her Blessed—a model of holiness for the whole world. How did she arrive at that shining sanctity which became so transparently evident as her long life drew to a closee It was simply by being a true Christian—through a complete surrender of herself into the hands of God, allowing him to do with her exactly as he pleased She was a woman of clear supernatural vision and good judgment. But at the age of thirty-three she was subjected to a series of misunderstandings, deposed from her office of Superior, deprived little by little of her title of Co-foundress, and she endured not only personal humiliation of the most painful kind, but the far greater agony of seeing the Cenacle pulled out of its right context and governed by one who possessed neither vision nor judgment.

Readers of this review will already be familiar with the name of Edith Stein—or Sister Benedicta, as we prefer to call her (cf. the May 1949, February and April 1950 issues of Life of the Spirit). Of her life something has been said, and the translation of her biography should soon be available in English. We are now able to enter more deeply into her thought through die publication of her works. In 1949 Schnell and Steiner Verlag of Munich published some of her essays on woman's vocation under the title Frauenbildung und Frauenberufe. Meanwhile Dr Gelber of Louvain and Fr Romaeus Leuven, O.C.D., have been preparing an edition of her complete works, which are being published jointly by Herder Verlag of Freiburg and Nauwelaerts of Louvain. Some eight volumes are envisaged of which two have appeared in 1950. The second, Kreuzeswissenschaft ('The Science of the Cross’), can be described here along with the earlier work on Roman's vocation.

A correct view about the purpose of the Missions must determine the qualities needed in a missionary. The first requisite is adaptability: he has to form new Christians, and has to adjust himself to a new and foreign outlook and way of life. While the development of communications and health services has rendered the possession of exceptionally strong bodily qualities generally unnecessary to-day, and the variety and extent of mission work gives an opportunity for almost all kinds of talents and types of mind, there are certain general qualities which are still necessary for all engaged in mission work.

Pope Pius XI stressed especially the dangers of nationalism among missionaries, and these are obvious, though nowadays such tendencies are less than formerly. Yet they are not entirely gone, and Pope Pius XII urges the missionary to make of his Mission a second fatherland, an adaptation not possible to some characters.