Sigeid Undset's conversion in 1924 aroused something like consternation in Norway. There are few Catholics in the country—not quite three thousand— and there is much prejudice and accompanying ignorance of Catholic teaching. And yet her intimate friends and those who read her books carefully had long been aware of the trend of her thoughts. As far back as 1915 she wrote to a friend that ‘the Eoman Church has at least form and is not irritating to one's intelligence’. Later on she remarks that Eoper's life of his father-in-law, Thomas More, is one of the most beautiful things she has ever read; and her preoccupation with and widening knowledge of the middle ages, the ages of faith, in Preparation for the writing of her masterpiece, Kristin Lavransdatter, no doubt played a great part in enabling her to take the final step.

Brother, if thou desire to have the homely presence of our Lord Jesus Christ ghostly in thy soul in feeling, but how the blessed presence of Jesus is felt, it may better be known by experience than by any writing, for it is the life and the love, the might and the light, the joy and the rest of a chosen soul. And therefore he that once hath soothfastly felt it, he may not forbear it without pain, he must needs desire it, it is so good in itself and so comfortable. What is more comfortable to a soul here than for to be drawn out through grace from the vile noise of worldly business and filth of desires and from vain affection of all creatures into rest and safeness of ghostly love, privily perceiving the gracious presence of Jesus, fully fed with favour of his unseeable blessed face?

And therefore, good Lord, sith it is so that I may not nor can not have no good thought be it never so little a thought but if I have it of thee, as thou sayest thyself: Sine me nihil potestis facere. Therefore, Lord, I knowledge well that thou art of my soul both the door and the key, as thy gospel saith: Ego sum ostium. And Holy Church clepith thee the key, saying O clavis David, O thou Jesu the key of David. And sithen good Lord I am of un-power and thou art the door and the key, therefore my sweet lord now at this time I fall down to thy majesty, knowing that I am not worthy to lift up mine eyes towards thee for the multitude of my sins, but with a meek will I say Domine labia mea aperies, Lord thou shalt open my lips with the key of thy mercy, and so come in and let in thyself into mine heart, thy privy chamber, I Pray thee Lord.

Every now and then the Church is handed a bouquet, over the fence as it were, by someone outside her fold. Professor Jung has done this and surely we can take it. He tells us that he finds ‘frequency of complexes … highest among the Jews, Protestants come second and Catholics only third’. But what is even more interesting is the reason for this state of things. This is not found specially in the psychological value of confession but rather in the way in which Catholic belief helps a man through the natural psychological crises of ordinary human life. Indeed the professor seems to show that as Christian morals help to keep people out of prisons, so Christian dogma is of value in keeping them out of asylums. For the life of man is normally a progress beginning as a child under the care of its parents passing through various stages till he attains to maturity and becomes himself a parent.

This extract is from a 15th-century MS. Laud miscell. 330 on the religious life, written probably for Benedictine nuns, relating the external and interior life to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in an unusual order. The first chapter occupies almost half the work with a rambling commentary on the whole of the religious life, rule and customs as worked out under the guidance of holy fear. Of the other more brief chapters, the last two dealing with the higher gifts seem worthy of transcription. The unknown author's originality of approach and tender devotion, his shrewd insight into character and the directness and charm of his language raise the piece above the commonplaces of religious exhortation, so that it is still attractive and convincing to the simple of heart to whom it was dedicated four hundred years ago. The spelling has been modernised.

He began to be sorrowful: he began to be afraid. We live today in a world so haunted by fear that this story of Christ's agony must be very close to us. Anxiety lies heavy on the heart of men; and on the lips of philosophers the very word has become a commonplace. But it is not only fear that we share with this figure in the garden. The most fearful thing about the world's fear is its hopelessness, its sense of futility, a futility reflected again by those philosophers for whom anxiety is an anguish from which there is no issue. Here, in the garden, he began to be afraid: and it was indeed a dread of the torments to come; it was indeed the burden of loneliness; it was the terrible sense of defilement, the even physical horror of the black waters of evil overwhelming him; but added to all this there was the knowledge that it would all to some extent be in vain, to some extent be futile.

The Stimulus Amoris, long attributed to St Bonaventure but now known to be a composite work, the main part of which was written by James of Milan, a thirteenth century Franciscan, was extremely popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Walter Hiltou made a translation of it, adding many passages of great beauty and interest. The work has not been printed hitherto. We give a chapter in which Hilton's additions are printed in brackets. The text is taken from MS. Vernon.

Few paradoxes can be more important for the Christian in quest of the true life than that between the multiplicity of Christian praying and the single unity of Christian prayer. This is especially applicable to the Christian who has made some progress in grace and is beginning to live a life of union. Mother Julian in her fourteenth revelation includes a short treatise on the prayer of beseeching in order to show how that type of prayer is part and parcel of the prayer of love, which is her one prayer. But from the very first she was confronted by many forms of prayer contrasted with the simplicity of God's goodness.

From the wider and more general considerations we may now presume to formulate in clearer and more precise terms what is here meant by the words Nature and Grace. In the modern vernacular they no longer at once offer to the mind the clear-cut idea they once represented when Catholic doctrine was more familar and more closely ingrained in the English mind. In the developing and perhaps changing philosophy of any given people, particular terms or words endure in current use; but gradually they are emptied of the significance that once charged them, and they are apt to become uncertain coin of exchange, particularly within the generation which marks the dissolution of a preceding era and the opening out upon new and uncertain adventures of the human spirit.

To bridge then the abyss between human and divine, it is necessary to find within the created nature of man some kind oi ledge, or base, or some point d'appui, where the grace of God could alight, and there infuse life. Or, to vary the metaphor (and the use of metaphor is our only way of stating these truths), there must be within the creature a ground or soil in which God could plant a seed, an embryo of his own life of grace. In the first days of preaching the Gospel of Christ, his apostles made use of the metaphor of engrafting, a figure of speech as suggestive and accurate as human words could well be; and by this was intended the implanting of a new growth or life upon some different trunk, which was already in its own order alive.

What we are having to go through during these years, so full of war's unprecedented waste, drives us to seek ever more closely for the meaning of such happenings. However many and varied the answers which are given, one thing stands out clearly, that there is discernible in these events not only a world-wide call to reflection and repentance but a special message from God. Rearing upon the present, lighting up the past and foreshadowing the future, this message lays bare the causes of what is happening and so points out the way to victory, just as the keen-eyed doctor looks at the symptoms of sickness in order to come upon the cause of the evil and the means of healing at the same time.

Quite often the modem type of spirituality is partially condemned as subjective and introverted, as too self-conscious to be fully God-conscious. No doubt some truth lies in this accusation; for the whole renaissance and post-renaissance attitude of mind as exhibited in philosophy, science, theology, has been centred on human experience and the analysis of human life and values. Perhaps this was what Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote The Present Age, saying that it is killing itself with reflection, that even the children who should typify the middle ages in their direct and outgoing lives are often precocious, consuming with the rest of European grownups an 'enormous amount of scruple and deliberation'. The accusation of beiug too self-analytical and reflective has often been made against the great Spanish mystical writers.

The tram-car, fuller than any English tram would dare to be, went jangling and clanging through the streets of Rome, out beyond the walls, on the Grottaferrata; we dismounted, directed by eager and friendly voices, near the convent of the Cistercian nuns where we were to be guests. The fact had impressed those whom we had told of our intended visit. ‘What! You are going to stay with the Seplote Vive? Do they take guests? You're not thinking of taking the veil, are you? How on earth have you managed that?’

Religiouis life implies certain specific characteristics: the vowed and dedicated life; the three counsels of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience; the ordered sequence of Mass, the daily Office and Mental Prayer; with some element of work and recreation at ordered times. We are so much used to the life's being lived in community that we are apt to think the Religious life implies, per se, Community life. But to be precise, this is not so.

Mother Julian was able to resolve the conflicting paradoxes involved in the relation between the world and God because she had attained to that concrete touch by which the Spirit of God brings all into one. By the ‘touch’ of divinity the Spirit draws all the experience and ideas of a life-time into the immediate orbit of the single and simple reality of his being.

And what might this noble Lord do of more worship and joy to me than to shew me that am so simple this marvellous homeliness? (e. 7, p. 16.)

This is the day, my dear friends, when the Holy Spirit, so long promised, was sent from heaven to the holy Apostles and to all who were living in the love of God. Again this is the day when, by the divine mercy was restored to us the precious and priceless treasure that we had lost of old in the earthly paradise, by the devil's instigation and human weakness. Doubtless the manner of the Holy Ghost's visible descent upon the disciples was marvellous, but what happened interiorly was of another and different beauty: beyond the understanding of reason, intelligence or feeling.