The exhortations and counsel of St Benedict in his Rule on the reception of guests are too well known to be repeated here. Their importance however can never be sufficiently stressed and their wisdom and beauty can never be aufficiently praised. There is in the Luxembourg Museum of Paris a painting by Dauban of a stranger being received by s convent. It is a perfect interpretation of the 53rd chapter of the Rule, with a poignant beauty and a moral for all humanity.

Doubtless there were guests even among the primitive communities in the deserts of Nitria and the Thebaid, although such a specu Istion is beyond the scope the present essay. During the earlier history of the monasteries, the hd 12th centuries for example, hospitality was a sine qua non of monastic life. In some cases, in-deed, as of the abbeys of Reading and Battle, the foundation-charters indicated that the providing of such hospitality in the district was the motive of the founder.

The relationship between Church and State, between Church and Society, was then very different from what it is today. The Church was closely interwoven with the entire national fabric.

Two lives are set before us in the Lord’s passion and resurrection: the life that we now endure and that for which we long. For he who deigned to endure this life, is well able to give us that other life. Indeed by this he shows us how much he loves us, and how he wishes us to believe that there we shall be given the good things that belong by right to him who willed to share in our ills. We are born, he is born; because we shall die, he has died. These two we have known in this life of ours—the beginning and the end, being born and dying: in being born, the beginning of labour; in dying, a passage to uncertainty. These two we have known, to be born and to die: this abounds in our land. Our land, the earth: the land of the angels, heaven. And so our Lord came to this our land out of that other: to the land of death from the land of life; to the land of toil from the land of bliss. He came bringing us his own bounty, and patiently he bore our ills.

The Bible excepted, no other book in Christendom has circulated so widely as ‘The Imitation.’ Prepared during one of the darkest hours in European history, between the dead or dying Middle Ages and the alluring dawn of the delusive Renaissance; and as the picturesque Michelet writes: ‘L’Imitation de Jésus Christ, le plus beau livre chrétien après l’Evangile, est sorti, comme lui, du sein de la mort. La mort du monde ancien, la mort du moyen âge, ont porté ces germes de vie.’

The most precious of the early manuscripts is the famous Antwerp Codex written by Thomas himself, with the subscription Finitus et completus anno domini MCCCCXLI per manus fratris Thome Kempensis in Monte Agnetis prope Zwolles. Before the war there were still in existence sixty dated manuscripts of the fifteenth century, and about thirty undated ascribed to that century.

Although the evidence is overwhelming in favour of Thomas à Kempis as the author, after his death other claimants to that great honour were put forward, the most notable being Jean Gerson, Chancellor of Paris.