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,