The National Gallery in London possesses one of the most fervently religious pictures ever painted. The last picture which Botticelli left to the world, the ‘Nativity’, sums up and expresses the religious sentiments aroused in his soul by the preaching of Savonarola, the visions of Dante's Divina Commedia, and the spiritual quality of Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco. It is the only painting executed by him in the last twenty years of his life, his ‘religious’ period, and it embodies the fruit of his contemplations as he contrasted the tragic events of that troubled time in Florence with the peace-bearing message of the Incarnation.

We must leave to him all our anxieties—the loved one whose faith seems almost to have failed, and be certain that love is in his heart still and that all will come right. You will not be afraid to live, for ‘neither breadth, nor length, nor height, nor depth, nor things present, nor things to come’, can separate you from the love of Christ. You will not be afraid to live, nor when the hour comes, to go down with him into the Valley of Shadow. How should you be afraid, for you can only say ‘I live: now not I, but Christ liveth in me’.

‘We should remember’, says St Thomas Aquinas commenting on the Ave Maria, ‘that of old it was a very great thing for angels to appear to men, and also was it the right thing for men to show them reverence. Thus to the credit of Abraham it is written that he showed hospitality to angels and reverenced them. But that an angel had shown reverence to man was a thing unheard of until the time when he reverently greeted the Blessed Virgin saying: Ave, Hail’ Thus in the eyes of Catholic theologians the veneration of our Lady began at the Annunciation when she was accorded honour and respect by the messenger of God himself.

Traditionally, meditations on death have leagued with those on the judgment and on hell to induce a type of fear that leads to repentance. Death terrifies the pagan and the Christian who by sin has strayed into a pagan way of life. In a world given over to the search for material well being and the more physical perfections of human life these terrors are pushed into the background of the mind. The foreground is wholly filled with the desires and activities connected with good living. Meditation on death is the last thing the living materialist would willingly undertake.

Stand on tiptoe and you will reach Heaven', says St Francis of Sales, and perhaps that is a good I description for us to begin with in thinking about prayer. Because the raising of the mind and heart to God so often gives us that insecure sense of being on tiptoe, reaching over the top of that high cupboard in the hall; we are quite sure it is there, that thing we are looking for, only we cannot quite see—and we cannot quite reach—and perhaps that little extra of the tiptoe will get our fingers onto it. There! We felt it! Just the merest touch, and now it has gone again! Silly of us to try, really; everyone said we were fools and should not do it; much better give it up before we strain, ourselves or overbalance—or shall We have one more try?

Blessed Virgin, Saint Mary, our Blessed Lady, the Mother of God, who with all the saints dost not cease to pray unto Almighty God in general I for succour in all distresses of the whole Catholic ‘Church, I beseech thee most humbly that as it hath both pleased thee of special favour to take upon thee the special protection of this realm of England thy Dower, so thou wilt vouchsafe by thy special prayers to thy sweet Son our Lord Jesus Christ, to prefer the same continually, and at this present, most instantly to deliver it from schism and heresy, and to restore it again to the unity of the holy Catholic Church, that all English people, above all other nations, may worthily from henceforth call thee blessed, and honour thy lame for ever, saying thus:

Fifty issues of THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT have now appeared and it would seem to be a convenient point at which to pause and take stock of the position of the review. It is quite evident from the four years’ experience of editing Life Of The Spirit that it has definitely to use the hackneyed phrase-filled a need. The regular flow of letters of gratitude and congratulation, and the fact that the review has nearly trebled its circulation since the first issue of July 1946 are sufficient evidence of this fact. The need however is so vast a one, as there is no other review published in England specifically on the lines of La Vie Spirituelle (which has provided a matrix for similar reviews in Spain, Italy, Germany, U.S.A., Ireland and in several other countries), that there has also been evidence of dissatisfaction in certain quarters as to the manner in which we have set about filling this gap in the ranks of religious periodicals. It is inevitable that the various types of interested readers should not find all that they had hoped for in these pages to suit their condition.

In Scripture there are revealed mysteries so deep as to defy man's unaided reason. Unless God himself had revealed them, man would never have come to know them. But such is the conflict between the depths of these sublime mysteries and the merely human language that cloaks them that often it seems that Scripture is proposing for a our belief some impossibility. Our faith tells us that this cannot be so, but we might be tempted to think that the expression of these truths is not exact, nor what it should be. This again is not true; what is true, however, is that we have to use God-given reason to lay bare still more God's revelations. Then we see that God's revelation is in no way an impossibility and that Scripture's expression is exact. A striking example of this fact is furnished by the revealed doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. There are many passages in Scripture where we find a revelation of this mystery. St Paul writing to the Romans says ‘But you live the life of the Spirit not of nature; that is, if the Spirit of God dwells in you.

One might suspect a distrust towards marriage in the words of a recent statement in a publisher's blurb advertising a book upon saints who were I married. The blurb declares it the purpose of the book to show that ‘marriage is compatible with sanctity'. The force of the ‘compatible’ needs exact appreciation, and may be more easily gauged if one reads it as ‘a sacrament instituted by God (e.g., marriage, ordination, etc.) is compatible with sanctity'.

Yet the misconception lurking in the sentence does not so much arise from a false view of marriage as from a false view of sanctity; clearly it is referring to canonised sanctity and not to being a saint; one hopes that there are more saints than the canonised. And, indeed, the many attempts which have been made in the last few years to rescue the married from the limbo of half-hearted Christianity nearly all labour under the same misconception. In the many Continental reviews which have dealt with the subject one hears an appeal for the canonisation of more married saints.

The Mass, said St Vincent Ferrer, is the highest act of contemplation. This relation between the Mass and contemplation, and hence between the priesthood and the contemplative life, is something which has received very Jittle attention; and yet it is something of supreme importance W the spiritual life of a priest, and in the whole conception of contemplation and the contemplative life. For too long, contemplation has been regarded as a matter of individual piety, the final phase in a system of meditation and mental prayer, to which few are expected to attain and which has no apparent relation to the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church. Garrigou-Lagrange has done much to correct this tendency, by showing that contemplation is not to be regarded as an extraordinary grace to which only a few can aspire, but as part of the normal perfection of a Christian life; the development of the grace which we all receive at baptism under the influence of the gifts of the Holy Ghost.

The Indulgences of the Holy Year are usually extended to the Universal Church after the closing of the Holy Doors. In 1650 there was such an extension till Easter Sunday, 1651, which fell on 30th March in England, but on 9th April in countries that had adopted the reformed calendar. The following sermon was written by Bl. Peter Wright, S.J., and exists in a volume of sermons, all in his own handwriting, at Stonyhurst. I gratefully acknowledge the kindness of Fr H. Chadwick, S.J., the Librarian, in allowing me to transcribe and publish it.

Bl. Peter Wright was born at Slipton in Northamptonshire of a Catholic yeoman family, lost his faith as a young man, and went to Holland to fight with the English Protestant regiment against the Spaniards, who then possessed half the Netherlands. He soon, however, deserted, was reconciled to the Church and became a Jesuit. He was appointed chaplain to the English regiment fighting on the side of the Spaniards.

During the Marian Congress which preceded the definition of the dogma of the Assumption last November, G. Gaetano di Sales, who leads a movement Pro Rogalitate Mariae, gave a paper on the meaning of the ‘Miraculous Medal’ and of the symbol of our Lady with a globe in her hand. He pointed out how specially indebted he was to this Marian devotion as he had been brought back to the faith by a special grace received in the Chapel of the Apparitions from which the devotion sprang. The following summary will convey the substance of the paper read in Rome.

We should not be ourselves scandalised because the announcement of the definition of Mary's Assumption has scandalised many earnest and honest minds. Bather may we ask whether we have fully appreciated its significance if we ourselves are not in some measure shocked and disturbed. True, the Pope will tell us nothing that we have not always taken for granted as part and parcel of the Catholic faith; we have meditated upon it in the last two decades of the Rosary, we have celebrated unquestioningly every August 15th. Yet it is no obvious, easily credible commonplace which is to he formally proclaimed to be an article of our faith; rather does it tax and test our faith to the utmost, and present a crucial challenge to our profession of acceptance of the central Christian mystery.

St Thomas More, ‘the one genius of England’, to quote Erasmus, is one of the best-loved of Englishmen. His wit and learning led Swift to number him among the seven great men of the world. His gentleness and charity led the Elizabethan London playwrights to name him ‘the best friend the poor e'er had’. Yet his very greatness and the warmth of his humanity have, in some respects, obscured the essential More, to the vast collection of Moreana available there is very little concerning Thomas More the saint, even less on More the theologian and little on Thomas the lawyer. By profession St Thomas was a lawyer, but it was as a theologian that he was admired and criticised by his contemporaries, and it was as the ‘leader of the opposition’ that he was liquidated by Henry.

In prayer we have to manufacture our own prayer. ‘Prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God’—not the mind and heart but my mind and heart; it is personal—at least, it should be. It is an art like anything else is—an art to be learnt, not some special gift given to one and not to another. We all have it; some have it and don't use it. Take any other gift—memory, reasoning, will-power—we all have them to a certain degree.

It is consoling at times to reflect that whereas men have prayed to God from their earliest origins, it is only comparatively recently that they have probed and analysed the structure and development of prayer. Consoling, because of the vast and ever growing literature on the subject which, if anything, becomes more remote and obscure.

In the recently published Paternoster Series (Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1s. 6d. each), four of the six booklets are directly concerned with prayer—all are reprints—and are written by well-known writers. The Path of Prayer, by Fr Vincent McNabb, O.P., might be called 'prayer meditated',