Preface

THERE is a certain peculiar difficulty, half pleasure, half diffidence, which must attach to the writing of a preface to such a book as this. A 'religious' must needs look upon prayer as the most practical as well as the most important activity in life. Any book which can make the ways of prayer more frequented, which can guide the bewildered, and above all can assist the clergy in doing so (one of the most difficult as well as the most necessary of their tasks), cannot but be sure of a welcome from every religious. But for a religious Superior to commend a book which springs from his own Community is a more delicate matter, and requires a belief in the book's value which is not always necessary to the writers of prefaces.

The book would seem to me to be one that may be commended not only to the notice, but also to the careful and above all devout study, of those called upon to direct souls – and this on two separate grounds.

First, if one can judge, the book is timely. The Tractarians, great men of prayer as they were, were forced, by the very circumstances of the case in which they found themselves, to concentrate upon the one basic end of the recovery of Catholic dogma. The English Church seemed to be in a parlous state, and its most alarming symptom was that it could see it appeared to have discarded its appeal to the Early and Undivided Church, and to be in danger of becoming an isolated entity in itself. With the vision of the Church Catholic, whose commission was from outside time, whose strength and whose message were not her own, the English Church's hope revived, and slowly from that hope came confidence and fulfilment.

But this was only a first step. The laity—even that butt of the more worldly clergy, the ' ecclesiastically minded ' laity—do not absorb theology as a rule from reading it; or, even if they do, its implications and corollaries are as a rule obscure to them. If the Oxford Movement was ever to become more than a clerical mental attitude, then there would inevitably be needed another restoration, the restoration of Catholic worship.

The battle for this was bound to be longer, because such a restoration was more practically startling to the plain mind than any abstract doctrinal emphasis. But we can roughly say that by the outbreak of the war the battle had been won in many parts of the kingdom, or at least was going successfully.

But the victory for Catholic worship produced in its turn a new need. The keynote of Catholic worship is latria, that prostrate adoration by the ' nothingness,' which is the human soul, of the supreme and everlasting ' All,' that is God — that adoration which Baron von Hügel called ' the heart of religion.' But once this conception of religion had been regained even to a slight extent, the old-fashioned ' pietism ' which the eighteenth century at its best had substituted for devotion was bound to be inadequate to the needs of souls.

The restoration of Catholic devotion inevitably had to wait until the preliminary steps of restoring Catholic Faith and Practice had been taken. Devotion is alike their fruit and their only guarantee of life. But to change the whole current of a soul's life, let alone that of a Church, is often enough a dangerous business. Certainly, even where it is most tranquilly accomplished, there will be swirlings and eddies and something of a backwash. In this case the process has been complicated to an indefinite extent by the simultaneous impact upon the English mind not only of the Catholic tradition, but of a number of other forces, racial, psychological, critical, and moral (or frequently anti-moral), which, though they have arisen outside the religious world, have their full effect upon it.

It is under such circumstances as these, when the Catholic ' Mind ' of the Church in these provinces, at many stages of development and swayed by a multitude of very different influences, seems to be groping in bewilderment, that we have to regain for the children of our Church that plain but often weary path to sanctity which has been beaten out by the footsteps of those whom we call Saints, after they have trodden it to the end – the Catholic tradition of prayer, in which Being and not ' Doing ' is the all-important thing.

And here, I think, comes in the other great merit, in my eyes, of this book – the truly Catholic wideness of its view. One cannot help feeling at times that the Ignatian method is being over-pressed among us to-day. In spite of its psychological excellences and its splendid results under suitable conditions, it remains what the great and wise Saint who drew it up always intended it to be, rather a gymnasium for the spiritual athlete than a universally applicable system.

The over-stressing of what after all is one very fruitful method is understandable. Once the method is fully grasped, there are few souls who cannot profit by it to an extent, many for whom it is excellently suited, and even the best of all methods. But whether all souls, or even the majority, necessarily get from it the full graces of prayer which the Holy Ghost only waits to shed abroad in their hearts is another question. Other methods were little known among us, and of the dangers of unregulated reading of ' mystical ' books many a director could give painful examples. At all events, from the sane, sober methods of St. Ignatius there would not spring that ' mysticality ' which hides

God behind the foggy sentiments of the worshipper's own mind and self. And so many an experienced priest has come to rely, even if he vaguely knew that other methods did exist, upon the only one whose study was not necessarily a specialist's preserve.

It is, then – at least, so it would seem to me – the special value of this book that without decrying or neglecting the virtues of the Ignatian method, it does present in detail the methods of a number of guides to the spiritual life. It is a platitude that no two souls are quite alike in their approach to prayer. It is well to have more than one path along which to guide them to the single Goal of all prayer – God.

' Jerusalem, which is above, which is the Mother of us all,' has her twelve gates, and Saints have entered by them all. I would commend to directors the need we have of broadening our grasp of the methods of prayer. It is true that methods are not all. But they are something, and in the early stages of the prayer-life they are of great importance.

In conclusion, I would only say this – it is the vocation to real sanctity to-day which often seems most lacking among us, clergy, religious, and laity alike. Yet it is charity nourished by grace – that inchoatio quædam beatitudinis which alone can attract our weary wounded world, that seeks for beauty and cries out for perfection even in the frail tottering things of earth that have so often cheated it already. The vision of that Life ever old and ever new – born yet never ageing – the eternal reconciliation of rest and realised omnipotence which is the blessed felicity of the Saints, dawns upon the eyes of charity even in this world. If the blind are not once more pathetically to lead the blind into the ditch, and even over the precipice, the eyes of our charity must be strengthened for that vision, and that can only be by prayer.

That this book may counsel anxious priests, may guide some who have already started on the long road of prayer, and may lead many to set out upon the strangest adventure of human life that leads from human life to Life Himself, is the hope and earnest prayer of

DENYS, Abbot of Pershore.