Chapter I: The 'Gap' in the Religious Situation of To-day

ANYONE who is at all familiar with the present position of Catholicism in the Anglican Communion—that is, in any or all of the provinces in communion with the see of Canterbury — must be conscious of the existence of a certain 'gap' in teaching and practice which, to a much larger extent than is generally recognised, nullifies and renders sterile all the considerable progress which has been, and is being, made.

That 'gap' is the absence of insistence upon, and the practice of, mental prayer.

Whilst in almost every other way we have assimilated, carried on, corrected and developed the work begun by the Tractarian Movement, we have sadly failed in learning and reproducing that practice of the interior life of prayer and mortification in which our fathers trained themselves and their people. Lest this statement should seem to savour of exaggeration, I venture to call attention to three facts, chosen from amongst many, which substantiate it.

(1) Some time ago an English diocesan Bishop addressed a questionnaire to his clergy in which he asked for information as to their teaching about, and practice of, prayer. The question did not receive a single answer!

(2) A long and varied experience amongst nearly all classes, both at home and abroad, not only in ordinary parish work, but also in conducting missions and Retreats, has revealed the existence of an astonishing ignorance as to what Christian prayer is, and how it should be practised.¹ Only a very few, even amongst the clergy and laity who make Retreats, know of, and actually live, lives of prayer, and, if they have attempted to do so, they are usually in a very elementary stage, making little or no progress for want of knowledge. Most of them have never been taught clearly, and imagine that mental prayer is a spiritual luxury reserved for an élite few, as well as being exceedingly difficult. That it is neither I shall hope to show.

(3) A knowledge of the contents of the bookshelves of the average modern priest reveals, to some extent, the reason for this ignorance and neglect of mental prayer. For, whatever may be found there, it is comparatively rare to find any of those solid, enduring, indispensable books on the spiritual life and the practice of prayer which exist in so rich an abundance that it is almost incredible that they should be so ignored. The truth of this statement will appear to anyone who compares the average priest's library with the Bibliography at the end of this book. I do not imply that the absence of at least some standard books on prayer means that a priest does not pray and teach his people to pray, but it does normally afford the presumption that he has not that regard for the subject which the books he does possess indicate he has for others.

Now I would claim that it is precisely this absence of the teaching and practice of mental prayer, with all that it involves, which is the most serious thing in the life of the Church to-day, which, more than anything else, is ' holding up ' the true and necessary development of the Catholic Revival in our midst. For, despite the fact of a great amount of organisation and activity, more alarming than reassuring to many, there is a quite perceptible pause, and something of a consequent depression, existing to-day. Some words of Fr. Faber's in a letter written in 1850 to Mr. Watts Russell about the then state of Roman Catholicism in England have an unpleasantly familiar sound to-day : ' We have all been too cocky here in England, both old Catholics and converts. We have gone on as if the game were in our own hands; we have run off to shows, pageants, functions, fine churches, gentlemanliness, publicity, and not corresponded to what God was doing for us outwardly by an increase of asceticism or prayer, or the practice of an interior life generally. We were getting more hollow and presumptuous daily. . . . Alas, the misery is that so few people take a supernatural view of things.'

We have seen, almost within the limits of a lifetime, the recovery of Catholic ideals, faith and practice in a country which more than any other had lost touch with the main stream of Catholic tradition and life; we have familiarised the people of England, as no one else could have done, with doctrines they had forgotten, Sacraments they ignored, and practices they had been taught to abhor: we have got an appreciable number of them to Mass and the Sacraments and to some growing perception of the supernatural, yet we are, or should be, sadly conscious that something is yet lacking. There is: and it is the realisation of the fact that the acceptance of the Faith, the hearing of Mass and the reception of the Sacraments are not all; that Faith, Cultus and Sacraments need a background and reinforcing power. That background, that power, is the interior life of prayer.

For, amongst other reasons which will be dealt with in a later chapter, it is prayer alone which makes the grace of the Sacraments operative in our lives. For, although the grace of the Sacraments is given ex opere operato, it does not produce fruit without our moral assimilation and response, which is mainly the work of prayer. This is one reason why all the masters of the spiritual life teach that mental prayer is morally necessary to the acquiring and maintaining of even a low degree of holiness. We see people going regularly to Mass and the Sacraments for years, yet remaining in a mediocre and barren piety. It is because they do not really pray. That is the reason, referred to by Fr. Rawlinson at the First Anglo-Catholic Priests Convention (Report, pp. 79 ff.), why we do not produce 'heroic types of sanctity.' It is largely due to the fact that our direction in and out of the confessional is almost entirely moralistic, concerned more with sins than with sanctity, with the overcoming of temptation by strenuous, external efforts of our own rather than with the building up of the interior, spiritual life, of contentment, with a well-drilled, mediocre piety instead of aiming at producing a desire for perfection.

In the course of the history of the Church there are some striking illustrations of her continuous appreciation of the supreme need of prayer in the Christian life. And by prayer, let it be said once for all, I mean much more than the term ordinarily conveys to-day. Not the recitation of ordinary, vocal prayers, mainly composed of petitions and intercessions, but that mental prayer which has been the continuous tradition and practice of souls from the earliest days of Christianity, the prayer of being with God, of attention to Him, of reflection upon spiritual realities, prayer which is, as says St. Nilus, 'an intercourse of the spirit with God' (de Oratione, 3), 'an elevation of the soul to God' (St. John Damascene, De Fide Orthodox, I. iii. 24), 'a friendly intercourse in which the soul converses alone with Him by Whom she knows that she is loved' (Life of St. Teresa, chap. viii.), an act which 'places our understanding in the Divine Light, and exposes our will to the warmth of heavenly love' (Introduction to the Devout Life, St. François de Sales, pt. ii., chap. 1).

In the Christian ages, most conspicuous, not only for striking examples of heroic sanctity, but for a very deep and widespread devotion amongst all classes, e.g. those of Syrian and Egyptian and Gallican monasticism, of early Benedictinism, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in France, Spain and Italy, there is an apparent absence of emphasis, particularly in the earlier periods mentioned, on the reception of the Sacraments compared with that laid on prayer. This does not mean that the Sacraments were not esteemed; on the contrary, one reason why so comparatively little is said about them is that they formed, where they could be had, so normal a part of Christian practice. Still, those ages were not Sacramental in the sense that ours is; Confession and Communion were, with notable exceptions, infrequent; St. Antony did not receive Holy Communion for some years; in the earliest Benedictine monasteries Mass was only said and Communion given only on Sundays and the greater feasts, whilst the normal rarity of Communion, even amongst religious, in mediæval times, and indeed up to the Counter-Reform, is well known. Yet there was never a time when all alike, clergy, religious and laity, were not exhorted to the life of prayer, and that in its most advanced stages. Neither infrequent reception of the Sacraments nor any state of life was held to constitute any bar to the practice of mental prayer. Whatever else might be omitted, for one cause or another, this was absolutely necessary. Preaching to mixed congregations in the Lateran basilica, St. Gregory the Great exhorts all classes to strive after the highest states of prayer, as in his Pastoral Rule he clearly demands it of the clergy. The great teachers of the Middle Ages were no less insistent, and the immense work of the Counter-Reformation was founded on it. The reform and sanctification of clergy, religious and laity all depend upon this: to pray and to teach souls to pray - it is all. For given this, everything else will follow. It is as true to-day as ever. No duty is more incumbent upon the clergy than this. Unless they themselves learn how to pray, and centre all their efforts on teaching others to pray, their work is useless. For it is ignorance of this more than anything else which is the main cause, not only of the shallowness and mediocrity of modern piety, but of the general lapse from all Christian practice. It is not the difficulties of belief, the conflict between religion and science, or rather the camp-followers of science, the time-spirit or any of the many things at which the learned tilt; it is primarily that our own people do not know how to pray and, not knowing, fall an easy prey to any temptation that besets them. It may be an article in the daily paper, or the fact, as I have seen it, of being suddenly placed in circumstances, e.g. in a foreign country, where all the normal surroundings of life are absent, where there is not only no church, priest or Sacraments, but a distinct absence of any moral or spiritual tone. For the man or woman habituated to prayer this would be hard enough; for one who does not know how to pray it spells disaster. The average priest and well-disposed parent imagines that if a boy or girl is brought up to say vocal prayers twice a day (and how many do even this without fail any confessor knows), is confirmed and started off with a monthly Communion, it is enough. It is not enough; without mental prayer it is worth very little.

Nor should the teaching of prayer be confined to a select few—the faithful communicants or those who attend a week-night service. They need it, and we shall be surprised at the number who actually welcome it; but so also will many who we have never suspected would respond to it—I mean those who seldom come to church at all. We complain about the exigencies of modern life which make it almost impossible for thousands even to fulfil their Sunday obligation or to receive the Sacraments frequently. But we have actually become so obsessed with the idea that the Christian life consists in going to church—‘a fond thing vainly invented' by the Puritans of the seventeenth century – that in dealing with 'outsiders' we begin at the wrong end by endeavouring to persuade them to come to a 'mission' service, a mothers' meeting or Bible class, or even, daringly, to Evensong, or a Confirmation class. The general results are familiar enough. If we succeed, they are usually more firmly convinced than they were that religion is not for them.

Far better to face the truth that the Christian life does not consist in 'coming to church,' that the great majority of Christian people never have gone to church with that frequency which we expect, and that if we were in their places we should not do so either. It is not modern conditions solely which account for our empty benches, nor original sin. There never has been a time when the vast majority of Christian people could or did do much more than fulfil their Sunday obligation by attendance at a low Mass. Our mistake is that, failing to get them to church, we give them up as hopeless and confine our attention to those who come, or are likely to come. We need an Apostolate to the non-churchgoers, an Apostolate, not of processions or open-air preaching, still less of subsidiary attractions, but of prayer. And by this I mean, not chiefly intercessory prayer for this class, but the deliberate centring of efforts on getting them to pray. Most of them still retain one or two truths on which such an attempt must be based. They believe in God, in some indistinct way in our Lord and in prayer. It would not be difficult to get many of them to some little practice of prayer; say, a simple act of adoration and offering every morning, or a carefully recited Pater and Ave, some little use of ejaculations and of offering their work, etc., to our Lord, with Him, in Him and for Him, a short evening prayer. It would require both infinite care and patience, but in each soul who began in the smallest way we should have implanted a Divine seed of limitless possibilities, for once a soul really begins to pray, the way is open for our Lord to operate, desire for holiness grows, and the normal channels of grace are sought as well as the expression of the new life in Christian worship.

After this digression, which might seem to countenance laxity as to the necessary Christian obligations, though it does not nor is intended to do so; after, too, what I have said about the less 'Sacramental' ages of the Church, it may not be unnecessary to point out that the modern Sacramental movement is not to be viewed with suspicion. Brought about, as it largely was, by the insistence of the leaders of the Counter-Reform - Mother Blémur, writing of the reforms brought about in the Benedictine houses in France by the introduction of mental prayer, says that one of the results was an increased frequentation of the Sacraments, 'car auparavant l'usage en était rare' (Blémur, ii., pp. 121, 122) - checked for a moment by Jansenism, which had far more influence in England than is commonly recognised, reaching the full approbation of the Church under Pius X, it has already begun to bear fruit. What I am concerned with is not subtraction or substitution, but the combination of our Sacramentalism with the prayer life of the Saints. The Church is a living body, not a static institution; a shrine of living realities, not a museum of relics. And, being a living body, she cannot be tied down or for ever bound within the particular limits of development reached in any one age; to live is to move, in motu vita, to touch life as it is here and now. Thus the Sacramental Revival, both in cultus and communion, is the Church's answer, the answer of the Mind of Christ, Whose Body she is, to the materialism of our day, her deliberate way of combating the tendencies of the human spirit in our time.

In each age the Church, divinely guided by the Spirit of Jesus, her Head, and despite much hindrance, not only from the world, but from the frailty of her members, carries on the mission of Jesus, opposing to the spirit of the world the spirit of the Gospel under new and varying forms, some of which persist, others of which do their work and pass away, never, however, without handing on some notable contribution to the life-total of the Body. In the first three centuries of her existence she met and conquered the world by the spirit of martyrdom, later by the institution of the eremitical and cœnobitic life; Benedictinism was the salt and preservative during the Dark Ages, the Friars that of the time spirit of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a large part of the disaster of the Reformation being due to the failure of the Church to make any general and adequate response to their labours. The Counter-Reformation saved Catholicism in Europe, indeed it saved Christianity for the world. And in our day Sacramentalism in its varying forms, daily Masses, frequent and daily Communion (a return indeed to the 'early' Church), the cultus of the Holy Sacrament, is our contribution to the age-long tradition of the Church, a contribution which seems about to lead to another wave of devotion in prayer and to the religious life. It must necessarily be so, for by no other means may faith be translated into living experience or grace become operative in human lives. No man's religion is safe, much less potent, until it has become in very truth his own. As Miss Evelyn Underhill says, 'No one, as a matter of fact, takes any real interest in the explanation [of the life of the Spirit] unless he has had some form of the experience' (Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day, p. 5). He must 'taste and see that the Lord is gracious,' and such taste and sight, sight because taste, comes, as St. Bonaventura says, 'of desire, not of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not of the teaching of the schools.'

One word more. Most of us do not sufficiently recognise how much we have been and are handicapped by four facts in our history and development.

(1) The fact that for three centuries we have been entirely cut off from the main stream of Christian tradition, development and life. Only those who know something of the interior life of the Catholic Church in Europe as well as of her external labours during that time can have any idea of its richness and diversity, and in some part realise our own irreparable loss.

(2) Added to this is the second fact that during this time we have lived in an heretical atmosphere, an atmosphere in which 'what was Christian in Christianity had largely disappeared' (Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, chap. ii., p. 13). Religion has become merely a synonym for morality, philanthropy and self-improvement; Faith reduced to feelings; the Christian life regarded as an activity rather than an act, doing rather than being; the intellectual and moral side exalted to the exclusion of the spiritual and affective; nature opposed to grace; a riot of conflicting and ultimately anti-Christian tendencies, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Jansenism and Puritanism, a spiritual malaria from which we still suffer.²

(3) A necessity of our peculiar and abnormal circumstances has produced a third fact, that for the past half-century our attention has been mainly riveted on external things. The restoration of Divine worship, the use of the Sacraments, the replacing of dogmatic truth before the minds of our people, the recovery of a liturgical and ceremonial sense – these and other things, which had to be done, have so occupied our minds and activities that we have had little time even to perceive the need of something more. Thus we have evolved a type of Catholicism which rarely gets beyond the mediocre; we have become content if people come to Mass and the Sacraments more or less regularly; we have not, at least often, discerned their capability of and our own responsibility for the awakening and development of a truly interior life.

(4) We have – and this becomes more marked daily in both clergy and laity – neglected serious study of and meditation upon the New Testament. We have usually, following the wrong guides, given some attention to criticism, history, etc., of Gospel times, textual revision and the like, but not to ‘reading the Bible biblically,’ as the Dominican saying has it; i.e. reading the text itself and comparing one part with another. Commentaries, ‘ces gloses parasites qui coupent la parole au Maître,’ have been a snare and delusion to us; the word of God has been buried beneath a mass of trivialities, the Divine Spirit has fled from our too exclusive intellectualism.

Now all this has created and developed that hard, unsupernatural, unspiritual and profoundly un-Christian tone and habit of thought which is characteristic of our time. Pages could be filled with examples of it. But it will suffice anyone to compare the ordinary ideals of the parochial clergy or the spirit of the average

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alone cannot be treated as if there were no fundamental differences between them. It is precisely in fundamentals that they are different. But why waste time on ‘disappearing’ religions in an hour of return to an ever-vital Catholicism? ‘Calvinism and Zwinglianism are disappearing from the map of Europe’ (Mr. Arnold Lunn in The Review of the Churches, April 1903, p. 314).

Anglican book on religion with the New Testament, The Spiritual Combat, The Devout Life of St. François de Sales, or the Royaume de Jésus of St. John Eudes, to see the vast gulf between the spirit of one and the other. And 'it is the spirit which giveth life.'³

Footnotes

1. 'It is generally recognised that our people to-day hardly pray at all,' - Fr. Conran, S.S.J.E., in the Church Times, April 4th, 1930. ↩

2. I must not be taken to be depreciating or criticising the lives or the prayer of individuals who have held, in greater or less degree, Lutheran, Calvinistic, Jansenistic or Puritanic tenets. I refer to them as systems of doctrine and practice which, as such, are opposed to the teaching, spirit and mind of the Catholic Church. The Lutheran doctrine of faith, the Calvinistic conception of God, the Jansenist teaching on grace, the Judaic-Manichean spirit underlying Puritanism, together with the complete repudiation of the Church, the Hierarchy, the Sacraments of fifteen hundred years, and the overthrow of moral principles which they produced, are sufficient to justify the terms used here and elsewhere. A system which produced or was produced by Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Beza, Knox, etc., and that which produced St. François de Sales, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa and the innumerable Saints of the ↩

3. Speaking at the 1930 Church Congress, Lord Eustace Percy said, 'The members of the Church speak, as St. Paul refused to speak, "in the words that man's wisdom teacheth"; in loose phrases which may fit a dozen meanings, in terms which are indeterminate, and definitions which do not define. We no longer preach Christ crucified, but "the principle of the Cross"; regeneration and redemption are swallowed up in "a process of spiritual development," the Gospel itself is converted into "the New Testament ethic."' ↩