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Chapter III: The Object and Necessity of Mental Prayer

WHY, it may be asked, was it necessary, in a book on methods of mental prayer, to begin with such a sketch of the Christian life as I have just given? Mainly because it is not commonly seen, understood and followed by those who profess and call themselves Christians. The practice of the Christian life is not ordinarily and clearly seen as a practice of the life of Jesus Christ, a continuation of His life, interiorly and exteriorly, with a constant recurrence to Him as the one source and principle of all that we are and do, a life lived by Jesus, in Jesus, with Jesus and for Jesus. To compare the average modern view of what the Christian life is with that of St. Paul, notably in the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, and of St. John in his Gospel and Epistles, will be proof sufficient of this.

But if our understanding of the Christian life be wrong, inadequate or distorted, it naturally follows that in like proportion and degree our prayer will be so. In fact, unless we see the Christian life as it is in Jesus Christ and is meant to be in us, we shall not see either the necessity or the end of mental prayer. Assuming, then, all that has been said or implied in the previous chapter, we shall now consider :

  1. The object of mental prayer.

  2. The particular need of it to-day.

But first a common fallacy must be dissipated. There is absolutely no justification for the very common idea that sanctity, perfection, is only required of certain classes or individuals in the Church, that whilst it may naturally be assumed that the clergy, religious and certain of the laity should strive after the highest possible perfection, the ordinary layman or laywoman is only expected to seek some lower degree of perfection. This is not true; the teaching of the New Testament and the lives of the Saints absolutely negative such an idea. There is but one Christian life, one Christian sanctity, to which all Christians without any distinction are called. 'Be ye therefore perfect' is addressed to each baptised child of God; so is 'called to be Saints,' 'this is the will of God, even your sanctification,' for 'without holiness no man shall see the Lord.'

There is no state or condition of human life from the throne to the gutter from which Saints have not been produced by the grace of God. The Church has canonised thieves, murderers, harlots and beggars, artisans and tradespeople, men in every rank of professional life, women in every vocation; her calendar has no restrictions of race, culture or condition, for 'with God there is no respect of persons,' nor any state of life or action not sanctified by the life and actions of Jesus.

Perfection consists in the loving union of the will with God, a union, as we have seen, made possible by a right use of His gifts. It is not, as Père Poulain points out, to be regarded 'as a fixed and well-defined goal to which we must attain under pain of having lost our time,' but 'an endless road along which we continue to advance' (Graces of Interior Prayer, xxiv. 27). The words of Almighty God to Abraham, 'Walk before Me and be perfect,' express clearly in what our perfection in via is to consist.

To such perfection all are called, all are capable of it, all must strive to attain it. It is not in the end or in the general means by which the end is to be sought, but in the particular use of the means by each individual soul, that there are degrees in the manner of our progress. On these two points all the Saints speak with one voice. Fr. Baker admirably sums up their teaching in the first chapter of Holy Wisdom. ' Our duty in our present state and the employment of our whole lives must be constantly and fervently to co-operate with Divine grace, thereby not only endeavouring to get the victory over self-love, pride and sensuality, etc., by humility, divine love and all the other virtues : but also, not to content ourselves with any limited degree of piety or holiness, but daily to aspire, according to our abilities, assisted by grace, to the same perfection for which we were first created, to wit . . . a continual, uninterrupted union in spirit with God, by faith contemplating Him, and by love ever adhering to Him . . . for experience demonstrates that all the sublime exercises of contemplation may be as purely and perfectly performed by persons the most ignorant and unlearned (so they be sufficiently instructed in the fundamental doctrines of Catholic Faith) as by the learnedest doctors, inasmuch as not any abilities in the brain are requisite thereto, but only a strong, courageous affection of the heart.'

It follows, then, that whilst mental prayer is necessary for all as a chief means of perfection, any methods, much less any particular methods, are not necessary in the same sense, although, as we shall see, they are necessary in a large number of cases. But it should be remembered that where circumstances make any formal act of mental prayer in the ordinary sense of the word practically impossible, we must not cease to inculcate the vital necessity of the life of prayer and to suggest how it is possible for any soul to 'pray without ceasing.' Practically, the division runs between those who have or could make time and those who have not, but no height of prayer open to the former is closed to the latter. The Saints have been and are the busiest people in the world; our feeble excuses falter upon our lips as we contemplate their practice of prayer.

  1. 'This is Life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent' (John xvii. 3), and we cannot doubt that the knowledge of which our Lord speaks is not merely a knowledge of or about God, but such a knowledge as will produce a right attitude toward God – that is, a knowledge of God and Divine things which will awaken, develop and perfect a life of love for God. For though it be true that eternal life is the gift of God, yet no less true is it that it consists, as St. John of the Cross says, in a union of the soul, transformed by love, with God, which is only verified when we realise in ourselves the resemblance of love – that is, when, by the exercise of the union accomplished in Baptism, we, who have been made 'partakers of the Divine nature,' realise that union by the moral response of our wills with the will of God. This union, which is the end of our creation and in which consists our sole Beatitude, since, as Dame Julian saw, 'He is the Very Rest and willeth to be known, and it pleaseth Him that we rest in Him; for all that is beneath Him sufficeth us not,'1 is no Pantheistic absorption of the many in the one, with a consequent loss of individuality and creatureliness, but is essentially personal in character, a union of the creature, between God and whom there is an infinite difference in kind, not merely in degree, with the Creator by an act of the will moved by and responding to Divine grace. It is a union based on knowledge, for we cannot desire or even think about that which we do not know, nor without such knowledge as is possible to finite creatures could any real union with God be attained. More, since it is pre-eminently a union of love, the kind of knowledge which is required is that of friendship in the very highest sense of the word.2

How, then, is such a knowledge to be gained? The Saints and masters of the spiritual life, speaking from an experience verified by their lives, unanimously answer, by means of mental prayer. For 'prayer is an ascension of the soul towards God' (St. Nilus), 'a familiar conversation with God' (St. Ephrem), 'nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who we know loves us' (St. Teresa), 'the uniting of the soul with God' (Dame Julian), 'a familiar talk and an intimate union with God' (St. Alphonsus). Speaking more exactly of the mental or reflective act in prayer, the Ven. Fr. Libermann defines it as 'a sensible application of the mind to a supernatural truth, in order to convince ourselves of it, and to be brought to love it by the help of divine grace'; and Cardinal Landrieux, Bishop of Dijon: 'We reflect in order that we may think aright, we think aright in order that we may desire aright, we desire aright in order that we may pray aright, we pray aright in order to obtain the grace of loving, willing and doing what is right.'

Let us consider all this a little in detail.

Only by thought, reflection, concentrated attention, are we able to gain a knowledge of any object. Real knowledge cannot be imparted, it must be gained; like a Sacrament, it requires the co-operation of the whole self; body, mind, will, must all set themselves to see, to enter into, to grasp and appreciate, and use whatever it may be we desire to know. The preliminary steps are never easy or pleasant; even when the subject is one which appeals to us, there is a necessary amount of drudgery to be gone through. But if – whether being compelled or attracted to a particular subject – we give our thought and attention to it, the day comes when it occupies, enthrals, dominates us, and the more we give ourselves to it, the more it possesses us and becomes a living and powerful force in our lives.

True as this is of those things which are perceptible to and knowable by human reason, it is all the more true of things which lie outside and beyond the perception of the senses. 'The things of God require study,' says Faber. Now in the Catholic religion we have a revelation of Eternal Reality, of a distinct world of Persons, Truths, Things and Operations, a world of which we are all - consciously or unconsciously - a part. Note I say a revelation, for the Catholic religion is a revelation, not a discovery; it comes from God, is not the product of man's search after God, but the answer to that search. It is a revelation, too, of what is - and always has been - there, eternally existent, outside and beyond and independent of time and creatures, for it is a revelation of God Himself. It is there, and, in one way or another, suddenly or gradually, we become aware of it, are awakened to our need of realising and entering it for ourselves.

It is Faith which enables us to take the first step. In the oldest, most widely and continuously used Baptismal Service of the Church, the first question addressed to him who seeks eternal life is 'What desirest thou?' 'Faith.' It is necessarily so, for 'without faith it is impossible to please God: for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him' (Heb. xi. 6). Faith is a gift of God which enables us to accept that which God reveals, 'a supernatural virtue by which, stimulated and aided by the grace of God, we believe as true that which He has revealed, not because of the intrinsic truth of things, known by the natural light of the reason, but because of the authority of God Himself, who cannot deceive or be deceived.' That is, our reason, aided by grace and moved by the will, accepts and believes what the Church teaches, not because it is convinced by arguments or proofs, not because it sees or understands, much less 'feels' that it is true, but simply on the authority of God Himself. (It would be absurd, of course, to think that the Church could teach anything as de fide - that is, as necessary to belief - which was false, since this would mean a total uncertainty about the whole Christian religion, which we only know of through the Church, which gave us the Bible in precisely the same way that she has given us the Faith and the Sacraments.)

The next step on the path of knowledge is that we are taught about this new world of realities, this true patria of ours, of which we are made free in Holy Baptism, by our parents, priests, teachers, etc. If we have the happiness of being brought up in a Catholic atmosphere - and this counts more than anything else - we learn early to pray, we gain a supernatural spirit from living in contact with holy persons and things which become as real and familiar to us as are our parents, our home, our cats and dogs - an estimable grace which he who lacks it finds difficult to gain in later life. Yet for all, although especially for the latter, a further step is needed - that is, to enter into a personal, intimate experience of that world for themselves. And this can only be done by some form of mental prayer, in which we pay attention to, concentrate and think upon, the Persons, Truths, Things,

Works and Ways of that eternal, supernatural world of Reality to which we belong. 'Man arrives at the knowledge of truth in two ways,' says St. Thomas: 'first, by that which he receives from another; second, by applying his own efforts: and the latter is meditation.' 'Faith,' says Faber, 'has a sort of vision of its own: but there is no light in which it can distinguish objects except the light of prayer.' In mental prayer we are like the shepherds who, having heard the Divine revelation, said, 'Let us now go and see' for ourselves, and thus going by faith they found Jesus and 'returned glorifying and praising God.'

We have seen already that union with God consists in an act of Divine charity by which our wills are conformed to His will, that this is the main object of prayer3 in which we seek to know God in order that we may love Him and do His will, for, says St. Teresa, 'in this consists the highest perfection, he who most excels in this practice will receive the greatest gifts from God and make most progress in the interior life'; and St. Alphonsus, 'We ought to pray in order to be perfectly united to God: and that which unites us to God is not so much our good thoughts as the good movements of our will.'

Now union with God is union with a Person, for God is someone, not something, and this implies that the knowledge of Him which is necessary is, in degree, the same kind of knowledge, sought for in the same way, as we have of persons in this world. Such knowledge is twofold. We may know a person – as, for instance, we know the King or the Prime Minister – by hearing of them, reading about them, seeing their portrait or even by catching a glimpse of them at a distance, the latter of which transfers our knowledge from one of faith in the word of others to personal sight and experience. So we hear and read about God, we see, or we may see, His portrait in Jesus Christ, in the Church, in the Bible, and in the Saints. But such knowledge is incomplete; it lacks that personal, intimate verification which constitutes true knowledge of a person, the knowledge of friendship. There is an immeasurable difference between the knowledge I have of King George and the knowledge I have of my intimate friend. The latter has been gained, not imparted through others, by personal companionship, by frequent intercourse, by a mutual sympathy and regard, by an intimacy in which we have unveiled ourselves to each other so that no longer language, as is so often the case, 'conceals thought,' although it so often fails to express it. But we do not need words, my friend and I, for mind and will are at one, and silence is no barren refuge, but a home in which one rests in surest confidence.

This is that knowledge of God which is eternal life, a knowledge of friendship, of union of mind and heart and will, a knowledge experienced in the depths of one's being, a knowledge which cannot adequately be told or conveyed, for all our words are too cold, too foolish, too small -

The love of Jesus, what it is None but His lovers know.

And even the greatest of them but stutter and stammer and multiply word upon word, only to know they can never say that which is in their hearts. 'My secret is mine.' Yet for such knowledge were we poor creatures made. 'Our natural will is to have God, and the goodwill of God is to have us' (Dame Julian), nor will any other or lesser knowledge satisfy us; little as we are, our littleness was created that it might be filled by the infinite God. And nowise may we gain this knowledge save by mental prayer. 'I am the Way,' cries our Lord, 'Come unto Me,' 'Learn of Me,' 'Follow Me,' and in mental prayer we most completely come unto Him, place ourselves as disciples in His school, follow Him in surrendering our minds to His Mind, our wills to His Will, our hearts to His Heart.

The fruits of mental prayer, then, are knowledge, appreciation, liberation, leading to the possession and enjoyment of God Himself – knowledge which comes from being with God, ' in Thy light shall we see light ' ; appreciation born of a loving attention to Him, a discovery of the value and beauty of Divine things arising from an absorption in them ; liberation from the tyranny of the senses and of material and passing things, the growth within us of the ' glorious liberty of the children of God ' ; the possession of God Who responds to the desiring love shed abroad in our hearts and dwells within us ; the enjoyment of the experienced presence of Him for Whom we were created, the finding delight in God Himself Who alone is the delectation, fulfilment and beatitude of human life. ' I have found Him Whom my soul loveth, I will hold Him and not let Him go. '

There is yet another reason which gives point to the unanimous conclusion of the Saints, that without mental prayer it is morally impossible to arrive at even a low degree of sanctity. For it is mental prayer which makes the grace of the Sacraments and the gifts of the Holy Spirit operative in our lives. It is perfectly true that the Sacraments convey grace ex opere operato – that is, in virtue of the sacramental rite duly performed in accordance with the mind of the Church, not in view of the faith or merits of those who receive them. For the Sacraments are the acts of our Lord Himself, the channels He has chosen through which to bestow His grace. But this does not mean, as say the ignorant, and indeed, as it sometimes appears that some Christians imagine, that they act as charms or magic are supposed to act – i.e. independently of any moral co-operation of the will with the grace given. One is constantly being astonished at the number of people who, although they frequent the Sacraments regularly and even frequently, yet show so little of the effect of the grace they receive in their lives that they are so unspiritual, so unsupernatural, so lacking in the mind and heart of Jesus. The real, fundamental and quite sufficient reason is that they do not pray, or at least that they do not pray aright. For without prayer grace remains, as it were, a dead weight in the soul, unassimilated and without force and power; for prayer ' is the force of the soul,' as St. John of the Cross says, which turns to use and directs into its rightful channels the grace we have received. So it is that grace, aided and reinforced by prayer, tends to the transformation of our whole life, a transformation which can only be effected when we open ourselves, expose ourselves to the action of God within us. 'Mental prayer is the complement of the most Holy Eucharist, our Saviour having given both to us as means of uniting us to Himself. In mental prayer (oraison) we receive the same gifts as in Holy Communion, although not in an equal degree: in mental prayer, as in the Eucharist, we adore Jesus Christ present, in such a way that it seems we have but to part a curtain to see Him openly: in mental prayer Jesus Christ nourishes and fortifies the soul, He unites Himself to it directly; He abides in us and we in Him, making our soul like to Himself, giving us a distaste for earthly things, filling us with love for heavenly realities and fortifying us against the devil' (Esprit de M. Olier, iii., p. 34). Thomas à Kempis had already said that there are ' two tables set on either side in the storehouse of Holy Church. One is the table of the holy altar, having the holy bread, that is, the precious Body of Christ; the other is that of the Divine Law, containing holy doctrine' (Imitatio, IV.

xi. 4). It may be worthy of note, in passing, that experience shows that a devout, meditative reading of Holy Scripture immediately after one's thanksgiving for Holy Communion is of great value.

Thus is it, too, that evil is overcome by good, and in no other way. To how many the Christian life seems but a dreary and well-nigh hopeless struggle against temptation, a struggle which, with all the goodwill in the world, but barely keeps them where they are, if indeed, they are not going back. It should not be so and it need not be so. Temptations there will always be, effort there must always be, but there is infinitely more to be gained in prayer than by effort. The common fault of those who desire and are trying to serve God is preoccupation with themselves. It is a fatal mistake and defeats its own purpose. How shall we ever escape from sin and self, which is our one need, whilst we are constantly occupied with sin and self? 'O Lord, all our ills come from not fixing our gaze on Thee: if we looked at nothing else but where we are going we should arrive, but we fall a thousand times and stumble and stray because we do not keep our eyes bent on Him Who is the way' (St. Teresa). And that very wise director, Fr. Dignam, writes to a religious superior, 'Boldly take the thought, that since you have for so many years gone on grubbing and puling and pining about your poor little self, with small fruit, you will in future leave it quite to our Lord's care, while you take care of Him.'

Half an hour's mental prayer every day, or less if we really cannot give as much, will do more for us in a month than constant self-examinations and gazing at our poverty and misery will do in a lifetime. Not that we must expect to become Saints in a month, but that this is the way to become saintly, for sanctity cannot be taught, it can only be caught by contact with sanctity. Not by mere efforts of our own, even aided by a prayer of petition now and then, shall we overcome our temptations, subdue our passions, and get rid of our chief enemy - self, but by daily placing ourselves in the Divine Presence ' in Whose Light we shall see light,' by daily exposing our poverty and frailty before Jesus our life, by contemplating Him in His mysteries and giving ourselves to the powerful influence of His Spirit, that He may imprint upon our souls a living image of His own perfection. ' " I have prayed and striven long," said a penitent, " and yet I have failed. How shall I pray better? " " Go home and pray for God's glory." In striving there is a pain of effort, anxiety, failure, grief, humiliation, sadness . . . in the thought of God there is peace. What is life but " to know Thee," elsewhere we are all astray ; at other times we are giving out ; but in contemplation and praise we are receiving, and so it moulds our character. . . . Now we see " as a mirror," yet while so beholding, there is perpetual transformation ' (Archbishop Temple, Life, vol. i., p. 446).

  1. Mental prayer has always been necessary to the Christian life; it has never been more necessary than it is to-day. Amongst the reasons which make it so, four may be noticed in particular: (1) the dangers involved in the growing popularity of pseudo-mystic literature and cults; (2) the tendency in those who have some little knowledge of mysticism to ignore the ordinary ways of the Christian life; (3) the widespread ignorance which exists of the fundamental truths and principles of the Faith; (4) the heretical temper of mind which so infects the atmosphere we live in. The avoidance or the cure of these evils lies, to a very large extent, in the practice of mental prayer.

For indeed it was the existence of similar reasons that caused the appearance of definite methods of mental prayer in the sixteenth century, and has rooted them so deeply in the normal Catholic life. Methodical mental prayer may have been, as Dom Chapman has written, 'an entire reversal of tradition,' though it would seem much nearer to the facts to call it a 'development' rather than a reversal. But if we consider the actual conditions which the Counter-Reformers had to face, the prevailing ignorance of and neglect of prayer, even in the religious orders; the high wave of heresy which struck at the very foundations of Christianity; the substitution of a religiosity of feeling and sentiment in the place of the ancient Faith and worship; the loosening of moral standards, witnessed to by the Protestant reformers themselves; may we not say that a 'reversal' was both necessary and justifiable? As a matter of fact, the Counter-Reformers founded their work on and accomplished what they did by lives of prayer and the preaching of the necessity of mental prayer for all – a fact which some of the would-be counter-reformers of to-day might take notice of.

(1) Catholic mysticism has lately attracted a motley band of camp-followers who are a distinct peril to the unwary, who from their ignorance of the subject and of the dangers which are inherent in amateurs meddling with any science, are easily led astray by some facile presentation labelling itself mystic. From the eclectic adventures and modernist tendencies of one popular writer on mysticism to the latest 'esoteric' cult, every phase of pseudo-mysticism flourishes in our day. Amongst the ranks of regular communicants may be found those who have 'taken up' some variety of 'New Thought,' usually the product of an uneducated American from somewhere west of Chicago, or the astute mind of an Anglicised 'babu.' I have known the son of a Malayan head-hunter, educated in a Christian mission, quite successfully propagate in a small but profitable way a 'mystic' cult which found adherents amongst men and women by no means fools except in this. I have met a Buddhist monk – one of six who were about to embark on a mission to convert England to 'esoteric Buddhism.' Not that the blessed word 'esoteric' had even entered their minds before they found it in an English dictionary, for the gospel they will preach in suburbania – they are not likely to concern themselves with Poplar – will bear as little resemblance to the Buddhism of Thibet as the Mohammedanism of Woking does to that of Bengal.

But the dangers are nearer and more difficult to distinguish. Many who would find no temptation in such travesties fall easy victims to the errors contained in such works – now easily procurable – as Madame Guyon's Short and Easy Method of Prayer or the Spiritual Guide of Molinos, together with more modern works of a pseudo-mystical character. The uninitiated should always consult an experienced director; there is no more to be ashamed about in not having a knowledge of mysticism than there is of not having a knowledge of any particular natural science. Anyone who is attracted to the subject would do well to begin by a careful reading of the first seven chapters of the Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, and by a good use of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

(2) Bunyan has drawn a vivid picture of those who seek to escape the early and necessary steps in the spiritual life, to miss the first rungs of the ladder, but who, as Christian warns them, having come in without the Master's direction, 'shall go out by yourselves without His mercy.' Such is the way of that pseudo-mysticism which aims at enjoying the fruits without paying the price, at attaining the heights by a cable-railway rather than by a steep and arduous climb, the way of the tourist, not of the mountaineer. Catholics are sometimes disturbed by finding the devotees of some modern cult apparently enjoying a peace and satisfaction that they are far from possessing. They need not be alarmed, for the phenomenon is not new, nor would any master of the spiritual life look upon it as anything but a dangerous symptom.

St. Ignatius, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross were all familiar with such cases, and have some exceedingly plain words to say about them.4 The various and ascending degrees of prayer may not so exactly correspond with the three stages of the spiritual life, the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways, as some writers would have us believe, but there is no doubt that beginners must begin at the beginning, as also that there are cases where the more advanced need at least an occasional return to mental prayer.

(3) The existence of a widespread ignorance of the fundamental verities of the Christian religion will hardly be questioned by anyone, but there is a great need of realising how very far that ignorance extends to our 'churchgoing' population, and even to professing Catholics. I have come into intimate contact, during several years abroad, with men and women who represented a very fair 'cross-section' of English life, and a large majority of whom were church-people. They were, with very few exceptions, almost completely ignorant of elementary Christian truths5 and duties; above all, they had not the slightest conception of what Christian prayer means, nor of its necessity. And the tragedy of it is that they go out to places and surroundings devoid of any spiritual and moral atmosphere, denied, too, the ordinary services and Sacraments of the Church, except at infrequent intervals, and have not got the one thing which would enable them to persevere – a habit of regular, desiring, loving prayer. This argues, it is obvious, a lack of proper teaching, and gives one to wonder what the clergy at home are occupied about when they do not even teach their people how to pray. For whatever else they may be taught will afford little of results unless they are shown how to reflect upon, to grasp the meaning and consequences of, and seriously apply the truths which, it may be presumed, they were told were necessary to their eternal salvation. If one may always presume even that! The fact is that they do not realise either the meaning or the value of what they have been taught because they have never been instructed as to the means of gaining such a realisation, they have not been taught to handle and verify and use the truths of religion as they have the truths and principles of the science or profession they have taken up. That bears some relation to life; their religion, none.

Hence arises that lack of conviction so characteristic of modern Christian life. Men acquiesce, they in a sense more or less believe, but there is little of vitality, of force, of conviction about their religion. It is not due, as is sometimes assumed, to a national characteristic of reticence, though some of it is undoubtedly due to the feeling that God must not be mentioned in polite society. But touch one of these 'reticent' people upon a matter in which he is interested, which he deems of importance – politics, sport, business – and note the difference. If the average Christian of to-day is reticent about his religion it is not because it is so deep and so intimately dear a thing to him, but because it is so shallow and so cheap. And it is so largely because he has never meditated upon it, however much he may have argued about it, a thing he is curiously fond of doing; he has never seen it as one reality, never been convinced that it is the one thing that matters, never, in a word, come face to face with his God. As Luis of Granada wrote in his Libro de la Oracion y Meditation, 'On all sides we find large numbers of people who are irreproachable in faith but disorderly in life . . . their faith is like money in a cash-box, or a sword in its sheath, or medicine on a chemist's shelf - that is to say, it is not used for the purpose for which it was intended . . . they believe quite unreflectingly.' There lies the fundamental weakness of English Christianity, that ' complacent vagueness,'6 as Dr. Selwyn has termed it, which of itself sufficiently explains our feeble position and lack of spiritual influence, the paucity of true vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and the lack of missionary zeal. How shall we desire to become apostles of and propagate a religion in which we have so little conviction ?

(4) Lastly, there is that heretical atmosphere, legacy of almost forgotten men and days, which hangs, a numbing, chilling cloud, all about us : that temper of thought and attitude which had reduced faith to feelings, religion to morality and philanthropy, worship to subjective musings upon self, and which is almost totally devoid of any sense of the supernatural, a religiosity as remote from Christianity of the New Testament and of the ages as it would be possible to conceive. Not only has it infected the very air we breathe, but it has debased and cheapened the terms in which the Christian Faith has been enshrined from the beginning so that they no longer mean to us what they were intended to mean. We hear them - such terms as 'faith,' 'grace,' 'sanctification,' 'salvation,' 'worship' - and almost instinctively conceive something other than the words actually mean. Even God has been relegated to a place outside the universe and sufficiently far off as not to trouble us, whilst Jesus Christ is little more than one who, as a popular preacher said the other day, ' was undoubtedly sincere but might, of course, have been deceived ' !

For all these evils, the evil of pseudo-mysticism, of attempting to build a spiritual house without sure foundations, of ignorance of and lack of conviction about the eternal truths, of the malaria of heresy, not less but more dangerous because less clearly defined than in earlier days, there is but one remedy – the practice of mental prayer. We have no longer to try to preserve a Faith held and believed, but to restore a Faith which has been lost, lost because men did not meditate upon it so that it became the very stuff and fibre of their lives. The Counter-Reformation, with its insistence on prayer, which brought back half Europe to the Church, did not reach England – nor yet has reached her. Signs and whispers of that living presence which once filled our land have we heard, and there was a moment when the spirit of it seemed about to dawn upon us. But we have well-nigh quenched it by our preoccupation with external things and by that futile activity which has become more and more characteristic of an apostolate which had been better devoted 'to prayer and the ministry of the word' of God. A Bishop has been reported as saying recently, in referring to the 'World Call' and its failure to produce any results commensurate with the energy expended on organisation and the like, 'Our very failures have driven us to prayer.' Would to God it were true, much more that we had begun with the knowledge that prayer must come first, that spiritual ends can only be attained by spiritual means, that the devils to-day will be driven out by no lesser force than 'prayer and fasting.'

We have, I say, to restore a lost Faith, and this is only possible when the teaching of that Faith is reinforced by the prayer of meditation upon the mysteries we are called not merely to believe but to adore, to desire, to become possessed by. We have to scatter a fog of vague, pious sentimentality by the apprehension of Realities, God, Jesus, Mary, and all they represent, seen, praised and loved. We have to banish ignorance by making men sit down and meditate upon eternal truths. There is little need to exercise ourselves about mysticism whilst the major part of our congregations have not grasped and entered into the meaning of the fact of God, of the end of man's creation, the Incarnation and Passion of the Lord, and the mysteries of the Gospel. We have to combat heresy; and with what weapon shall we go forth if not with that of prayer and the convictions and burning love born of prayer?

For cleric and laic alike that knowledge which is eternal life, that force which alone preserves from sin, that light which illumines the darkest path, that power which makes an apostolate alone fruitful, that salt which preserves the soul from the corrupting influence of worldliness, which makes Saints, is to be found in mental prayer. For, as says St. Teresa: 'Herein is nothing to be afraid of but everything to hope for. Granted that one does not advance, nor make an effort to become perfect, so as to merit the joys and consolations which the perfect receive from God, yet little by little he will obtain a knowledge of the road to heaven . . . no one ever took God for his friend without being amply rewarded . . . prayer is the door to those great graces which God has bestowed . . . if this door be shut I do not see how He can give them . . . to him who has not begun to pray I implore him by the love of our Lord not to deprive himself of so great a good' (Life, c. viii.).

And in our own time the saintly Benedictine Bishop Hedley writes of daily mental prayer, 'It is the hour in which the soul lives: that is, lives its true life and rehearses for that life of eternity, in which prayer in its highest sense will be its rapture. It is the hour of its intensest discipline, when acts are produced which vibrate long afterwards through the hours of the day, through the spaces of life. It is the hour of calm when the thronging elements of man's personal life are ranged in order and marshalled in obedience, so that the will may aim at one thing and one thing only. It is the hour of the kindling of that precious fire – the fire of Divine Love – which must burn through every pulsation of life, or else life's deeds can never be borne to the heavens, but must drop like leaves to wither on the earth. It is the hour when the continual presence of the awful Sovereign of the creature is, in a certain sense, made actual and real, when the heart speaks to God, and – what is of infinitely greater moment – when God speaks to the heart.'

Footnotes

  1. Revelations of Divine Love, chap. v. ↩

  2. St. Thomas, following Aristotle's doctrine of the identity created between the knower and the known, 'the power of perceiving the knowable is itself the possession of the knowable,' teaches that knowledge is the highest form of life, in that whilst desire tends toward the possession of life, the intellect actually achieves that possession in one indivisible act in which knower and known, lover and beloved are one. So Dante says of the blessed: / 'And all are blessed even as their sight descends / Deeper into the truth, wherein rest is / For every mind. Thus happiness hath root / In seeing, not in loving, which of sight / Is aftergrowth.' / (Paradiso, canto xxviii., Cary's translation.) ↩

  3. "Prayer tends to God through being moved by the will of charity, as it were, and this in two ways. First, on the part of the object of our petition, because when we pray we ought principally to ask to be united to God." (Summa Theol. II. ii. lxxxiii. 1, 2). ↩

  4. St. Teresa, Minor Works : Conceptions of the Love of God, ii. 1, 2, 17, 30; for St. Ignatius vide Bremond, Histoire littéraire, ii. 138. ↩

  5. For instance, such truths as are contained in the 'Foundation and Principle' of the Ignatian Exercises. ↩

  6. Church Times, February 3rd, 1929. ↩

Chapter 8 of 19