The Art of Mental Prayer

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 some 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 HUgel 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 antimoral), which, though they have arisen outside the religious world, have their full effect upon i