upon the study of those, from the days of Montanus down to the present, who have professed to depend exclusively upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and have done so at the sacrifice of other integral truths of the Catholic Faith. The whole faith must be held, not for the sake of mere doctrinal orthodoxy, but for its pragmatic value in the building up of personal religion. We may say that it is the Holy Spirit who vitalizes the faith, who animates that which apart from Him would remain dead bones.

The world is doing some serious thinking to-day, but its thinking is often misleading and fails to arrive because it lacks the guidance of the indwelling Holy Spirit, who was to convince it of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, and with the conviction bring the comfort that comes from the realization of the possibility of attainment. Mere education of the conscience is futile as a remedy for the world's recognized ills, for the conscience is weak, it has an initial defect, and needs, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, a Power not its own that makes for righteousness, and righteousness is unattainable apart from that Power. At best, the conscience deals with sins, not with sin. The Pharisee had, quite likely, broken no law; his selflaudation was not unwarranted from his point of view, but his point of view was wholly wrong, he was a pitiful sight in God's eyes, far more offensive than the Publican who had sinned much. There are many Pharisees in our Churches to-day who know little or nothing of the Spirit, and have never caught sight of the truth that morality, however valuable in itself, is a byproduct of religion, and that the Holy Spirit has a nobler mission to accomplish than Ethical Culture; that mission is to make men holy, to restore the lost likeness to God. Morality is largely the outgrowth of custom, the crystallization of social conventions; e.g., the excessive use of alcohol, the practice of duelling, the keeping of slaves, were all regarded as part of the established customs of days not so very remote, and it is hardly fair to say of any of them that they were merely tolerated.

We need a new and truer view of sin. A view which no school of ethics can teach us, for sin is neither aesthetic nor moral

failure, nor is it a moment in an evolution towards goodness, as the schools of the day in their learned resonant phrases would have us believe. The Holy Spirit alone can teach us the nature of sin, that it is failure to apprehend and acquire the character of God, the character which alone can fit us for intercourse with God through eternity; no moral success can atone for failure to learn this lesson-without it heaven itself would be hell for those who entered. Think what an eternal association with One whom you never knew would mean, can we conceive of anything more tiresome, better calculated to make a hell for us?

Then, what the Holy Spirit teaches, He gives power to realize, and modern ethics, however high and noble, lack this dynamic, this creative push towards the attainment of an ideal, in Bergson's language, and lacking it the world is thrown back upon the same conclusion to which Ovid's sad words bore bitter witness, "Video proboque meliora, deteriora sequor." If the world could have been saved from its sin by education, Christ need not have come, the Holy Spirit need not have been sent. A deeper insight is necessary than can be secured by the training of one side of man's nature and so the Church teaches us to pray, "Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit." Victory over sin and growth in the character of God are secured, now as of old, "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."

But in the building up of the spiritual life, the Holy Spirit serves other functions than those concerned with sin and the escape from its power, for the spiritual life is built, or, rather, grows, it is not static. This growth can only be attained by constant dependance upon the Holy Spirit. Men have always more or less dimly recognized this need of dependence upon the Holy Spirit for spiritual progress; Pelagianism has never secured a long-continued hold upon human thought, but has always been sporadic in its manifestations. Still there is a natural inertia, a tendency to settle down and be content with what we have; and the possibility of spiritual growth stands in need of constant emphasis. That it does not yet appear what we shall

be is as true in this world as in that lying beyond the veil of time. There should be a greater certainty of the richer gifts which the Holy Spirit has in store for those who seek. The great spiritual experiences of the past are lacking in the present, not because they have become anachronisms, as we sometimes imagine, but because people have not been taught to look for them or to regard them as possibilities. What our Lord said to His Apostles, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now," is equally true as applied to what the Holy Spirit has to give. In Him will be found the solvent for the new difficulties of every age, but we are not prepared to hear the things which He has to speak. If we were He would lead us along the way which reaches its goal in the whole truth revealed in the light of the Beatific Vision.

There is, of course, much left to be said. Many sides of the activity of the Holy Spirit in the world of to-day have been left untouched, and all treated very inadequately and only in outline. One side, that would require an article itself, a side that stands in great need of treatment, is that of the vocation of the Holy Spirit as it comes to every man, the diversity of His gifts, which finds a place for the service of every man, woman, and child, and suffers loss as the service is not rendered, for we are too much inclined to think of the ideal of Christian life and character as being on a dead level, as though the pattern Christian were he who conformed most closely to the shape of the mould in which all are formed. Consider the diversity of the saints, and realize that they are diverse, not chiefly because of their circumstances or their personal peculiarities of ability, talent, etc., but because the Holy Spirit conferred diverse gifts upon them, and they could only retain the gifts as they gave them expression in His service.

In closing, the writer would emphasize what he has tried to keep clear throughout, that the characteristic work of the Holy Spirit to-day as every day is to make holy, and that the presentday world stands peculiarly in need of just this work, and is in great danger because it is satisfying itself with substitutes, or, closing its mind to obvious facts, and in despair either thinking

itself satisfied up to the measure of the attainable, or else that satisfaction is impossible and that it is all a hopeless puzzle. In a word, saintliness must be restored to the Church, in this alone lies the hope of the world, the Holy Spirit alone can make the restoration, and, once made, the hope is realized, for with the restoration come wisdom and power which make success inevitable.

O

Nature--An Aid to Meditation

BY CAROLINE FRANCES LITTLE.

"To him, who, in the love of Nature, holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language."

NLY to the one who has learned to worship God before

the Altar, does Nature reveal her spiritual secrets. For "Not the sun, but the Red Lamp tells us most comfortably of God"; and Christianity is a Divine revelation, not, as some say, a religion of Nature. Yet a rightful contemplation of her manifold and beautiful forms may be utilized most profitably as an aid to meditation. St. Hilarian, an abbot whose day we observe in October, said that he longed to be alone, alone with God, and with Nature which spoke to him of God. Some of Our Lord's most beautiful parables were drawn from the flowers, the birds, and the wheatfields; and as man He was a lover of Nature. Looking upon the tropical flowers, which grew in such prolific abundance around the Galilean Lake, He said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." To increase our faith He called attention to the sparrows, who are ever under the watchful care of the heavenly Father.

We read that Solomon, the wise king, was versed in the things of Nature. "And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things,

and of fishes." Bishop Coxe said that all analogy points to the fact that the Cross was made from a cedar tree; and we know that the sponge was offered to our Lord upon the hyssop. He looked upon the above quotation as prophetic, for the hyssop was employed in the sprinkling of the blood, which was typical of that flowing from the Sacred Heart, for the cleansing of the world's sins.

In the one hundred and fourth Psalm, that grand Nature poem, as well as in others, we see that the sweet singer of Israel was one who communed with God through His creation. "O Lord, how manifold are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all. The earth is full of Thy riches." The Wise Men through their study of astronomy and astrology were so familiar with the starry heavens that when a new and strange luminary appeared, they were capable of receiving the revelation that it pointed to an event of transcendent import. In the words of another, "The hills, mountains, and woods were the first temples of God on earth. It is well for us to remember that Christians at the beginning worshipped God out under the trees, or on the hillside, beneath the blue, sunny skies. The grass, the shady trees, and the cloud-flecked sky, may sometime be a great help to worship." Our Lord went up into the mountains to pray beneath the star-studded canopy of night; and Nathaniel made his meditation upon Jacob's vision under a Syrian fig tree.

The works of Nature are replete with spiritual lessons, but the hieroglyphics are more easily deciphered by the soul that lives in habitual communion with the Creator. As one looks down upon a swiftly flowing river, from some mountain top, how wonderful are its suggestions. We may think of the river of life, and our souls like tiny barks, floating upon its surface, drifting on to the boundless ocean of eternity. Or we muse upon the river of death, which each must cross alone; and on the further banks of which wait our dear departed, eager to welcome us. Further, it may suggest the river that proceedeth from the Throne, leading the soul on to a meditation upon the celestial glories.