under his influence will acknowledge this power, a power which has made many a Christian look back to a retreat as an era in his or her spiritual history. I was particularly struck by its force in one direction-that of bringing so many different minds into harmony with this definite system of meditation and thought. And consequently, its influence, essentially adverse to morbid conditions of sentiment, put a sound wholesomeness into religious feeling, carrying on all steadily forward without hurry or exultation. Overhead the sky was clear; we felt the ground firm under our feet. Just for that week we had let the business of daily life drop out of our hands, and may be, in a higher mood, had taken up in its place the higher business of religion, pursuing it with the same calm activity which best makes way in the round of common life. So, working on quietly, every day as it went by seemed to bring among us more contentment in meditation, more heartfelt devotion, more attraction towards the simple time-honoured practices of Catholic piety. Beside fair statues in garden grotto, or at quiet shrine, our Lady drew her children to her feet, and infinitely dearer than the imaged Virgin, aye, dearer even than the face of the living Virgin shall be in the world to come, grew the deep sense of the personal abidance of our Lord in His Sanctuary. Reader! go into a religious house, the house which alone among all the homes of men is evermore watching to God; pass only a few days-days, alas! too fleeting and too few-under the same roof as the Blessed Sacrament; let cach day, opening with Mass and closing with Benediction, be filled with meditation and prayer; do this, and with both heart and soul you may touch the secret of the Divine words: "I shall draw all things unto Myself." Full of charity towards secular women, and deeply conscious of the help to their interior life afforded by these convent retreats, the Foundress of the Order which gave us hospitality established them in all her houses. And I cannot close the subject without saying that her daughters carry out this part of their rule with the same generosity of spirit which inspired it. It was quite impossible that so large a body of persons could have been housed, fed, and cared for without entailing much selfdenial and much sacrifice of personal comfort upon the community at large. The strain must have at times been severe, but no sign of it was ever permitted to cloud their refined and generous hospitality. The guests of that house actually fulfilled Macaulay's ideal of contemplative life, and while meditating with Mary, sat at the table of Martha. Nor was this kindness limited to the convent itself; the nuns ungrudgingly gave up to strangers all their delightful grounds. It was a great boon. There we found enough to content both eye and heart; the loveliness of simple, natural things which relaxed for us the tension of thought and gave a passing rest to the mind. One morning it happened that, threading those garden solitudes, some fancy led me further on by tangled fern and ivies, through shadowed walk and alley, past orchard boughs, thick interlaced and laden with young fruit, under the rich gloom of an ancient cedar, past a sun-dial ancient as the cedar, which had counted out the hours for generations long since gone to dust, and out at last into a sunny fruit garden where bees were murmuring over Lord Bacon's favourite marjoram "warm-set" as he advises, over wide-blown roses, spiked lavender, and many other homegrowths of old-fashioned English gardens. Beyond the garden, and close shut in with thick, high walls of evergreen, lay the convent burial-ground. groves were flooded with sunshine, its serene stillness was unbroken, save for a few moments when a lark, high overhead, broke into sudden song, and then as suddenly hushed her song, leaving the silence all the deeper for her interlude. Nowhere, surely, can the lap of mother earth hold out a more perfect resting-place. Its To the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Source of True Contrition. GREAT Heart of Christ! Far off within the porch I fall, Strong Heart of Christ! Thou, on the shameful Tree, Poor Heart of Christ! No lance Thy chaliced treasure broke, Still, meekest Heart, That, crying unto me, Did'st pardon all that gave Thee pain, For, O tender Heart, I needs must falter near Thy throne, There, sweetest Heart, O Royal Heart, Grant, when my Guest-if this Where lies mine endless bliss In Thee! J. G. Faith and Credulity. WHEN many Catholics are anxiously asking what is the true character of the reported apparition of our Lady at Knock, and are impatiently expecting an ecclesiastical decision of some kind, a few words upon the subject of visions may be interesting to our pious readers. The remarks which we propose to make are not intended to furnish arguments for or against the miraculousness of any wonderful occurrence which has been or may hereafter be deemed worthy to be submitted to the judgment of the Church, but they may help to make ideas less vague, and even perhaps in some cases to set right mistaken notions about many incidents of less importance which belong to the experience of private life and have more of personal or domestic interest than of general notoriety. Comparatively few persons, even of those who despise whatever savours of romance, can say with sincerity that they have never listened to a tale of supernatural wonder related by an eye-witness convinced of the truth of every word which he says. Now where does superstition begin? Is it wrong to believe in ghosts and banshees, and secondsight, and clairvoyance, and dreams? St. Joseph in the New Testament, and his namesake in the Old Testament, had truthful visions in sleep; many saints were gifted with a faculty of clairvoyance which would reduce to shame the most successful medium of London or New York; it seems to be part of human nature to believe in warning voices and the shadows which coming events cast before them; and ghosts have fairly earned a standing ground, at least after sunset, by sheer importunity. You may drive them out with a pitch-fork, but come back they will Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. It is superstitious to believe in the influence of causes of which either reason or faith denies the existence, and it is superstitious to attribute to existing causes an influence which we know from reason or faith that they cannot exert. Thus the ogres and ghouls and fairies of nursery tales are creatures for which revelation can find no room; but angels and devils and disembodied souls can, with the permission or by the command of God, do many wonderful things, so that even the stories of malicious goblins and "good people" may have a remote foundation in fact, being developed with the aid of fancy from actual experience of various spiritual agencies busy in the world of bodies. In the same way, neither reason nor revelation permits us to suppose that the movements of the stars which follow fixed rules can guide or indicate the events of history and the course of human life which depend upon the concurrence of two unfettered causes-the freewill of man and the grace of the Holy Ghost. Astrology is a superstition precisely because it pretends to be a science. If it were satisfied with the declaration that God can, when He likes, and sometimes does, make a particular conjunction of the heavenly bodies coincide with the crisis of a lifetime or an epoch, as He bade the Star of Bethlehem announce the Birth of Christ our Lord, and covered the earth with darkness at mid-day to mark "the death of the Author of nature," there would be no fault to find. This distinction provides the key to many perplexities. God can give signs in earth, air, fire, and water. A comet may add reasonable terror, when Divine Justice is scourging nations with war and famine and pestilence; an earthquake may be a sign of wrath to a guilty city; the flight of an arrow or a fall of snow may mark the site on which a church is to be built; a dream |