The Holy Gospel according to St Matthew, chapter 22 ‘...And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying, “What think ye of Christ: whose son is he?” They say to him, David’s”.’

I Have to speak to you tonight about the holy Rosary. There are, of course, ten thousand things to be said about it, the least of which is a glorious battle on which probably depended the civilisation of the world; but I am going to allow a little child to lead me and you into the Rosary.

There are not many trees in London streets, but there are a great number of children—better than trees of course—and God, in his goodness, often allows little children to hail me. The other day I was passing through one of our streets, close at hand, made beautiful with the feet of little children and their gambols, and two little ones I found suddenly by my side. I think they must have crossed the little narrow street; I don’t know. I only know that suddenly I found two little ones by my side. I think their aggregate age would be about six.

Though perhaps most people who are at all familiar with them appreciate the writings of St Augustine, comparatively few feel any attraction for those of St Jerome who, unlike St Augustine, has left us no sermons or devotional treatises, his work consisting for the most part of technical Commentaries and minute disquisitions on difficult passages of Holy Scripture.

Both Saints have left us a vast correspondence. But how their letters differ! If we except Augustine’s earlier ones, his philosophical discussions during his first days as a Christian, the remainder are for the most part the outpourings of a shepherd of souls; the same is true of his sermons which lend themselves to quotation at every turn and wherein the devout can always find food for their souls. St Jerome, too, has left us many spiritual letters. But we get the impression that such letters were not his life’s work; he writes them almost under protest as though feeling that they are stealing time from the real work to which God has called him, that of translating and commenting on the Bible.

The great Dominican Order of which St Thomas Aquinas is the finest flower may still be, in the minds of many Englishmen, ‘in a special way associated with the Inquisition in Spain. It may therefore come as a surprise to those unacquainted with the work of Francisco de Vitoria, to learn that it was a Spanish Dominican, who died four hundred years ago, who was in his day Europe’s foremost champion of the rule of international law and of human rights. Of Basque origin, Vitoria was an active university teacher at the violent epoch when the Spaniards, having defeated the Moors at home, were founding their American colonies. Vitoria's opinions commanded wide attention among his contemporaries; so much so, that his idealism incurred for him considerable opposition in powerful governmental circles at a time when interests and passions combined to obscure impartial thinking on international affairs.

It may be instructive, in what follows, to compare some of Vitoria’s principles (as set out and expounded in the collections of his works produced and introduced by J. B. Scott for the Carnegie Endowment for international peace) with the principles now to be found in the United Nations Charter, the latest constructive attempt to create an international order.

No doubt the discovery of the Americas by Columbus in 1492, when Vitoria was young, was an event just as stupefying as the discovery of the atomic bomb is to us. The mariner’s astrolobe of 1480 may be compared with the cyclotron of today. Neither of these wonders has prevented international lawyers from facing the future and applying their principles to new problems and unthought-of circumstances.

Before proceeding to a detailed discussion of the English spiritual authors, some explanation is required of the order and design of the treatment. For we do not intend to follow a chronological order and indeed we have included the Ancren Riwle which is outside our period, as also William Langland who scarcely deserves the name of mystic though he was a great poet and the mystic is often, if not always, a poet too.

Our plan is to climb up the scale, the ladder of perfection, from the lowest rungs to the topmost, where, like Jacob’s ladder, they disappear into heaven. The theme of this essay has been adopted from Père Garrigou-Lagrange’s now celebrated thesis that the highest flights of infused contemplation and mystical union are on the royal road to holiness open to all. A scheme therefore of tEe normal growth of the generous soul cooperating to the full with the graces offered her, will begin with the first conversion and end with the heights of union described in different terminology by St John of the Cross, Mother Julian, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.