² Op. cit., p. 82

³ Contemplation of persons and their qualities entails: I great deal of analytical thinking and an incessant use of the imagination. But analytical thinking and imagination are, precisely the things which prevent the soul from attaining enlightenment. On this point all the great mystical writers, Christian and Oriental, are unanimous and emphatic ‘ (p. 80).

⁴ Cf. C. Lebrun: The Mystical Teaching of St. john Eudes, p. 133; E. Underhill: Worship, p. 69. The mystics with whom Mr. Huxley deals are mainly concerned with the lower (introductory) stages of the mystical life; Fr. Joseph himself for example was concerned in his teaching with the prayer of quiet; there was no departure from tradition in associating these forms of prayer with the Passion-has not the very ‘ Dionysian ‘ Tauler left us Meditations on the Passion?- and equally certainly there was no intention of substituting these introductory stages for mystical prayer itself. The ascent of Mount Carsme1 demands a technique, intellectual as well as moral ; it may be held that this particular sort of technique is too cerebral or too ‘ busy ‘ to achieve its object perfectly, or that those who taught it in the days of Fr. Joseph put so much emphasis upon it as to obscure its object; but the main point here is that neither they nor their technique set out to obscure that object, and that the possession of the objective by the highest mystics in its turn does not exclude, but on the contrary implies, active concern for the redeemed word and its Redeemer.

⁵ Questions de Conscience, p. 153.

⁶ E.g. that Catholics believe in the ‘magic efficacy of rites and sacraments ‘; that orthodox Christianity has always tended to confuse the merely psychic with the spiritual ‘ ; that petitionary prayer is appropriate only to those when ‘ religion is anthropocentric.’