for my training and a beneficed priest to give me a title.  I will give you a full account of myself when we meet at the end of the month; but in this letter, written in sad circumstances, I want to tell you that I have learnt with the soul what I have long spoken with the lips—­the need of God.  I expect you will tell me that I ought to have learnt that lesson long ago upon that Whit-Sunday morning in Meade Cantorum church.  But I think I was granted then by God to desire Him with my heart.  I was scarcely old enough to realize that I needed Him with my soul.  “You’re not so old now,” I hear you say with a smile.  But in a place like this one learns almost more than one would learn in the world in the time.  One beholds human nature very intimately.  I know more about my fellow-men from association with two or three dozen people here than I learnt at St. Agnes’ from association with two or three hundred.  This much at least my pseudo-monasticism has taught me.

We have passed through a sad time lately at the Abbey, and I feel that for the Community sorrows are in store.  You know from my letters that there have been divisions, and you know how hard I have found it to decide which party I ought to follow.  But of course the truth is that from the moment one feels the inclination to side with a party in a community it is time to leave that community.  Owing to an unfortunate disagreement between Brother George and the Reverend Andrew Hett, who came down to act as chaplain during the absence of the Reverend Father, Andrew Hett felt obliged to leave us.  The consequence is we have had no Mass this Easter, and thus I have learned with my soul to need God.  I cannot describe to you the torment of deprivation which I personally feel, a torment that is made worse by the consciousness that all my brethren will go to their cells to-night needing God and not finding Him, because they like myself are involved in an earthly quarrel, so that we are incapable of opening our hearts to God this night.  You may say that if we were in such a state we should have had no right to make our Easter Communion.  But that surely is what Our Blessed Lord can do for us with His Body and Blood.  I have been realizing that all this Holy Week.  I have felt as I have never felt before the consciousness of sinning against Him.  There has not been an antiphon, not a versicle nor a response, that has not stabbed me with a consciousness of my sin against His Divine Love.

     “What are these wounds in Thy Hands:  Those with which I was wounded
     in the house of My friends.”

But if on Easter eve we could have confessed our sins against His Love, and if this morning we could have partaken of Him, He would have been with us, and our hearts would have been fit for the presence of God.  We should have been freed from this spirit of strife, we should have come together in Jesus Christ.  We should have seen how to live “with the unleavened Bread of