discourses in the Upper Chamber of Jerusalem and the temple courts.  His activities and His proselytisms were unbounded.  He broke up domestic circles and the routine of offices.  He called the young man from his estates and Matthew from custom-house and James and John from their father’s fishing business.  He made a final demonstration of His unlimited claim on humanity in His Procession on Palm Sunday, and on Ascension Day ratified and commissioned the proselytizing activities of His Church for ever in His tremendous charge to the Apostolic band. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations ... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all the days, even to the consummation of the world.

Yet this, it must be remembered, was not only not the whole of His Life on earth, it was not even a very considerable part of it, if reckoned by years.  For three years He was active, but for thirty He was retired in the house of Nazareth; and even those three years are again and again broken by retirement.  He is now in the wilderness for forty days, now on the mountain all night in prayer, now bidding His disciples come apart and rest themselves.  The very climax of His ministry too was wrought in silence and solitude.  He removed Himself about a stone’s throw in the garden of Gethsemane from those who loved Him best; He broke His silence on the Cross to bid farewell even to His holy Mother herself.  Above all, he explicitly and emphatically commended the Life of Contemplative Prayer as the highest that can be lived on earth, telling Martha that activity, even in the most necessary duties, was not after all the best use to which time and love could be put, but rather that Mary had chosen the best part ... the one thing that is necessary, and that it shall not be taken away from her even by a sister’s loving zeal.

Finally, fault was found with Jesus Christ, as with His Church, on precisely these two points.  When He was living the life of retirement in the country He was rebuked that He did not go up to the feast and state His claims plainly—­justify, that is, by activity, His pretensions to the Messiahship; and when He did so, He was entreated to bid his acclaimants to hold their peace—­to justify, that is, by humility and retirement, His pretensions to spirituality.

III.  The reconciliation, therefore, of these two elements in the Catholic system is very easy to find.

(i) First, it is the Church’s Divinity that accounts for her passion for God.  To her as to none else on earth is the very face of God revealed as the Absolute and Final Beauty that lies beyond the limits of all Creation.  She in her Divinity enjoys it may be said, even in her sojourn on earth, that very Beatific Vision that enraptured always the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ.  With all the company of heaven then, with Mary Immaculate, with the Seraphim and with the glorified saints of God,