the latest influence that had played upon it, and he translated that touch into poetry of speech.

But most of all, he was affected by contact with other minds. Sometimes those who talked with him found an apparent want of response at the moment, an inability to give them, as it seemed, the help they sought. But when he was in the pulpit it was otherwise; then his words would go straight to the mind of the one who needed them. One instance of this I remember in the case of a lady who had been an agnostic for years. She went to see Father Maturin, and came away saying that he could not help her-that it was no use hoping for help from anyone. She had built much on meeting him, and she was thoroughly depressed and discouraged. That same evening she came, however, to hear him preach, and after the evening service was over she went into the sacristy and asked how quickly it was possible for her to be received into the Church. All the difficulties he had seemed unable to solve when she laid them before him Father Maturin had answered in his sermon.

If one man feels a difficulty it is probable that many others have felt the same; and from intercourse with many and various minds Father Maturin drew that knowledge that made his touch in preaching so sure and so unfailing. All his life he was studying men, and to a rare psychological insight he added a depth of human sympathy that made his words go home to all who heard them. Monsignor Benson used to tell the story of a young man who, after hearing Father Maturin preach, came to him full of wrath, saying: All that I told you was in the strictest confidence. How could you repeat it to Father

Maturin!' Monsignor Benson Monsignor Benson assured him most solemnly that he had not repeated a word. 'But you must have told him. He knew all about me; he preached at me the entire time.' And Monsignor Benson had the greatest difficulty in persuading his friend that he had not betrayed his confidence.

This imaginative sympathy with the difficulties of others was so great that it sometimes startled men of narrower mind, and one pious critic was heard to say, 'I don't like Father Maturin's sermons. He always says things like "Some people say there is no God, and there's a great deal to be said for that theory." The critic perhaps thought that this was a new method, forgetting the words of the Summa of St. Thomas: 'Is there a God? Apparently not.'

To Father Maturin it seemed, as to St. Thomas, and again to Cardinal Newman, that he could not hope to win his opponent unless he could first show a realisation of his point of view. But it was not only or chiefly on theory that he so acted. It was an instinctive necessity-he saw into his hearers' minds so clearly that he was hampered in putting out his own view until he had dealt with theirs, and got it, so to speak, out of the way.

In many ways Father Maturin's mind was a very modern one. He read omnivorously, and would come down to breakfast full of the most intense sympathy with the hero or heroine of the novel of the hour. He loved to discuss the book, and would make every allowance of heredity and environment, longing to stretch a point in interpreting the moral law, so as to find an excuse for a character who had touched his heart. Although he could at times

become extremely irritated with a book or person, he was in general far readier to admire than to criticise.

He loved thrills, and would lie awake shivering over a ghost story. He had a wonderful collection of these, some invented by himself, which he told to child friends to their terrified enjoyment. And then suddenly, at the end of a shiver of horror, they would see a smile broadening on his face and some absurd anti-climax would follow. I well remember a ghastly story of murder and haunting, and of a woman carrying the finger of her victim in a small black bag; and just when she opened the bag Father Maturin would wake with a start.' He would sit in an arm-chair in his rather untidy cassock twinkling with laughter or shivering with a terror not altogether simulated on those evenings of story-telling. All the same stories had to be told time after time-all the silly jokes that formed a sort of ritual gone over; but through it all we had a respect for him that made us treasure the deep sayings that came sometimes in the midst of all the nonsense. It was the nonsense of one light-hearted as a schoolboy-so transparently light-hearted that one could see down below the fun into clear depths of delight and wisdom. As examples of the excellent fooling in which he often. delighted let me quote two letters written to a girl friend. The first is an answer to one written to him from a convent where she was making a short stay after having a gay time in London :

Downside Abbey: March 31, 1910.

What a beautiful thought to write to me from the convent! To me in my humble cell-four bare walls,

bare floor, two bare tables, bare bed, and very bare chairs the letter came redolent of the beautiful spiritual atmosphere in which it was written. I could see you writing it, with the life of St. Theresa open beside you, laid aside just for the moment while you sat by the open casement and anon lifted your eyes to the veiled figure of a nun telling her beads in the Convent Garth.

Sunday. I was cut short in the midst of some very beautiful thoughts, the train of which has been broken, and the peaceful scene in the convent broken in upon and wrecked. I hope you had a nice time in Cambridge and enjoyed it much more than your time in London; the quiet of the convent and the edifying conversation of the nuns in their gentle voices must have been a real refreshment after that trying time in the noisy, dusty, restless world.

We are having beautiful weather here if it were not for, I think, the very coldest wind I ever felt, which has been blowing steadily from the North Pole ever since I came here. I am afraid all these expeditions to the North Pole, and all the talk about it, has done a great deal of harm and made it really exceedingly unpleasant.

The other letter refers to a long-standing joke about a Retreat that was to be organised on a new and, I am afraid, rather frivolous system. We were to include in the daily programme rides, dances, and other diversions for the retreatants, and carefully to exclude any morbidly serious element. Father Maturin writes with mock solemnity:

As to your important letter of August 17 about the 'Retreat of the Future,' I have filed it and given it

careful consideration. I think in future any letters on that subject should be written on gilt-edged paper; for myself, I should prefer them to be written on vellum-to be preserved for posterity as a turning-point in the religious movement of the twentieth century. I think the 27th April would be a good day to begin on, as I see by my Catholic diary that that is the feast of St. Thuribius of Mongrovio. I suggest this day for obvious reasons which I need scarcely go into. I will mention one or two:

(1) We know nothing about him, therefore no one can say he would not approve of the lines upon which we propose to act. If we take him as our patron and say we are sure it is just what he would have wished, it cannot be reasonably contradicted; indeed, I think we might go so far as to say we are following as closely as possible the lines we are sure were dear to his heart. If anyone denies it we can demand proofs.

(2) Then, too, I think it would be impossible to prove that when he went into Retreat himself privately, which I am sure he did, his Retreats were not largely conducted on these principles. At any rate, we must demand of our opponents proof to the oppositereasonableness must be the key-note of all our dealings with our opponents.

(3) Then I am told that in one of the old Indian dialects, of which there are no remains or even traditions extant, a word beginning with the letters M-O-N meant beauty, and another beginning with the letters G-R-O-V, though I grant not in that order, meant quiet, retirement, or an oak-tree, which obviously means the peace of a forest. So here we have the very thing—a Retreat, or time of quiet, conducted on the principles of beauty. Now, as there are no records of the language extant, it will be obviously impossible to prove that the words do not mean what I assert they do. We must