BELIEFS
aside their clothes to relieve their burning bosoms/ Con-
templation, meanwhile, has come to be regarded as * mainly
the sensible tasting of mysteries, especially of the Passion/
(It is worth remarking that 'the tendency to substitute for
a superrational concentration of will a subrational expan-
sion of feeling' began, at any rate in the sphere of religion,
not in the eighteenth century, as Babbitt has said, but in
the seventeenth.) In this unpropitious atmosphere mys-
ticism could not thrive; and, as Dom Chapman points
out, there has been an almost complete dearth of Catholic
mystics from the late sixteenth century down to the present
day. Significant in this context is the remark made by
Father Bede Frost, in his Art of Mental Prayer, to the effect
that the great age of sacramentalism began in the nine-
teenth century. During the Middle Ages far less stress was
laid on sacramental religion than is laid at the present time,
far more on preaching and, above all, spiritual exercises
and contemplation. An unsympathetic observer would be
justified in pointing to the fact as a symptom of degenera-
tion. A religion which once laid emphasis on the need to
educate men's wills and train their souls for direct com-
munion with ultimate reality, and which now attaches
supreme importance to the celebration of Sacraments (sup-
posed in some way to cause the infusion of divine grace) *
and to the performance of rituals calculated to induce in
the participants a * subrational expansion of feeling,* is
certainly not progressing. It is becoming worse, not
better.
Systematic training in recollection and meditation makes
possible the mystical experience, which is a direct intuition
of ultimate reality. At all times and in every part of the
world, mystics of the first order have always agreed that
this ultimate reality, apprehended in the process of medita-
1 The Council of Trent anathematized * si quis dkerit sacramenta
novae legis non continere gratiam/
293