Catholics. He was seeking a centre for a theological seminary in which English Catholic priests might be trained. Allen was a powerful and sanguine Catholic and believed that his cause was merely in eclipse. He felt confident that Philip would finally annihilate the heretic Queen. Allen wished to be prepared for the aftermath, to have a strong body of trained priests ready to restore the pure teachings of former days. The founding of the University and the presence of Oxford professors at Douay influenced Allen to begin his seminary there. It was so successful that after ten years the Pope granted a subsidy which was regularly paid until the French Revolution. In the years that followed its foundation a very large number of men became students at Allen's seminary. Three hundred of these were secretly sent back to England from time to time, for work of conversion, instruction, and intriguing. Of those three hundred Douay priests, one hundred and sixty are enrolled as martyrs. When the seminary was well started, Cardinal Allen plotted with Philip the expedition of the Armada. He tried to raise an auxiliary company among the English students and residents of Douay, but only a few responded. The defeat of the great scheme left the academicians free to turn their attention to a Catholic translation of the Bible. This translation, the Douay Bible, still the standard Catholic translation, was published at Antwerp in 1600.

Father Baker was a member of the English Benedictine community at Douay. From Douay, in his old age, he was sent secretly to England for missionary work. In the prosecution of that work he died, as has been already stated.

A large part of Baker's writing was done at a town near Douay, where for nine years he was spiritual guide to a group of English nuns. He has explained his method of instruction in a life that he wrote of one of the nuns-Dame Gertrude More. After Baker's death, a loyal monk, Cressy, studied diligently whatever he could find of his friend's composition; he went through more than forty of Baker's treatises, made an abstract of the teachings, and published that abstract at Douay in 1657 under the title Sancta Sophia, Holy Wisdom. Dame Gertrude More and other nuns wrote their impressions and memories of Baker's instruction. Many of the manuscripts remained in the convent at Cambrai until the French Revolution drove the nuns back to their own country. Some of Baker's writings were lost during the disorder of the Revolution, but others are still preserved in English convents that are descended from the mother house at Cambrai.

The community of nuns that Baker so successfully guided crossed over to Douay in 1623. The community was the fruit of faithful pastoral work on the part of a Catholic priest among English families. (Elizabeth's tolerant policy required little of ordinary Catholic families. She haled priests to prison on account of their intriguing.) That priest, a Father Jones, in his ministrations found nine young gentlewomen whom he thought fit for religious training. Their families gave consent, and

Jones planned to bring his wards together. But as monasticism had ended in England, Jones crossed over with his charges to Douay, whence they proceeded to Cambrai. Three older nuns from an English convent in Brussels were made Superiors of the new group.

The troubles of the young community began at once. Different English priests from Douay were appointed Chaplain and Confessor to the nuns. The training of these priests had been altogether in preparation for argumentative proselytising. They did not know the elements of interior, contemplative living; hence they were unable to give suitable direction to the novices. Baker's pupil, Gertrude More, seems to have been the greatest sufferer from that lack of discipline. She appears to have had no vocation to religious life when in her eighteenth year she left her country and her father. She had merely very strong affection for God and a strong aversion from the life of the world. Her father was wealthy. She had refused to consider marriage. A tradition of devout Catholic loyalty continued in the family-Gertrude More (Helen we should call her, for that was her baptismal name; at her formal entrance into the convent she took St. Gertrude as patron and was thereafter called Gertrude More) was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII's Chancellor, Sir Thomas More. The chaplain of the More family considered their loyalty and the girl's distaste for worldly life as sufficient foundation on which to erect the structure of a religious character. The girl was partly influenced also by the fact that her choice would decide the fate of the proposed convent. The other candidates were poor. Without the contribution of Helen More's dowry which her father agreed to make, the establishment of the community would be impossible.

Helen More made her choice and went eagerly to work to acquire the graces of an interior life. She had a strong and active intellect and had some of the scholarship which distinguished the uncollege-trained ladies of earlier centuries. She inquired of the missionary chaplains and she read diligently all the books she could find. But the books and the viva voce advice she received were both harmful. She was not only hindered and retarded but actually lost ground. From a cheerful and pleasant companion, she became morose. She lost her inclination toward divine things and became so hopeless that she regretted the step taken. That was her state after eighteen months at Cambrai. Baker was then appointed Chaplain. At first he aroused her enthusiasm and restored her hope of coming into actual union with God. But the enthusiasm was short-lived. She took a hostile attitude toward Baker as well as toward her Mother, and refused to consult him. This opposition continued for some time. Finally the comfort and aid which other nuns received from Baker's guidance induced her to consult him again. He was able to give her the help she needed, and she followed the method of prayer he suggested during the nine remaining years of her life. She died painfully of small

pox, but inwardly at peace, in 1633. She was born in 1606-two years after the gunpowder plot.

Baker's way of approach to God may be called Vedantin. It seems abstract to our Western minds. Instead of approaching spiritual communion through the humanity of Christ, which is the normal Catholic way, the approach is made through the divinity of Christ. This seems as difficult as the Sankhya way in the East. It also seems unnatural; the humanity is a natural bridge for the very purpose of spanning the chasm. Baker is explicit, however, in his directions. An aspirant to spiritual communion is bidden to seek after God nakedly, in the Essence of His Being, and is cautioned "not to allow the soul to rest in even the noblest image that has ever been created, the image of the humanity of our blessed Saviour. For the soul (in some cases), through her strong propensity, is unable to use the image of the humanity of our Saviour at all as a step to the Divine simplicity." Baker's ideas when he writes of spiritual communion bear a striking resemblance to the "absorption" idea of the East. Rightly or wrongly, that notion or distortion—the drop lost in the ocean-represents Western opinion of Eastern religion. Baker writes as follows of the soul and God-a passage which might easily pass for some Vedantin comment. There is nothing in the thought to identify it with a Christian writer. "Like covets like,' says the philosopher, and so the spiritual soul of man thirsts after the noblest and most perfect of its kind, the Divine Spirit. He being infinite, the finite spirit of man may satiate and fill itself with Him and in Him, in a way it can not with other things, because the latter are limited and finite. Thus the Divinity is the infinite, profound centre or resting place of man's soul. Hence it ever desires the ocean, which, for its depth and wideness, is capable of containing it and millions of others. She thirsts after the spaciousness and infinity of God, wherein alone she can have her fill and be secure from perils. Nothing can touch or harm a soul while she is immersed in the Divinity."

It is that unusual, un-Western idea that gave to an envious superior a handle for proceeding against the orthodoxy of Baker's teaching. In 1633, after Baker had been for several years guiding the house at Cambrai, a new President of the community was appointed. That new President, envious of Baker's influence, made doctrinal charges. The specific charge was that Baker's teaching about obedience to an interior voice was subversive of obedience to Superiors. A committee of Benedictines was appointed for a searching examination. A close scrutiny was made of Baker's writings, and the Cambrai nuns, after viva voce examination, were ordered to give up all notes of interviews with Baker, all comments, all prayers, etc., written or suggested by his teaching. The committee. reported complete vindication of Baker. That was inevitable. Interior prayer, interior listening for a silent voice, could never, Baker said, unless at the very beginning, conflict with outward obedience. For that inner activity is not a check to the outer-it goes along simultaneously

with the outer.*

Nevertheless, Baker makes no evasion. He puts in the first place the virtue that St. Benedict made the foundation of the Order-obedience. If a person aspiring to union with God is forbidden by a Superior to practise interior prayer, Baker declares that person is to obey the Superior-"God will make it up to him."

Indications of that suspicion against his orthodoxy are frequent in Baker's writing. It introduced into his treatises an apologetic tone that is seldom pleasing. He feels the need to explain, to justify and safeguard.

Baker's abstract, Vedantin views are easy to trace historically. They are an heritage from the Areopagite whom Baker read and passed on to the nuns for study-together with writings of St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross and Tauler. The anonymous work, the Divine Cloud of Unknowing, is a link between Baker and Dionysius.

The Divine Cloud is an extraordinary writing of which almost nothing is known. There are five manuscripts in the British Museum. There are other manuscripts also. Mr. Edmund Gardner says the manuscripts are at least of the fifteenth century, but thinks that it is safer to assign them to the fourteenth. Baker found himself in complete accord with the teachings of the Divine Cloud and wrote a comment upon it. The original and his comments were first published two hundred and thirty years after Baker's death by another Benedictine. The book is difficult to obtain. It is said that Catholic booksellers are forbidden to sell it to laymen-another indication that Baker's way is not quite the normal way of Catholic Christendom.

In his comment, Baker states that the Divine Cloud is founded on Dionysius, and he quotes from Dionysius' epistle to Timothy: "Thou, then, Timothy, leave thy senses and sensible exercises, and all sensible and intelligible things. Keep under by a strong effort of thy mind the things which are not and which are, and as far as it is possible to thee, rise up unknowingly to that union with God, which is above all substance and knowledge." Baker's comments reveal profound sympathy between himself and Dionysius. "As God is infinite," he writes, "there can be no true sensible (i.e., of physical senses) image of God. A devout soul should free itself of all such images and retain only an obscure and general notion of God; the mind should remain in a kind of vacuity."

To attain to union through an obscure and general notion of God with the mind held in a kind of vacuity-that is Dionysius' way of negation. Dionysius spoke always of the "Transcendence of the One." To Dionysius the One [God] is above all created things, and cannot there

* "As to following prayer when the Superior at such time would wish otherwise to employ a person, I say that after the soul hath been some good space practising that exercise, Superiors would fail to hinder her in it by imposing that which to them seemed fit, and the soul would have no desire to resist them, nor could she do it without a check from God Almighty. For no employment which religious women have in religion can hinder them after they have had a good entrance into prayer; because if they pray not at one time they can easily pray at another, or best of all, pray with the work itself, and make the work their prayer."-Dame Gertrude More in her Apologia.

fore be reached through created things. The way of negation is the way taught by Baker, also. "The knowledge which Dame Gertrude had of God," Baker writes, "was of that kind which spiritual writers declare to be the truest knowledge of which we are capable in this life and that is by way of negation-that God is none of those things which we can imagine or conceive with our understanding." Baker is perhaps the most thorough-going representative of the Areopagite in the West. He passes far beyond mystics like Richard of St. Victor. Richard embodied the teachings of Dionysius' "Mystical Theology" but he clothed them in Biblical allegories and gave them an appearance of concreteness, familiarity and domesticity. Erigena, the first translator of Dionysius, seems to understand his author fully. But even Erigena holds to the usual Catholic teaching that man must reach God over the bridge of Christ's humanity. "He wished to make His Humanity a medium," Erigena wrote, "for the transmutation of all human nature to Divine. He descended alone, in order that He might ascend with many. He, a God, made Himself Man, in order that He might make Gods of men." The unknown author of the Divine Cloud and Father Baker reproduce the complete abstractness of Dionysius. They counsel their readers to consider the naked Being of God.

Union with God [the Transcendent One] through the way of negation was the victorious end to which Father Baker led his spiritual daughters. But it is an end-it is not a method. We cannot think that a man of his wisdom would speak about transcendence, the way of negation, etc., to a nineteen-year-old girl in great distress over a mistaken vocation. He pointed out to Gertrude More certain spiritual exercises. which he thought would bring her relief. He tried to start her on a simple way of prayer that would lead her interiorly to the spiritual plane. His wish was to make her spiritual life independent of himself personally. Something must now be said about the spiritual exercises Baker gave to Gertrude More.

His plan was to lead her to God along the path of least resistance. That path for her was the one of her natural affection for God. The mistakes of the missionary chaplains and the harm she got from books seem to have been of two kinds. They counselled "doing violence to nature." That is excellent counsel when used under the guidance of a skilful director. But unwise use of it almost wrecked Dame Gertrude's life. The second mistake was the effort to hold her, as a novice, in the elementary stages of meditation-the stages of memory and understanding. Baker saw that Gertrude More was an unusually gifted beginnerthat her natural affection for God was strong enough to kindle her will, and that for her the earlier stages of reasoning, which with most aspirants lead up to an awakening of love, were altogether unnecessary. He counselled her to seek God naturally-to let her affections be her guide in ejaculatory (mental) prayer. She obeyed, made selections of sentences from St. Augustine, and used them. That simple exercise seems