energies, and can only be trodden at the cost of a certain inward
seclusion of which outward seclusion is normally a condition.
Instinctively, Catholic tradition has regarded it as a vocation
apart--as, like the life of continence, a call to something more than
human, and demanding a sacrifice or atrophy of functions proper to
another grade of spirituality. Even what is called a "life of thought"
makes a similar demand to a great extent; it involves a narrowing of
other interests; a departure from the conditions of ordinary practical
life. The "contemplative life" is inclusively all this and more; it is a
sort of anticipation of the future life of vision. Still, though for a
few it may be the surest or the only approach to sanctity, yet there is
no degree of Divine love that may not be reached by the commoner and
normal path; there have been saints outside the cloister as well as
inside. One could hardly offend the first principles of the Gospel more
grievously than by making intelligence, culture, and contemplative
capacity conditions of a nearer approach to Christ.

It seems to us then that Patmore failed to get at the root of the
neglected truth after which he was groping, and thereby fell into a
one-sidedness just as real as that against which his chief work was a
revolt and protest.

As a convert, Patmore is most uninteresting to the controversialist. His
mind was altogether concrete, affirmative, and synthetic, with a
profound distrust of abstract and analytical reasoning. As we have said,
Christianity and, later, Catholicism appealed profoundly to his
intellectual imagination in virtue of some of their deeper tenets, for
whose sake he took over all the rest _per modum unius_.

The idea [of the Incarnation] no sooner flashed upon me as a possible