Lift Up Your Hearts

I was unaware until Humphrey Nye gave me a copy this week that RL Ashcroft wrote, in addition to Random Recollections of Haileybury, a book for those who had been confirmed. It is not a confirmation course, but a call to a deeper religion for those who have grown up in other ways but not found any deeper religious instruction. The following paragraphs are from the foreword.

I am sure that our chief need today is to get back to the vitality of the first Christian message - to a vivid belief that God is Love; that Christ, by virtue of His Cross and Resurrection, can save us from our lovelessness; that the Holy Spirit can thrill us and warm the dying embers of our love - we want to get hold of a message which will give us confidence and strength and enthusiasm, which will create in us a sense of fellowship one with another, which will make our personal lives sweet and holy and inspiring, and will finally send us out into the workaday world with a compelling song in our hearts so that others shall take notice of us that we have been with Jesus.

...

With Christ it is all or nothing. There is no such man as a nominal Christian. "The Christian life is the life of the First Christian, Jesus Christ, continued in the members of His mystical Body, the Catholic Church." [Bede Frost, The Art of Mental Prayer.]  And the basis of such a life is the conviction that there lived on this earth One who was divine as well as human, that some day, some how, we shall meet Him, and meanwhile we shall adore Him, and pray to Him, and allow His Spirit to move in us, and try to live like Him.