clear that the first, direct from God, is a better vocation than the one which is inspired by human example, or the third, which arises from the failure of everything else.  At the same time they ARE all three genuine vocations.  What applies to the vocation seems to me to apply equally to the community.  What you stigmatize as our pseudo-monasticism is still experimental, and I think I can see the Reverend Father’s idea.  He has had a great deal of experience with an Order which began so amateurishly, if I may use the word, that nobody could have imagined that it would grow to the size and strength it has reached in ten years.  The Bishop of Alberta revealed much to us of our beginnings during his stay at the Abbey, and after I had listened to him I felt how presumptuous it was for me to criticize the central source of the religious life we are hoping to spread.  You see, Rector, I must have criticized it implicitly in my letters to you, for your objections are simply the expression of what I did not like to say, but what I managed to convey through the medium of would-be humorous description.  One hears of the saving grace of humour, but I’m not sure that humour is a saving grace.  I rather wish that I had no sense of humour.  It’s a destructive quality.  All the great sceptics have been humourists.  Humour is really a device to secure human comfort.  Take me.  I am inspired to become a preaching friar.  I instantly perceive the funny side of setting out to be a preaching friar.  I tell myself that other people will perceive the funny side of it, and that consequently I shall do no good as a preaching friar.  Yes, humour is a moisture which rusts everything except gold.  As a nation the Jews have the greatest sense of humour, and they have been the greatest disintegrating force in the history of mankind.  The Scotch are reputed to have no sense of humour, and they are morally the most impressive nation in the world.  What humour is allowed them is known as dry humour.  The corroding moisture has been eliminated.  They are still capable of laughter, but never so as to interfere with their seriousness in the great things of life.  I remember I once heard a tiresome woman, who was striving to be clever, say that Our Lord could not have had much sense of humour or He would not have hung so long on the Cross.  At the time I was indignant with the silly blasphemy, but thinking it over since I believe that she was right, and that, while her only thought had been to make a remark that would create a sensation in the room, she had actually hit on the explanation of some of Our Lord’s human actions.  And his lack of humour is the more conspicuous because he was a Jew.  I was reading the other day a book of essays by one of our leading young latitudinarian divines, in which he was most anxious to prove that Our Lord had all the graces of a well-bred young man about town, including a pretty wit.  He actually claimed that the pun on Peter’s name was an example of Our Lord’s urbane and