Father Baker lived so long before the errors of false mysticism had been thoroughly investigated, refuted, and condemned that it was very easy for him to fail of detecting what was unguarded, inaccurately expressed, exaggerated, or of erroneous tendency in a book which was approved by a number of prelates and theologians. He has certainly not borrowed or adopted what was erroneous in the book, but that portion of its teaching which was sound and safe, upon which the error was a mere excrescence. The mere fact of citing a book which has been placed on the Index is a matter of small and only incidental moment. Dr. Sweeney seems to us to have followed too timorous a conscience in his way of treating the chapter of _Sancta Sophia_ in which the work of De Rojas is quoted. We cannot agree with him that Father Baker would have suppressed that chapter if the book had been censured during his lifetime. He would have suppressed his commendation of the book, and looked carefully to see what the error was on account of which it had been condemned, as any good Catholic is bound to do in such a case. But we feel confident that he would not have felt himself obliged to make any essential alteration in what he had written on the prayer of silence, though he would probably have explicitly guarded it against any possible misapprehension or perversion. Any one who reads the _Sancta Sophia_, especially with Dr. Sweeney’s annotations, will see at once how absurd is the charge of a tincture of semi-Quietism against so sober and practical a writer as Father Baker, and how remote from anything favoring the illusions of false spirituality are his instructions on prayer. It would be almost as absurd to impute Quietism to Father Baker as rigorism to St. Alphonsus. We are afraid that Dr. Sweeney’s signal-board of “caution” will scare away simple-minded and devout readers from one of the most useful chapters of _Sancta Sophia_, one which is really the pivot of the whole book. Father Baker’s special scope and object was not to give instruction in meditation and active exercises, but to lead the soul through and beyond these to contemplation. The instructions on the prayer of interior silence are precisely those which are fitted to enlighten and direct a person in the transition state from the spiritual exercises of discursive meditation to that state of ordinary and acquired contemplation which Scaramelli and all standard writers recognize as both desirable and attainable for those who have devoted a considerable time to the practice of mental prayer. Father Baker’s directions on this head should be judged by what they are intrinsically in themselves, without any regard to anything else. Are they singular, imprudent, or in any respect contrary to the doctrine of the saints and other authors of recognized soundness in doctrine? We cannot see that they are. Whatever perversion of the method of prayer in question may have been