To our own credit be it said that this reprehensible manner of writing is more common in England than among ourselves. Miss Alcott has avoided these faults; and in saying this we consider we have said much in her praise. Her _Silver Pitchers_ is a charming little temperance story told in her best vein. It is somewhat New-Englandish, but that has its charms for some――ourselves, we must confess, among the number. Pity Miss Alcott could not understand that there are higher and nobler motives for temperance than the mere impulse it gives to worldly success and the desire to possess a good name. The siren cup will never be effectually dashed aside by the tempted ones till prayer and supernatural considerations come to their assistance. THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXIV., No. 140.――NOVEMBER, 1876. Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1877. THOUGHTS ON MYSTICAL THEOLOGY. St. John of the Cross, in commenting on these two lines of the thirty-ninth stanza of his _Spiritual Canticle_: “The grove and its beauty In the serene night,” gives us a definition of mystical theology. “‘In the serene night’――that is, contemplation, in which the soul desires to behold the grove (God as the Creator and Giver of life to all creatures). It is called night because contemplation is obscure, and that is the reason why it is also called mystical theology――that is, the secret or hidden wisdom of God, wherein God, without the sound of words _or the intervention of any bodily or spiritual sense_, as it were in silence and repose, in the darkness of sense and nature, teaches the soul――and the soul knows not how――in a most secret and hidden way. Some spiritual writers call this ‘understanding without understanding,’ because it does not take place in what philosophers call the active intellect (_intellectus agens_), which is conversant with the forms, fancies, and apprehensions of the physical faculties, but in the intellect as it is passive (_intellectus possibilis_), which, without receiving such forms, receives passively only the substantial intelligence of them, free from all imagery.”[35]