(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of the historical and institutional elements of religion, at least in the case of more advanced souls, is one of these abuses.--Now it is true, and Catherine has been a striking instance, that the proportion of all these different elements towards one another vary, and should vary, considerably between soul and soul, according to the _attrait_ and degree of advance of each; that the soul’s most solid advance is in the direction of an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness, and not in that of a multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of even the more central of those elements and means may, for souls called to the prayer of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and largely unmethodized; and that, for such souls (and, in various degrees and ways, sooner or latter, for perhaps most other souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation and of all but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of love, and of dim, expansive trust and conformity is possible, sometimes alone possible, and is proved right and useful, if it leaves them strengthened to act and to suffer, to help and to devote themselves to their fellows, to Christ, and to God. But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other souls, that the historical and institutional elements must ever remain represented, and sufficiently represented; indeed the persistence in these elements of religion will be one of the chief means for avoiding delusion. We have St. Teresa’s experience and teaching here, as a truly classical instance. And if the prayer of Quiet will give a special colour, depth, and unity to those more contingent-seeming practices, these practices will, in return, give a particular definiteness, content, and creaturely quality to that prayer. And thus too the universally and profoundly important union and interchange with souls of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spirituality will be kept up. Only the sum-total of all these souls, only the complete invisible Church, is the full Bride of Christ; and though the souls composing her may and should each contribute a varying predominance of different elements, no soul should be entirely without a certain amount of each of these constituents.