Whatever is to be said of the general hardness of a priest's life, in this one respect it stands out as more fortunate than that in most other professions. A priest on a town mission--and it is on such a mission that a holiday is really needed--commonly has four consecutive Sundays off duty once every year, which means in many cases that he is able to absent himself for nearly five weeks. The conditions of his life render this possible, and nobody grudges it. Even the war has not interfered with a priest's holidays, at any rate as regards their length. And in this country they are more systematically regularised than in most others. Some half a century ago a Belgian Bishop wrote to Cardinal Manning asking him to dissuade his priests from visiting Belgium when on their annual holiday, lest they should unsettle the local clergy and instigate them also to look for holidays. In our time, however, holidays for priests, before the war, were not so unknown there. A primary result of this systematic arrangement for holidays is that an appreciable part of a priest's life is spent in this way, and it becomes of importance for us to enquire how we spend it. The science of arithmetical addition often produces startling results. A person adding up accounts for the first time is surprised at the total amount of money that he finds has passed through his hands, both on the credit and on the debit side. Let us apply the process to the priest's holiday. We will suppose that the average time he takes is one calendar month--which is ordinarily well within the mark. In the first twelve years of his priesthood therefore he spends a year in holidays. One who has reached his silver jubilee has occupied over two years so: an old priest may have spent four or five years in this way. Clearly much will depend both in time and in eternity on how it has been spent.