THE GOLDEN STRING

The title of this beautifully written book is derived from the lines by William Blake that start: ""I give you the end of a golden string"". This is the life story of Don Bede Griffiths, now a Benedictine monk of Prinknash Abbey, in England. It opens with a mystical experience of school days which led Griffiths to becoming a sensitive nature worshipper -- but with steadily diminishing religious faith. Then, under the influence of C.S. Lewis at Oxford, he launched into a wide program of reading philosophy and literature. Disillusioned by World War I, Griffiths and two friends cut themselves off from the world in a ""return to nature"", living in a remote cottage, entering gradually on a regime of fasting, then Bible reading and prayer. By degrees, Griffiths became intrigued by the Catholic Church and finally was baptised and soon thereafter entered monastic life. It is as clearly written a brief for Catholicism as one is apt to find, and a cogent justification for monasticism in the modern world. Bede Griffiths speaks from these pages as a most appealing personality and even those who cannot accept his conclusions will agree that his arguments are forcibly put. This might get something of the market of The Seven Storey Mountain if the appeal spreads beyond the Catholic readers.