ALTHOUGH THE LETTER which follows was printed in the very year in which it was written, and has been reprinted twice since, I do not hesitate to make it available again, seeing that the writer was the proto-matyr of the English Reformation, John Houghton, the last Prior of the London Charterhouse, canonized in 1970. The text of Houghton's letter and of the answer to it from his correspondent, a fellow-Carthusian at Cologne named Dietrich Loher (Loer), are preserved in a book by the latter, a small octavo volume issued at Cologne in 1532. Following its titlepage, which reads D. Dionysii Carthusiani, Doctoris extatici vita, simul & operum eius fidissimus catalogus. Coloniae excudebat Iaspar Gennepius. MDXXXII, there are seven pages containing the original Latin text of both letters. Today it has become a rare book, which is hardly to be found outside a few great libraries and therefore cannot be widely known or easily read. This is obviously the source from which, almost a century ago, Dom Lawrence Hendriks reprinted Houghton's letter as Appendix VI to his pioneer study, The London Charterhouse, its monks and its martyrs.’ Even this work is no longer within everyone's reach today. Hendriks, moreover, printed only the Latin text, without any indication where it came from, and devoted but a few lines in his Chapter VII to its general contents, remarking that this and a short letter written when Houghton was Prior of Beauvale ‘are the only authentic writings of Blessed John Houghton that have come down to us.’ Wishing to make once more available this precious evidence concerning the personality and preoccupations of the martyr-made all the more poignant for us by the realization that little more than two years and a half after the penning of this gracious and affectionate exchange of letters, Houghton in May 1535 was to undergo King Henry's specially savage butchery at Tyburn-I offer an English version of both letters, with some notes to place the correspondence in its historical setting. The Latin originals are reprinted as an Appendix to this article.

No one but a saint should attempt to write about a saint. This is less evidently so in the case of active saints or martyrs, those whose external actions, whose whole lives are in themselves striking or edifying; then a biography can be of interest in the same way as it would be of any other outstanding personality; but of the contemplative saint, the mystic, there is often little to recount in the medium of time and place; very often they are monks or nuns whose entire lives have passed in uneventful routine of religious duties; the drama is interior and hidden.

It is true that St Teresa founded convents, that St John of the Cross was for a time in prison, that St Bernard and St Catherine intervened in the political crises of their times. But these are not the important things about them; these actions, however useful and successful, are accidental, and sorry to the true significance of their lives—the union of their souls with God in love, and even in the more specific sense, union through the interior way of contemplation.