A Nun and her Friends. By Katharine Tynan. (Kegan Paul,
Trench, and Co.)—Mother Mary Xaveria Fallon, whose story is told in this volume, held high office among the Nuns of Loretto, an Order which devotes itself to education. The contemplative life has never been regarded with as much favour in Western Christendom as it has found in the East. Certainly, outside the limits of the Roman Church, the Orders that give themselves to the work of the hospital and the school command a sympathy that the most striking representatives of asceticism do not com- mand. Mother Mary Xaveria was an eminently sane-minded as well as single-hearted woman. It is possible, indeed, that as her life advanced, the almost inevitable tendency to exaggerate per- sonal discipline showed itself in her ; • but that her life-work was done in a really reasonable human spirit, this biography abun- dantly shows. Miss Tynan writes with much force and eloquence, and in a kindly spirit, where those outside her own communion are concerned. She has added some interesting particulars of the history of the Order of which Mother Mary Xaveria was so illustrious a member, giving us sketches in particular of the life of Mary Ward, who first conceived the idea of a Teaching Order, and of Frances Ball, whose place Mary Fallon was afterwards to fill.
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