Memoirs

Priest And Apostle
Edmund Lester, Si. By Clement Tigar, S.J., M.A (Oxon.). (Longmans. 3s. 6d.)
Reviewed by G. ELLIOT ANSTRUTHER In the chapel at Osterley there are panels of honour bearing the names of nearly three hundred priests, secular and regular, whose vocations were fostered in that Middlesex centre, at Campion House, as a result of the initiative and care of the late Fr. Edmund Lester. At present a further four hundred young men, former Osterley students, are at various stages of their preparation for the priesthood in diocesan seminaries or in religious orders.
If no monument of Fr. Lester's own priestly zeal remained to us than this, it might well be monument enough; yet the training of " Our Lady's Young Priests," as he loved to call them, was but a part of that convert worker's activity for the promotion of religion. Throughout the English-speaking world. for instance, there has spread that great spiritual crusade of his foundation : the Knights. Handmaids, and Pages of the. Blessed Sacrament. And who shall measure the doubts dispelled, the questionings satisfied, the anxieties consoled, by his always wise and often amusing answers to correspondents during the years when he edited Stella Maris?
In this brief memoir by Fr. Lester's successor at the training college at Campion House we have a terse and graphic account of the man and his work, to which portraits and other illustrations give additional interest.
" Osterley is filling an important gap in the work of the Church in England." So the Archbishop of Westminster writes at the close of a preface to the volume; and the rest of us should be grateful to Fr. Clement Tiger for having preserved in print the story of that work in relation to its founder and first ruling spirit. To the narrative chapters he has appended notes illustrative of Fr. Lester's method of spiritual direction; these admirably round-off the book and complete the picture.