Lightning Meditations

For more than twelve years Mgr. Knox contributed every month a short sermon to The Sunday Times. In 1951 he gathered seventy-one of these sermons into a book which he entitled Stimuli. Introducing the collection Mgr. Knox warned readers to beware the sting these sermons contained: like the Scriptures, they have barbs here and there hidden beneath the surface,''ready to pierce the skin of your conscience, though it be as tough to kick the goad as the university of Tarsus can make it." At the same time Mgr. Knox pointed out that the book did not consist merely of scoldings, but contained comfort as well as admonition. This second collection contains sermons of a later date than those published in Stimuli. Through practice Mgr. Knox's skill in condensing his lesson was made perfect. This volume, I think, is both more disturbing and more comforting than the first. Each little sermon illuminates the dark corners of our conscience like a flash of lightning. The title Lightning Meditations is most apposite. Mgr. Knox carefully kept cuttings of these later sermons, and no doubt intended to republish them as a book. I have arranged them here on roughly the same pattern that Mgr. Knox followed in the first volume. No word has been altered. Occasionally I have added a footnote where there was need for a date or reference to a text.