It may be helpful to approach the subject of the place of symbols in Christianity from the consideration of two sets of difficulties or disabilities which seem to affect many Catholics nowadays in the western world.

First, Catholics are often accused of not reading the Old Testament. If this is true, and by and large it seems to be, it is important for us to discover why it is so; and the likely explanation seems to be that to a great extent we have lost the clue to the reading of the book, we have forgotten the ‘language’, the idiom, in which it is written. Again it seems undeniably true to say that the modern Catholic, however deep and vivid his belief in the efficacy of the sacraments, often finds little meaning if any in their ritual, the ritual for instance of the baptismal waters; whereas it is clear that in the days of primitive Christianity this same ritual had on the neophyte an immensely vivid impact.

Secondly, many Catholics nowadays seem to feel that the formulas, the propositions, in which the Christian faith is stated and propounded to them in creed or catechism have about them a certain unreality: they seem so dry, so technical, so remote from ordinary everyday speech and everyday reality, that they may easily come in the end to seem meaningless: the dogmatic formulas, the definitions of faith, so remote and so dry as to be unreal; the moral principles, so neat and tidy as to seem lacking in validity.