This book gives one the deepest kind of delight. It is intensely moving spiritually and morally. Too often the word of God, which in the Scriptures moves us so compellingly, seems to lose all its power when clothed in theological language. The book that can present theological truths so that they move the spirit to love and follow God with spontaneous joy is a rare exception: among such works in English I remember the books of Dom Anscar Vonier. Many attempts make shipwreck at the start by relying on a pious emotionalism foreign to the theological truth itself. Here, however, in Father de Lubac’s Sur les Chemins de Dieu, theology moves the soul by its own power, by the presence of God’s word within it. Fr de Lubac succeeds in the task he explicitly set himself: to help men to find God, not merely to indicate to them that there is a God to find. He convinces the reader experimentally of a difference between proving God’s existence and revealing God as present and essential in our own Eves. He succeeds in showing that God is not just a need of the human mind, but my need.

This is what Fr de Lubac would most want to hear, I think, from someone who has read his book: and he would be prepared, I am sure, to enter into discussion about difficulties and infelicities of expression with anybody sincerely concerned to enhance the books power to lead souls to God. Behind the rather unmoving nature of what follows, there lurks such a concern.