What do we mean by ‘integration”? A creature is integral when it possesses all it needs for its perfection and completeness. A thing can remain essentially intact without being whole or integral. A car on its trials with engine, wheels and chassis only is essentially a car but it has no integrity. Or again we use integrity of a character that has preserved the wholeness of a good moral life or of fidelity to truth, as opposed to the one who has compromised either of these perfections by his conduct or dishonesty—for even should he repent he will lack something; he will lack that unity of a life unbroken by sin. By integration, then, we mean that quality of wholeness which is given to a thing when it is finally completed; and when applied to human life this quality can only be gauged with respect to the whole of life from childhood to old age, a life begun with a certain perfection given by God the Creator, but with a hundred conflicting possibilities and powers which have to be co-ordinated into a whole, i.e., integrated.

It is just this element of intactness which is absent in modern life. We manage on the whole to preserve the essentials of life for we continue, at least barely, to Jive. But there is no sense of completeness about it. Our home life is one thing, our work another, our leisure another, and our religion something apart from all these: all are divided off into separate compartments.

In his Round the World in Any Number of Days Maurice Baring says that ‘The most precious of all books are those which seem to do the work for you. You don’t have to bother; you are not aware that you are reading’. His list includes Tolstoy, Trollope, and that most lovable of writers, William De Morgan; to them we might add his own name and work. The easiest and friendliest author of our generation, and one of the most distinguished, has gone, now that he is dead; he can be matched in certain qualities, surpassed in some, but there is—there always will be—only one Maurice Baring. His peculiar charm almost eludes analysis, and analysis appears an absurdly pedantic word to use in talking of one who so deprecated pedantry; but one tries to describe his quality for the mere pleasure of writing about it.

His style is like good manners, unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable, but, like good manners, enjoyable and, also like good manners, part of himself, neither a pose nor an acquisition. In catholicity of taste and. culture he can hardly have been matched among the most scholarly writers of his generation; in this, indeed, he would seem to belong to a more suave and lettered age than ours. But he could never have ‘played the sedulous ape’ unless out of Puckish criticism, as in his delicious drolleries Dead Letters and Lost Diaries, which are so often exactly what the celebrities concerned ought to have said or written.

The contributors to this volume, as Dr Kirk tells us in his foreword, ‘found themselves, some six years ago, united in the conviction that the whole subject of the Christian ministry, its doctrine, its continuity, its place in the full scheme of Christian doctrine, was ripe for a fresh survey’. Convinced that one of the most hopeful features of modern religion is the movement towards reunion, and persuaded that the crux of this movement is the doctrine of the ministry, they agreed to collaborate in the production of a constructive historical and theological survey of the origins, meaning and importance of the episcopacy in the Christian Church. The whole is considered with special reference to the interests of the Church of England and to the difficulties in this regard felt by non-episcopal communions. This involves a large variety of subjects of research in the ten essays of the volume. All the essays are by well-known scholars of the Catholic school of thought in the Church of England.

By now we should be able to understand without being disturbed or disconcerted how deeply this process of ‘Allegorization’ is bound up with the flowering of the New Testament. We have now gone beyond the form to the essence of the Gospel message. After the explanations we have given, we need no longer fear to say it; the very concepts, the fundamental ideas in the preaching of Jesus and the Apostles are now revealed, not simply in their imaginative clothing but in their most intimate substructure, as allegorisations of ideas in the Old Testament. To prove this we will consider just three ideas, but they are the most central in the New Testament: that of the Kingdom, of the Messias, and of Sacrifice. On these three themes alone all Christian dogma could be reconstructed.

Where do they come from? How do they arise? It is unnecessary to point out the place assigned to the Kingdom in the preaching of our Lord as given in the Synoptics; that preaching is the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’ and nothing else. But where does the idea itself come from? One can assign it a double origin; on the one hand the old eschatological concept (going back to the origins of the religion of Israel) of the ‘Day’ when ‘all will be changed’, when God will intervene in the affairs of this world as an all-powerful judge and will re-establish all things in conformity with his will. And on the other hand the ‘mother-idea’ from which the expression ‘people of God’ arises.