The liturgical revival, or more precisely, a renewed understanding of the liturgy, involves a biblical revival. It must be admitted that such a statement is rarely received enthusiastically. The most resolute good intentions (and it is mainly priests we have in mind, and priests who are full of zeal for souls), the most resolute good intentions, seem to falter under such a blow! ‘What?’ it will be said, ‘we must “initiate” people into the Bible? As though it were not difficult enough to “initiate” them into the liturgy alone !’ To this protest we may reply that the fact is already there. Our liturgy, the Roman liturgy, is biblical from beginning to end. Not only is it mostly composed of biblical texts (or at least biblical commentary) but even those parts which are purely ecclesiastical in composition, breathe the same atmosphere, use the same vocabulary, the same forms of thought, as the biblical texts themselves. These arguments will have little weight, however, with many of those who protest against a ‘biblical initiation’ in addition to a liturgical; and it is not difficult to see why.

By ‘liturgical initiation’ they do not understand at all an initiation into the traditional liturgy, for which they have no more taste nor interest than they have for Holy Scripture. What they envisage is rather a quite new ‘concoction’, a liturgy re-made in an emancipated form, intended to ‘make contact with the masses’ by getting rid of everything in our actual liturgy which betrays its biblical or patristic origin.

The Bishop of London first published this book in Australia in 1943 when he was Archbishop of Brisbane, and the present English edition includes a few alterations. In the Preface he explains how the letters were freshly translated from the Greek into an entirely modern medium, and then rewritten into a freer translation with occasional explanatory phrases. The result he has called either a free translation or a close paraphrase. A careful study of his text shows that it is frequently a very close translation, although the title of paraphrase has freed the translator’s conscience from an obligation to strict adherence to the original word—or phrase—order, has permitted the insertion of phrases or even whole sentences, and has sometimes made possible a completely English idiom to replace that of the original.

Naturally the Catholic reader will make comparisons with the Catholic versions familiar to him : the Challoner-Rheims of 1749, and the new translation of Mgr Knox of 1945. He might also compare the American Revision of 1941, which is too little known in this country apart from its use in Fr Stedman’s Daily Readings and Sunday Missal, and which is in fact a new version with great merits as a literal translation (usually very close to the Greek), which is easily readable, and which is in ‘biblical’ English with many archaisms removed and without notable Americanisms. For checking according to the Greek he will of course turn to the Westminster Version of 1931.

When these two essays were written—in 1934—a climax was reached in what some have called the Theology of Crisis. For some time before that date it had been obvious that Brunner and Barth, the leading exponents of the school, had been drifting apart in their respective formulations of the doctrine of man, but the clear lines of their divergence were not defined till the publication of these essays. Both writers appear to have modified details of their teaching since 1934, but the radical disagreement remains. The essays, therefore, may be regarded as giving classic expression to two fundamentally opposed interpretations of the interaction of nature and Grace from a Protestant standpoint.

The disagreement is partly explained, but only partly, by temperament. Barth is a preacher, a prophet who thunders from the heights, often through obscuring clouds; he is a man of passion, impatient in his convictions. Brunner on his part is a teacher, much concerned with clarity in exposition, far more sensitive to difficulties, broader in his sympathies; but at times he lacks the intuitive genius of his opponent. While all this is important and a key to much they write and to some of their oppositions (for the one, by his very psychological constitution, is often the complement of the other), yet it is not the whole story. The problem raised in the essays is not susceptible of any such facile solution. There is a real divergence, a parting of the way which is fundamental for their theology.

Poor people do not differ from rich people in this natural characteristic, that they both like to have individual medical attention and realise that the best way to obtain this is to pay a reasonable fee to the doctor of their choice. Nevertheless one meets many people of all classes who make, sometimes grudgingly, the admission that they think a State Medical Service would be a good thing.

There are several causes of this discrepancy. In the first place, it is by no means confined to medical matters. More than ever since the Second War, some commodities are badly distributed and many of us have got into the way of thinking that nationalisation, or control by the State, offers a satisfactory solution. This is a trend of the times, and statistical statements have got us into the habit of supposing a ‘trend’ to be something inevitable. Eor instance, this was the defeatist talk some years ago of many doctors who were by temperament, by training and by reasoned conviction opposed to State Medicine as a bad thing for the people: they summed up wearily by saying that it was all a trend of the times and there was no resisting it. Another attitude, less easy to dispose of, was, and is, to point to the many defects in our present medical services and to suggest that State control at least offers a remedy, no other being available.

In an increasingly pagan world, it is a truism to say that Catholics must become more Catholic or they will have to compromise their faith to an extent which will prove fatal. The truly Catholic life must express wholeness of dedication to Jesus Christ and an integration of all activities. One aspect of the chronic lack of wholeness in living seems to me to stand out above the rest at the present time and to be of great importance. I refer to man’s dependence on the fruits and hence the well-being of the earth, which have largely ceased to interest the modem educated man except from a scientific and mechanical point of view.

More than enough has already been written on the disintegration of our times, but right action can only emerge from knowledge and understanding, natural and supernatural. First, then, I am going to try and put the problem, as I see it, in its true context. In the book of Genesis we read that man was born in a garden to dress and keep it. Before he fell, man did not have to work by the sweat of his brow, but he did have to keep a garden in as good a condition as he found it. In practice he would have perhaps to keep the divisions between different kinds of plants and to maintain an orderly arrangement in the garden. For, first of all, the garden of Eden was a perfect creation, and not the finest system of husbandry in the world we know can show a garden to rival this paradise of pleasure.