Of all the developments that have taken place in Wales since the end of the war, perhaps those most vital to the life of the nation are the efforts now being made to preserve and extend the use of the Welsh language. Until recent years it was taken for granted that the language was such an integral part of the average Welshman’s being as never to be in serious danger, and this in spite of the early defection of whole counties like Radnor and Monmouth and of parts of several others. Now, however, with the immigration which started with the war we find people of English and other nationalities settled not only in the towns and villages but even in farms and homesteads in the remotest parts of the country. In my own village, for example, fifty per cent of the children attending the village school are of English parentage and many of the farms in the valley have been bought by English people. In former days such immigrants were rapidly absorbed into the native population and soon became Welsh both in speech and outlook. Occasionally that still happens, but the trickle of immigration has become a flood and the process of absorption is in danger of being put into reverse. Added to this, there is the influence of television, the wireless, English newspapers and magazines and, by no means least, the increase of rapid transport to cities and resorts, most of which have long been anglicized.

No form of biography is more difficult to write than the life of a man or woman credited with sanctity. If the account is to be uniformly honest, the impression of transcendent goodness must inevitably be marred: the smallest fault is enough to invalidate the claim to perfection. If the picture is deliberately edifying, the impression conveyed is too remote to command admiration, still less affection. The conventional Lives of the Saints possess an advantage over modem essays in hagiography in that they are concerned with persons sufficiently long dead for their faults to have sunk into oblivion. If the subject happens to be near-contemporary, however, certain imperfections are bound to loom large. ‘God protect us from living saints’, wrote an ancient ecclesiastic. In the first biography of Edith Stein to appear in English, the author makes a genuine attempt at objectivity. She does not minimize a certain stiffness of character in her subject, while admitting that this gradually mellowed; and there is much criticism of her theological views. If the book suffers from one major fault, it lies in its refusal to allow us sufficient opportunity of judging the woman for ourselves. For every little fact we are given a disproportionate amount of comment. And this liberal comment, however fair in intention, is apt to come between us and the extraordinary woman about whom we feel we can never know enough on the factual plane alone.

This stricture apart, Miss Graef’s book is of compelling interest: one hopes that it will-be both widely read and vigorously discussed.

The worship of the Christian community culminates in the sacrifice of the Mass. At Mass, a priest, assimilated by his ordination to the High Priesthood of Christ, offers, in the name of Christ, a true sacrifice to God. This act of sacrifice is identified with our Lord’s sacrifice on Calvary for though the manner in which the victim is offered is different, the victim is the same. The body given and the blood shed is made present through the signs of the bread and the wine. More than that, Christ who died then and once and for all released the bonds of sin, is now, under the appearance of bread and wine, really present, so that his body and his blood become the heavenly food of the Christian community. This is the sacred passover meal at which the lamb is sacrificed that the people may be delivered. The lamb of God who offered himself, who gave himself upon the Cross as a pure and holy victim, offers himself again, by the ministry of priests, in an act of adoration, love and generosity.

The Mass is the memorial of that sacrifice that makes all other sacrifice acceptable, of the sacrifice through which the world is overcome. It is the union of the people of God with their risen Lord; hence it is the sign of victory. The life of the Church which is constituted by the victory of Christ, is one in which we share in the gifts won for us by Christ.

There is a very real sense in which everything that is is sacred. We say, or at least said, that life is sacred; motherhood is sacred, and so on. Far be it from me to deprecate this usage. For does not the root evil of our time, the secularization of life, he precisely in atrophy of the religious sense? It was this very tendency of the historical process which caused voices to be raised amid the wilderness of nineteenth-century industrialism, reaffirming the holiness not only of God’s creation but also of the works of man.

Holy: holiness: here we have le mot juste. We say God is holy. The word is inadequate but not erroneous. It would never occur to us to say God is sacred: not only would that be erroneous, it would be absurd. Sacred to what? This question alone is enough to make it clear that whereas the concept of holiness is absolute, that of the sacred is relative. It might be said that holy is predicated of God and of his gifts to us, sacred of our gifts to him.

Whatever is sacred is holy, but not all that is holy is sacred, save in the very diluted sense of meriting our respect. Be it clear from the outset that in these pages the word is not used in this its most generic meaning but in the truest and most positive sense by which sacred signifies set apart by man for the worship of God.

In Christ all things are reconciled to the Father for he makes peace ‘through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth and the things that are in heaven’ (Col. I, 20). As the second Adam he brings to mankind the forgiveness of God. The work of redemption is accomplished in that the redemptive deed has taken place. In order that the deed may be brought to bear on human beings who live a time-conditioned existence the saving rule of God, established in Christ, is given a temporal character. So that human souls may become ‘holy’ Christ is constituted as the ‘head of the body the church’, for God ‘hath subjected all things under his feet and hath made him head over all the church, which is his body, and the fulness of him who is filled all in all’ (Ephesians I, 22-23). Christ is thus present to men in and by the Church.

The Church is the assembly of those, who believing by faith in Christ, live under the rule of Christ. Christ is ‘in’ the Church in that the Church teaches in obedience to his command. Christ, the head of the body, rules as King and the directive work of the Church, her leadership of man towards God, is a sharing, in the Spirit, of Christ’s supreme governance. Her voice as she represents in each age the teaching of Christ, is the voice of Christ speaking to man. The Church does not only bring teaching and direction, she also brings life to the soul.

At long last the educational work of the religious Orders in the modern world is coining into focus. The days are gone when, for example, one still had to depend, for the educational pioneering of St Augustine, upon contemporary and sub-contemporary Lives. With the rise of research-schools in Education in our modern Universities the ‘field-work’ on original documents is being done, for Order after Order. Some of these dissertations, notably that of Dr Mary O’Leary on the Society of the Sacred Heart, have been published. Others, such as the monographs by Mother Mary Philip on Mary Ward, Fr Patrick Walsh on the Society of African Missions, or Mother M. Dominic on the schools of the Assumptionist Nuns, are to be seen only in the libraries of the Orders or of the Universities for which they were written. As time goes on and the field-studies multiply, a coherent picture of modem Catholic education will at last emerge. It is very much to be hoped that the present Lasallian celebrations will stimulate in other fields the trained research students without whom the full picture will never be possible.

It is remarkable that, until only a few years ago, the work of so outstanding a pioneer as St John Baptist De La Salle himself, which is being commemorated in London this month, on the occasion of the centenary of his Institute’s arrival in England, was known only through such tributes as the standard historians of education had been able to cull from the pious but undiscriminating early biographies. The life of De La Salle by Blain was for generations the source.

The lost literature of medieval England, as Mr R. M. Wilson and R. W. Chambers before him have shown us, would probably occupy as much space in our libraries as what has survived. The earliest records tell of such losses as that of the Ingeld-lay which Alcuin reproaches the monks of Lindisfarne with being so fond of; and to the end of the Middle Ages we can compile for each century a formidable list of works which have vanished, some through the indiscriminate ravages of time, others, we need not doubt, victims to pious zeal (it was Fumivall who at a meeting of the Early English Text Society complained of a lack of Lives of the Sinners). But yet from time to time sunken treasure Is washed up, to be chanced upon and dragged away in triumph by some more fortunate beachcomber, whilst the rest of us stare after him in envy. This present century is hardly likely to see another so sensational discovery as when in 1934 the lost ‘Book of Margery Kempe’ appeared in the Victoria and Albert Museum to have its contemporary binding repaired, and proved to be not at all the improving but genteel vade mecum suggested by the extracts by Wynkyn de Worde and Pepwell, but rather the spiritual autobiography of one of the crackedest pots in all the annals of religious enthusiasm. Twenty-one years have not been long enough for medievalists to recover from this discovery; and now Dr Price comes along with what may be a new work by Chaucer, The Equatorie of the Planetis, which caught his eye in MS. Peterhouse College, Cambridge, 75.1.

Dr Ernest Beaumont in his new book examines the ways in which two major Christian poets relate human love to the salvation of the soul, so that the former appears as a means, under divine grace, to the latter. Of such interrelating Dr Beaumont is rather suspicious; he smells heresy in it. He finds excuses however for Dante, reserving most of his disapproval for Paul Claudel, who is blamed both for misrepresenting (in his Ode Jubilaire for the Dante centenary, 1921) the role of Beatrice in Dante’s work, and for adding, in his own dramas, a series of more or less explicit expressions of a false idea of human love. The falsehood seems to consist chiefly in Claudel’s thinking (a) that if human (erotic) love could be ‘satisfied’ with its object, God would be ‘excluded’; (b) that since it cannot be so satisfied, this love implies a longing which only God can satisfy; and (c) that, this being so, lovers who refrain from carnal satisfaction may become, providentially, grace-bearers to one another and so, in a sense, mutually ‘necessary’ in a process of producing, reciprocally, ‘the child of God in each other’. This last ‘error’ is the more glaring in that the love in question is made to contrast with married love to the disadvantage of the latter.

Since I am far less acquainted than Dr Beaumont with the dramatic work of Claudel, my feeling that his critique of the French poet is somewhat partial is not in itself of much interest.

At first sight there is something arid about a creed. But a Christian ignores the creed at his peril. It is fatally easy to drift along in a tide of emotional devotion, and precisely because our devotion is not disciplined by the rule of faith, to become stranded on the sands of sentiment. No individual has sufficient balance or insight to receive the full content of revelation, and each individual tends to inject some personal bias into his formulation of the faith; the tendency is to interpret in terms of our own psychological structure and interests. This is seen even in the great Saints and Doctors of the Chinch, but they, since they are holy, accept the correction of their bias from the Church, and receive, within the Church, a life that complements their insufficiency. This is even more markedly the case when the individual is living on his religious emotions, on unregulated devotional responses, which, since they lack the defining and purifying influence of the creeds, very easily degenerate into mere superstition. No doubt faith can co-exist with superstition; but the thorns grow very fast, and can soon choke the good seed. It is a good rule which says that the more strongly the emotions are stirred, the more urgently credal definition is required. This is not to say that emotion, feeling and devotion do not play their part in religion. Of course they do, for Christ claims the whole person, and human feeling is used by the Holy Spirit as a way in to the furthest places of the soul.

Mr Blackmur is an American critic of considerable reputation—to judge from this book, not undeserved. This is the first substantial work of his I have read: I knew him previously as an authority on Henry James’s Prefaces, which I thought he overrated as criticism. The frequent bracketing of them (as of equal critical interest) with Flaubert’s Letters is unfortunate: James’s greatness in criticism is more unequivocally manifest in the essays on French poets and novelists and in the book on Hawthorne. Mr Blackmur, however, himself shows (not always with happy results) the influence of the James of the Prefaces (and sometimes of other Jamesian manners: the autobiographical anecdote on page 9 is told in the style of A Small Boy and Others). His own virtues as a critic are a refreshing absence of the genteel kind of academicism and some powers of analysis of poetic effects—in which he shows the influence of Mr Empson. His general value-judgments and ascriptions of importance are not always to be trusted, and his critical tact (or ‘touch’) can be questionable, but we may usually expect intelligent and unexpected comments from him—though they sometimes are rather marginal. The characteristic vice of his writing is corrugation—unnecessary difficulty; he falls into ‘pseudo-botanical’ jargon of the kind D. FL Lawrence objected to, fails satisfactorily to tackle his themes or even, at times, to make them intelligible, and at his worst shows a peculiarly American kind of externality—a lack of inner understanding of the work, or the man, he is considering.

The origin of this work goes back to the winter of 1942 when a Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to consider the possibility of producing a European history ‘of an objective character’ which might be available for general use after the war. The results of their deliberations are three volumes on the history of European civilization which, the editors hope, may be translated into other languages in order to communicate ‘to the youth of Europe, as dispassionately and as justly as possible, some sense of the inheritance of Europe and the influence of that inheritance’.

In the dark days of the last war England was the hope of an oppressed Continent, and it would have been invaluable if the liberation of Europe, having had its point of departure in this country, could have been followed by an intellectual assessment of the spiritual values of the European past to meet the hopes of a despairing world. If the First World War can be regarded as the real end of the nineteenth century, there are grounds for seeing in the Second World War the end of a whole phase of European history which we would describe as the triumph and fall of human reason. Europe was confronted by a barbarian revolt of unreason. What was this Europe? What could, and indeed can, be salvaged from the past? Or should the question really be: what is the new view of man which the European inheritance compels us to accept?

The section of the creed introduced by the words ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’ consists of a relatively long Christological statement. This statement is an essential part of the original proclamation of the Gospel, and indeed, is found both in the Epistles of St Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. The reason for its inclusion in the creed is both because the Gospel cannot be expressed without it, and because it serves to refute any view of our Lord’s life and suffering as only apparent and not real. The whole section is a witness to the historic reality of his words and actions. By the emphasis it lays on this section, the Church refutes the most pervasive of all heresies, Docetism. The term ‘Docetism’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘suppose’ or ‘seem’ and the heresy suggests that Christ only apparently possessed a human body or that only some of the events recorded in the Gospels are salvific. All Docetism pre supposes an idea of what salvation should be like, of what divine action cannot involve. From this ready-made standpoint it proceeds to select the elements in the Christian Gospel that it finds congenial and to reject the rest. The Christological section of the creed serves to remind Christians that it is the Gospel that judges the man and not man the Gospel. The article ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’ is introductory to this Christological section.

The Apostles’ Creed, like all creeds, is a formal summary of salient points in the tradition—in the paradosis, what is handed over in the spirit from the Apostles to the end of time. Though it was not drawn up by the Apostles it does represent a systematic elaboration of the trinitarian formulae and clauses found in the Epistles of St Paul. The evidence suggests that in the primitive Church the creeds take shape first in association with the interrogations which are part of the baptismal rite, and secondly in the catechetical instructions. Be that as it may, there is no evidence for fixed official creeds till the turn of the second century when the Roman Creed was formulated as a declaratory creed for catechumens—this is the creed which, with some modifications, we know as the Apostles’ Creed. This creed follows a basic trinitarian pattern—the first article treating of God the Father, the second to the seventh with God the Son, and the eighth to the twelfth with God the Holy Spirit.

Simple though the creed is in language and structure as compared with the creeds for bishops characteristic of the fourth century, each article states a mystery of faith—it is, says St Thomas, the task of an article of a creed to give guidance to the mind of the faithful on points where there are distinguishable reasons for asserting that faith here carries us beyond reason. Hence it is clear that creed-saying is an activity of faith and that the creeds are concerned to direct the faithful mind to supernatural truth.

The fourth article of the creed, ‘Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried’, summarizes the events in our Lord’s Passion. It is important in considering this article to remember the general interpretation given in the Scriptures to these events. It is this interpretation that directs the awareness in faith of the significance of the events. The dramatic force of the story is so great on its human level that it can sweep us away into a jungle of feeling and emotion which has little theological character, unless it be recalled by a constant reiteration of the dogmatic values involved.

In the accounts given in the Synoptic Gospels of the baptism of Jesus, there is a strong implicit reference to the prophecy of Isaias about the suffering servant of God. This servant is the elect, in whom God delights, the one who is despised, and the most abject of men; who bears their sorrows and infirmities, ‘since he was wounded for our iniquities; he was bruised for our sins’ (Is. 53, 1-7). He, says the prophet, is to be led ‘as a sheep to the slaughter and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer’. St John’s Gospel makes the reference explicit. ‘The next day, John saw Jesus coming to him; and he saith “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who taketh away the sins of the world.” ‘ (John 1, 24). All the Gospels then introduce Christ, at the beginning of his ministry, not only as the Messias, but also as the suffering servant (pais).