‘The end justifies the means.’ There are few more effective passion-raisers than this hackneyed sentence. To accuse A someone of holding the doctrine can cause great offence; and to be so brazen as to defend it in argument may rouse even greater indignation. But what, whether it is true or not, does it mean? What does ‘justify’ mean? ‘To make just’ is the obvious answer; ‘the end makes the means just'. ‘Justify’ means to make just, as ‘rectify’ means to make right. But when a mistake is rectified, something happens, something is put right that was wrong; you had your tie on crooked, and now you have put it straight, you have rectified it. Nothing happens, however, in the same obvious sense, when the end justifies the means, or when (using the word justify’ more strictly) you justify your actions.

Justice or righteousness (they translate the same Hebrew word: tsedek) is that by which Israel lives, that by which it maintains its existence as Yahweh's chosen people. To act righteously, or justly, is to act in such a way as to maintain the covenant.

When Yahweh intervened to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, he set them apart from all other nations; and on Mount Sinai he bound them to himself by a perpetual contract. They became a nation set apart for Yahweh, who although Lord of all the world freely chose them for his own through no merit of theirs. By this act Yahweh revealed his righteousness to Israel, and even imposed it on them too through the law, as the charter of the covenant. So the Hebrew law is quite unlike the law of other peoples: it is entirely theological, and is not the expression of the will of the people or of their ruler.

‘Social Justice’ could hardly be bettered as a phrase: it has a nice, modern ring about it, and no discernible meaning. The modernity of the phrase must, I think, be traced to the word ‘social', because after all ‘justice’ is a very old word, and in any case the modern campaigners do not seem to be so intense about that part of the catch-phrase. We are all, it must be agreed, ‘socialists’ in some sense nowadays, whatever our views on justice may be. It is understandable therefore that in the phrase ‘social justice’ the emphasis will be on ‘social', and that the word ‘justice’ will be added merely for rhythmic reasons. The rather medieval-sounding question—but is not all justice social?—is thus irrelevant from the start; and any attempt to understand how the same groups of people can demand at one and the same time the abolition of the death-penalty and the introduction of birth-control, or can deplore the control of government by capital whilst enthusing about the control of capital by government, would do best not to start from the notion of ‘justice'.

Let us proceed, in a very humdrum way, from the general to the particular. A word first, then about what virtue is. It is a perfection of our nature. It means, literally, strength. The Latin word virtus comes from vir, a man, and the basic idea is one of manliness or manhood, if the ladies will pardon so masculine an attitude; but manliness not so much distinguished from womanliness as from childishness. Virtue is the proper characteristic of the adult. The virtues are firmly rooted dispositions or habits or attitudes by which our faculties are given a bias towards the performance of good actions instead of bad actions—the faculties we are concerned with in the moral life being the will and the sense appetites, not the mind, except for the key virtue of prudence, of which more anon. Left to themselves the other faculties lack direction, and just dissipate their energies aimlessly.

I Have imposed rather narrow limits on the scope of this short article, to make possible a close examination of a few poems, rather than deal in a more general way with the subject. I have chosen to examine some examples of Middle English lyric poetry written between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth century. My selection has been confined to the religious lyrics, omitting the secular lyrics of the period. This choice may of course reflect a personal preference, but it should not, I think, misplace the correct emphasis, since most of the lyrics extant from this period are religious: for every one secular lyric there are three or four religious lyrics, and moreover the religious lyric has been neglected to some extent in favour of the secular love-lyric, as many of these are among the more obviously attractive features of Middle English literature. The secular lyrics are nevertheless highly conventional, and, especially in the thirteenth century, lean heavily upon French tradition.

The purpose of this article is to see with St Thomas some aspects of the moral movement of man towards his creator, those aspects namely that have to do with his teliow travellers on the way to God, man's positive contribution to human social living. And this human social life, being human, should be rational; yet, as St Francis of Sales observes in his Introduction to the Devout Life, seldom do we meet rational animals who are reasonable! There is so much injustice in the world, in spite of reason's dictating to us that the good things of this world should be evenly distributed according to each one's need and place in society. Millions of our fellow men struggle to keep alive at bare subsistance level. The more one studies history, the more one sees it as continual warfare, cynics would say a losing battle, to obtain justice.

‘Behold, I send you as sheep among wolves; be you therefore as cunning as serpents and as simple as doves’ (Matt, x, 16).

Our Lord spoke these words to the apostles when he was sending them out for their first piece of apostolic work, and the Dominican order is quite explicitly and openly an apostolic order. It was founded by St Dominic to carry on the work of the apostles, the work of preaching the gospel. All the different branches of the order, the second and third orders as much as the first, are all caught up in this apostolic function, but of course in different ways and degrees. In the fullest way it is the priests and brothers of the first order who are given this apostolic function. Officially and authoritatively it is our business, not yours, to preach the gospel by the spoken and written word and by all our priestly activities.

On Wednesday in Holy Week 1783, an emaciated, tattered ragbag of a young beggar-man collapsed on the steps of Sta Maria dei Monti where he had attended mass. At eight o'clock that night he was dead and with the morning light a scrabble of urchins went shouting in the gutters of Rome, ‘E tnorte il santo!'. The fiercely enthusiastic scenes and circumstances surrounding his death seemed prescient of an early official recognition of his sanctity. No doubt the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars delayed this and he was beatified in May 1860 and canonized in December 1883.

It is more than unfortunate that his name has become synonymous with eccentricity, exaggeration and squalor. Perhaps this most humble of men, for whom none had greater contempt than he had for himself, would prefer it that way. He is in the splendour of the saints.

The present code of canon law makes no mention of hermits. However, it would be wrong to interpret this silence as a condemnation. At the time when the code was compiled, indeed practically since the French Revolution, the solitary life had all but disappeared from the western Church. Those few who followed it, if there were any at all, did not justify any particular legislation. The Church had no intention of making laws for a manner of religious life that no longer existed and, from all appearances, no one had any intention of reviving.

But contrary to all one would have thought, since the last war the eremetical life has again come into favour. In many places but especially in the monastic orders rather clear tendencies and desires have arisen for this ancient form of asceticism and for this way of giving oneself to God. And some of these aspirations have been realized with an admirable simplicity and seriousness.

Today's gospel reading, dearly beloved, as it reaches our ears and strikes on the hearing of our minds, calls upon us to understand a great mystery. And with God's help we shall the more easily achieve this if we turn our attention to what is related shortly before. Jesus Christ, the saviour of the human race, before he instituted that faith which brings back sinners to righteousness and the dead to life, surrounded his disciples with prophetic instruction and with mighty works, so that they should believe that one and the same Christ was both the only-begotten of God, and son of man. For one of these without the other is of no profit for salvation. It is equally perilous, whether we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ is God and not man, or man and not God. “We must confess both, for just as true humanity is united in him to divinity, so is true divinity united to humanity.