The work of our salvation is a unity. As the creed of the mass proclaims, it was for us men and for our salvation that Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, came down from heaven; was made flesh by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary; and was made man. Within that same context of ‘for us men and for our salvation', the creed goes on to place the other mysteries of Christ: his passion, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation. The trend of recent study1 of the mystery of Christ's resurrection is to see this mystery within the unity of the work of salvation. This does not mean that the apologetical value of the resurrection is minimized, nor that the necessary distinctions that are made in soteriology between the various mysteries of Christ, especially between his passion and resurrection, are to be discarded. But it does mean that we do not get the full understanding of the resurrection until we see it as a saving mystery; indeed, as the saving mystery.

In sacred scripture, to be God's servant is to be God's friend. The servant is someone especially chosen, especially loved. God prefers him to others. He is ‘my servant'. There is a wonderful sense of intimacy and belonging in that possessive my'. God chooses his servants with a spontaneity and freedom which we see reflected in our own choice of friends. And to be chosen is to belong. We are no longer our own. We are committed to another. The choice is not only one of love but of demand. To be a friend is to be someone of whom a great deal may be asked. God's servant is always someone from whom God feels free to ask for more, much more, than other men.

Sacred scripture bears constant, unswerving witness to this fact. Intimacy with Yahweh means demands by Yahweh. If he chooses someone to be his servant it will inevitably follow that he will have sometliing to ask of them, a task, a mission, an assignment.

The gospels and the new testament generally tell of'good tidings of great joy': but so does the old testament in its own way, for we can read it as a long-drawn preparation for the gospel, and text after text speaks of God's joyous plan. It is perhaps in this aspect of the scriptures that we best realize the fundamental unity of old testament and new. This unity is well illustrated when we, as we should, explain the term ‘gospel’ by citing texts of Isaias, e.g.:

Get thee up upon a high mountain,
thou that bringest good tidings to Sion;
lift up thy voice with strength,
thou that bringest good tidings to Jerusalem, (xl, 9.)
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings
and that preacheth peace;
of him that showeth forth good,
that preacheth salvation
and saith to Sion,
thy God shall reign, (lii, 7.)
The spirit of the Lord is upon me
because the Lord has anointed me.

The Lord also presented himself to be tempted by the devil, in order to be our Mediator in overcoming his temptations by giving us not only the strength of his help but also the encouragement of his example. But Satan's first attempts after Christ's baptism to steal into the inner citadel of his mind by every possible entry were foiled, and every form of seductive temptation was used up in the desert without success; he, the spirit of death, had failed to overpower spiritual Life, and so he turned himself, avid for any sort of human death, to procuring the death that he was able and permitted to inflict on that mortal part which the Mediator of life had received from us. And it was precisely here, where he was able to achieve something, that he suffered total defeat; the moment he accepted the power to slay the Lord's flesh from without, the power by which he held us from within was itself slain.

Near the Arch of Titus and overlooking the Forum is the Church of St Francesca Romana, or as it is more frequently called, the Basilica di Sta Maria Nuova. In the confession is a statue of a woman with an attendant angel, and in the crypt, in a glass case, are the remains of that woman dressed w a. religious habit. Every hundred years the casket is taken to an obscure convent under the Capitol Hill in the Tor di Specchi, which is the house of the order of Oblates founded in 1433. Here the sisters remove the old habit, rotten with age, and dress the skeleton of their revered and beloved founder in a new habit, and the body is then returned to its tomb in the church.

Frances was born in one of the palaces on the outskirts of Rome, in the square now named Piazza Navona and not far from the church of St Agnes, in 1384. Her parents were of noble birth and the child was brought up in a pious and prosperous household in the midst of considerable luxury. At a very early age she announced her wish to enter a convent, but her parents insisted that she should marry, in 1396 and at the age of twelve, a rich nobleman, Lorenzo Ponziani.

You would hardly expect to find any remains of the effigies of the Dominican saints in England today, after the great clearance made at the time of the Reformation, From 1221, the year St Dominic died, until the end of Mary's reign in 1558, or for three hundred years, there had been a continuous Dominican life throughout the kingdom.

It is amazing how quickly it spread and took root in most of the principal towns of England and Wales. In no other country were so many priories founded in so short a space of time. At the suppression, there were over a hundred, with an estimated number of nearly two thousand friars.

The eastern counties seem to have been the stronghold, and it is here that relics—strange as it may seem—have survived to the present day, in stone, alabaster, wood and glass.