In this paper I want first of all to examine what the liturgy essentially (or rather existentially) is: and then, having made my view of that question clear I want to make some brief suggestions as to how this conception of the liturgy might be grasped by undergraduates taking a combined honours course in theology and English literature. I am going to discuss this particular combination of subjects, partly because it is explicitly mentioned by Laurence Bright in his paper in the symposium, but also because I think it is a combination particularly interesting in itself. What I have to say must not be construed as constituting a syllabus for a course let alone as a substitute for the teaching of the history of liturgical forms and their relation to the theological preoccupations of their periods.

Just over a hundred years ago Count Cavour enunciated the gran Principio: Libera Chiesa in libero Stato. Today, although there are still many places, not all of them professedly anti-Christian, where such a principle is not at work, theologians seem more eager to shew us that the freedom Christ has given us is not a freedom from opposition and contradiction but a freedom to live responsibly in the free Church. The emphasis on freedom is no rash and young intrusion, it is an emphasis encouraged by the first authority.

While the third session of the Vatican Council has many problems of the highest importance to consider, for the benefit of the whole Church and also for particular sections of it, there seems to be extant today a situation of comparatively recent origin which has never been thoroughly examined, discussed, or pronounced upon in any authoritative discourse, and yet it is one of which more people are becoming increasingly conscious: it is the problem of celibate women and the part they play the mystical body.

Among the picturesque figures of the Fathers of the Desert this Moses stands out like a silhouette against the white glare of the desert of Scete. In his youth he was a slave in the household of an official of the Egyptian government but was dismissed because of the flagrant immorality of his life, but more particularly because he was an inveterate thief and this of course would be harder on his master's purse and property than any spare-time debauchery.