In the last article we spoke of the Church as the community of those who have been baptised. It is the new creation consisting of those who have left behind their old out-of-date lives in the waters of baptism and been born again to a new life, a share in the life that Christ brought back from the dead. In this article we shall look at the Church from another point of view. Last time we said that roughly speaking the Church consists of those who have been baptised and have not renounced their faith, this time we start from the rough generalisation that the Church consists of those who go to mass. Last time we found that the formula we started from had a lot more in it than immediately met the eye and we shall find the same in this case, but once more we shall begin with the obvious straightforward meaning and leave the qualifications until later.

In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue i t … .

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. (Gen. i. 27-8; 2. 23-5).

This was what daily life was to be for man, unfallen and unredeemed. Then man rebelled, trying to make himself independent of God, and succeeded only in making himself subject to his own weakness and dependent on the rest of creation.

By the end of bk vii Augustine has completed his original programme of first establishing the starting-point of faith—that is to say examining the revelation of the mystery of the Trinity in scripture—and then going on to justify it or account for it, against Arians and others, in the language of metaphysics and logic. His work is finished then, apparently, and yet he is still not halfway through. He gives us the key to his intentions in the short prologue to bk viii; he is going to go over the same ground all over again, but in ‘a more inward manner’, a characteristically Augustinian design. So far we have been considering the mystery of the Trinity objectively, as something ‘out there’, seen from the outside. But this can hardly satisfy us unless our interests are merely academic. We must find our way inside the mystery, and the way into God is into ourselves.

Reunion, is in the air today; in discussion in Church circles, in the press, on the radio and television, and even in the House of Lords. Among the non-Catholic Churches the last few years have seen schemes of reunion for South India, North India and Ceylon, and all these schemes show a readiness to examine established positions in the light of the present challenge to Christianity from atheism and materialism.

This drawing together of the non-Catholic Churches is comparatively recent, and is very largely the achievement of the Student Christian Movement and other inter-denominational societies that have made many of those who have worked with them impatient of the barriers that divide one denomination from another, particularly on the Mission Field. The result has been a growing awareness of the evils of division and of the damage done to the Christian cause in the eyes of the unbeliever.

It is hard to imagine why Karl Hörmann's Introduction to Moral Theology has been translated into English. The author states that the book was written for lay people. In fact, it is the kind of book which is most at home in the pocket of the seminarist at examination time. The publishers claim that it is ‘a guide to principles and practice in modern life’. In fact, many of the infrequent practical examples are hot from Aristotle or the thirteenth century. Every page is leprous with jargon. We read of ‘the positive method’, of ‘substantial union’, of ‘ontological goodness’, of ‘the sense-appetite’; words such as ‘convenience’, ‘determine’, ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘elevated’ are used in senses quite alien to their English usage. Frequently the examples take us back to that quaint and vivid world where men set fire to their neighbours’ houses and kill their friends while hunting, where captains throw overboard their merchandise to lighten the ship, and where maidens miss mass to avoid being put to the blush by their banns.