In this article and the next I want to say something about the sacraments of penance and the anointing of the sick. What I have to say is more than usually tentative; where it differs from what is more commonly taught it should be regarded as an attempt to throw additional light on the topic, not to supplant accepted ways of thought.

First I must explain why I treat these two sacraments together: it is because I regard each of them as a sacrament of return to the eucharist. Each of them belongs to a situation in which the Christian is for one reason or another prevented from sharing fully in the mass. Penance deals with the obstacles created by sin, anointing with those due to sickness. As I have suggested earlier, we get the clearest view of any sacrament when we see how it is eucharistic, how it is related to the common meal that symbolizes Christian love. To see how a sacrament—or anything else for that matter—belongs to the eucharist is to see its function in the Church; for the Church is centred upon the Lord's Supper.

It may be worthwhile in conclusion to recapitulate briefly my main train of thought. Because the Church is a human society directly gathered together by God, and since the liturgical assembly is what makes this society encounterable in the world, it follows that we must take the liturgical assembly as the prototype, or model, for any human organization which is to approximate itself to Christian ideals. For a Christian, the society brought into organic community by God must take precedence over any purely human and secular model. But what has tended in the past to obscure this insight has been the monolithic and institutional appearance of the Church.

In the collective worship of the Church we have the most profound expression of the life of the Christian community—it is easy to say this but much less easy to feel or observe it. It is widely acknowledged that there has been a drift away from any social significance in, for example, the mass. It is seen as an obligation, a slot machine service for the individual, a collective but hardly communal form of worship. Many people who are aware of this deplore such a state of affairs; others feel that this is the way it should be, it is efficient and suitably formal; still others feel that all is not well but dislike the proposed remedies more than the disease.

The three-penny Catechism of Christian Doctrine (1958 edition) has two questions, 29 and 30, on ‘the likeness to the Blessed Trinity in the soul’. They state that ‘there is this likeness to the Blessed Trinity in my soul; that as in one God there are three Persons, so in my one soul there are three powers. The three powers of my soul are my memory, niy understanding and my will’. This is an echo, but a seriously distorted one, of Augustine's teaching about the image in the De Trinitate, especially in books ix and x, which we will be examining in this article. The distortion is curiously ancient, not to say inveterate; it is to be found in the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the twelfth century work which was to remain the standard theological text-book of the schools of the sixteenth century and beyond, and although it was explicitly corrected by St Thomas, here it is, as brazen as ever, in the catechism of the twentieth century.