It is a strange fact of history that the Church does not escape some loss when she has to engage in doctrinal controversy. So much has been gained, such steps forward in the clarification of doctrine made, that it is only after a period of years that the suspicion grows that the whole truth has not yet been said. Yet closer analysis of the nature of 'controversial theology' shows how inevitable this must be. From the first the Catholic protagonist suffers the disavantage of being forced to fight on ground chosen by his adversary. If he is able, he will seize his opponent's weapons and turn them against their owner. But what has happened? He is left victorious in a field not of his own choosing and with weapons not of his own making, effective though they were in the historical context of the controversy.

Although the doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul is perhaps more widely appreciated than formerly, it may be doubted Whether the same can be said of that of the Holy Spirit lying and operating in the Church as a whole. Sometimes we are so preoccupied with human failings in the Church's members that we tend to forget the intimate presence in the Church of the Divine Guest whose gifts show her to be an opus plane divinum, as Pope Leo XIII called her. We tend to forget that the Church is a theophany, that the ‘Trinity in which Unity is apparent in the unity of the Church—the Father, as the principle to which we are united, the Son as the milieu in which we are united, the Holy Spirit as the tie by which we are united: and all is one'. (Bossuet: Lettre sur l'Unité de l'Eglise.)

Although the early Church was by no means exclusively composed of holy and perfect members, there was in those days, one may think, a more widespread realisation of God's presence in the Church, specially attributed to the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.

The Church of Christ is our mother: the true mother of the living. It is through her that we have life, it is she who nourishes life within us, it is she who gives us access to the living God. None the less, concerning this Mother for whom we should have only love, how many temptations beset us! Some of them are fierce, yet recognisable others are obscure, hence more insidious. Some temptations are perennial and others are peculiar to our age. They are too many-faced, indeed, even mutually contradictory, to allow any of us to feel safe from their threat.

There will always be some individuals who perfectly identify their own cause with that of the Church and end by subordinating, in good faith, the Church's cause to their own. In their desire to serve the Church they actually put her to work for themselves: ‘a dialectical turn about', which changes friend into foe, and takes place with as much ease as subtlety. For them the Church is, in fact, a certain familiar social order to which they belong.

The Mass is both sacrifice and sacrament. As sacrifice it consists principally in man's activity, Christ's and ours, inspired and aided by grace, and of God’s approval and acceptance of what we do. Christ as man and Head of his Mystical Body represents that sacrifice of himself and us in him which he offered on Calvary. We his members endorse and ratify this, associating our own offering with his. It is in Christ's name as well as his own that the priest says: ‘Brethren, pray that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God'. And God's reply is to receive and accept this offering as if saying once more: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased'.

It is needful to be quite clear about the nature of our activity. The priest says words and makes gestures which are essential to the offering of the sacrifice. There would be no Mass without them.

This is a devout thesis, ‘in sensu composito', and is well worth reading and acting upon. Briefly, the author believes that he has hit upon a great truth in St John's gospel which hardly anyone seems to have adverted to, viz., that on Calvary the Beloved Disciple was entrusted to the care and guardianship of Mary not merely as the representative of the human race but as a priest: it was because he was a priest that he could adequately an” properly be chosen to represent all mankind at the foot of the cross. There is much more to say for this thesis than might appear at first glance. The author has marshalled many persuasive reasons and presented them forcefully. His style is rather alarming, with capitals and thick typ and broken sentences strewn all over the pages, and one fears he would defend it as ‘the psychology of the printed word’ (he does go so far as ‘ speak of the ‘psychology of our Lord on the cross’) but one soon gets use to this, and it has its advantages.