In this concluding article on St Augustine's great masterpiece, as well as seeing how he finally completes the many subtle patterns of his thought, we must also recapitulate and try to get a comprehensive view of the work as a whole. In his closing book, xv, he himself provides the reader with a recapitulation of the earlier books. But first we must see how in books XIII and XIV he finishes what we can almost call the history of the divine image in man which he began in book XII. In so doing he also brings to a conclusion the analysis of this image which he had begun much earlier in book IX.

The purpose of this article is to describe a course of religious instruction I have been trying out with boys from seven to twelve years old who attend non-catholic schools, and who visit me once a week. It seemed worth while to make it more widely known in this way, in case others, might like to make use of it in some way, or at least to suggest ways of improving it.

Those of us who have heard Elgar's ‘Overture to the Dream of Gerontius’ will not have forgotten its awesome atmosphere of religious mystery. God is calling a Christ-dedicated soul home to complete union with himself; but first there must be a pilgrimage of purification, since only holiness can abide even the veiled presence of the All-Holy.

‘Remember that your congregation consists if characters from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, said the film critic to a preacher. He was annoyed, as most of us would be. Beer-swilling adulterers like Arthur Seaton may well be present occasionally at mass, but they are not likely to be regular churchgoers; and even if they were, we cannot overlook the vast numbers of ordinary decent Catholics who only want as much to do with such types as charity strictly requires. And if we are reminded that there are also good people in this film, we can still say that they do not adequately represent that great varitations which we can find in most large churches on Sunday. But the reminder does draw attention to an often neglected aspect of our preaching: the congregation.

The variety of ways in which the study of theology may be incorporated into the ‘General B.A.’ degree, as it is called in most of our universities, is great. The structure of this degree is itself by no means uniform, and many universities are engaged in a revaluation or re-organisation of general studies. All this makes the drawing-up of blue-prints unrelated to particular circumstances an academic exercise without academic relevance. The ‘Proposals’, however, are primarily a statement principles; and it is as well to clarify principles independently, and before the onset, of the inevitable complications of their being put into practice.

To say that the being of God is the basis of human society may seem to anyone who believes in the procession of creatures from the divine, mind, conceived by his thought, made actual by his will, a statement of the obvious; indeed any theist would be likely to agree that since nature of ultimate truth must be the source of all truth and being, whatever theory of creation is held, it is from God that the shape of what concerns human destiny must descend. Any real belief in God affects our ideas about man and human society, but the Christian belief in the Trinity most profoundly tempers the structure of our thought.

The idea of society (as an unspecified notion, not tied down to this society or that, in one age or another), and of man's life in common is closely related to the mystery of divine society. It could hardly be otherwise since the fundamental doctrine of Christianity shows God knowing and loving, having within his essential unity true interchange and the mutual give-and-take indispensable to the concept of community or society.

In Northern Ireland, where I have grown up and lived and worked the barriers separating Catholics and Protestants have made any kind of constructive encounter between them almost impossible. In the late 1950's there were some signs here and there that a few Protestants and Catholics were at least prepared to look at one another over the fences of deep-seated fear and distrust, but the winds of change had not then begun to blow. In the last brief year or two the God-given inspiration of Pope John has breathed its influence on a world of Christian people ready to listen, to try to understand and to accept a new attitude of mind and spirit.

‘You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of the darkness into his marvellous light’ (I Pet. 2.9). This priesthood of all the faithful is the basis of the lay apostolate. Parents have a particular apostolic responsibility and need to understand the nature of their priesthood if they are fruitfully to fulfill their role.

Throughout the scriptures the role of a priest is to offer a gift to God in an effort to get into a right relation to him. The gift that is offered may take the form of Old Testament ritual sacrifices, of the spiritual sacrifice of a holy life, or of the sharing in the one effective sacrifice ot Christ through baptism and the eucharist.

We left St Augustine at the end of our last article and of book x of the De Trinitate with his image of the divine Trinity in the mind now completely delineated, and comprised in the mind's acts of remembering, understanding, and willing itself. A question, however, remained outstanding: whether there is any real distinction between the mind's memory and understanding of itself or only the verbal one. St Augustine is quite capable of showing the reality of the distinction by an effort of sheer mental introspection, and in fact he will do so in book XIV. But for the moment he is going to illustrate it by observing the lesser trinities the lower levels of human cognition, in sensation, imagination, and mental knowledge of the external, temporal world.

In some Company you can feel very much the odd man out if you can't tell your conversion story. I can't: I'm a ‘cradle Catholic’. At least, until recently I thought I couldn't. But after all, faith is man's response to God's action in history, and history includes us. (Is this why it's ‘bunk’?).

‘What do you ask of the Church of God?’ ‘Faith’, said my godmother for me. My convert friends said it for themselves. And yet in a sense, in a very important sense, otherwise the priest would never have let them get that far, they already had faith. To ask for faith is an act of faith.