Some have claimed St John Chrysostom as the greatest Christian preacher of all time. Whether this is true or not is hard to say; and in any case it is doubtful if the discussion of such a claim would be of much value. What is certainly true however is that he had all the qualities needed to make a great preacher. He was a man of strong convictions, with the power to express them in vivid, forceful language; concrete and practical in his illustrations; able to evoke the whole range of human feelings, but always with complete sincerity. In himself he was affectionate, generous and open; lacking the tact that might have enabled him to steer more safely through his enemies’ intrigue, but quite without fear; ready with sympathy for all he met, so that he made and held many friends, and when preaching, could catch and hold the attention of his hearers. He did not have the speculative mind which enabled Athanasius, Basil and Cyril of Alexandria to contribute so much to theological development.

To the people St John addresses, the question ‘What is truth?’ (xviii, 38) was not simply a matter of intellectual curiosity or scepticism. The gospel offers an answer to the deepest needs of a sophisticated society, in search of ‘life', ‘light’ and ‘truth'. Although we are pressed by questions of a similar kind, yet John's answers are not immediately understandable to us. The problem what the meaning is of the concept ‘truth’ in the fourth gospel is best approached along three separate ways: in what contexts does it appear in the gospel, what were the connotations attached to it in the contemporary world, and how far is all this relevant to us?

As for the first point, it is most helpful to return to the context of Pilate's question; because the account of our Lord's trial before the Roman procurator has a far greater importance in the evangelist's mind than just that of a chronicle of certain juridical facts.

The system of sex education which we have worked out during the past seven years in our school, an all-Catholic day grammar school for girls in the centre of a great city, is an attempt to ensure that each of our pupils has the right kind of enlightenment on the sacred mysteries of life.

From the school's viewpoint this is an obvious necessity. Girls have to be prepared for the naturalistic outlook of the world around home and school on sex, love, purity and marriage, which threatens the sanctity of the home. For this they must understand the full significance of and derive the full benefit from the religious and moral training given in school, especially on the sixth and ninth commandments and the sacrament of matrimony—a difficult, if not impossible, objective without proper preliminary sex enlightenment.

Doth not wisdom cry aloud and prudence put forth her voice ? Standing in the top of the highest places, by the way, in the midst of the paths, beside the gates of the city, in the very doors she speaketh, saying, O men, to you / call, and my voice is to the sons of men! O little ones, understand subtlety, and ye unwise take notice! Hear, for I will speak of great things, and my lips shall be opened to preach right things. My mouth shall meditate truth and my lips shall hate wickedness. (Prov. viii, 1-7.)

My dear brothers and sisters in St Dominic: I think that the Dominican vocation is the hardest of all, because it is the vocation of an apostle. It is true that all of us suffer from the results of Adam's sin. We can cry with the apostle of the Gentiles, ‘Who is weak, and I am not weak?’ We are all engaged in the struggle with our adversary, who goes about, like a roaring lion, to devour us.

Fr George Florovsky is a Russian Orthodox theologian of repute, at present teaching at Harvard in the United States. We are happy to print here a translation of an article which first appeared in Russian in the Messenger of the Russian Christian Students Movement, and then in a French translation in Vers L'Unité Chrétienne./rom which this translation is made. We thank the editors of both journals for permission to publish an article so remarkable for its calm objectivity and its understanding and appreciation of the Roman Catholic position.

The Vatican Council (1869-70), by the reckoning of the Roman Church, was the last ‘ecumenical council'. This council has never been formally closed. Its labours were only temporarily interrupted by the pressure of outside events, the occupation of the Papal States and the city of Rome by the troops of nationalist Italy, which at the time appeared to threaten the freedom of the council's decisions and even the freedom of the Church itself.

‘Of truthfulness it is much less than courage of heart and holiness'—this adaptation of Belloc might be prompted by some hack moralists of the day before yesterday, who instead of riding the downs with God's first gift to man, subtle, eloquent, sure, sweet, more beautiful than the sun, whose company is without tediousness but with gladness, land us in a bog of mental restrictions and verbal circumlocutions. True, they carry some sort of apparatus for extricating us, but their effect is one of casuistry rather than candour, and they irked Newman who was formed by another tradition: it was ironical that he, who in all conscience had a delicate sense of honour, should have been exposed to Kingsley's bluff. Not that Anglo-Saxons anyhow have cause for complaint against the slippery Latins, for they themselves, though they may not go in for suggestio falsi—the half-lie—are adept at suppressio veri—the half-truth—and of all nations the frankness on which they pride themselves seems most baffling to others.

We hear the words of the Mother of God and we think how much the generations have fulfilled them. Over the centuries, increasingly, men have recalled the wonder that is Mary and have held her blessed. What is that glory in her soul that causes us to halt and gaze in awe and love? Rosa mystica, the mystic rose, is before us and therein is a whole world of mystery, a life, a deep-set complex of relations. Look into the heart of a rose, of a rosebud, you will see an interweaving, interscrolled patterning of petals and from it you will breathe a scent as of all heaven. So, in the Spirit, is Mary, containing the divine mysteries and breathing the very ‘odour of Christ Jesus. ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee.'

In a celebrated passage Gibbon justly remarks that ‘the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousions and the Homoiousions'. But this unfavourable impression of the preoccupations of the early Church has been shared by more than ‘the profane'. In somewhat less amiable terms than Gibbon the equally Olympian figure of Mgr Duchesne speaks with an oddly similar distaste of the dogmatic developments of the first five Christian centuries when he writes: Since the curiosity of men would investigate the mystery of Christ, since the indiscretion of theologians laid on the dissecting-table the Blessed Saviour, who came to be the object of our love and of our imitation rather than of our philosophical investigation, at least the investigation should have been made more peaceably by men of approved competence and prudence, far from the quarrelsome crowd'.

Israel encountered the one true living God at Sinai in a manifestation of fire and storm, and when they set out again to take the land he had promised their forefathers, they were bound to him in the living bond of the covenant; as his people and a holy people they were to worship him alone, and to obey the elementary moral law he had established among’ them. Whatever the religious practices of Israel had been until then and whatever they assimilated from their neighbours in Canaan and further afield, only that was now acceptable which could be used or reinterpreted in the light of this unique revelation and relationship. The golden calf was not acceptable as an image of the living God, because he could not be represented by lifeless images.

In sacred scripture, to be God's servant is to be God's friend. The servant is someone especially chosen, especially loved. God prefers him to others. He is ‘my servant'. There is a wonderful sense of intimacy and belonging in that possessive my'. God chooses his servants with a spontaneity and freedom which we see reflected in our own choice of friends. And to be chosen is to belong. We are no longer our own. We are committed to another. The choice is not only one of love but of demand. To be a friend is to be someone of whom a great deal may be asked. God's servant is always someone from whom God feels free to ask for more, much more, than other men.

Sacred scripture bears constant, unswerving witness to this fact. Intimacy with Yahweh means demands by Yahweh. If he chooses someone to be his servant it will inevitably follow that he will have sometliing to ask of them, a task, a mission, an assignment.

Origen, the great Alexandrian theologian who died in A.D. 253, is a key figure in the Christian tradition of scriptural interpretation. Earlier this year a monumental book appeared on ‘the sources and significance of Origen's interpretation of scripture'. The author, Dr R. C. P. Hanson, D.D., a senior lecturer in theology at Nottingham University. Allegory and Event is a sequel to Origen's Doctrine of Tradition, which appeared five years ago.

It is a book full of excellent qualities; great erudition, vigorous style, acute judgments. Dr Hanson's over-all estimate of Origen as a ‘prosaic rationalist', a theologian who seriously undervalued the significance of the saving event (heilsgeschichte) in Christian revelation, is probably to be preferred to the more favourable assessments of his thoughts made by the French Jesuits Frs de Lubac and Daniélou, who after Origen himself are the main targets of Dr Hanson's adverse criticisms.

In writing, not long ago, of what he has found in the Movement for a Better World, Fr Ludwig Tovini, Italian Dominican member of the movement's promoting group, referred, amongst other things, to an equilibrium between the grandiose wish to change the world and the realistically moderated belief in the possibility of change, and advocacy of it, without Utopian optimism that would banish the existence of evil from the earth. Such equilibrium, difficult to maintain on account of continually having to avoid die danger of falling into one excess or another, is not so common, Fr Tovini went on to say, even in the Catholic field, ours being an age when ‘whimsical hankerings after originality often lead to the taking up of unbalanced or eccentric positions …'.

A ‘better world’ Pope Pius XII defined as being a world ‘more according to the heart of God', giving to this relative concept an essentially Christian value.

In Easter 1955 at Freiburg-Wallenried, Father Conrad Fischer, parish priest and general secretary of Catholica Unio, was suddenly snatched from the fruitful field of his activities by a malignant disease. One year before his death he wrote to me on the question of the revival of the diaconate in the following terms:

I personally am deeply pre-occupied with the question, more deeply, perhaps, even than yourself. In very truth it could be the source of a unique renewal of vitality within the Catholic Church. The presence of one or several deacons living with their families in a parish would bring the Church to the notice of many laymen. People would be compelled to a far greater extent to take ‘churchfolk’ into account. The concerns of the Church would be more deeply impressed on the minds of lay-people… . Through the diaconate something would come to life again in the Church; the layman's sense of responsibility towards his parish.

The Concept of Tolerance. There is about tolerance something paradoxical, for it consists, in fact, in permitting something which we know with certainty to be either an evil or an error: permissio negativa mali, as the theologian carefully defines it. Negative, because the permission does not imply either encouragement or approval.

From this definition it follows that tolerance is not, in the strict sense of the word, a virtue. We ought rather to say that the exercise of tolerance is authorized and required by a virtue, on account of some greater good which must be promoted or defended. The ultimate justification for tolerance has to be sought in the reflection of the divine laws governing the world, which human rulers are required to achieve. ‘Human government', says St Thomas, ‘is derived from the divine government, and must imitate it.

Strictly speaking old-age pensioners no longer exist in Great Britain, for a kindly government has replaced the words ‘old age’ with the pleasanter sounding term of ‘retirement'. That is but another example of a change that signifies little, for nothing can banish old age. It is a condition which is inevitable for all but those who die before that time is reached. No kind words or exercise of tact can eradicate it, though much can be done to ameliorate the lot of the aged.

Like all problems, the problems of old age cannot be solved unless they are met with realism, for it is impossible to overcome any difficulty that we refuse to recognize. No soothing words, no refusal to look truth in the face can alter the fact that to be in receipt of a retirement pension is to have started upon the final stage of that journey that leads from the cradle to the grave.

THE full significance of our Lord's ‘Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God’ (Matt, v, 8) is only to be understood in a setting of worship. Behind it is the thought of the psalm: ‘Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord; or who shall stand in his holy place? The innocent in hands, and the clean of heart…’ (Ps. xxiii, 31f). Man must become pure in his inmost being; and he must do so as a preparation for worship. But the man who conceives such desires discovers within himself impeding faults. These cause him grief; and the acknowledgment of being in such a state is to be penitent. Penitence as a prelude to the sacrifice of worship is the theme of Ps. 1: ‘A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit; a contrite and humbled heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

The term ‘desert’ (midbar) in the Bible will often mislead people in our western countries, for what is meant by the term is, as often as not, something like uncultivated pasture-land or steppe-land. The root debar in cognate languages means ‘to drive to pasture', and the midbar is the zone between cultivable land and absolute desert, a zone to which cattle could be and still are driven to gather what food they can. Such a ‘desert’ does in fact respond to beneficent rain, and sometimes appears, for a short time at least, quite green. The psalmist knew how the desert could be green, and sang of how ‘the stream of plenty flows; flows through the desert pastures, till all the hillsides are clad’ (Ps. lxv, 13). And Job tells of the almighty power of God who has ‘carved a channel for the tempestuous rain, a vent jor the echoing thunderstorm, that they should fall on some lonely desert where foot of man never trod, water those trackless Wastes, and make the green grass spring …’ (Job xxxviii, 26).

CONVERSION means by and large changing the main principle which governs the shape and direction of a human life. As such it may be for better or for worse; a man may commit himself to evil, he may decide against God, he can adopt Marxism, if he is a Catholic he may turn to Greek Orthodoxy or to Protestantism, if he is a Christian he may become a Jew or join a religion alien to our tradition. In short, what a psychologist may call a conversion, a moralist or canonist may call an apostasy.

Moreover, a distinction can be drawn between a religious conversion and a moral conversion. The first is a matter of our ideas concerning God and the economy of salvation, a change of mind and an intellectual conviction which usually leads to the acceptance of the teaching of a religious body, and agreement with its practices.