The questions I want to put to the Catholic Church can be summed up in one: You Catholics, we Evangelicals—who do you think we are? What do you make of us? (I) To begin with our baptism. It is no secret that in the case of converts, baptism is usually repeated, arousing deep dismay on the Evangelical side. In my opinion there is no justification for this. There seems to be no doubt that, in Catholic doctrine, baptism is usually repeated, arousing deep dismay on the Evangelical side. In my opinion there is no justification for this. There seems to be no doubt that, in Catholic doctrine, baptism performed according to the Evangelical ritual is valid. But in practice the circumstances of a previous baptism are seldom taken into account.

Our frequent salutation of the Blessed Virgin as Mother of Good Counsel in the Litany of Loreto makes us familiar with the above title, even if we are not acquainted with the picture which goes by the name of our Lady of Good Counsel. This ancient painting has been eloquently described as ‘exquisitely humane and tender … the small Child has his right arm round his Mother's neck, his left hand catches at the edge of her dress. His little face is turned upwards towards her; he is certainly whispering to her—but, asking her something? Telling ker some small childish sentence, or even word, or not even so much as a formed word, if you think of him as still too tiny a babe to make a whole word? … Anyhow, a mother's instinct always understands what her baby means, and often, what her grown son means, better even than his father does… .

With the theological virtues, we move away from ourselves to attain the highest obj ect set before human action. Wonderful as it seems, God becomes our object. No one calls in question the fact that the theological virtues are preeminent and people certainly do not dream of denying that they have a part to play in the spiritual life. It is doubtful, however, whether they are cultivated with the care they deserve and whether they are actually directed towards their object. Let us consider this direction which it is important they should take in practice.

Among the different virtues, faith bears a strongly marked objective character. Its purpose is to attach the mind to the truths God has revealed. These truths in no sense derive from us and are certainly not the fruit of our meditations. God has revealed them and they have entered into us through the medium of hearing.

It is from veneration of the early martyrs that the whole great business of the cult us of the saints in the Christian Church derives. Whatever the dignity and importance and interest of the saints whose festivals figure in the various calendars of the Church, those feasts must all, without exception, give place to the anniversary of the martyrs in point of antiquity. Already in the second century the annual commemoration of St Polycarp was celebrated in Smyrna from the time of his passion; from the begining of the third century such commemorations were becoming general.

There is nothing surprising about this. For the first three hundred years of their history Christians lived in an atmosphere of martyrdom, of witness by blood. ersecution was not continuous, and it varied in intensity from time to time and from place to place, but the possibility of being called on to die for the name of the Lord Christ was never far away; and that state of affairs, again at times and in places, has recurred ever since.

Baptism joins us to Christ and allows us to share his divine life. It is the Holy Spirit who brings this new life to a Christian—'if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his’ (Rom. 8, 9). This close relationship between baptism and the gift of the Spirit was indicated by our Lord, who coming up out of the Jordan waters ‘saw the heavens opened and the Spirit as a dove descending and remaining on him’ (Mark 1, 10). The Spirit which filled Christ fills us too when we are baptized, and unites us as members of Christ to our head: ‘as the body is one and has many members … so also is Christ. For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free’ (1 Cor. 12, 12-13).

Our non-Catholic friends often ask us questions, in particular about our Catholic attitude to themselves, for most of those who are anxious about Christian unity inevitable feel that their own position in relation to the Catholic Church is a key-issue in the whole matter. In the September Number of Una Sancta a prominent Lutheran theologian asks of his Catholic friends five questions, which to him represent The major problem of a Protestant considering the relation of Catholic and Protestant. The writer is Dr Hans Asmussen of Heidelberg, and his five questions are enquiries about the Catholic attitude towards Protestants on certain issues. The same questions mutatis mutandis mignt be asked by an Anglican or Free Churchman in this country, though every group would present the questions in a different context and perhaps add particular ones of their own.

Legends are part of great events and if they help to keep I alive die memory of gallant self-sacrifice they serve their purpose.’ That is a quotation from Walter Lord's book A Night to Remember which describes the sinking of the Titanic when it struck an iceberg in 1912. The particular legend here referred to is that of the singing of ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’ as the ship went down. I have chosen it as an example with whicn begin this paper because it is a legend that I have been acquainte with personally and can vouch for as being in existence with four years of the event that it concerns; it was, in fact, curren very soon after the ship went down. It was totally untrue. If you examine this particular legend you will find that it contains all the elements of those popular legends connected with the saints including the fact of being untrue. There you have an example of the sort of problem confronting the writer of the lives of the saints.

A natural division of the fourteen stations of the cross lies simply in this: that according to the arrangement usually adopted in churches the first seven stations are a journey out from the sanctuary, the last seven a journey back. The division lies between the second fall arid the meeting with the women of Jerusalem; and it is natural that it should fall there for this reason too, that in the touching sequence of stations four to six Christ has given us, through Mary in the first place and then through Simon and Veronica, all that pertains to our own cross’ bearing in this life: the share of his burden and the likeness to himself bearing it. After that, immediately, he falls for the second time as if emptied of strength by his gift. The seventh station has the nature of a conclusion, but what is concluded is only the first half of the way: its outward journey.

The sacraments, and baptism first of all, are the means by which Christ unites us to the Church which is his body. Yet we may well wonder how the pouring of a little water, the brief statement of the priest, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’, can effect so great a change of course it is possible simply to reply ‘because God wills it to be so’, and perhaps ultimately there is nothing more to be said, but it is still open to us to explore the meaning of such mysteries as far as we can. The truths revealed by God and handed on to us by the Church are indeed mysteries, acceptable only to those who have received the grace of faith, but faith is given to our minds and needs to be thought about.

Keep the good thing committed to thy trust by the Holy Ghost who dwelleth in us, so St Paul brings out two sides of a relationship. First, ourselves who are told to keep the good thing, literally the deposit granted to us that we ourselves ftiay render it to God; second, the indwelling Spirit, the Gift himself present in person. Correspondingly we may consider a double movement in prayer, the ascent of the mind and heart to god, which is what we do from grace and the virtue of religion, and the coming down of the Spirit who breathes through us so that we are rather acted upon than acting, who himself giveth testimony to our spirit that we are the sons of God. It is with the first we are engaged in this article, reserving the second until later.

I should like you to look upon this paper as the basis of a symposium. What I want to do is to put forward certain fundamental principles which lie at the very heart of our Dominican vocation, and to draw from them one or two seminal ideas, ideas which like seeds will grow and fructify in the mind and, so produce fruit in the way we live our day-to-day Dominican life. I want to do this moreover with a special eye on your office as superiors. Superiors hold a key place in community life. They are fathers and mothers of the family, and like good fathers and mothers their chief function is to foster and develop the family spirit, which is the chief educative factor in the religious community, as it is in the secular home.

Nowhere are we told more clearly and briefly of the manner of Christ's presence amongst us than in the introduction to St John's gospel. He is made Flesh; that is to say he is one who comes. In the first instance it is he who comes to us. Secondly he is the light that is the life of men, but a light that shines in darkness. Thirdly he must be awaited and received by us. And fourthly those who receive him fmd that they have the power to see the light shining in the darkness. ‘And we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and truth.’ (John I. 14).

The Jews were remarkable in that they were looking to the future. Not for them only to rest content with the great favours that God had shown them in the past; the greatest favour was to come, in the person of the Prophet, the Messias, the holy one of God.

It is sometimes felt that the inward tendency and logic of liturgical prayer, and those of contemplative prayer, are conflicting, so that these two types of prayer will always attract different temperaments and define different vocations. And indeed, there is an evident divergence between the tendency of contemplative prayer towards simplicity, as the soul is drawn away from multiplicity of concepts and images towards a dry and wordless absorption in God, and the surface multiplicity of the liturgy with its complexities of ceremonial and chant, its elabore ate and absorbing symbolism, its richness of doctrinal content and conceptual teaching. Yet in such a field, personal attraction cannot be the deciding element; it is primarily from the life and living voice of the Church, and only secondarily from the writings of the saints and the masters of the spiritual life, that we must learn the laws of the interior life.

It might be thought that much, too much, has been said about what the Holy See has for over fifty years called actuos participatio of the people in the Mass, and much of what has been said is often superficial enough. The impression has sometimes been given that all that was required was that you should make the people vocal, that it was a good thing for them to be roused, that they should be weaned from ‘individualistic’ ways of assisting at Mass, that they themselves should say all that the server says, or that they should sing all the plainsong chants of the Mass even when these are not fitted to their capacity. Taken separately most of these things are good in themselves but they do not go to the roots of the matter. The question is: why should the people be active at Mass? To answer this question one needs to consider two matters: (I) the nature of the Mass itself; and (II) the nature of the Christian people.

Drought and flood, too little and too much, are alike man's bane. Water is at once a blessing and a curse. In the biblical tradition it has been chosen for a villainous role: from the primeval abyss through to the Deluge, from the threat of the Red Sea to the menace of Assyria's overflowing river, from the flood that would overwhelm the Psalmist to the great waters that were the throne of persecuting Rome, this one element of the four has played its malicious part. Of its nature unruly, it symbolizes the chaos which would, if it could, defy the check and order of God. But it can be harnessed. The controlling spirit of God dominates the first abyss, his hand shuts the doors of the cataracts of heaven; he divides the obstructing Sea, Emmanuel survives the cascades of Assyria; God delivers his Psalmist from great waters and, like Daniel's beasts, the Prostitute is thrust back into the abyss from which she came.

In attempting to teach religion to sixth-formers in a live fashion one becomes aware of a temptation to go to extremes. We may be so much aware of the needs the boy will experience within a few years of leaving school and the tests to which his faith will be put that we bow to necessity and equip him with a set of slick answers to all the questions with very little understanding of the underlying theological principles; we teach him apologetics rather than theology. On the other hand we may be so aware of the limitations of the ready-made answer that we embark on a long-term policy of teaching theology which of its nature can never be finished in a school life and which, much more disastrous, might easily be confined to a speculative study of principles with little linking up with personal and contemporary problems.

How often people put, rather anxiously, the question: How do I know if I have a vocation? It is not easy to answer, and part of their anxiety comes from the fact that, as likely as not, they are looking for a cut-and-dried answer that can seldom, in the nature of the case, be given. The following of a vocation is a venture of faith. But it still remains true that the venture ought to be made with prudence. My aim in these articles is to examine first what a vocation is, and secondly what kind of answer can be given to the question just put. It is, after all, a question that many, besides those who feel themselves drawn to consecrate their lives to the service of God, may be called upon to face. Parents and priests and teachers may have to help solve it. And experience shows that all too often they have but the vaguest idea how to set about it.

In talking about lives of saints for children, I have divided the subject up into three sections according to age. This is arbitrary, but I had to divide it somehow. The first section is about children under seven, the second from seven to twelve, and the third from thirteen to sixteen or seventeen, or perhaps for boys a bit later. There are of course enormous changes withio these age ranges, but the great upheaval caused by the dawn ot reason and conscience, and the still greater changes that take place at puberty are some justification for this. It is clear that a lot oj what I say applies to all the groups, and that all such general divisions are to some extent misleading and annoying, but could see no way of avoiding them without chaos.

The interest of a child in saints can be said to begin only when he first asks ‘What is a saint?’. Children between four and seven are of an age to enjoy stories about saints in the same way that they enjoy stories about witches, princesses and dragons.

One of the early names for Baptism was the ‘Sacrament of Faith', and those who were baptized became the ‘enlightened'. To think of this Sacrament simply as an fitiation rite, performed once and then left in the background as one would walk through the front door of a house and shut it before settling down in the drawing room to be comfortably at home; to think of it simply as the formal entry into the Church is to miss its constant power to raise the Christian to the heights holiness. The earlier Christian understood that it brought an entirely new light into the newly baptized's life and that light shone and transformed everything so that as his eyes grew accustomed to its power they could eventually perceive the glory of God, and sustained by baptismal grace reach to the heights of the Christian union with God.

Prayer means turning our hearts and minds to God. No two persons converse with him in identical ways; even in corporate prayer we each infuse the same words with our individual needs and aspirations, and private prayer, whether vocal or meditative, is essentially personal. But we all have hearts and minds and, broadly speaking, the same problems: and the greatest of these is aridity. No one has ever advanced in the spiritual life without experiencing times when devotion seems non-existent, prayer distasteful or humiliatingly difficult, meditation moribund and discouragement an ever-present temptation, but though our books warn us of these trials our own experiences are different from anything we expect to undergo.