The young couple, both teachers, one at a Catholic school in the city, did not know that the National Pastoral Congress would be taking place that week-end in Liverpool until they agreed three or four days before to put me up. On the Saturday afternoon thousands of people were left outside when the gates were locked at Anfield long before the kick-off: that Liverpool FC retained the First Division championship obviously stirred far more hearts far more deeply, Catholic ones no doubt included, than the NPC’s deliberations ever had any chance of doing. With all such qualifications duly noted, however, the Congress was nonetheless the most important event in the history of the Catholic Church in England and Wales since the restoration of diocesan bishops in 1850. On the Sunday afternoon the Liverpool Orange Lodge held a march, with several bands and plenty of Union Jacks, so they at least had an idea of what was going on.

The Congress, in effect, took the form of seven three-day conferences of about 300 people each, dispersed at centres all round the suburbs of Liverpool. The Congress gathered in plenary session only at the beginning and the end, for the inaugural Act of Reconciliation and Renewal in the Cathedral on the Friday evening, and then again on the Tuesday morning, first in the Philharmonic Hall, simply to receive the reports and resolutions of the seven conferences, and finally for the concluding celebration of the Eucharist, again in the Cathedral.

In the period in which Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, he was regularly investigating ways in which the drama might reflect and explore matters in doubt. In the Histories he had attempted to support certitudes upon which Man might depend, or at least find it useful or even necessary to depend; but after Henry V he was more interested in what was the experience of living with a philosophy or belief than in how it might be justified and made to work. Julius Caesar is a play of “isms”: stoicism, epicurism, absolutism, and so on; Hamlet, as a Renaissance scholar-prince, seeks a place to stand between the “isms” of chivalry and those of the new politics. In Measure for Measure, a morality play warping towards tragedy, it was the “isms” of practical Christianity which came under scrutiny.

Shakespeare’s working knowledge of the Bible has long been recognised, though he seems to have been more familiar with some books of the New Testament than with others. Matthew is more extensively quoted than the other three Evangelists together; Romans is more extensively quoted than even 1 and 2 Corinthians together. Romans was, of course, the great “Protestant” letter, and Shakespeare could be expected to know it more intimately than any other. Echoes of Romans, in terms of quotation, paraphrase, and shared terminology, are notably denser in Measure for Measure than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays. That this is not an accident, but rather evidence of a carefully planned investigation of Paul’s terminology and dialectic is what I am proposing in this paper. Whatever else he is doing, Shakespeare is testing out Romans.

The doctrine of creation is theologically central. If God is not our Creator, we humans are not his creatures, much less made in his image: and still less can we fall short of the divine glory or be recreated in accordance with it. It is therefore vital for theists, and for those theologians who are committed to any of these doctrines, not to commit themselves to positions which entail or presuppose the denial of the creation doctrine.

So far, I should imagine, Brian Davies, O.P. who recently contributed to New Blackfriars a review of my recent book God and the Secular, would agree. The review was a generous one, which endorsed the need for natural theology, and indeed for maintaining the doctrine of creation. But Davies also contended that my own claim that God is an individual, and as such a member of a class, makes this doctrine collapse, and thus effectively undermines theology. My present purpose is to explain how, far from undermining theology, belief in God’s individuality and membership of a class is indispensable for upholders of the creation doctrine. At the same time I shall take the opportunity to expound the state of a discussion about these matters in philosophical books and journals which may have escaped attention.