In a series of articles, of which this is the fourth, I have attempted to Trace a particular theme of God's presence to Israel, and of Israel's encounter with God in his holiness, through the Old Testament into the New. The theme has its source in a vision—Moses’ vision of the burning bush (Exod. 3). A blaze of mysterious fire, awful, yet irresistibly attractive, draws Moses towards itself, and the voice of God himself issues from the flame summoning him and miraculously empowering him to enter within the sphere of its numinous radiance. At Sinai (Exod. 19) the same encounter with holiness is repeated on a gigantic scale. Yahweh descends on the mountain in the midst of fire, amid earthquake, thunder and lightning and the sound of a terrible trumpet which grows louder and louder. Here the whole mountain becomes charged and glowing with holiness and so constitutes the numinous sphere of mortal danger to all creaturehood.

There is nothing intrinsically virtuous about scrubbing a stone floor— nor about peeling potatoes—nor about doing large quantities of washing by nand. It is not sinful to put down a good plastic floor covering and wipe it over easily with a damp cloth. Using a potato peeler is not one of the seven deadly sins, and the washing machine was not invented by the devil.

When one makes such statements baldly, like this, they are so crudely obvious that it seems fatuous to waste one's breath uttering them. Yet there is a school of thought among Catholics in this country that makes it necessary to say such obvious things. Perhaps it would be better to call it a school of feeling, as there doesn't seem to be much real thought behind it. It may be as well to name no names; but there has been, and still is, a tendency among certain high-minded Catholics (male) to regard the scrubbing of floors as practically necessary to the Salvation of females.

In comparing the very vivid sense the Israelites of the Old Testament had of themselves as the chosen people to the shght feeling modern-day Christians have for themselves as the new people of God, it is interesting to notice that a powerful symbol (that of the scapegoat), integral to the Jewish law of holiness, has been reproduced in the Christian way of life with a much less valid one (that of the underdog).

In the book of Leviticus (16. 2-28) one can read how, before the high priest entered the Holy of Holies each year, two buck goats were presented to him, one of which was not killed but symbolically through a laying-on of hands, invested with the sins of the people; then led away by a man appointed for the purpose to an uninhabited place in the wilderness, there to be let loose or pushed over the rocks from the top of a mountain.

It is generaly admitted that far too many modern books on prayer and The spiritual life are of little value. Such books often enough claim to belong to the tradition of the Church, depending upon and being continuous with the great figures of the past such as St Bernard and St John of the Cross, but in fact this dependence is merely superficial, there being a fundamental break in a process of transmission which must be essentially organic, with its roots in the past and its life in the present—that surely is the significance of tradition.

To claim that our thought about the nature of prayer should be up to date is not to claim that it should dissociate itself from the past—far from it. The very nature of Christian speculation is that it must give full value to and appreciate language and thought-form in which the Church has given expression to her consciousness of the life of Christ within her throughout her history and particularly as witnessed to by the great patristic figures and doctors of the Church.