As it stands now, the infancy narrative of the first gospel is the work of the Greek writer who perhaps translated and certainly expanded the original Aramaic gospel of the apostle Matthew. But equally certainly he did not invent the episodes which he has used to construct it; they come to him, perhaps already somewhat moulded or schematized, from the traditions of the earliest communities. His narrative falls into two parts, conicident with our two chapters; the first traces and proves the Davidic descent of Jesus, the true king of Israel; the second narrates his danger from the actual usurping king, Herod. Within the narrative in its final form, there are secondary themes; in the first part, the defence of the purity of Jesus’ mother, in the second, the homage paid to him by the Gentile world and its co-operation in preserving him.

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.

Orate fratres, say the priest — ‘Pray brethren, that this sacrifice which is Mine and your my be acceptable'. So the congregation is offering the Sacrifice of the mass with the priest. We are not simply there, we are taking part. Our part is subsidiary, certainly, but it is not just a fiction or a facade, it is real. Therefore, we should think about it and utter ow. thoughts. We have a subsidiary part in the offering, we should make our subsidiary contribution to the discussion of the mass which is now everywhere being carried on. We have been co-offering, sub offering, for nineteen hundred years. I have sometimes asked myself ‘Doesn't anybody wonder what we think?’ And now an editor has asked me.

It may seem surprising that the liturgical education of my childhood was as good as it was—for my first eleven years belong to that very unliturgical period, the nineteenth century.

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.

‘Parsons are all liars’. This was the opinion of a sergeant in a military training establishment who taught me how to ride a motor bicycle, long before I ever dreamt I would enter the parsonic ranks myself, The sergeant spoke in praise, not blame. For it was also his duty to instruct cadets in the art of expounding the mechanisms of the objects they rode, and it was his view that if parsons could speak fluently for forty minutes on stuff they could not possibly prove—and that was what he meant by saying they were liars—then cadets ought to be able to speak for five minutes, in the classical military ‘lecturette’, on the hard facts of the internal combustion engine.

In this article and the ones which follow we shall be looking in some detail at the system of sacraments which constitutes the framework of the Church. It will perhaps be remembered that in a previous article I said that certain things which are said metaphorically of the people of God in the Old Testament are said literally of Christ; and these same expressions—'first bom son of God', ‘priest of Yahweh', etc., are to be said sacramentally of the new people of God, the Church. The Church is Christ existing sacramentally in the world; existing, that is, in our hearts by means of the system of sacraments.

It is common to treat of each sacrament as fulfilling some particular spiritual need of a man or as corresponding to some phase of his natural life. In what follows we shall use a rather different method. We shall try to understand each sacrament by seeing what part it has to play iin the realisation of the Church.

Before the gospels were written, or rather before the gospel was recorded in writings which achieved stability in the four books we now have, there was an oral tradition. Before even the passion of our Lord, his sayings were circulated by word of mouth, handed on by those who had been present, to those who had not yet heard or seen him, stirring some to enmity, drawing others towards him. The apostles themselves were sent out by our Lord in his own lifetime to proclaim the coming of the kingdom of heaven and to set out the general lines of his teaching, a new teaching distinct from that of the rabbis, calling men to repentance and a greater purity of intention, to an inward purity of the heart deeper than outward purity before the law. They would have reported the actual words he used; perhaps he even gave them schemes to remember the outlines by and made them learn his sayings by heart

In his introduction to the De Trinitate, Augustine stated his plan, as we saw in the first article, of beginning by establishing what he calls the initium fidei, the starting-point of faith, which he does by showing that the mystery is revealed in Scripture; and then of going on to give reasons for—reddere rationem, which is better translated, perhaps ‘to account for'— the one true God being a Trinity, and for the rightness of saying that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are of one substance or essence. It has been commonly held that the first part of this programme occupies Bks I-VII, in which the dogma is discussed, and that the second part is undertaken in Bks VIII-XV, in which Augustine is thought to look for a sort of proof of the mystery in the created image of the Trinity which is man.

Two preliminary points: the first can be sufficiently made through a series of quotations.

From the Aylesford Priory News Letter;. ‘There was also (at a dinner) a very interesting and lively parish priest from a nearby (French) parish. His work has to do with the “problem” of industrial relationships between employers and employees. He apologized for mentioning the word “problem” to describe his work'.

From a private letter of an Oxford history graduate and ex-family case worker, now married with two small children. ‘I was asked with five or six others (to the B.B.C.) to discuss problems of new housewives. I always say I haven't had any problems—of course I burn the chips regularly but I accept this as a part of life!’

The outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost can be seen to have fulfilled several currents of Old Testament prophecy and symbolism. As the spirit inspired the heroes of Israel andled them to victory over Israel's enemies, we can see the Spirit working in Christ's victory over the prince of this world and the Christian's victory over evil. Or, again, just as the spirit of God hovered over the primal chaos rendering it obedient to the ordering word of God, so the Spirit is at work now bringing the new heavens and the new earth into being, the redeemed world out of darkness to the light of the final day. Or the spirit is a fire of purification, or the refreshing waters the nomad depends on in the wastelands. But there is another aspect which it may be worthwhile winging out in this age of liturgical revival, the connection of the spirit with prophecy, with one stage of prophecy in particular.

Throughout the course of the growing development of the kingdom of God, the death of a Christian has taken a well-defined and importan place. The ending of the earthly life of a Christian man is an essential phase in the coming of the kingdom of God. What I propose to do in these articles is to analyse the meaning of this phase placed in the whole of Christian eschatology or expectation of the future. I shall first examine death as an objective occurrence in Christian saving history, and then in a subsequent article show how we Christians should personally experience the event of death in an eschatological attitude of mind: in other words what the answer of our life to death will be.

In the Dominican rite of interment, we sing ‘let us be glad and rejoice on this wonderful day God has made, on which he has called one of our loved ones to himself'.

We are known as an organization holding an easily definable body of ideas as indisputable, ideas, which, on the whole, are unacceptable to many intelligent people. We are also seen as something like a series of pressure groups in trade union, political and social spheres; but it is felt our pressure is just to get something or other stopped. Where people are aware of the existence of educated and intelligent Catholics, their Catholicism is regarded as an aberration that can be discounted. If it is remarked upon at all, it is seen as a matter for surprise that X is a Catholic. This is such a universal state of affairs, that a consideration of why this should be the case is not utterly out of place. One does in fact often come across appeals to make some sort of self-examination, and having done it to go out and become a better Catholic cricketer.

The salutary worth of Christ's death, as we have said, does not lie in the mere biological disintegration of a man who was at the same time God, but rather in the obedient love through which Christ sacrificed himself in absolute attachment to God. Death objectively and factually implies the abandoning of all; a thorough rooting out and dispossessing of self, a passive being-shut-off from without, a loss of proprietary right to self. Death takes everything from us. This precisely is the nature of death as a punishment for sin.

Death is something that happens to us; in itself dying is not an Action done by man, let alone the greatest action he does: it is something which overcomes us. Death can therefore only have a positive, Christian and salutary significance when we freely accept this alienation from self, which is a fact, as a positively desired detachment from self for the love of God in union with the dying Christ.

The word which we translate as ‘testament’ could equally well be called an alliance, a pact, an agreement, a covenant. And when we speak of a ‘new covenant', we are implicitly appealing to an ‘old’ covenant—we mean that our present relationship with God is the conclusion and climax of a relationship which already existed in some form. Therefore, if we are to understand this basic institution of our religion we have to see it in its original setting.

For practical purposes we may begin with Abraham. Abraham was a semi-nomad wandering on the outskirts of civilisation in the second millenium before Christ. His position was not unique or strange: it is quite a normal way of life, one that is still lived by people in the same circumstances in the Middle East today; it is even a necessary way of life for people who depend for their livelihood on animals which have to keep on the move in search of pasture and water.

For a Catholic the main lines of the Christian faith are as certain as, if less demonstrable than, the law of gravity. This attitude of mind is not only part of the concept of faith, which in itself excludes doubt, but a psychological characteristic of ‘being a Catholic', considered as a state. However lightly any Catholic may sit to his religious obligations, their existence, and the existence of a determinate authority with the right to loose and bind, is generally acknowledged, even if only with a snarl; and when it is denied there is something in the quality of the denial that tends to stress the fact denied. The idea of the Church has a precedence in individual lives as fundamental as the symbolic rock on which it is founded. It is not just a case of knowing all the answers.

Hebrew thought, and therefore the Hebrew way of speaking, is concrete and realist. Greek thought, which has influenced to some degree all our western civilization, is abstract, speculative, analytic. For example, by reflection and analysis Greek philosophy arrived at the notion of man composed of two elements—the one visible and material, the other invisible and spiritual; and for most of us it has become almost instinctive to speak of man as composed of ‘body and soul’, without realising that we are speaking in terms of Greek philosophy.

But the Hebrews took man as they found him—he is just a man, a single thing, a living being endowed with movement and intelligence and speech. of Course, they did distinguish different aspects of this single being, they could look at him from different points of view; but these different aspects were simply aspects of the same single whole— not separate parts which were really different things and only accidentally united.

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.

‘Holiness’ seems to be the term we would choose in preference to any other to denote moral perfection in its highest and most general form; a holy man is one distinguished by the practice of outstanding virtue.

For this reason it is important to note that in the Bible holiness is not used primarily of men at all, but of God; and in God it is not first of all a moral quality so much as a quality of his being. (This is not to say that Israel's idea of God was ever divorced from morality, or that the Bible was ever concerned with a philosophical definition of God like the Greek First Cause. That, I hope, will become clear in what follows. But it does mean that the Bible is not so anxiously concerned with morality, especially human morality, as we are inclined to be).

For Daniel, a pilgrim from Kiev, the journey to Jerusalem began with a cruise among the islands that was in itself full of interest. At Petal, for instance, there were the asphalt deposits on the water that were piously believed to be an oil distilled from the bodies of drowned martyrs. Gallipoli, Abydos, Crete, and Tenedos in sight of Troy, all had something to offer. On Mytilene there was a shrine to St Georage,and on Chios another to St Isidore. Ephesus was full of recollections of St John and the seven sleepers, and at Cyprus of the twenty bishoprics, the pilgrims climbed the mountain where Helena had had a shrine built for the holy cross. Daniel makes no mention of the time the journey took, such a question having no importance for him whatsoever. But he does keep a note of the distances he covers.