The terms in which this essay is written, and the examples used to illustrate various points, are for the most part not specifically Catholic. One reason for this is a desire to present the problem in the idiom of the world with which Catholics want, or should want, to communicate, since they exist partly for its sake.

It looks as though the most primitive forms of communication were non-conscious and non-voluntary. Investigators working on animal communications as they are found in such creatures as sticklebacks, and even in more highly developed beasts like ducks, believe the evidence warrants their assuming that both stimulus and response as shown, for instance in patterns of aggression or mating behaviour, are almost automatic. Investigators conditioned by methods of modem scientific research are of course prone to believe in automatism, since it is a concept which makes their task of abstraction and generalization very much easier than would ideas of spontaneity and of feeling: and the outside observer may conclude that they are tempted to minimize the influence of factors they cannot measure and even sometimes to deny that they exist. It is incidentally fascinating to notice how, when they extend to human behaviour the methods and presuppositions of their earlier work, they seem to rationalize the belief that when man fell he fell away from the glorious liberty of the children of God into an animal automatism; an automatism which, since he is not wholly an animal, set him under the domination of the idea of mechanism and of the machines his brain created, from prayer-wheels to electronic brains and a concept of the State based on the image of a robot Leviathan.

A Variety of books recently published on Lord Acton’s historical and political ideas testifies to a general Acton revival. His preoccupation with the safeguards of liberty in the modem State and with the problems of power has rightly been found to have a special relevance to our own times; more so than it had to the comparatively tranquil days of Acton’s own generation. But, as so often happens when people set out to discover a prophet, he defies the seekers. Rare are those wise men who follow a star, expecting to find a king, and recognize at once what they really find. In Lord Acton’s case, too, there has been a good deal of shooting at crows and hitting of pigeons, and when the controversial dust stirred up by the Acton revivalists has settled, it may be discovered that his real greatness was not primarily that of the historian or political thinker at all, important and stimulating as his ideas are. It will be found that he was not a Liberal Catholic but a Catholic Liberal, which is a very different thing; that his political and historical ideas are not the expected panacea for our own ills, but need recasting in the contemporary moulds. But Abbot Gasquet’s judgment will then not have been invalidated; it was that Acton’s greatest claim to the attention of a later generation lies in his work as a Catholic journalist and editor, and in the part he played in the mid-nineteenth century, at a critical period in the history of English Catholics.

In this final article we shall examine and contrast the verdict of two traditions upon one of the most far-reaching and divisive of all doctrinal developments, the cultus of our Lady and the Saints; the tradition of historic Christendom in East and West, and the tradition of the Churches of the Reformation. The development of Mariology, which is of course a part of Christology, from the virginal conception and the divine Motherhood, clearly grounded in the New Testament, to our Lady’s perpetual virginity, her Immaculate Conception and her corporal Assumption, together with the universal mediation of her merits and intercession, is viewed by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches upon precisely similar principles; the later developments being regarded as implicit in New Testament doctrine. It is true of course that since the definition of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated by Pius IX, Orthodox theologians have unanimously denied what they formerly treated as an open question. Dr E. L. Mascall has remarked on the suspicion of the West that the real objection is not so much to the dogma itself as to the mode of its promulgation. He goes on to suggest the need for a deeper investigation by the Orthodox of the nature and transmission of original sin, with a view to clearing away misunderstandings concerning its bearing upon the doctrine as defined.

This universal tradition of the cultus of our Lady, a wholly developed doctrine, found in the Scriptures in seminal form only, was rejected at die Reformation in deference to the insights of the Reformers, who claimed not only to set right abuses, but, on the strength of those insights, and in opposition to the authority of the Church’s Tradition, to decide what were abuses, and what were not.

The worship of the Christian community culminates in the sacrifice of the Mass. At Mass, a priest, assimilated by his ordination to the High Priesthood of Christ, offers, in the name of Christ, a true sacrifice to God. This act of sacrifice is identified with our Lord’s sacrifice on Calvary for though the manner in which the victim is offered is different, the victim is the same. The body given and the blood shed is made present through the signs of the bread and the wine. More than that, Christ who died then and once and for all released the bonds of sin, is now, under the appearance of bread and wine, really present, so that his body and his blood become the heavenly food of the Christian community. This is the sacred passover meal at which the lamb is sacrificed that the people may be delivered. The lamb of God who offered himself, who gave himself upon the Cross as a pure and holy victim, offers himself again, by the ministry of priests, in an act of adoration, love and generosity.

The Mass is the memorial of that sacrifice that makes all other sacrifice acceptable, of the sacrifice through which the world is overcome. It is the union of the people of God with their risen Lord; hence it is the sign of victory. The life of the Church which is constituted by the victory of Christ, is one in which we share in the gifts won for us by Christ.