In a previous article I showed that the first effect of the Word was to create a community, and this time I want to speak about this community, showing first what it meant for the Old Testament, and then how the notion was deepened in the New. Textbooks sometimes approach this matter by asking themselves whether Christ founded a church to exist after him, and showing that he did so by reference to various gospel texts. The inadequacy of this lies in the fact that it conceives the possibility of Christ's not having founded a church. When we see Christ in the context of scripture we see that the Church is not an institution which Christ decided to have but might have decided not to have. When we see Christ in his Old Testament background, as he is presented by the New Testament, we see the Church as inevitable. Of course, God might not have planned to have a church but this would have meant having a totally different plan for the world. The Father's plan, as we learn from the tremendous last epistles of St Paul, was to bring all things to fulfilment in Christ.

The De Trinitate is not the best known of St Augustine's works. But in my opinion it is his masterpiece, of a far greater doctrinal importance in the history of the Catholic faith than the Confessions or the City of God. It is indeed something of a theological portent, and as befits such a portent it took an uncommonly long time in coming to birth. As he himself says in a letter to the Bishop of Carthage which prefaces the work: ‘I was a young man when I began it, an old man when I had it published'. It seems that he began it about 400 A.D. Twelve years later it was still unfinished, and his friends getting impatient managed to publish the first eleven books of it and part of the twelfth, which was as far as he had got, without his consent. At this he stopped work on it altogether for some time, but was at length prevailed on to finish it— there are fifteen books of it in all—and publish it, perhaps round about 418 A.D.

The weeping and wailing of Margery Kempe are so un-English a phenomenon, that it is no wonder if many of her fellow pilgrims reviled her as a hypocrite, a Lollard, and a ‘right wicked woman’. It seems never to have occurred to her that most people went on pilgrimage in a somewhat holiday mood, and that therefore her pious table talk was, for them, entirely out of place, to say nothing of her habit of falling down and crying ‘wonder loud’ for compassion of Jesus. With foreigners she usually fared much better, simply because they did not understand the purport of her cries. They would make sympathetic remarks about hot weather and indigestion.

Both at home and abroad, however, Margery had her consolations. There were always the ‘ghostly men who loved and favoured her’, particularly when she cried. ‘Worshipful clerks, both archbishops and bishops, doctors of divinity and bachelors also’, encouraged her to believe that she was led by the Holy Ghost and by no evil spirit, and the list of these is certainly impressive.

Professor David Knowles, when still a young Downside monk, published in 1927 a short survey, The English Mystics,which workers in this field have used and quoted and respected as one of the first appraisals to be both popular and scholarly, free alike from prejudice and enthusiasm, of the reputations of some spiritual writers of later mediaeval England. In that same year, Hope Allen produced her vast study, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, and since then much else has been accomplished. She assisted in the sensational discovery and the publication of the Book of Margery Kempe; and although most of us have come to deplore her methods, her ebullience and many of her contentions, we who have followed her have all learned and profited much from Hope Allen's tireless devotion to her subject. Professor Arnould's text of Rolle's Melos, Professor Hodgson's critical editions of The Cloud of Unknowing and the allied treatises, Dr Helen Gardner's studies in the text of the Cloud and The Scale of Perfection, and the edition of The Chastising of God's Children in which Miss Joyce Bazire and the present writer collaborated, are all works which could not have begun where they did, had it not been for the pioneering of Miss Allen.

Not much of a Red Sea, a mere smudge of holy-water dabbed at in the porch, but in the moment that it takes we have left Egypt, the door has closed behind us like the pillar of cloud and we set out on our journey up the aisle into the domain of the holy, to the mountain of God. The Sinaitic fire burns in sanctuary lamp and candle-flame; the limit of approach is fixed. ‘Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy’. To say that is to accept the responsibility of being God's holy people. Far from being merely a self-righteous expression of religious apartheid, it is an appeal to God to implement his choice, to give us the grace to fulfil the priestly purpose of the making of the nation. ‘Send forth thy light and thy truth … And I will go unto the altar of God’. To be ‘distinguished’ in this way by God's choice of us in baptism is to enter into the creative pattern, the opus divisionis; land emerging from the abyss; light separated from darkness; a separation not destructive but creative.