The obliteration of familiar landmarks and the destruction of an old and accustomed order seem to produce a twofold effect. The majority of those who come afterwards seems quickly to adapt itself to the new outlook and new ways, while a minority clings with determination to what it can remember of the days gone by, and, filled with an intense desire to preserve the values of the past, canonizes both the bad and the good in the old order. It was thus with the Reformation. The forces which produced it had slowly been gathering for centuries. The scandals of the late medieval church were but the manifestation of far deeper ills, of which perhaps the most deadly of all had been, in practice, anv almost complete loss of the sense of the oneness of all Christians with the triumphant and risen Christ. In consequence, a spirit of gloom and insecurity, coupled with an unconstructive puritanism in morals, had prevailed among the devout and had tended to make salvation depend almost entirely upon the precariousness of subjective intention.

‘The end justifies the means.’ There are few more effective passion-raisers than this hackneyed sentence. To accuse A someone of holding the doctrine can cause great offence; and to be so brazen as to defend it in argument may rouse even greater indignation. But what, whether it is true or not, does it mean? What does ‘justify’ mean? ‘To make just’ is the obvious answer; ‘the end makes the means just'. ‘Justify’ means to make just, as ‘rectify’ means to make right. But when a mistake is rectified, something happens, something is put right that was wrong; you had your tie on crooked, and now you have put it straight, you have rectified it. Nothing happens, however, in the same obvious sense, when the end justifies the means, or when (using the word justify’ more strictly) you justify your actions.

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.

Justice or righteousness (they translate the same Hebrew word: tsedek) is that by which Israel lives, that by which it maintains its existence as Yahweh's chosen people. To act righteously, or justly, is to act in such a way as to maintain the covenant.

When Yahweh intervened to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, he set them apart from all other nations; and on Mount Sinai he bound them to himself by a perpetual contract. They became a nation set apart for Yahweh, who although Lord of all the world freely chose them for his own through no merit of theirs. By this act Yahweh revealed his righteousness to Israel, and even imposed it on them too through the law, as the charter of the covenant. So the Hebrew law is quite unlike the law of other peoples: it is entirely theological, and is not the expression of the will of the people or of their ruler.

In a previous article we considered the Old Testament theme of ‘pilgrimage, encounter, communion’ from its initial instance at Sinai to its later eschatological developments. At the root of this theme lies the idea of the kabod, the visible manifestation of Yahweh's holy presenceto the people in the form of a numinous and fiery cloud. We have now to consider a second tradition which grows out of this initial conception of Yahweh's presence by his kabod, and which has also exercised a decisive influence on the development of Old Testament theology as a whole. It is the theology of the tent of meeting. We have seen that the essential characteristic of kabod theology is that the fiery cloud, the kabod, descends at certain sacred moments on a holy place chosen by Yahweh for his encounter with his people. At first this is Mount Sinai. But at Sinai itself Yahweh chooses to have a movable sanctuary made so that he can accompany the people. Instead of the people going up to him in the mountain, he will come down to them at the tent. The shrine which awaits his presence accompanies them wherever they go.

If you live by mountains or the sea your life is moulded by them. It may be that they are out of sight and that it is only in the lie of the land, in a wind that blows over you cold from the snows or warm and salty from the sea that you are made consciously aware of them; perhaps you remember from time to time to make an expedition to refresh your memory of the way they look. But in some way or another they are a presence in your life. Although we’ are not always aware of her, our Lady is always present to the Church, is present in the life of each one of us; when we are aware of her it is not by the senses of the body but by the spiritual sense of faith.

As yet we know nothing in detail of the agenda, doctrinal and disciplinary, for the deliberations of the Vatican Council to be convoked in the near future by Pope John XXIII. These no doubt will be made known to us as the Commissions go forward during this year with their preparatory work. We can however take the coming Council as a symbol, as all its predecessors have been, of the historical development of the Church's life and teaching. It is a symbol of what may be called the togetherness, in doctrine and life, of all the parts of which the Mystical Body of Christ in the world is made up. Another word for this might be the conciliarity of the Church; both of these are clumsy words for what they are here used to express, namely the living and. spreading of the faith by a society in which by grace every individual person is deeply concerned and closely united with his neighbours in the whole. This holds good of the total hierarchy of its being, from its highest ruling authority down to its humblest member.

With these impressive words begins the epistle to the Hebrews, and we are taught that God it is who commands all history, and God who reveals himself by speaking through all the sacred history of Israel as also to the new Israel of God or body of Christ. The stress in the text is first of all on God who has all the initiative, and who brings about a continuity in old and new testament covenants because the same loving God brought all essential history to its real conclusion in the revelation of a Saviour who is Lord of all.

Our text also speaks of ways many and various. Two points are made: the frequency of God's utterance, and the variety of ways in which his message comes to the world. Let us try to illustrate that frequency and the many ways and modes.

We commonly think of St Catherine as the greatest of Dominican tertiaries; and so no doubt she is; it is as natural to think that of her as to think of St Thomas as our greatest theologian. Yet it is easier to assess the greatness of a theologian than the greatness of a tertiary. Theology is a science; being a tertiary is a vocation. You can compare one theologian with another in respect of qualities that are fairly evident, at least in principle, for they are intellectual qualities expressed in rational argument. A theologian is great in the degree that he gives satisfactory answers to the questions put by the human mind when it asks, what does the Christian faith mean? It is true that a theologian will not be able to give such answers with a clarity and profundity that deserve to be called great unless his intellect is docile to the Holy Spirit, that is unless he has the Gifts of understanding and wisdom to a high degree.

This article, and the four which follow, will be about revelation, about the community God has established, and about the sacraments that constitute it: they are theological, concerned with God and his dealings with men. Most of what I say will probably be pretty familiar stuff to you, but some of it may be new; this is because I shall be drawing on the results of the great theological revival which has been going on for some years in the Church but which has not yet had its full effect in England. A word in passing about this revival, because we will be constantly coming back to it. It is one aspect of a quiet reformation, a surge of new life within the Church. The most obvious signs of this are the liturgical movement, the return to the scriptures and the Fathers and, above all, the new understanding of the place of the laity in the Church.

St Luke dedicates his gospel to Theophilus, a man of some rank, it would seem, and tells him that his intention is to help him ‘recognize the solid grounds of the instruction he had received’ (1, 4). To appreciate his gospel to the full, then, we need to have some sort of idea about what instruction Theophilus had received. If we assume that he had received much the same sort of instruction as all other first generation converts of the apostles and their followers—and it seems a reasonable enough assumption to go on, until the contrary is proved—then it is possible to form some idea of what it consisted of from the Acts of the Apostles.

Israel's first call to holiness was full of the awe of Sinai, that dread meeting with God on the mountain:

I am the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that I might be your God.

You shall be holy, because I am holy. (Lev. xi, 45-46.)

So far from being ‘a serious call to a devout life', this shattering contact with the ‘wholly other’ is the very source of their life as a people. They live constantly in the memory of this encounter; they respond to its claims with a fanatical insistence on their separateness. The Red Sea divides them now from a profane world; they have been brought out of Egypt to be shattered and remoulded around this experience. God has spoken to them out of the thunders and lightnings of the holy mountain, and in that moment of history they have been set apart; still trembling in the grip of that fearful revelation Israel grows to nationhood as a chosen people.