One should not make too much of the fact that Karl Barth and Thomas Merton died on the same day. Barth was an old man, a Doctor of the Church in the highest tradition, and his historic task was surely accomplished. Merton was still “young,” a famous public and troubled seeker after God and man, and no one now will ever know what he might have become. Barth; one supposes, had not read Merton; and Merton, one suspects, had not read deeply in Barth. But the sadness and shock of reading their obituaries together in the New York Times last month brought to mind certain values to which they both bore witness—with whatever differences of temperament, generation and style.