To any believer in God it may be taken as a truism that all existing things are as he, the Creator, made them. There is a permanent and vital link between all created beings and the divine intelligence and will—which is only another way of saying that God is the first and universal cause. Nothing which exists escapes the divine causality. As the philosophers know, first among the causes is the final cause; the end hi view decides the course of action. God in creating had an end or purpose. Every creature exists for a purpose and this purpose is achieved by the attainment of its end, by the realization in each individual of his own nature.

This is true in a special way with regard to human nature. The end for which human nature exists is the knowledge and the love of God. Hence there is an ordering of human beings to God as to their final end. St Thomas speaks of this as a contemplation of divine things: ‘aliqua contemplatio divinorum’, and sees it as the natural perfection of human intelligence.

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Were mankind committed to this order, the order of human nature and the natural knowledge of God, there would be no question of the life of faith. But man has been translated from die order of his own nature to a new order by which he is made, in St Peter’s words, a sharer in the divine nature. He is lifted into a new order of being which is so much above his own nature that it is a super-nature, and the order in which this activity takes place is known to us as the super-natural order.

This is the order of grace in which we are favoured by God— by which we are in a state of grace.

To the eye of faith, and so of theology, there is no authentic Christianity apart from the Catholic Church, and the Church has an inward pattern or design centred on Christ. I say ‘inward’ to imply that this pattern is not visible to the historian as such. History can only show the development of the Church as an institution making certain claims: to interpret these historical data in terms of that pattern is the work of theology.

The pattern might be represented by two lines drawn from a central point. The point is Christ, both Saviour and Word; the lines are a line of ‘grace’ passing through sacraments to the souls of men, and a line of truth passing through faith and teaching to their minds. Grace and truth combine in Christ, and of this fulness we have all received; but grace in one way and truth in another. Life and light, identical in Christ, reach us through distinct media within the one Church: grace through the sacraments, and supremely in the Eucharist; truth through faith and the Church’s articulation of the faith and in the rules wherewith she applies it to the details of conduct. In both communications the Church, we believe, is necessary. But the manner of her mediation differs in each case.

Where sanctifying grace is concerned the Church is purely God’s instrument, in the most limited sense of the term. Her task here is simply to effect the sacred sign, to consecrate, for example, the host and administer it; the rest—granted the recipient’s response—is all God’s work. The Church here is a mere vehicle of a divine action; and this in virtue of the power conferred on every priest at ordination. And so limited is the human share in this sanctification through the sacraments that the priest’s personal moral quality makes no difference at all to the degree of grace transmitted.

Five years ago the position of architecture in this country changed radically. The Festival of Britain, the South Bank Exhibition in particular, marked the final victory of the ‘Modem Movement’ within the architectural profession; a change which seemed both popular and officially acceptable.

The Festival Exhibition did not contain any one building which could be called great architecture; there was little, by European standards, that was even very good. But the glamour and the freshness of the various pavilions, the spaciousness and excellent acoustics of the Festival Hall had good publicity value. And the free, ambling layout of the South Bank reminded visitors of those pleasures of town life which we, in this country, had lost and almost entirely forgotten.

The change was radical; but it was not sudden. During the war social conditions had altered a great deal, and after 1945 much of this adjustment became statute, so that building, which for long had been a private perquisite, turned into public business. Hence the abandonment of many quasi-traditional prejudices and increased discussion of architecture at a rational level. It was no longer: ‘I’m paying for it, I’ll have what I like and I know what I like’ but ‘We all have to pay for it, so we had better agree on what is best’. Hence, too, the increased prestige of the architect as a technocrat and—this last with much coyness on the part of some architects—as an artist.

As a result of all that, architecture is the art most in the public eye at the moment and the Arts Council have at long last recognized this state of affairs by organizing a photographic exhibition of Ten Years (1945-1955) of British Architecture. There is also another innovation: this is the first properly designed Arts Council exhibition.