Outside St Paul and the Acts the term charis—whence our ‘grace’—is rather rare in the New Testament, but the idea, as Dr Ryder Smith has said, ‘is everywhere.’ Common alike in secular Greek and the Septuagint, charis was a wonderfully apt term for Christian uses. In the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew chen, meaning favour or goodwill freely bestowed and presupposing the idea of love and of a love active and generous. Again charis, as derived from chairein, ‘to be glad,’ carried a sense of joy—-joy on both sides for the gift bestowed, both in the giver and in the receiver, or more precisely in the relation arising between the two as a result of the gift. Thus it could denote a state of being in communion or fellowship, and in the New Testament (especially in St Paul, but cf. John i, 14-16) it became the chief term signifying the specifically Christian situation of being loved by God, in Christ, and of returning this love, in Christ—or simply of being ‘in Christ.’ Certainly the Church was fortunate in having to hand a word so flexible and beautiful.

Around charis gathered the other Christian words, faith, love, peace, etc., as well as, in St Paul particularly, the contrast-term ‘law’ and the term for grace’s antagonist, ‘sin’. In time these words came to be defined more precisely, and as each one became more precise all the rest were affected too. The Church could not understand ‘love’ or ‘faith’ except in the context of grace, and in particular, and more quickly, she found she could not understand grace except in relation to sin and vice versa.

This eminently quotable and much quoted passage from Lady Chatterley's Lover allows us to indicate the purpose and scope of the reflections which follow. It is certainly an exploration of consciousness (and conscience) that we propose to make, but neither as novelist nor as saint, concerned to illuminate and purify the secret springs of life, so far as these are accessible to the intelligence of feeling and sympathy; it is rather from the viewpoint of the Christian theologian that an attempt will be made here to explore consciousness and conscience, to analyse its ingredients, to take stock: an exercise of intelligence sensitive enough, it is hoped, to avoid the crudities of brute imperatives, but none the less conceptual and discursively rational, while at the same time resorting to those privileged sources of insight available to the Catholic in divine revelation.

This is not a statement of a political kind: a manifesto for yet another Catholic Guild; nor is it what Field Marshal Montgomery would call an excuse for belly-aching. It is rather an agenda for further study—a plea for a new attitude of mind. I say attitude of mind, because my own experience of Catholics has been that in this country they still tend to look at social questions differently from their fellow Christians—as aliens, not as members by birth of a society which ‘belongs’ to the members of the other denominations, in their capacity as citizens. This attitude is expressed in terms of keeping oneself to oneself, or the halfresentful assumption of a superiority which is not felt: ‘They have the society, but we have authority’.

But as far as social questions go, what does this authority amount to? A few half-remembered phrases from St Thomas, a couple of encyclicals? If so, this is not authority, but mere slogan-thinking.

I have also met Catholics who say that social problems do not really exist as such. The only problems are theological. It is all a question of applying the answers already available in the deposit (that is, I think the term) of the faith. Thus an exact study of social questions is unnecessary, especially as the Welfare State has eliminated poverty, starvation, bad housing, and all the normal objects of Christian charity.

Contemporary study of the Old Testament appears to be dominated by three trends, associated with three broad groups of scholars. For practical purposes these groups may legitimately be described as ‘schools’, but only in a sense broad enough to allow for the intellectual independence of each individual scholar. The designation ‘school’ is often resented and repudiated nowadays.

The first group, led by the German scholars, A. Alt, M. Noth and G. von Rad, is usually called the ‘History of Tradition’ school. The second, consisting primarily of Scandinavian scholars with S. Mowinckel and J. Pedersen at their head, is sometimes described as the ‘Comparative Religion’ school. For reasons which will appear later I personally prefer to call it the ‘Palaeo-anthropological’ school. The third general trend is that of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. It is characteristic of the new awakening of Catholic Old Testament scholarship, especially in France, and here the leader is unquestionably R. de Vaux. The approach of certain American scholars such as W. Albright, G. E. Wright and J. Bright is markedly similar to that of the French, and it would not be wholly inaccurate to classify these too under the same general heading of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. Let us very briefly consider the distinctive approaches of each of these schools as exemplified in their most important and most representative works.

The characteristic approach of the German school may be described by means of a double simile. The enormously complicated amalgam of tradition which we call the Old Testament is regarded as a sort of snowball. The nucleus of the snowball is constituted by the Grundlage, the central ‘pan-Israelite’ traditions recording the events of the exodus, Sinai and the entry into the promised land.