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.

In a gospel passage which is seldom quoted with reference to the spiritual life, our Lord reminds us that no father, asked for a loaf or an egg, will hand his son a stone or a scorpion, and since earthly parents give their children only wholesome food, We may be certain that our heavenly Father will show even greater loving wisdom towards us. Each day we ask him to give us this day our daily bread and, at least in England, usually obtain it. We also ask for patience, charity and such other virtues as we may be in need of; we ask him to increase our devotion and remove our distractions. Very often it seems that our heavenly Father hands us stones instead of virtues; scorpions instead of grace. It seems that the only answers to these prayers take the form of despondency, failure to be charitable or patient, or show any other admirable quality; our distractions are worse and our sensible devotion sinks to zero.

Graham Greene's last two works of prose fiction are very encouraging. No one can deny Greene's competence in the early work, nor his Tightness in choosing characteristic themes of the times (violence, cauchemar, sex and sin) and treating them in suitable modes (the employment of cinematographic devices, newspaper techniques and popular psychology), but the high estimate of Greene, particularly on the continent (he shares it with Somerset Maugham, it appears), has always raised doubts among his serious English readers. There is the central problem of his obvious commitment to Roman Catholicism which affects the reader; and, it is fair to say, irritates both Catholic and non-Catholic reader. Writing as a Catholic, I should say that the main burden of complaint is the meretricious nature of this involvement. We can admit that Greene can and does present the conditions of salvation and damnation with vivid effectiveness; Pinkie, wandering through the back-streets of Brighton in the early morning, presents us with the sensation and the dilemma:

Like many other members of the Catholic gentry in penal times, Margaret Ward had to earn a livelihood in domestic service. She was born in Cheshire at Congleton and went to live in London with another gentlewoman named Mrs Whitall, probably in the capacity of companion or housekeeper.

The Catholics of the district around Bridewell, where she lived, were much agitated by the plight of a secular priest named Richard Watson who was imprisoned in the gaol there. Margaret would hear his story, how during his first imprisonment he had been so weakened by starvation, vermin and close confinement in the fetid atmosphere of the place, that he had renounced his faith and attended a Protestant service.

Afterwards, his conscience becoming a greater misery than all he had endured in the gaol, nothing would satisfy him but to go to confession and be reconciled.