The fundamental reality of all early religions is that of union, union with the family, with the tribe, with the rest of creation, with God. There is a general consensus of opinion on this point among anthropologists and other students of the prehistoric and the primitive. Thus, ‘The savage seldom or never thinks of the individual as having a distinct personality; all tends to be merged in collective or corporate personality, or is dissolved in fortuitous relationships between men, animals, plants and cosmic and other inanimate objects and forces.’

Spanish Catholics—that is to say, Spain—arc commemorating this year the fifth centenary of St Vincent Ferrer's canonization. Thus, 1954, the Jubilee Year of St James the Apostle, has found a worthy successor, for, amongst the thousands of names forming Spain's imposing contribution to hagiology, hardly one has a greater significance for the student of history, as well as for the layman, than that of this Valencian saint. It would be pointless and extravagant to try to evaluate what each of the great saints has given to the chronicle of human happenings, since their deeds and words are outside the scope of earthly speculation.

Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, it began to seem that the differences between Protestant and Catholic in France might soon be settled, and that the great division between Christians, little more than a century old, could be healed. That hope faded, but the Bishop of Meaux was one of those who, having caught it in his student days, never entirely lost it, and whose work for re-union, which made him the greatest Christian peacemaker in Europe, remains as a point of departure for all those who set the same hope before them today.

To understand the sacramental principle, it is necessary to recall the Plan of Redemption. God, three Persons, knowing and loving each other, exists from all eternity. When he chose to create other beings out of nothing, there was but one model, himself. Therefore, each creature is a unique reflection of God. It is itself and, at the same time, it is, to intelligent beings, a revelation of God. This quality of being real yet symbolic makes every creature, in the wide sense of the Latin word, a sacramentum, or, in Greek, a ‘mystery’. The correct attitude towards creatures saves their dignity from two false extremes. Some people would make each creature an absolute in itself—unrelated to anything else, no more than its physical constituents. The opposite error limits the creature to its function of symbol, ignores its value as an individual reality, credits it only for the power to suggest something else. Saint John Chrysostom has neatly described the creature as sacrament: ‘that of which one aspect is seen and the other aspect is believed’.

Some men in shrift tell a long fit in fair words, as it were a long treatise, and with a dry heart and cold as lead, more by custom than by contrition of heart. Those men though they say mickle they receive not ever in shrift the virtue of the sacrament. And truly againward, there are many simple Christian men rough and rude, that when they are touched then loathe their life in sin. They wail and weep if they may, and run to Holy Church for help. And if they would shew their sin fully, scarcely then they shew any so clearly as they would. But they are letted sometime for simpleness, sometime for uncunning and sometimes because they are so sorry and ashamed of themselves that they desire to shew all their sins with the circumstance and they cannot bring them forth.