These opening words of the Aihanasium, and countles other pronouncements of the Church to simile effect have been an occasion of much opprobrium and of genuine perplexity. They would indeed be detestable, even blasphemous, were they understood to mean that God arbitrarily trarily insists that the recitation of a right password, e.g. homoousias, Jilioque, transubstantiatio, ensured admission through the heavenly gates, while the utterance of an incorrect formula—homoiousias, subordinate, consubstantiatio, was a meaningless guarantee of the pains of hell. Such monstrous misconceptions are not at all behind the Church's meticulous formulations of dogma or her vigorous anathemas to heresy. She knows full well that, as the Vatican Council says, ‘Divine mysteries by their very nature so transcend the created mind, that even when delivered by revelation and accepted by faith, they remain covered by the veils of faith itself, and are, it were, wrapped in cloud’ (Denzinger, 1796).

In considering this sacrament we have again to see how something natural has been transformed by the power of god acting through his Church. As in penance, where the matter of the sacrament is sorrow for sin, what is transformed is not something non-human, such as oil or water, but the mutual consent of a man and a woman to give themselves to one another for the purpose of continuing the human race; something, that is to say, effectively significant even before it is given a new dignity by the action of Christ. For marriage is as old as the human race, and following the lead given by St Paul (Ephesians v, 31) we can learn its significance from the original institution in Paradise.

The account given in the book of Genesis (ii, 18-24) begins with God's action in creating a partner for Adam, because ‘It is not good for man to be alone’.

In last month's article ‘Sacrament and Symbol’ we say something of the nature of the sacramental sign and its relationship to the human creature for whom it was instituted. But the sign exists for the sake of the thing signified and its most important function (though not its only function) is to lead us to a knowledge of this thing signified. In this article, therefore, I propose to give a short account of what St Thomas understood by res sacra, the sacred reality lying behind the sign.

For this sacred reality is the thing signified. ‘A sacrament, says St Augustine, ‘is the sign of a sacred reality’; and St Thomas adds, ‘in so far as it is making men holy’. The Augustinian definition is too wide; as wide, in fact, as it possibly can be for it includes the whole of creation.

The poetry of Paul Verlaine is a challenge to the conventional reader of religious literature. It is neither decreed nor supposed that every author of meditations or guides of the spiritual life be a saint, either in glory or, by reputation, in the flesh, but it is disconcerting if he is, publicly and, so to say, extravagantly, a sinner. It can hardly affect the reputation of verlaine to say now, fifty years after his death, that he is best remembered as a poet who sinned. Such a reputation alone might have effectively excluded him from the catalogue of religious writers. Verlaine enjoyed, however, the distinction of having published, in what appeared subsequently as little more than an interruption in his wayward career, poetic witness to a state of conversion and intimate conversation with God. He failed to win much sympathy from contemporary French Catholics, and it is difficult now to accord his religious poetry the esteem which, on its own exclusively, it deserves.

Truly to seek God implies that we consider him above all as the first principle of both nature and grace, then as the conserver of all being, and thirdly as the sovereign master who governs every creature and arranges everything by his providence. Hence we should consider all events, even the smallest, as manifestations of God’s will and pleasure.

Seeking God means willing nothing and desiring nothing except what he wills and arranges by his providence. We should consider as it were two acts in God in our regard: one by which he wills to give us certain graces to lead us to a certain degree of glory if we are faithful to him, and the other by which he does not will to give us more grace or raise us to a higher degree of glory than this. Few people have enough courage and fidelity to fulfil God’s purpose, and reach by their co-operation that degree of grace and glory which God desires.

Divorce In Britain, a trickle in the second half of the nineteenth century, has become a flood which has already done irreparable harm to the national life and threatens to do still more in the future. The Anglican attitude to this evil is often criticized as ambiguous and inconsistent, but it is only fair to recognize that the corporate influence of the Church of England has been, and still is a real and important check to the further spread of this erosive tide of divorce. While most non-Catholic bodies in England have long since ceased to offer any effective resistance to the practice, the Church of England continues, in the face of ever growing criticism, to maintain her ban on the rege marriage in her churches of divorced persons who have a former partner still living. This ruling has been lately reaffirmed by an Act of Convocation.

Every priest of the English Dominican Province begin this studies at Hawkesyard Priory. There he spends three years studying various aspects of philosophy before going to Blackfriars, Oxford, where he begins the study of theology. These first three years at Hawkesyard are important for more than an acquaintance with the formal discipline of philosophy, though this of course is the central theme of his intellectual life there He must enlarge his understanding of Scripture, familiarize him- self with the Fathers of the Church, her history and liturgy; and he must continually enrich his experience of human possibillity and achievement even where this is not explicitly ordered to the redemptive mysteries of the Church.

These are all aims with which readers of The Life Of The Sprit will sympathize; and it is for this reason that they are asked to help in die achievement of these aims by contributing to the chief means which makes that achievement possible: the appropriate current literature.