The word ‘myth’ has fallen on evil days so far at least as common speech goes. We say that something is a mere myth, an old wives’ tale, or else that it is primitive, interesting enough for the anthropologist, but from the sophisticated point of view only a fable. The word carries with it the suggestion that something untrue is being asserted in a specious and attractive way. A lie is clothed with all the charm of a story for children.

So far as this sense goes we are all, rightly, children of the Enlightenment. The myth story is no substitute for science. The myth is not, in any of its forms, verifiable in the same manner as is the scientific proposition, but it does not follow that mythological statements are untrue or unimportant. To assert this a priori is simply to restrict one's notion of verification to an admittedly useful technique, which quite clearly fails to test the whole content of experience.

It is not out of place, perhaps, to consider the influence of the Platonic habit of thought upon the conception of the virtuous life, particularly of the beginner. The general characteristic of the beginner is that of acquiring the virtues, so that the virtuous life appears to him at first as something outside himself, something that has to be grasped and brought into his own possession. The Golden Epistle of William of St Thierry sets this out very clearly in terms of what he calls the ‘animal man’, the man who lives by his senses rather than by the interior grace within him. Such a man is first moved by authority or admonished by a teacher; he accepts the good where he finds it, but he finds it always in what otheis say and do. So he begins by being obedient and by imitating the ways of others.

Come, Lord Jesus!’ is the earnest prayer in the closing words of the last book of our Holy Scriptures. This, the only prophetic book of the New Testament, tells of a Kingdom founded by the Lamb that was slain, withal a Kingdom still looking to and yearning for a greater perfectioning. We are the fortunate children of that Kingdom, privileged with the blessing of seeing the things that we see, and able in faith to cast our minds over the unfolding of God's plan through the ages, and so enabled to grasp something of the wonder of the Word-made-flesh and his dwelling amongst us. The Incarnation is the first and necessary step in God's redemptive plan. It Prepared for and is a presage of a Second Coming which will mean a completion of God's plans and which will bring the world of men as well as the universality of creatures to the term which God has prepared for them.

We are told that the first question asked by the infant Thomas Aquinas was: ‘What is God?’ The pursuit of that question became his life's work; to it he gave all his energy and ability. Yet from the time of his earliest writings he had reached the conclusion that in this life he would never find the answer. ‘Nescimus', he will say—'We do not know.’ And he will repeat St John Damascene's ‘In Deo quid est, dicere impossible est —.'It is impossible to say of God what he is.’ St Thomas says this over and over again in his writings, from the earliest to the last. He insists not only that we do not know what God is—the essence, nature and ‘whatness’ of God—but also that we cannot know it: non possumus. He loves to repeat the assertion of the Mystical Theology of'the pseudo-Denys that the most perfect union with God is union with the utterly Unknown.

‘Grace and peace … from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the first-born of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of earth. To him who loves us and has loosed us from our sins in his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests to God and his Father—to him be the glory and the might for ever and ever: amen!’ (Apoc. i, 4-6.) This text from the last book of the Scriptures serves to recall a large and important aspect of the apostolic witness to the doctrine of the King and his Kingdom. The Apocalypse is full of the Kingdom in all its phases: as it now is, even now triumphant, and yet to be perfected, consummated in a hereafter. It is a sustained vision of Jesus Christ gloried fied as also of the Bride of Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem glorified.

He was a little below medium height and lightly built, but his erect carriage and fine head made him stand out in company. His complexion was fresh, his hair dark chestnut, his eyes greyish-blue, probably, and very brilliant. The long curved nose, strong jaw and full lips are familiar to us from portraits; not so the charm of expression, the noble grace of bearing and gesture that impressed and attracted his contemporaries. We imagine Savonarola grim; as fierce as his terrible sermons; but his nature, all the evidence shows, was warmly affectionate and even gentle. He won the Florentines, especially the young and the poor, by so evidently loving them. An early writer says that he had about him ‘una’ certa humanità humile et urbana', and dilates on the beauty of his hands, so clear-skinned and spare that the light seemed to show through them. We are told that his rough habit was always neat and—a remarkable thing in that climate—never soiled with sweat.

Of all the events of the Old Testament there is none which is of an importance comparable to the Exodus. It was the mighty Act of God, in the light of the whole history of Israel was given its meaning. By this act Israel had been delivered from bondage and formed into a people, it had been given a Law and made the subject of a Convenant; it had been guided through the desert and brought into the Promised Land. This was the pattern in which the Prophets saw the history of Israel. They looked back on it as the ‘time of her espousals', when Israel had been ‘holy to the Lord'. (Jer. 2, 2.) As time went on it was regarded more and more as the Golden Age, the period when God had been manifested to his people and they had walked in his light. But at the same time it was seen also as the ideal of the future.

Why did Pilate condemn our Lord to the Cross? He knew our Lord was innocent of the crimes brought against him; he knew more: he realised in some way our Lord was not merely man. The Romans believed in gods appearing in human form, in goddesses having human sons, and so on. Quite clearly Pilate was awed by the presence of Christ. Yet he condemned him! There were two reasons for this awful sin: first, Pilate's evil life, his horrible cruelty, had raised up against him many enemies, and given them a handle to bring about his disgrace with the Roman Emperor. The background or Pilate's life was wrong. The second cause was self-love. When Blessed Henry Suso had a vision of his Dominican master in glory he was told that to attain holiness there must be the renunciation of self. From this station I learn that I may sin suddenly and gravely against my Lord unless my life in general is true and spiritually healthy; and that the more I have of self-love the more I shall prefer self to God and his will.

It is always attractive to make a comparison between mystics differing in their nature and formation; and a study of their experience, fundamentally the same, in its different interpretations, helps us to discover lights and shades, tones and accents, individual peculiarities that may escape our notice when we consider one mystic alone. This is so in the case of Catherine of Siena. Set by the side of other women mystics her world becomes more distinct, and her own figure takes on clearer outline. Compared with St Gertrude, for instance, she is more ecclesiastically-minded; compared with St Hildegarde, more positive; with St Teresa, more subtle; while perhaps she outstrips them all in enthusiasm and eloquence.

When one has traced the bridegroom and the bride motif in the pages of the Old Testament and seen with what divine persistence God wooed his chosen people lest the alliance be forgotten: ‘I will espouse thee to me forever’ (Osee 3, 19), one is the more forcibly struck by the few references in the Gospels of the New Testament to Christ as the Bridegroom of the Covenant. In the writings of the Four Evangelists the nuptial theme practically disappears, at least as far as direct allusion to Christ's fulfilment of the promised espousals goes. It is as if the actual presence of the ‘young man’ whom Isaias prophesied would come and ‘dwell with the virgin’ (Isaias 62, 5) made all further allusion unnecessary. Even in the Gospel of St John, where we find more evidence of the fulfilment-sense than in the other Gospels, there is only one mention made of the Bridegroom

The Church and Charity are two realities which are intimately connected with one another: the community (koinonia) which is the Church is grounded in a loving union (agape) and the union which is charity (agape) is in turn based on a communion (koinonia). To state more precisely the relationship existing between the Church and charity will be our concern in what follows.

Of the many references in Holy Scripture to the bond which exists between the Church and charity the most notable is that of Ephesians 4, 15-16: ‘Rather we should hold the truth in charity, and grow in all things into him who is the head, Christ. From him the whole body, welded and compacted together by means of every joint of the system, part working in harmony with part—from him the body deriveth its increase, unto the building up of itself in charity.’

In an age of technical achievements and the mechanical repetition of words the unique Redemptive action of Christ The Word is particularly significant. Men are obliged in the exercise of free-will to choose Christ, who is the Word and brings the words of life, or Satan whose words are lies leading to death. Life eternal is the proper end of the whole man, but since the Fall he is open to temptation, and most of all to temptation through natural pride. Thus his especial tendency to pride is found in those activities which distinguish him from the other living creatures. His reason, a common object of idolatry, his humour—did not Bernard Shaw among other satirists take refuge from faith in a kind of pseudo-Godlike mockery? — his ability to use tools, whether useful or artistic or for pleasure, and above all his power to communicate the life of his soul through language, to other souls.

Faith and Worship, like Christian life itself, are principally concerned with mystery, the divine mysteries with which we are brought into contact through the Incarnation. It is no mere coincidence that both the Christian faith and the Christian liturgy are essentially bound up with the Christian mystery: and to go even further, the very mysteries of pagan cults apparently so foreign to any aspect of the Christian religion, are themselves related by essential ties to the faith and the worship of the Christian. We must first establish the connection between all these elements before we can see the importance of the life of faith in the life of worship.

When man is confronted by the real God he is at once presented with that which is all knowable and so infinite in its perfection as to be beyond his own capacity to know. The reality of the divine being is too intelligible for man, like the intensity of light that obscures the objects of vision.