It is intriguing to speculate where theological controversy would be without St Paul. From the very beginning he has been quoted on both sides of every argument. This has been facilitated by the proverbial obscurity of many of his statements, but indirectly it is evidence of the complexity of his thought. Paul is not easy to understand because he was not a simple man. His enthusiasm had nothing of the shallow lucidity that characterizes the fanatic. The Corinthians accused him of ambivalence, but it is probably truer to say that he was simply a very hard-headed pragmatist. He was certainly capable of letting his mind run free in a sweep that carried his thought into a cosmic dimension, but for all that he never lost his sharp awareness of the realities of any given situation. This latter facet of his character has been rather overlooked, because the interest of commentators has lain elsewhere. However, at precisely this juncture in the history of the Church it is important to recognize the pragmatic dimension of his thought, because its realism is very instructive. Fortunately this aspect appears most clearly when Paul has to concern himself with the relationship of the believer to the society in which he lived, since this problem is perhaps the most crucial confronting the Christian today.

In my first article I offered some reasons for thinking that the concept of modelling modern liturgies on some pattern formed in the distant past is one which has begun to outlive its usefulness. However, if we turn from Rome and the documents produced by the Consilium there to the actual areas of concern or experiment, we find a potentially far more fruitful situation. Two groups of people seem to be most interested in the changing shape of liturgy: those who love the Roman rite and wish to see it preserved in more or less its present form and those who feel that a new creation is required if we are to have forms of worship apt for the needs of contemporary man. To be sure, the habit of accepting whatever comes from above is ingrained in the Catholic and a large number of the faithful will certainly make the best of whatever is offered liturgically, as they have done in the past, but the two groups I have mentioned are the only ones whose response to liturgical change is not basically passive; each can put up a good case and it is around their needs as worshipping members of the people of God that two types of liturgy will crystallize. Such a polarization is something which we shall have to accept; we must give up the desire to enforce upon all our fellow Catholics a type of worship which at a given moment happens to suit us personally. We must also realize that the two concepts of worship involved are not susceptible of the kind of superficial reconciliation provided by the ICEL translation of the Canon.

No, not a rather rhetorical reflection on the events surrounding the publication of Humanae Vitae, simply the reaction of the Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford in 1897 to an earlier papal encyclical, Apostolicae Curae.

The problem of Christ and world religions is both significant and urgent. It is significant because the very universality of Christ is at stake in the current dialogue among the great religions of the world. The problem is urgent, because, now that the old solutions no longer hold, we must find a new answer to the problem. The whole Church is everywhere on the move and so is seeking out new paths; and in this particular case what she is looking for is a response that is free at once of the exclusiveness that has sometimes unhappily characterized the end of syncretism. We have now, I believe, reached a turning point in the history of Christianity: even Vatican II has already considered other religions as paths to salvation.

In the first part of this paper I wish to speak of three aspects of the confrontation of Christ by Hinduism, and in the second part I shall try to conclude the discussion by showing what a confrontation of Hinduism by Christ might suggest.

My first section could be entitled: ‘‘The Misunderstanding’, for we cannot deny that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism. All the historical exceptions only prove the rule of what the Abbé Monchánin called ‘the great misunderstanding’. I should like to begin by quoting a proverb known in many languages which asks: ‘What is the first requirement if you want to teach Gopal Sanskrit?’ A rationally minded person would immediately answer: the first requirement is that you know Sanskrit.

The chief moral impact of the Slant group, personally encountered, is that they believe in argument. They believe, with Aquinas, that truth is commensurate with the human intellect, and not, as some believe and most of us half believe, something fundamentally alien to it, approached only through organic imagery, mystery, silence and so on. In practice this means that Slant will argue relentlessly on long after the uncommitted liberal (that ubiquitous figure) has come to a halt, because he has arrived at the edge of his intuition, or is satisfied with some bit of poetic imagery that has floated up, or is merely tired and wants to go to sleep.

Two books from the Slant group illustrate the opposing sides of this enthusiastic belief in the mind. One of them is disastrous; for at its worst it can result in an over-confidence so appalling in its naiveté and so inhuman in its anger that the uncommitted liberal might be forgiven for ceasing to read further. Thus Neil Middleton solemnly points out Descartes’ ‘mistakes’, as if the whole Cartesian experience could be exposed as a false turning in the mind of Descartes. Thus he comments on a not-negligible passage from Catherine of Genoa: ‘although it is possible in this, as in every other case, (my italics) to show how wrong the author is. . . .’