Essays from Oxford

"It is one of the drawbacks of advancing years," writes Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, in his latest book, The Hidden Stream, "that you never feel quite sure to what extent the coming generation has abandoned the idols of your youth." Monsignor Knox, 65, might reassure himself by looking at his own popularity. A shy but witty man with an archly pure sense of scholarship, Roman Catholic Knox, in his tastes and in the clarity of his thinking harks back to the rigorous England of his youth. Yet a modern public which by & large can no longer digest the simplest of his Latin quotations still queues up to read almost anything he writes.

The Hidden Stream (Sheed & Ward: $3) is a sharp change of pace from Knox's best-known literary work--a good roomy, English translation of the Bible (which took him nine years to complete--TIME, Nov. 15, 1948). It consists of selections culled from the conferences which he has given through the last dozen years to students at Oxford. Although he left the Catholic chaplaincy there in 1939 after 13 years, he has gone back regularly to lecture successive generations of students. Ranging in their subjects from "What Is Religion?" to "The Christian Notion of Marriage," the religious essays in The Hidden Stream are a once-over-lightly in the principles of Catholicism, delivered with an easy candor that makes rebuttals, for a time, seem almost as trivial as a few motes of dust in a cozy Oxford common room. Excerpts:

What Is Religion? "We have been treating religion ... as if it were a mere attitude one can adopt towards life. The truth is that the word 'religion' under the Christian dispensation has changed its meaning. It . . . stands for a transaction if you will, for the paying off of a debt . . . Religion in our sense is a claim: the claim which God has upon us for worship of whatever kind, and in whatever currency He demands . . . Don't let us imagine that any code of conduct, keeping our word, or controlling our senses, or being kind towards our neighbors, is itself the Christian thing. It is only the flower springing from the root."

The Breadth of Christianity. "When you compare Christianity with Confucianism, you are comparing two systems of personal morality. When you compare Christianity with Mahometanism, you are comparing two forms of fighting enthusiasm. When you compare Christianity with Buddhism, you are comparing two streams of mystical tendency. And, unconsciously, you have recognized [in so doing] that Christianity is something greater than the other three, because each of those others corresponds to one particular need, one particular mood of man, whereas Christianity corresponds to all three."

The Means of Salvation. "Have we [Catholics] thrown over the maxim, Extra ecclesiam nulla salus--'No salvation outside the Church'? Not at all; only, to understand its meaning properly, it's perhaps best to translate, 'Outside the Church no means of salvation.' As long as you are not a Catholic, the religious body you belong to will not of itself help you to get to heaven. I say, 'of itself; incidentally it may; you may be led to repent of your sins and start on a better life by attending a Buchmanite meeting, or by listening to a solo in Magdalen Chapel ... but it won't do you any good to mention those institutions, with all respect to them, when you reach your judgment. All the identity discs in heaven are marked R.C."

Good & Evil. "Evil as such is something negative, and cannot, therefore, exercise any spell over the human mind. When we sin we are always aiming at something which is in itself good; but it is the wrong good in that particular context. It is a good thing to drink a glass of wine: as St Thomas says, 'If a man deliberately abstains from wine to such an extent that He does serious harm to his nature, he will not be free from blame.' But if the glass of wine happens to be the fifteenth you have taken that evening, it is the wrong good in that particular context."

The Permanence of Marriage. "I call it DIVORCE, you call it DIVVORCE. That's because I think of it as a strange, exotic Latin word, like divert and divest* whereas you think it's an ordinary English word like divine. So far we have traveled in fifty years."

Sin & Standards. "Four hundred years ago, when the Reformation movement had got going, it was difficult to persuade people that any sins were venial; now, it is difficult to persuade them that any sins are mortal. We have all got so accustomed to a mental atmosphere in which everything is graded; one thing differs from another in degree rather than in kind . . . We are like travelers over a long tract of flat country who are not prepared to see a sudden precipice gaping at their feet. But that, you see, is the Christian religion all over; always these sharp antitheses, heaven and hell, God's smile or God's frown "

As spoken before audiences of his coreligionists, some of Author Knox's essays may ruffle non-Catholic readers. But his religious arguments, if forthright, are never labored. As he concedes, with some wistfulness: "Few things are so disappointing in life as the experience, gradually borne in upon one, that it is very difficult, in real life, to convince is very people by the arguments which seem satisfactory to oneself."

*Pronounced, in this case, DIVERT and DIVEST.

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