If we speak here of contemporary literature, let us nevertheless recall that in all ages men have recorded certain common responses to death and mortality that vary little. The universal themes of dread and stupor, of grief and compunction, of transience and corruptibility — such poignancies of our finite condition underlie whatever special cultural or even religious influences come into play, or whatever particular hopes are projected. It is for this reason that elegies for fallen heroes and laments for toppled cities and broken hopes, in Job or Homer, are still moving, or the heartbreak in a papyrus letter, or the plangent grief of Catullus as he comes across many seas to his brother's grave,

ut te postremo donarem munere mortis

et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem.

Indeed, we must say that it is only in total openness to such common experience of grief and trepidation that other more positive overtones of death can make themselves felt and justify themselves.

Until comparatively recently writers on religion were absorbed by questions concerning the origins of religious beliefs and practices. They endowed primitive man with a kind of rational logicality in his belief, or, like Frazer, they saw his religious practices as simply the application of erroneous reasoning. The modern trend is to try to view the religious or cultural institution as an essential part of society, existing because of the needs of that society. This is the theme, for instance, of Malinowski when he says that “religion is not born out of speculation or reflection, still less out of illusion or misapprehension, but rather out of the real tragedies of human life, out of the conflict between human plans and realities.”

Lex orandi — lex credendi. The interdependence of cult and creed was a truth well known to Archbishop Cranmer and the English Reformers. If Christian belief was to be restored to its evangelical purity, then the mode and content of public worship must be reformed accordingly. So far as the Eucharist was concerned, any major change would have to be in the Canon of the Mass, which was its ritual and doctrinal center. Changes there were; and, as events were to prove, the Canon of 1549 was only a beginning. But those influences which affected the center were felt elsewhere in the service as well. Among other things they account for a number of changes in those much admired prayers which Cranmer derived from the Roman rite, the collects. In this study I would like to examine the influence of Reformed doctrine on the composition of these prayers in the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549. The hundred-odd collects in the first Prayer Book fall into two classes: some sixty-seven which are fairly close translations of Latin originals as they were found in the Sarum service books, and the rest which are either completely new with Cranmer or have only a slight connection with a Latin collect. I shall deal with the effects of Reformed doctrine first on the translated and then on the new — or nearly new — collects of the Prayer Book.

When, in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, Eve reveals her unsettling dream, in which she saw herself eating the forbidden fruit at the prompting of a mysterious stranger, Adam dismisses it as an experience of no importance. Since her will was not involved, he believes, she incurred no guilt. His argument that the dream is without significance persuades her but not us, who have beheld Satan, during the couple's sleep, causing the dream in Eve in order to taint her faculties and perhaps to probe her weaknesses:

Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve;

Assaying by his Devilish art to reach

The Organs of her Fancy, and with them forge

Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams.

(IV, 800–03)

In 1936 Teilhard de Chardin summarized in the short space of a few paragraphs the broad lines of his whole life's work. The passage deserves to be quoted in its entirety, since it is perhaps the clearest statement of the triple direction taken by his thought in its search for unity in the Christian life.

The monumental work of Erwin R. Goodenough on Jewish Symbols opens new historical vistas. Our knowledge of Judaism and its religious attitudes in the Roman Empire was derived from written, mainly Talmudic, sources. For the first time Goodenough assembles, presents and interprets an imposing array of figured or otherwise decorated monuments which throw an unexpected light on the mentality of the period known as that of the Talmud. Who could imagine that at Beth She'arim, a famous seat of Talmudic learning, contemporaries of R. Jehudah, the compiler of the Mishna, were buried in a chamber decorated by a carved human figure surmounted by a menorah, or in a relief sarcophagus showing Leda and the swan, the mythological episode which was regarded as extremely indecent by a contemporary Christian writer?