Virtuous vows

by the DEAN OF ST ALBANS Poverty, Chastity and Obedience: The True Virtues by H. A. Williams (Mitchell Beazley, £2.50).
This is a slender volume of five sermons, preached either in Oxford or Cambridge. In the first the author attempts to "try to tell you why I am a Christian. As a "starter" to subsequent fare it served its purpose, and it would be unfair to criticise it out of context.
The heart of it is contained in the sentence! "This larger world, this infinitely large world of the unseen, of the spiritual dimension, what we call God, can be known and experienced and enjoyed only through and by means of the seen and material and tangible world, the world which science can unfold and explain to us ...
"Heaven is not somewhere else. It is earth seen for what it most truly and deeply is."
To some this may seem something of an over-statement to which the author, by his proper insistence upon the Incarnational nature of our Faith, has been driven. His desire to communicate the reality of the Faith has caused him to emphasise its this-worldly aspect.
Not much is said about the rest of the truth. The exposition of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience has the same characteristic. Very properly, the preacher wishes to place these virtues in a much wider context than the monastic vows. They are not the perquisite of the technically religious.
But it is disappointing that we read little about the monastic life which has claimed the author from a Cambridge college. Nor can I think that his auditory would be uninterested.
The True Virtues which he enumerates are so full of sweet reasonableness that one can scarcely account for the lengths to which people have gone in their pursuit. But then if a university pulpit is not the place for intellectualising, what is?