The world is everything comprised by the horizon of our understanding and our freedom. For as it is ordinarily experienced, it is at once a continuous stream of images formed by our mind and a kaleidoscope of desires and obligations, expectations and commitments, shaped by our intentions and refined and checked through social interaction. But the world is also the historical situation in which we inexplicably find ourselves, set down as we are in the latter part of this late dark age, the daunting twentieth century. Our enigmatic insertion into history we experience as being someone's child or someone's parent; as being younger than some, older than most; as having seen less than some or being more worldly-wise than others; as being now less, now more advanced in the practice of institutions on which our existence depends. Often we feel that the historical world, unfathomable to us in its dreariness and confusion, draws in upon us like a long, dark midnight, but without the assurance of a following day; and that the store of possibilities it holds against the future must be running low as it draws mankind inexorably towards the ultimate moment of self-knowledge in an ultimate self-encounter.¹ Inevitably, therefore, we feel that some of the colour is draining from the ever-shifting patterns we experience and suspect that some of its scope and variety are no longer obtainable.