From the Angel's Blackboard.

Fulton J. Sheen Triumph Books, $21.95, 245 pp.

I have never liked the expression "deposit of faith" because a "deposit" sounds disconcertingly like something you'd put or find in a bank or in worse places. "Deposit" just doesn't capture the living sense of what Jesus has told and continues to tell us in Scripture and tradition. Earth-shackled sinners though we may all be, I can't believe that our Lord would entrust us with a mere deposit, let alone bid us rely on one.

"Deposit" sounds too fixed, too predictable, too finite and too ... well, boring, for a thing to revere, to pass on to one's children, and to stake one's life on. Saint Irenaeus, not exactly our most ravingly liberal theologian, said that the depositum fidei is something which is continually stirred by the Holy Spirit and so "as if in an excellent vessel, is constantly being renewed and causes the very vessel that contains it to be renewed." Amen, and deposit is a clunky sort of word for such a wonder. If only we'd had better editors in the first couple of centuries.

Father John Hardon, who probably has no objection to the phrase "deposit of faith," has used the somewhat more euphonious term, treasury," for his anthology of great Catholic writing. It's not "a" treasury, but "the" treasury o Catholic wisdom, and the definite article leads me to suspect that in his heart of hearts he wants it to become a deposit some day. In the introduction, the claim is made that here is "a comprehensive anthology of the outstanding Catholic literature from the first century to modern times." That's an ambitious claim for just over 700 pages, an impossible claim, in fact, but God bless the man for trying: The result is a book well worth having, guaranteed to delight anyone who loves the church and likes to read.

You can't (and I certainly won't) quibble about what's included or excluded from a deposit of faith, but a fair part of the pleasure of an anthology or a treasury is quibbling, so here goes. As he presents the "mystics and martyrs, philosophers and theologians, poets and prose writers" who are "truly representative of the spirit and substance of Catholicism in its paradox of phenomenal stability and versatility over the centuries," Hardon does a nearly unassailable job from the Didache all the way through Gerard Manley Hopkins, although the blue-chip theologians and philosophers are more generously represented, it seems to me, than the great mystics. It's good that Saint Thomas More is here, and it's sad that Dame Julian of Norwich is not. Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of God gets no ink at all, and letting go a few pages of Saint Louis de Montfort's True Devotion would surely have been worth making room for a reflection or two.

But it's particularly in the last hundred pages (and somewhere early in the twentieth century) that Hardon's Treasury begins to lose its luster. Hilaire Belloc was a wonderful writer when he could keep his anti-Semitism in check or wasn't propagandizing for British imperialist murderers during the Great War, but a chapter from his Europe and the Faith can't shine very brightly in the same 700 pages with Patrick, Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Dante, and Newman. In a similar vein, Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven," while not all that great a poem, is a marvelous evocation of ferocious grace and God's terrible love of man, but to include even one more line of his poetry--and there are two other entire Thompson poems in the Treasury--invites readers to wonder why Joyce Kilmer's darkiest stuff isn't represented. And there's nothing by David Jones at all

The last entry in the Treasury belongs not to Jacques Maritain, who would have been a nice fit, nor to Ronald Knox, whose book Enthusiasm might have been mined usefully, but to the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, whose 100th birthday fell last year and provided the occasion for a commemorative collection of essays selected by Patricia A. Kossmann, his literary executor. I was born into a rare North American family whose television set disappeared during my childhood--it vanished (some siblings have suggested, and my parents have never denied, that it was sabotaged) at some point between the McCarthy hearings and the assassination of President John Kennedy. It didn't reappear in the living room until well into the color and cable era. So I was unable to be among the 30 million or so regular viewers of Archbishop Fulton Sheen's programs. Dear old Dr. Furrie, our family physician and my Confirmation sponsor, was, however, and I vividly remember hearing him rhapsodize one Saturday afternoon about the "Life Is Worth Living" show as he aspirated my injured knee, trying out an excruciating variety of needles neatly arranged on a stainless steel tray beside us. "You should watch him some time on a rerun," he said as my draining and superfluous blood began to fill the Dixie cup he'd made me hold below my own swollen kneecap. (Saturday was the nurse's day off at Dr. Furrie's office.) "It's just amazing how the guy lays everything out for you," he continued, smiling as I began to go woozy.

That unpleasant association notwithstanding, Fulton Sheen does, in fact, lay everything out for you, as befits a pioneering televangelist preoccupied by the consonance of apostolic faith and human rationality. This is the confident world view of the Balliiorc Catechism, of Father Smith Instructs facksoti, of The Catholic's Ready Ansucr, the baton Mother Angelica has recently picked up, and whether it's the Tridentine tidiness of the theology, or simply my own intellectual slovenliness, I can't quite make myself at home here. There are always three reasons or stages or conditions for everything. There is never a question hanging, never an innuendo, and always a definitive closure. In these essays on the confusion and inclusion of ordinary human life, work, fear, prayer, marriage, suffering, boredom, and pleasure, it's almost as if mystery is not only rationally penetrable, but exhaustible as well. Which doesn't seem right somehow. What is pleasant to notice, though (and impossible to imagine happening on prime-time television today), is the congenial ease with which Mother Angelica's predecessor infuses his essays with insights which could have been gathered today from Hardon's anthology, along with samplings from Beethoven, Napoleon, Jung, Dostoevsky, Darwin, H.G. Wells, Tolstoy, William James, and Milton. There may be all sorts of graduate students as well-read these days, but there are few, if any, evangelists. That is a sad thing for a community whose baptism makes amateur anthologists of us all.