The situation is one not unnaturally to be anticipated, for the whole
course of religious, secular and sociological development during the
last few centuries has been such as to make any other result improbable.
I already have tried to show what seem to me the destructive factors,
secularly and sociologically. As for the factors in religious
development that have worked towards the same end, they are, first, the
shattering of the unity of Christendom, with the denial by those of the
reformed religions of the existence of a Church, one, visible and
Catholic and infallible in matters of faith and morals; second, the
denial of sacramental philosophy and abandonment of the sacraments (or
all but one, or at most two of them) as instruments of Divine Grace;
third, the surrender of the various religious organisms to the
compulsion of the materialistic, worldly and opportunist factors in the
secular life of modernism. The truths corresponding to these three
errors are, Unity, Sacramentalism and Unworldliness. Until these three
things are won back, Christianity will fail of its full mission, society
will continue aimless, uncoördinate and on the verge of disaster, life
itself will lack the meaning and the reality that give both joy in the
living and victory in achievement, while the individual man will be
gravely handicapped in the process of personal regeneration.
It is not my purpose to frame a general indictment against persons and
movements, but rather to suggest certain ways and means of possible
recovery, and in general I shall try to confine myself to that form of
organized religion to which I personally adhere, that is to say, the
Anglican or Episcopal Church, partly because of my better knowledge of
its conditions, and partly because whatever is said may in most cases be
equally well applied to the Protestant denominations.
_The unity of the Church._ It is no longer necessary to demonstrate this
fundamental necessity. The old days of the nineteenth century are gone,
those days when honest men vociferously acclaimed as honourable and
glorious "the dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the
Protestant religion." Everyone knows now, everyone, that is, that
accepts Christianity, that disunion is disgrace if not a very palpable
sin. The desire for a restored unity is almost universal, but every
effort in this direction, whatever its source, meets with failure, and
the reason would appear to be that the approach is made from the wrong
direction. In every case the individual is left alone, his personal
beliefs and practices are, he is assured, jealously guarded; all that is
asked is that some mechanical amalgamation, some official approximation
shall be effected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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