_Sacramentalism._ The stumbling block, the apparently impassable
barrier, is that which was erected when belief was substituted for
faith; it is the intellectualizing of religion that has brought about
the present failure of Christianity as a vital and controlling force in
man and in society. The danger revealed itself even in the Middle Ages,
and through perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher, and certainly
one of the most commanding intellects, the world has known: St. Thomas
Aquinas. In his case, and that of the others of his time, the intellect
was still directed by spiritual forces, the chiefest of which was faith,
therefore the inherent danger in the intellectualizing process did not
clearly reveal itself or come into actual operation, but with the
Renaissance and the Reformation it stood boldly forth, and since then as
mind increased in its dominion faith declined. The Reformation, in all
its later phases, that is to say, after it ceased to be a protest
against moral defects and administrative abuses and became a
revolutionary invention of new dogmas and practices, was the result of
clever, stupid or perverse minds working overtime on religious problems
which could not be solved or even apprehended by the intellect, whether
it was that of an acute and highly trained master such as Calvin, or
that of any one of the hundred founders of less savage but more curious
and uncouth types of "reformed religion."
What we need now for the recovery and re-establishment of Christianity
is not so much increased belief as it is a renewed faith; faith in
Christ, faith in His doctrine, faith in His Church. We lost this faith
when we abandoned the sacraments and sacramentalism as superstitions, or
retained some of them in form and as symbols while denying to them all
supernatural power. If we would aid the individual soul to regain this
lost faith we could do no better than to restore the seven sacraments of
the historic Christian faith, and Christian Church to the place they
once held for all Christians, and still hold in the Roman Catholic
Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and (with limitations) in the
Anglican Church. Faith begets faith; faith in Christ brings faith in the
sacraments, and faith in the sacraments brings faith in Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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