Much of all this can even now be taught through a judicious use of the opportunities offered instructors in English, whether this is through the graded "readers" of elementary education, or the more extended courses in colleges and universities. Very frequently these opportunities are ignored, and will be until we achieve something of a new orientation in the matter of teaching English.

Now it may be I hold a vain and untenable view of this subject, but I am willing to confess that I believe the object of teaching English is the unlocking of the treasures of thought, character and emotion preserved in the written records of the tongue, and the arousing of a desire to know and assimilate these treasures on the part of the pupil. I am very sure that English should not be taught as a thing ending in "ology," not as an intricate science with all sorts of laws and rules and exceptions; not as a system whereby the little children of the Ghetto, and the offspring of Pittsburgh millionaires, and the spectacled infant elect of Beacon Hill may all be raised to the point where they can write with acceptable fluency the chiseled phrases of Matthew Arnold, the cadenced Latinity of Sir Thomas Browne, the sonorous measures of Bolingbroke or the distinguished and resonant periods of the King James Bible. Such an aim as this will always result in failure.

The English language is the great storehouse of the rich thought and the burning emotion of the English race, and all this, as it has issued out of character, works towards the development of character, when it is made operative in new generations. There is no other language but Latin that has preserved so great a wealth of invaluable things, and English is taught in order that it all may be more available through that appreciation that comes from familiarity. There is no nobler record in the world: from Chaucer down to the moderns is one splendid sequence of character-revelations through a perfect but varied art, for literature is also a fine art, and one of the greatest of all. Is it not fair to say that the chief duty of the teacher of English is to lead the student to like great literature, to find it and enjoy it for himself, and through it to come to the liking of great ideas?

In the old days there was an historical, or rather archaeological, method that was popular; also an analytical and grammarian method. There was also the philological method which was quite the worst of all and had almost as devastating results as in the case of Latin. It almost seems as though English were being taught for the production of a community of highly specialized teachers. No one would now go back to any of those quaint and archaic ways digged up out of the dim and remote past of the XIXth century. We should all agree, I think, that for general education, specialized technical knowledge is unimportant and scientific intensive methods unjustifiable. For one student who will turn out a teacher there are five hundred that will be just simple voters, wage-earners, readers of the Saturday Evening Post and the New Republic, members of the Fourth Presbyterian Church or the Ethical Society, and respectable heads of families. The School of Pedagogy has its own methods (I am given to understand), but under correction I submit they are not those of general education. Shall I put the whole thing in a phrase and say that the object of teaching English is to get young people to like good things?

You may say this is English Literature, not English. Are the two so very far apart? English as a language is taught to make literature available. "Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws should be deduced from examples. Philology, etymology, syntax are derivatives, not foundations. "Practice makes perfect" is a saying that needs to be followed by the old scholastic defensive "distinguo." Practice in reading, rather than practice in writing, makes good English composition possible. The "daily theme" may be overdone; it is of little use unless thought keeps ahead of the pen.

I would plead then for the teaching of English after a fashion that will reveal great thoughts and stimulate to greater life, through the noble art of English literature and the perfectly illogical but altogether admirable English language. The function of education is to make students feel, think and act, after a fashion that increasingly reveals and utilizes the best that is in them, and increasingly serves the uses of society, and both history and English can be so taught as to help towards the accomplishment of these ends.

There is another factor that may be so used, but I confess I shall speak of it with some hesitation. It is at present, and has been for ages, entirely outside the possibility even of consideration, and in a sense that goes beyond the general ignoring of religion, for while Catholics, who form the great majority of Christians, still hold to religion as a prime element in education, there are none—or only a minority so small as to be negligible—who give a thought to art in this connection. I bring forward the word, and the thing it represents, with diffidence, even apologetically: indeed, it is perhaps better to renounce the word altogether and substitute the term "beauty," for during the nineteenth century art got a bad name, not altogether undeservedly, and the disrepute lingers. So long as beauty is an instinct native to men (and it was this, except for very brief and periodic intervals, until hardly more than a century ago, though latterly in a vanishing form), it is wholesome, stimulating and indispensable, but when it becomes self-conscious, when it finds itself the possession of a few highly differentiated individuals instead of the attribute of man as such, then it tends to degenerate into something abnormal and, in its last estate, both futile and unclean. In its good estate, as for example in Greece, Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and in Oriental countries until the last few decades, beauty was so natural an object of endeavour and a mode of expression, and its universality resulted in so characteristic an environment, it was unnecessary to talk about it very much, or to give any particular thought to the educational value of the arts which were its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete forms of art, was highly valued, almost as highly as religion or liberty or bodily health, but then it was a part of normal life and therefore taken for granted.

Now all is changed. For just an hundred years (the process definitely began here in America between 1820 and 1823) we have been eliminating beauty as an attribute of life and living until, during the last two generations, it is true to say that the instinctive impulse of the race as a whole is towards ugliness in those categories of creation and appreciation where formerly it had been towards beauty. Of course the corollary of this was the driving of the unhappy man in whom was born some belated impulse towards the apprehending of beauty and its visible expression in some art, back upon himself, until, conscious of his isolation and confident of his own superiority, he not only made his art a form of purely personal expression (or even of exposure), but held himself to be, and so conducted himself, as a being apart, for whom the laws of the herd were not, and to whom all men should bow.

The separation of art from life is only less disastrous in its results than the separation of religion from life, particularly since with the former went the separation of art (and therefore of beauty) from its immemorial alliance with religion. It was bad for art, it was bad for religion, and it was worst of all for life itself. Beyond a certain point man cannot live in and with and through ugliness, nor can society endure under such conditions, and the fact is that, however it came to pass, modern civilization has functioned through explicit ugliness, and the environment it has made for its votaries and its rebels indifferently, is unique in its palpable hideousness; from the clothes it wears and the motives it extols, to the cities it builds, and the structures therein, and the scheme of life that romps along in its ruthless career within the sordid suburbs that take the place of the once enclosing walls. And the defiant and segregated "artists," mortuary art museums, the exposed statues and hidden pictures, the opera subsidized by "high society," and the "arts and crafts" societies and the "art magazines" and "art schools" and clubs and "city beautiful" committees, only seem to make the contrast more apparent and the desperate nature of the situation more profound.

It is a new situation altogether, and nowhere in history is there any recorded precedent to which we can return for council and example, for nothing quite of the same sort ever happened before. It is also a problem of which formal education must take cognizance, for the lack is one which must somehow be supplied, while it reveals an astonishing lacuna in life that means a new deficiency in the unconscious education of man that renders him ineffective in life; defective even, it may be, unless from some source he can acquire something of what in the past life itself could afford.

Indeed it is not merely a negative influence we deal with, but a positive, for, to paraphrase a little, "ugly associations corrupt good morals." Youth is beaten upon at many points by things that not only look ugly, but are, and as in compassion we are bound to offer some new agency to fill a lack, so in self-defence we must take thought as to how the evil influence of contemporaneousness is to be nullified and its results corrected.

I confess the method seems to me to lean more closely to the indirect influence rather than the direct. It is doubtful if "art" can really be taught in any sense; the inherent sense of beauty can be fostered and an inherent aptitude developed, but that is about all. As for the building up of a non-professional passion for art I am quite sure it cannot be done, and should hardly be attempted, and very likely the same is true of the application of beauty.

Text books on "How to Understand" this art or that are interesting ventures into abstract theory, but they are little more. We must always remember that art is a result, not a product, and that sense of beauty is a natural gift and not an accomplishment. On the other hand, much can be accomplished by indirection, and by this I mean the buildings and the grounds and the cultural adjuncts that are offered by any school or college. The ordinary type of school-house—primary, grammar or high school—is, in its barren ugliness and its barbarous "efficiency," a very real outrage on decency, and a few Braun photographs and plaster casts and potted plants avail nothing. Private schools and some colleges—by no means all—are apt to be somewhat better, and here the improvement during the last ten years has been amazing, one or two universities having acquired single buildings, or groups, of the most astonishing architectural beauty. In no case, however, has as yet complete unity been achieved, while the arts of painting, sculpture, music and the drama, as vital and operative and pervasive influences, lag far behind, and formal religion with its liturgies and ceremonial, its constant and varied services and its fine and appealing pageantry—religion which is the greatest vitalizing and stimulating force in beauty is hardly touched at all.

Bad art of any kind is bad anywhere, but in any type of educational institution, from the kindergarten to the post graduate college, it is worse and less excusable than it is elsewhere, unless it be in association with religion, while the absence of beauty at the instigation of parsimony or efficiency is just as bad. I am firmly persuaded that we need, not more courses of study but more beautiful environment for scholars under instruction.

I have touched cursorily on certain elements in education which need either a new emphasis or an altogether new interpretation; religion, history, art, but this does not mean that the same treatment should not be accorded elsewhere. There are certain studies that should be revived, such as formal logic, there are others that need immediate and complete restoration, as Latin for example, there are many, chiefly along scientific and vocational lines, that could well be minimized, or in some cases dispensed with altogether: one might go on indefinitely on this line, however, weighing and testing studies in relation to their character-value, but certainly enough has already been said to indicate the point of view I would urge for consideration. Before I close, however, I want to touch on two points that arise in connection with college education, if, even for the sake of argument, we admit that the primary object of all formal education is the "education" of the character-capacity in each individual.

Of these two, the first has to do with the college curriculum, but I need to devote little time to this for the principle has already been developed and applied in a singularly stimulating and lucid book called "The Liberal College," by President Meiklejohn of Amherst, to which I beg to refer you. The scheme is a remarkable blending of the prescribed and the elective systems, and provides for the freshman year five compulsory studies, viz.: Social and Economic Institutions, Mathematics and Formal Logic, Science, English and Foreign Languages; for the sophomore year European History, Philosophy, Science, Literature, and one elective; for the junior year American History, History of Thought and two electives, and for the senior year one required study, Intellectual and Moral Problems, and one elective, the latter, which takes two-thirds of the student's time, must be a continuation of one of the four subjects included in the junior year. It seems to me that this is a singularly wise programme, since it not only determines the few studies which are fundamental, and imposes them on the student in diminishing number as he advances in his work, but it also provides for that freedom of choice which permits any student to find out and continue the particular line along which his inclinations lead him to travel, until his senior year is chiefly given over to the fullest possible development of the special subject. The fad for free electives all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite line. This project of Dr. Meiklejohn's seems to me to recognize life as a force and to base itself on this sure foundation instead of on the shifting sands of doctrinaire theory, and if this is so then it is right.

For after all there is such a thing as life, and it is more potent than theory as it also has a way of disregarding or even smashing the machine. It is this force of life that should be more regarded in education, and more relied upon. It is the living in a school or a college that counts more than a curriculum; the association with others, students and teachers, the communal life, the common adventures and scrapes, the common sports, yes, and as it will be sometime, the common worship. It is through these that life works and character develops, and to this development and instigation of life the school and college should work more assiduously, minimizing for the moment the problems of curricula and pedagogic methods. If I am right in this there is no place for the "correspondence school," while the college or university that numbers its students by thousands becomes at least of doubtful value, and perhaps impossible. In any case it seems to me self-evident that a college, whatever its numbers, must have, as its primal and essential units, self-contained groups of not more than 150 students segregated in their own residential quad, with its common-room, refectory and chapel, and with a certain number of faculty members in residence, the whole being united under one "head." There may be perhaps no reason why, granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an "university" with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social "unions" as large as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies. A college such as this is a mob, not an organism, and as a mob it ought to be put down.

I said at the outset of this lecture that we could not lay the present failure of civilization to the doors of education, however great its shortcomings, for the causes lay deeper than this. I maintain that this is true; and yet formal education can not escape scatheless, for it has failed to admit this decline while acknowledging the claim set up for it that it could and would achieve this end. Certainly it will incur a heavy responsibility if it does not at once recognize the fact that while it can not do the half that has been claimed for it, it can do far more than it is doing now, and that in a very large degree the future does depend for its honour or its degradation on the part formal education is to perform at the present crisis. To do this it must execute a volte face and confess that it can only develop inherent potential, not create capacity, and that the primary object of its activities must be not the stall-feeding of intellect and the practical preparation for a business career, but the fostering and the building up of the personal character that denotes the Christian gentleman. I do not think that I can do better for a conclusion than to quote from the "Philosophy of Education" by the late Dr. Thomas Edward Shields.

"The unchanging aim of Christian education is, and always has been, to put the pupil into possession of a body of truth derived from nature and from Divine Revelation, from the concrete work of man's hand and from the content of human speech, in order to bring his conduct into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the civilization of his day.

"Christian education, therefore, aims at transforming native instincts while preserving and enlarging their powers. It aims at bringing the flesh under the control of the spirit. It draws upon the experience and the wisdom of the race, upon Divine Revelation and upon the power of Divine grace, in order that it may bring the conduct of the individual into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the civilization of the day. It aims at the development of the whole man, at the preservation of unity and continuity in his conscious life; it aims at transforming man's native egotism to altruism; at developing the social side of his nature to such an extent that he may regard all men as his brothers; sharing with them the common Fatherhood of God. In one word, it aims at transforming a child of the flesh into a child of God."



VII

THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC RELIGION

If philosophy is "the science of the totality of things," and "they are called wise who put things in their right order and control them well," then it is religion, above all other factors and potencies, that enters in to reveal the right relationships and standards of value, and to contribute the redemptive and energizing force that makes possible the adequate control which is the second factor in the conduct of the man that is "called wise." Philosophy and religion are not to be confounded; religion is sufficient in itself and develops its own philosophy, but the latter is not sufficient in itself, and when it assumes the functions and prerogatives of religion, it brings disaster.

Religion is the force that relates action to life. Of course it has other aspects, higher in essence and more impalpable in quality, but it is this first aspect I shall deal with, because I am not now speaking of religion as a purely spiritual power but only of its quality as the great coordinator of human action, the power that establishes a right ratio of values and gives the capacity for right control. Whether we accept the religion of the Middle Ages or not; whether we look on the period as one of high and edifying Christian civilization, or as a time of ignorance and superstition, we are bound to admit that society in its physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects was highly organized, and coordinated after a most masterly fashion. It was more nearly an unit, functioning lucidly and consistently, than anything the world has known since the Roman Empire. Whatever its defects, lack of coherency was not one of them. Life was not divided into water-tight compartments, but moved on as a consistent whole. Failures were constant, for the world even then was made up of men, but the ideal was perfectly clear-cut, the principles exactly seen and explicitly formulated; life was organic, consistent, highly articulated, and withal as full of the passion of aspiration towards an ultimate ideal as was the Gothic cathedral which is its perfect exemplar.

The reason for this coherency and consistency was the universal recognition and acceptance of religion as the one energizing and standardizing force in life, the particular kind of religion that then prevailed, and the organic power which this religion had established; that is to say, the Church as an operative institution. So long as this condition obtained, which was, roughly speaking, for three hundred years, from the "Truce of God" in 1041 to the beginning of the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Papacy at Avignon in 1309, there was substantial unity in life, but as soon as it was shaken, this unity began to break up into a diversity that accomplished a condition of chaos, at and around the opening of the sixteenth century, which only yielded to the absolutism of the Renaissance, destined in its turn to break up into a second condition of chaos under the influence of industrialism, Puritanism and revolution.

Since the accomplishment of the Reformation, this function of religion has never been restored to society in any degree comparable with that which it maintained during the Middle Ages. The Counter-Reformation preserved the institution itself in the Mediterranean lands, but it did not restore its old spiritual power in its entirety. Amongst the peoples that accepted the Reformation the new religion assumed for a time the authority of the old, but the centrifugal force inherent in its nature soon split the reformed churches into myriad fragments, so destroying their power of action, while the abandonment of the sacramental system progressively weakened their dynamic force. As it had from the first compounded, under compulsion, with absolutism and tyranny, so in the end it compromised with the cruelty, selfishness, injustice and avarice of industrialism, and when finally this achieved world supremacy, and physical science, materialistic philosophy and social revolution entered the field as co-combatants, it no longer possessed a sufficient original power either of resistance or of re-creative energy.

Religion is in itself not the reaction of the human mind, under process of evolution, to certain physical stimuli of experience and phenomena, it is supernatural in that its source is outside nature; it is a manifestation of the grace of God, and as such it cannot be brought into existence by any conscious action of man or by any of his works. On the other hand, it can be fostered and preserved, or debilitated and dispersed, by these human acts and institutions, and in the same way man himself may be made more receptive to this divine grace, or turned against it, by the same agencies, the teachings of Dr. John Calvin to the contrary notwithstanding. This is part of the Catholic doctrine of free-will as opposed to the sixteenth-century dogma of predestination which, distorted and degraded from the doctrine of St. Paul and St. Augustine, played so large a part in that transformation of the Christian religion from which we have suffered ever since. God offers the free gift of religion and of faith to every child of man, but the recipient must cooperate if the gift is to be accepted. The Church, that is to say, the supernatural organism that is given material form in time and space and operates through human agencies, is for this reason subject to great vicissitudes, now rising to the highest level of righteousness and power, now sinking into depths of unrighteousness and impotence. Nothing, however, can affect the validity and the potency of its supernatural content and its supernatural channels of grace. These remain unaffected, whether the human organism is exalted or debased. The sacraments and devotions and practices of worship, are in themselves as potent if a Borgia sits in the chair of St. Peter as they are if a Hildebrand, and Innocent III or a Leo XIII is the occupant; nevertheless every weakening or degradation of the visible organism affects, and inevitably, the attitude of men towards the thing itself, and when this declension sets in and continues unchecked, the result is, first, a falling away and a discrediting of religion that sometimes results in general abandonment, and second—and after a time—a new outpouring of spiritual power that results in complete regeneration. The Church, in its human manifestation, is as subject to the rhythmical rise and fall of the currents of life as is the social organism or man himself, therefore it is not to be expected that it will pursue a course of even exaltation, or maintain a status that is impeccable.

Now the working out of this law had issue in a great decline that began with the Exile at Avignon and was not terminated until the Council of Trent. In the depth of this catastrophe came the natural and righteous revolt against the manifold and intolerable abuses, but, like all reforming movements that take on a revolutionary character, reform and regeneration were soon forgotten in the unleashed passion for destruction and innovation, while the new doctrines of emancipation from authority, and the right of private judgment in religious matters, were seized upon by sovereigns chafing under ecclesiastical control, as a providential means of effecting and establishing their own independence, and so given an importance, and an ultimate victory that, in and by themselves, they could hardly have achieved. In the end it was the secular and autocratic state that reaped the victory, not the reformed religion, which was first used as a tool and then abandoned to its inevitable break-up into numberless antagonistic sects, some of them retaining a measure of the old faith and polity, others representing all the illiteracy and uncouthness and fanaticism of the new racial and social factors as these emerged at long last from the submergence and the oppression that had been their fate with the dissolution of Mediaevalism.

Meanwhile the Roman Church which stood rigidly for historic Christianity and had been preserved by the Counter-Reformation to the Mediterranean states, continued bound to the autocratic and highly centralized administrative system that had become universal among secular powers during the decadence of Mediaevalism, and from which it had taken its colour, and it kept even pace for the future with the progressive intensification of this absolutism. This was natural, though in many respects deplorable, and it can be safely said that adverse criticism of the Catholic Church today is based only on qualities it acquired during the period of Renaissance autocracy and revived paganism; qualities that do not affect its essential integrity or authority but do misrepresent it before men, and work as a handicap in its adaptability and in its work of winning souls to Christianity and re-establishing the unity of Christendom. Fortunately this very immobility has saved it from a surrender to the new forces that were developed in secular society during the last two centuries, as it did yield to the compulsion of those that were let loose in the two that preceded them. It has never subjected questions of faith and morals to popular vote nor has it determined discipline by parliamentary practice under a well developed party system, therefore it has preserved its unity, its integrity and its just standard of comparative values. On the other hand, it has held so stubbornly to some of the ill ways of Renaissance centralization, which are in no sense consonant with its character, that it has failed to retard the constant movement of society away from a life wherein religion was the dominating and coordinating force, while at the present crisis it is as yet hardly more able than a divisive Protestantism to offer the regenerative energy that a desperate case demands.

I do not know whether secular society is responsible for the decadence of religion, or the decadence of religion is responsible for the failure of secular society, nor does it particularly matter. What I am concerned with is a condition amounting to almost complete severance between the two, and how we may "knit up this ravelled sleeve" of life so that once more we may have an wholesome unity in place of the present disunity; for until this is accomplished, until once more religion enters into the very marrow of social being, enters with all its powers of judgment and determination and co-ordination and creative energy, just so long shall we seek in vain for our way out into the Great Peace of righteous and consistent living.

Of course there is only one sure way, one method by which this, and all our manifold difficulties, can be resolved, and that is through the achieved enlightenment of the individual. As I have insisted in each of these lectures, salvation is not through machinery but through the individual soul, for it is life itself that is operating, not the instruments that man devises in his ingenuity. Yet the mechanism is of great value for even itself may give aid and stimulus in the personal regenerative process, or, on the contrary, it may deter this by the confusing and misleading influences it creates. Therefore we are bound to regard material reforms, and of these, as they suggest themselves in the field of organized religion, I propose to speak.

No one will deny the progressive alienation of life from religion that has developed since the Reformation and has now reached a point of almost complete severance. Religion, once a public preoccupation, has now withdrawn to the fastnesses of the individual soul, when it has not vanished altogether, as it has in the case of the majority of citizens of this Republic in so far as definite faith, explicit belief, application, practice and action are concerned. In the hermitage that some still make within themselves, religion still lives on as ardent and as potent and as regenerative as before, but in general, if we are to judge from the conduct of recent life, it is held, when it is accepted at all, with a certain formality, and is neither cherished with conviction nor allowed to interfere with the everyday life of the practical man. As a great English statesman remarked in the last century, "No one has a higher regard for religion than I, but when it comes to intruding it into public affairs, well, really—!"

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, uncooerdinate 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.

Free interchange of pulpits, a system of reciprocal re-ordination, a "merger" of church property and parsons, an "irreducible minimum" of credal insistencies these, and others even more ingeniously compromising, are the well-meaning schemes that are put forward, and in the process one point after another is surrendered, as a quid pro quo for the formal and technical capitulation of some other religious group.

It is demonstrable that even if these well-meaning approximations were received with favour—and thus far nothing of the kind has appeared—the result, so far as essential unity is concerned, would be nil. There is a perfectly definite line of division between the Catholic and the Protestant, and until this line is erased there is no possible unity, even if this were only official and administrative. The Catholic (and in respect to this one particular point I include under this title members of the Roman, Anglican and Eastern Communions) maintains and practices the sacramental system; the Protestant does not. There is no reason, there is indeed grave danger of sacrilege, in a joint reception of the Holy Communion by those who look on it as a mere symbol and those who accept it as the very Body and Blood of Christ. Protestant clergy are urged to accept ordination at the hands of Anglican bishops, but the plea is made on the ground of order, expediency, and the preservation of tradition; whereas the Apostolical succession was established and enforced not for these reasons but in order that the grace of God, originally imparted by Christ Himself, may be continued through the lines He ordained, for the making and commissioning of priests who have power to serve as the channels for the accomplishing of the divine miracle of the Holy Eucharist, to offer the eternal Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ for the quick and the dead, and to remit the penalty of sins through confession and absolution. If the laying on of hands by the bishop were solely a matter of tradition and discipline, neither Rome nor the Anglican Communion would be justified in holding to it as a condition of unity; if it is for the transmission of the Holy Ghost for the making of a Catholic priest, with all that implies and has always implied, then it is wrong, even in the interests of a formal unity, to offer it to those who believe neither in the priesthood nor in the sacraments in the Catholic and historic sense.

The conversion of the individual must take precedence of corporate action of any sort. When the secularist comes to believe in the Godhead of Christ he will unite himself with the rest of the faithful in a Church polity, but he will not do this, he has too much self-respect, simply because he is told by some ardent but minimizing parson that he does not have to believe in the Divinity of Christ in order to "join the church." When a Protestant comes to accept the sacramental system, to desire to participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the altar, to make confession of his sins and receive absolution, and to nourish and develop his spiritual nature by the use of the devotions that have grown up during nineteen hundred years, he will renounce his Protestantism, when his self-respect would not permit him to do this just because he had been assured that he need not really change any of his previous beliefs in order to ally himself with a Church that had better architecture and a more artistic ceremonial, and locally a higher social standing. When Anglicans or the Eastern Orthodox come to believe that a vernacular liturgy and a married priesthood and provincial autonomy are of less importance than Catholic unity, and when Roman Catholics can see that the same is of greater moment than a rigid preservation of Renaissance centralization and a cold "non possumus" in the matter of Orders, then the way will be open for the reunion of the West, where this operation cannot be affected by formal negotiations looking towards some form of legalistic concordat.

The evil heritage of the sixteenth century is still heavy upon us, and this heritage is one of jealousy and hate, not of charity and toleration. It is an heritage of legalism and technicalities, of self-will and individualism, of shibboleths that have become a dead letter, of prejudices that are fostered on distorted history and the propaganda of the self-seeking and the vain. The spirit of Christ is not in it, but the malice of Satan working upon the better natures of men and justifying in the name of conscience and principle what are frequently the workings of self-will and pride and intellectual obsession. This is the tragedy of it all; that Protestants and Anglicans and Roman Catholics are, so far as the majority are concerned, honestly convinced that they are right in maintaining their own divisiveness; in perpetuating an hundred Protestant sects on the basis of some variation in the form of baptism or church government or the method of conversion; in splitting up the Catholic Church because of a thousand year old disagreement as to a clause in the Creed which has a technical and theological significance only, or because one sector is alleged to have added unjustifiably to the Faith while the other is alleged to have unjustifiably taken away. Self-will and lack of charity, not love and the common will as these are revealed to the world through the Divine Will of Christ, are working here. The momentary triumph of evil over good, the passing victory that yet means the banishment of religion from the world, and the assurance of disaster still greater than that which is now upon us unless every man bends all his energies to the task of making the will of God prevail, first in himself, and so in the secular and ecclesiastical societies in and through which he plays his part in the life of the world—these are the fruits of a divided Christendom.

I honestly believe that the first real step towards reunion would be a prompt cessation of the whole process of criticism, vilification and abuse, one of the other, that now marks the attitude of what are known as "church periodicals." Roman, Anglican, Protestant, are all alike, for all maintain a consistent slanging of each other. I have in mind in particular weekly religious papers in the United States which maintain departments almost wholly made up of attacks on Roman Catholicism and the derision of incidents of bad taste or illiteracy in the Protestant denominations, and others which lose no opportunity to discredit or abuse the Episcopal Church and the Protestant denominations, and finally a curiously malevolent newspaper representing the worst type of Protestant ignorance and prejudice, which exists on its libelous and indecent and dishonest assaults on Catholicism wherever it may be found. These are not alone, for the condition of ascerbity and nagging is practically universal. It merely echoes the pulpit and a portion of the general public. We all know of the so called "church" in Boston that is the forum of "escaped nuns" and "unfrocked priests," but in many places of better repute the sermon that bitterly attacks Christian Science, or "High Church Episcopalianism," or the errors of Protestantism generally, or the "usurpations of Rome" is by no means unknown, while elsewhere than in Ireland, the public as a whole finds much pleasure in bating any religion that happens to differ from its own,—or offends its sense of the uselessness of all religion. Let us have a new "Truce of God," and for the space of a year let all clergy, lecturers, newspapers, religious journals, and private individuals, totally abstain from sneering and ill-natured attacks on other religions and their followers. Could this be accomplished a greater step would be taken towards the reunion of Christendom than could be achieved by any number of conferences, commissions, councils and conventions.

It was the will and the intent of Christ "that they all may be one, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me," and in disunity we deny Christ. There is no consideration of inheritance, of personal taste, of interests, of intellectual persuasion that can stand in the way of an affirmative answer to this prayer. Every man who calls himself a Christian and yet is not praying and working to break down the self-will and the self-conceit that, so often under the masquerade of conscience, hold him back from a return, even if it is only step by step, to the original unity of the Catholic Faith, is guilty of sin, while it is sin of an even graver degree that stands to the account of those who consciously work to perpetuate the division that now exists.

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.

It is disbelief in the efficacy of the sacraments and in the sacramental principle in life that is the essential barrier between Protestantism and Catholicism, and until this barrier is dissolved there can be neither formal unity nor unity by compromise. This is already widely recognized, and as well the actual loss that comes with the denial and abandonment of the sacraments. There is in the Presbyterian church of Scotland a strong tendency towards a reassertion of the full sacramental doctrine; the "Free Catholic" movement throughout Great Britain is made up of Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, and other representatives of Evangelical Protestantism, and it is working unreservedly for the recovery and application of all the Catholic sacraments, with the devotions and ritual that go with them. Dr. Orchard, the head, and a Congregational minister, maintains in London a church where, as a Methodist member of the "Free Catholic" organization wrote me the other day, "the Blessed Sacrament is perpetually reserved and 'High Mass' is celebrated on Sundays with the full Catholic ceremonial." In my own practice of architecture I am constantly providing Presbyterian, Congregational, and even Unitarian churches, by request, with chancels containing altars properly vested and ornamented with crosses and candles, while the almost universal demand is for church edifices that shall approach as nearly as possible in appearance to the typical Catholic church of the Middle Ages. Of course some of this is due to a revived instinct for beauty, that almost sacramental quality in life which was ruthlessly destroyed by Protestantism, and also to a renewed sense of the value of symbol and ritual; but back of it all is the growing consciousness that, as Dr. Newman Smythe says, Protestantism has definitely failed, or at least become superannuated; that the essence of religion is spiritual not intellectual, affirmative not negative, and that the only measure of safety lies in a return towards, if not actually to, the Catholic faith and practice from which the old revolt was affected. It is a movement both significant and full of profound encouragement.

Here then are two tendencies that surely show the way and demand encouragement and furtherance; recovery of the sense of Christian unity in Christ and through an united Catholic Church, and the re-acceptance of sacramentalism as the expression of that faith and as the method of that Church. I feel very strongly that wherever these tendencies show themselves they must be acclaimed and cherished. The Protestant denominations must be aided in every way in their process of recovery of the good things once thrown away; Episcopalians must be persuaded that nothing can be wrong that leads souls to Christ, and that therefore they must cease their opposition to Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament explicitly for adoration, to such devotions as Benediction and the Rosary simply because they have not explicit Apostolic sanction, or to vestments, incense and holy water because certain prescriptive laws passed four hundred years ago in England have never been repealed. Above all is it necessary that the Episcopal Church should declare itself formally for the reinstitution of the seven Catholic sacraments, with the Mass as the one supreme act of worship, obligatory as the chief service on Sundays and Holy Days, and both as communion and as sacrifice. In this connection there is one reform that would I think be more effective than any other, (except the exaltation of the Holy Eucharist itself) and that is the complete cessation of the practice of commissioning lay readers and using them for mission work and clerical assistance. A mission can be established and made fruitful only on the basis of the sacraments, and chiefly on those of the Holy Eucharist and Penance. It is not enough to send a zealous and well intentioned layman to "a promising mission field" in order that he may read Morning and Evening Prayer and some sermon already published. What is needed is a priest to say Mass and hear confessions, and nothing else will serve as a substitute. How this is to be accomplished, now when the candidates for Holy Orders are constantly falling off in number, with no immediate prospect of recovery, is a question. Perhaps we may learn something from the old custom of ordaining "Mass priests," without cure of souls and with a commission to celebrate the Holy Mysteries even while they continue their own secular work in the world. For my own part I am persuaded that the best solution lies in the establishing of diocesan monasteries where men may take vows for short terms, and, during the period of these vows, remain at the orders of the bishop to go out at any time and anywhere in the diocese and to do such temporary or periodical mission work as he may direct.

Unworldliness: I have referred to the great falling off in the number of candidates for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church; the same phenomenon is apparent in all the Protestant denominations, so far as I know, but it has not shown itself in the Roman Catholic Church. This defection parallels the falling-off of membership in the various churches (except again the Roman Catholic) in proportion to the increase in population. We are told that the diminution of the ministry is due to the starvation wages that are paid in the vast majority of cases, and of course it is true that where a married clergy is allowed, men who believe they have a calling both to ministerial and to domestic life will think twice before they follow the call of the first when the pecuniary returns are such as to make the second impossible, which is, generally speaking, the situation today. To obviate this difficulty many religious bodies have recently established pension funds, but even this form of clerical insurance, together with the increase that has been effected in clerical stipends, has shown no results in an increase of students in theological seminaries and in candidates for Orders. The man who has enough of faith in God and a strong enough call to the ministry of Christ, will answer the call even if he does think twice before doing so. The trouble lies, I believe, in the very lack of faith and in a failure of confidence in organized religion largely brought about by organized religion itself through the methods it has pursued during the last two or three generations. There is a widespread belief that it is compromising with the world; that it is playing fast and loose with faith and discipline in a vain opportunism that voids it of spiritual power. Even where distrust does not reach this disastrous conclusion, there is a growing feeling of repugnance to the methods now being adopted in high quarters to "sell religion" to the public, as is the phrase which is sufficient in itself to explain the falling away that now seems to be in process. The attempt to win unwilling support by the methods of the "institutional church," the rampant advertising, so frequently under the management of paid "publicity agents"; the setting apart of half the Sundays in the year for some one or other special purpose, usually the raising of money for a specific and frequently worthy object; the "drives" for millions, the huge and impressive organizations, "scientifically" conducted, for rounding up lapsed communicants, or doubtful converts, or cash and pledges for missions, or pensions, or the raising of clergy stipends; the "Nation-wide Campaign," the "Inter-Church World Movement"; these—not to speak of the growing policy of "making it easy" for the hesitant to "come into the church" by minimizing unpopular clauses in the Creeds or loosening-up on discipline, and of attracting "advanced" elements by the advocacy and exploiting of each new social or industrial or political fad as it arises—are strong deterrents to those who honestly and ardently hunger for religion that is religion and neither social service nor "big business."

Christ said "you cannot serve both God and mammon," and this is one of the few cases where He stated a moral condition as a fact instead of indicating the right or the wrong possibility in action. Organized Christianity has for some time been trying to render this dual service, and the penalty thereof is now on the world. This consideration seems to me so important and so near the root of our troubles, and not in the field of organized religion alone, that I am going to quote at length from the Rev. Fr. Duffy of the American "Society of the Divine Compassion." What he has said came to me while I was preparing this lecture, and it is so much better than anything I could say that for my present purpose I make it my own.

"To the thoughtful person, and the need of reformation will appeal only to the thoughtful person, it must on reflection become abundantly evident that the chief necessity of our times in the religious world is the recovery of Faith. Probably lack of the true measure of Faith has been the story of every generation, with few exceptions, in the long history of Christianity, but there possibly never has been a time when men talked more of it and possessed less than in our own day. * * * *"

"Christianity is a new thing of splendid vision for each and every generation of men, unique in its promise and unapproached in its attraction. And yet how small a factor we have made it in the world's moulding compared with what it might be. We have not achieved a tiny part of what we might have achieved, because we lack the essentials of achievement; Faith and Faith's vision. Obsessed, after centuries of discussion and persecution, with the notion that faith is made up of mere belief, we have lost the secret of that victorious power that overcomes the world, and are weakly dependent upon the world's means for what spiritual operation we undertake. And so content have we grown with things as they are, that what they might be comes only as a dream that passes away quickly with the night; blind to our appalling money-dependency in modern religion, satisfied that the Kingdom of Heaven is as nigh to us as is possible under present conditions of society, we practically have substituted for the theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, the ascending degrees of belief, resignation, money. This is partly due to our religious inheritance and partly to mental and spiritual sloth which dislikes the effort of thinking, preferring easy acquiescence in conditions that are the resultants of blinded vision. For dependency upon money is not something merely of the present, but a condition in the spiritual sphere that is largely a product of a long past. The really inexcusable thing is our willingness, in a day of greater light and knowledge, to close our eyes to the true nature of the unattractive, anaemic thing we call faith, which would be seen as powerless to achieve at all, if taken out of the soil of material means in which it has been planted."

He then gives various instances of methods actually put in practice amongst the churches and denominations which indicate the renunciation of faith and an exclusive reliance on worldy agencies and he then continues:

"The Joint Commission on Clergy Pensions, appointed by the General Convention of 1913, made as the basis for apportionment, not the services of self-denial of, but the amount of stipend received by, the clergy eligible for pension, thus penalizing the priest who, for the love of God, sacrificed a larger income to accept work in the most needed places where toil is abundant and money scarce. It must be evident, of course, that the motive of the Commission is not an endorsement of the blasphemous gospel of Success, by adding penalty to the self-denying clergy; what is painfully obvious is their apparent unbounded confidence that there are no clergy sufficiently foolish to sacrifice stipend at the call of faith's venture! And since the Armistice, the only real activity in organized religion has been a series of "drives" for vast sums of money, in most cases professionally directed.

"A consideration of a few facts such as the forgoing must readily convince even the most unimaginative person that whatever power faith might have had in the past, it counts for little today; that its secrets, its very meaning have been forgotten. Otherwise there could not be this extraordinary exaggeration of the place of money in spiritual operation, and the unblushing, tacit admission that mammon, which Christ so warned against, had been recognized as the master of spiritual situation, instead of the willing servant and useful adjunct of faith it was designed to be in the Christian vision. Indeed they all speak of that, largely unconscious, atmosphere of distrust of God which is so all-prevailing among Christian people today. If the great, positive vice of the age is covetousness, the great negative one is distrust of God; the two invariably go together as parts of a whole—one is the reverse side of the other—for, it is not that we must not, or ought not, but that we "cannot serve God and mammon." And this atmosphere is one in which faith cannot exist, it is stifled, crushed, killed, except it breathe the pure, sweet air of God, with which it can alone surround itself when human hearts will.

"It is not surprising that out of such conditions should grow false values, and that spirituality should be measured by the world's standard. Thus we have fallen into the vicious habit of adjudging qualifications for spiritual leadership among the clergy by the amount of their stipends, and measuring their potentialities for usefulness in the Kingdom of God by the amount of their yearly incomes; among the laity, the men of power are ever the men of material means, whom we permit to play the part of Providence in feeding and sustaining the Church from large purses, the filling of which will not always bear close investigation, and the really successful parish is always the one that, no matter what its spiritual condition, rejoices in abundant material means. So evident is it that the means of spiritual life have been so confused with the purely material, that it occasions no surprise when a neighbourhood having changed from the residence district of the comparatively well-to-do to the very poor, the vestry feels bound to consider the moving of the church to a more 'desirable' quarter.

"These, of course, are hard facts to face, and it is not strange that we should seek to evade them by a false optimism that thinks evil is eliminated by merely contemplating good. The point is, they must be faced, and at a time when there is some evidence of a little awakening, it must more and more force itself into the consciousness of the thoughtful that the dead spiritual conditions of today are due to the shifting of faith from God to material things as the means of achieving. The only hope lies in the apparent unconsciousness of the error. This is invariably the atmosphere that prevails when ecclesiastical history repeats itself in corruption; it had been true of more than two or three generations, though obviously unseen save by a few of those contemporary with the times, that in Jerusalem, 'the heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money; yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say: Is not the Lord among us? None evil can come upon us.' Corporate unconsciousness, in greater or less measure, of these conditions, may influence the degree of guilt, but never can acquit of the sin. And the cold, naked truth is that today we stand almost helpless before a world of peculiar problems.

"What is there here to reflect the power and might of Christianity, such as the early Church, especially, possessed, and subsequent generations, in times of great faith, really knew so much of—the power to heal the sick, to cast out devils, to achieve wonders out of Christ's poverty, to experience the thrilling joy of religion in the ever-abiding Divine Presence, and witness the marvels of faith in the conquering of the world? How is it we are no longer able to communicate the secrets to the suffering world which are able to transmute the people's want into God's plenty, and attract and hold the hearts of men with the joys of the Vision Splendid? Why is it that hope has given way to resignation, that the preaching of forgiveness has been dwarfed by the insistence upon penalty, that distinct evils in the physical sphere are attributed to God and, because of that, held up to religious estimation as good; the day of miracles is regarded as belonging to a far distant past, the answering of prayer looked upon as the exception instead of the rule, and the old melody of joy in religion exchanged for the wail of despair in an interpretation of 'Thy will be done' that is only associated with human calamity? The reply is as simple as, to the thoughtful person, it is obvious: we have lost knowledge of a living, vital, conquering faith that is rooted in God Himself, and have satisfied the hunger of human sense by placing trust in the things of the earth which we see and touch, and in so doing lost the power spiritually to achieve.

"Now we can only approach, in the hope of a day of better things, the great practical and intellectual problems of our times from the standpoint of faith's recovery, for it is only in their relationship to faith they can be viewed intelligently by the Christian. And it will be found that at the root of all our difficulties and all our negligences—so many of them unconscious—and as the cause of our vain expediencies and attempts to justify the corporate spiritual situation, is the absence of vital faith and a whole obedience to which God alone has conditioned results. We need sorely to reconsider what faith really is, and when we have recovered in some measure that knowledge of it in experience, which declared its unspeakable worth in the early Church and in later periods of ecclesiastical history which stand out before all others, we shall look back upon our past distrust of God and His promises with shame and wonderment, and proceed to revise our cataloguing of spiritual values and degrees of sin. For the really destructive thing, before all others, is a weakened faith that compromises in a half obedience to Christ and a search for earthly props. The work of Satan has even been the prompting of distrust of God in the human family, just as the work of redemption means so largely the re-establishing of it in the Person of Jesus Christ. From the first temptation of man to the present moment, all the forces of evil have concentrated upon breaking man's trust in God and His promises; every sin has had that as its ultimate end, and every disaster, ill and trial, in the world and individual life, is subtly presented by the enemy of God and man (knowing our haziness of vision), so as to place the appearances against the Creator in a blind disregard for the created; just as in the life of the Incarnate Son all the great power of the forces of darkness were brought to bear unsuccessfully upon the snapping of His faith in His Father—from the time He was tempted to believe Himself forgotten, when hungering and physically reduced in the wilderness after His long fast, until the dreadful cry of dereliction from the Cross at the very end.

"The call for reformation today, then, is to the doing of things left undone, the search for and recovery of almost lost spiritual powers that alone lastingly can achieve for God and hasten man's salvation. And this requires the venture and daring that breaks from the world, withdraws from compromise, and that, rightly estimating the character and attitude of God, refuses longer to believe Him the author of evils we resignedly accept today by calling them good; and instead, claims the powers of the Divine promises for the utter destruction of the world's ills by a strict dependence upon spiritual forces and weapons for the accomplishment of results. Above all, this means a change and reform in corporate conduct as the end of repentance, for the present almost total disregard of the laws and principles of Christian living as given in the Sermon on the Mount."

These are hard sayings and strong doctrine, but will any one say they are not true? The weakening of religion, with the consequent decline of civilization, is ultimately to be traced back to organized religion, not to religion itself, and still less to any inherent defects in Christianity. Where organized religion has failed it deserved to fail, because it countenanced disunion, forsook the saving sacraments, and finally compromised with worldliness and materialism. With each one of these false ventures faith began to weaken amongst the mass of people until at last this, which can always save, and alone can save, ceased to have either the power or the will to force the organism to conform to the spirit. If we have indeed accomplished the depth of our fall, then the time is at hand when we may hope and pray for a new outpouring of divine grace that will bring recovery.

There are wide evidences that men earnestly desire this. I have already spoken of the great corporate movements towards unity, and these mean much even though they may at present take on something of the quality of mechanism instead of depending on the individual and the grace of God working in him. The "World Conference on Faith and Order," the just effected federation of the Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists in Canada, above all the eirenic manifesto of the Bishops at the last Lambeth Conference, all indicate a new spirit working potently in the souls of men. Concrete results are not as yet conspicuous, but the spirit is there and a beginning has been made. Even more significant is the wide testimony to the need for definite, concrete and pervasive religion that is daily given by men whose names have hitherto been quite dissociated from matters of this kind; scientists, educators, men of business and men of public life. It may be testimony in favour of some new invention, some synthetic product of curious and abnormal ingredients; as a matter of fact it frequently is, and we confront such remarkable products as Mr. Wells has given us, for example. The significant thing, however, is the fact of the desire and the avowal; if we have this I think we may leave it to God to see that the desire is satisfied in the end by heavenly food and not by the nostrums of ingenuity. For the same reason we may look without dismay on certain novel phenomena of the moment. In their divergence from "the Faith once delivered to the Saints" and left in the keeping of the Church Christ founded as a living and eternal organism through which His Spirit would work forever, they are wrong and therefore they cannot endure, but each testifies to the passionate desire in man for religion as a reality, and no one of them comes into existence except as the result of desperate action by men to recover something that had been taken from them and that their souls needed, and would have at any cost. Each one of these strange manifestations is a reaction from some old error that had become established belief or custom. No one who holds to historic Christianity is interested in them, but those who have found religion intellectualized beyond endurance and transformed either by materialism or rationalism, seek for the mysticism they know to be a reality (to employ a paradox) in the ultra mysticism of Oriental cults; those who revolt against the exaggeration of evil and its exaltation to eminence that rivals that of God Himself, which is the legacy of one powerful movement in the Reformation, rush to the other extreme and deny the existence of evil and even the reality of matter, while spiritism, the most insidious, perilous and fatal of all the spiritual temptations that beset the world at this time, gains as its adherents those who have been deprived of the Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints and have been forbidden to pray for the dead or to ask for their prayers and intercessions.

However strange and erroneous the actual manifestation, there is no question as to the reality and prevalence of the desire for the recovery of spiritual power through the channels of religion. It shows itself, as it should, first of all in the individual, and it is only recently that organized religion, Catholic or Protestant, has begun to show a sympathetic consciousness and to take the first hesitant steps towards meeting the demand. Because of this the seekers for reality have been left unshepherded and have wandered off into strange wildernesses. The call is now to the churches, to organized religion, and if the call is heeded our troubles are well on the road to an end. If the old way of jealousy, hatred and fear is maintained, then humanly speaking, our case is hopeless. If the older way of brotherhood, charity and loving-kindness is followed the future is secure in the Great Peace. Nothing is wrong that leads men to Christ, and this is true from the Salvation Army at one end of the scale to the Seven Sacraments of Catholicity at the other. The world demands now not denial but affirmation, not protest and division but the ringing "Credo" of Catholic unity.



VIII

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.

We have tried to approach each subject in this course of lectures in the spirit of peace, and the greatest contributory factor in the achieving of the Great Peace is the individual himself, on whom, humanly speaking, rests the final responsibility. "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." Not by majestical engines and curious devices and mass-action, nor yet by an imposed human authority enforced by arms and the law, but by the Holy Spirit of God working through the individual soul and compelling the individual will. Peace is one of the promised fruits of the Holy Spirit, and like the others is manifested through human lives; therefore on us rests the preeminent responsibility of showing forth in ourselves, first of all, those things we desire for others and for society.

We have experienced the Great War, we endure its aftermath, and amidst the perils and dangers that follow both there is none greater than that which attaches to exterior war, viz., that the attention of both combatants is focussed on the faults and the weaknesses and the crimes of the opponent, with the result that both become destructive critics rather than constructive examples. Chesterton rightly says, "What is wrong with the critic is that he does not criticise himself * * * rather he identifies himself with the ideal." Seeing evil in others and flattering one's self is the antithesis of the spirit that would lead to the Great Peace, for in that spirit the field of warfare is transferred from the external to the internal, and the interior contest, which alone establishes lasting results, necessitates a recognition of our own error and the need of amendment of our own life.

If our modern devices have failed; if the things we invented with a high heart and high hope, in government, industry, society, education, philosophy have in the end brought disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, it is less because of their inherent defects than because the individual failed, and himself ceased to act as the sufficient channel for the divine power which alone energizes our weak little engines and which acts through the individual alone. There is no better demonstration of this essential part played by the personal life of man than the fact that God, for the redemption of the world, took on human form and became one Man amongst many men. There is no better demonstration of the fact that it is through the personal lives of individuals that the Great Peace is to be achieved, both directly and indirectly, than the fact that peace, the gift of the Holy Spirit, was promised to the individual man, by Christ Himself, as the legacy he left to his disciples after His Resurrection and Ascension. Since then the world has been under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, the "Guide and Comforter" that was promised, even though it has blindly and from time to time rejected the guidance and therefore known not the comfort. The Old Law of "Thou shalt not" was followed by the New Law of "Thou shalt," and this in turn by the law of the third Person of the Trinity which does not supersede the dispensations of the Father and of the Son, but fulfills them in that it affords the spiritual power, if we will, to abide by the inhibitions and to carry out the commands.

Our search is for peace, the Great Peace, "the Peace of God which passeth all understanding," and we shall achieve this for ourselves and for the world only through ourselves as individuals, and so for the society of which we are a part, and in so far as we bring ourselves into contact with the Spirit of God. There is deep significance in the fact that the first time Christ used the salutation "Peace be unto you," was after His resurrection. It would seem that this special gift of the Holy Spirit had to be withheld from man until after the human life of God the Son had been brought to an end in accomplishment, for He says "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." "It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you: but if I depart I will send Him unto you. When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth." "Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you."

It is the spirit that quickeneth. After God had revealed the Law and given to us the great redeeming and atoning Life, He saw that we had need of a further manifestation before we should be able to keep the law and live the life. Therefore the Holy Spirit was sent to quicken us and give us power to do what we had both heard and seen. Today we accept the moral law, we recognize the perfection of Chirst's life, but we need to be reminded again that the power to be "sons of God" is present with us if we will but use it. As this power is a spirit it can only be apprehended spiritually; when our minds and hearts are set on material things, even on good material things, the "still small voice" of the spirit remains unheard: but if we listen first to that inward voice and then use the means of grace afforded us, we are enabled to lift up our hearts and minds to the Creator and then to use in His service all the material universe which is also His creation. We can not get a right philosophy by working for right philosophy, but only by living in the right relationship as individuals: then as a by-product of religion a right philosophy will come. We can not get a right industrial system by searching for a right industrial system, but if we show forth in our lives the Christian virtues, a right industrial system will come as one of the by-products of religion. So with each one of our so-called "problems." Life rightly lived has no problems. This is a hard saying for an intellectual age whose temptation is to trust in its own power rather than in the power of God, but "except ye become as little children" and walk by faith and not by sight the Kingdom of God is withheld. A soldier who suffered in the late war, and out of his suffering found peace, says, "Christ's hardest work is to teach the wise: Those who are entrusted with authority and responsibility will be the least prepared to make the venture of the Spirit, however much they may believe in it. They are sacrificing least now: they will have to sacrifice most when the Spirit comes. They have so much to unlearn: children and working men have so little. The whole of our world today is rooted and grounded in intellect. Our machinery, our institutions, our great systems, the entire body of enterprise is governed by brains. It is this that will alter. Just behind intellect there is a vision that is purer, keener, more powerful than the vision of your eyes, than the hearing of your ears, than the touch of your hands. This world is being transformed into another which comes into being at our spiritual touch. The world needs something personal, something from the heart. It is sick to death with the cold machinery of the intellect. But before men see this they must change their view of life, they must be born again. The scientists, the historians and theologians, the philosophers, have made the universe too big. It is not a big place: it is very tiny. Life is so simple, really. Our wise men have made it so difficult, so ugly. It is only children who can see the risen Christ; children, perhaps, out of whom seven devils have been cast. The world needs not critics, but teachers, and children are waiting everywhere to teach, but men, shutting the windows of their souls, try rather to mould these little ones to fit into the vacant spaces of their own stupid world. Are not children the true artists? They won't tolerate anything but Beauty. They see Beauty everywhere, not because it is there, but because they want it there. Everything they touch turns into something far more precious than gold: every word they utter is a song of praise. You are almost in heaven every time you look into the eyes of a child." Remember, please, these are the words of a man who has faced the horrible realities of modern warfare, and so do not dismiss them as mere poetry, or with Nicodemus' question, "How can a man be born again?", but listen to a modern interpretation of the answer to that question:—("The Life Indeed.") "We must be born again even to see the spiritual kingdom, must be born of water and the spirit to enter its gates at all. So to his little audience of disciples Our Lord says it is not an affair of legislation, of discovery, of which men say, 'Lo here, lo there! but the kingdom of heaven is within you. Why a second birth? This is a second birth because it must needs supervene at a point where two elements can work together, the element of an appealing, vitalizing spirit from the unseen and the element of free human choice. Being of the spirit, it is the birth into freedom: it is the soul emerging from its prison into the open air of liberty and light and life." Note the element of free choice. Our first birth is outside our choice and the gifts are unconditioned; our second birth, when again we become as little children, demands our response to the Holy Spirit and our persevering cooperation with Him to make His influence effectual for ourselves and for the "communion of saints" and the corporate religion into which the Spirit also baptizes us. In a recent sermon a bishop of the Episcopal Church says, "This is the creed of the Church—the Divine Father and Forgiveness: the Divine Son and Redemption: the Divine Spirit and Abundant Life. Therefore the Church still insists upon the creation of moral rectitude and spiritual character as the end and purpose of religion, aye, as the basic problem underlying all questions relating to human life—social, industrial, civic, and political. The Church still preaches the gospel of the Grace of God, the obligation and blessing of worship, the meaning and virtue of the Christian Sacraments." Also "My brethren, we shall not be content to criticize and find fault with our own age and time, but rather we shall pray for the power to see within its questionings, unrest and discontent—aye, its recklessness and apparent failures—the strivings of the Spirit of God. But each man has to voice for himself the conviction of the reality of the spiritual order and the spiritual life. Therefore, let us believe in and practice the worship of God, 'praying always' as St. Paul says, 'with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit,' or as St. Jude says, 'building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.'"

Let us accept this suggestion and try to find in the unrest of our own time evidences of "the strivings of the Spirit of God," waiting our perception and response. The soldier of the Great War, having faced death and imprisonment and suffering in many forms says, "compared with the depth of good in the world the evil is shallow." The first evidence of good in our own day is the almost universal discontent with evils and the desire to find a better way. The humility which recognizes that so widespread a condition cannot be the fault of any one nation or group but is rather the responsibility of each one of us, is cause for hope. Some of us believe that war can breed only war, hatred only hatred; that governments cannot make peace, but can only cause cessation of open hostilities, and that the real peace, the Great Peace, must await the action of the Spirit. This Spirit, of love and forgiveness, breeds love and forgiveness, indeed is far more potent than the spirit of hate. Because of this very strength and potency its evidences are not so immediately apparent, but they are deeper-rooted. Perhaps in this material sphere we human beings must see, and to a certain extent experience, hate, before we can really know love, and consciously and freely choose it. When that choice is made, when we, knowing all that hate and evil and malice can accomplish, yet deliberately choose to love our enemies, we have slain the Adversary and made hate and evil powerless. Of course we have not power of ourselves to do this but only through the grace of God. When we try God's way, not waiting for the other person to reform or to be generous or to speak gently or to forgive, then and only then do we deserve the name of Christians; then and only then are we walking in love; then and only then are we really praying effectually "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven." We have tried the way of the world, the way of reprisals, the way of distrust, and, thank God, we are none of us satisfied with the results. Perhaps now we may be ready to try the way of God by making the great adventure of faith, each one in his own person; faith in himself and faith in the future. The way of the world has bred fear that has issue in hate, and hate that has issue in fear; but the better way, that of faith, breeds trust that has issue in fellowship, and fellowship that has issue in trust. There is no problem of labour, of politics, of society that is insoluble if once it is approached in the spirit of faith and fellowship and trust, but none of these is susceptible of solution where the controlling motives are hate, distrust and fear. The modern policy of centralization and segregation has resulted in dealing with men as groups and not as individuals. When, for example, iron-bound cults (they are no less than this) meet as "capital" and as "labour," both merge the individuality of their members in a thing which has no real or necessary existence but is an artificial creation of thought operating under the dominion of ephemeral, almost accidental conditions. As a member of an "interest" or a cult, where humanity and personality are, so to speak, "in commission," a man does not hesitate to do those things he would never think of doing for himself, knowing them to be selfish, cruel, unjust and uncharitable. A case in point—if we need one, which is hardly probable since they are of daily occurrence—is the pending contest between the mine operators and mine workers in Great Britain, where both parties, with Government thrown in, are guilty of maintaining theories and perpetrating acts for which an individual would be, even now, excoriated and outlawed. The Irish imbroglio is another instance of the same kind.

In a personal letter from a consulting engineer who has had unusual opportunities, by reason of his official position, to come closely in contact with the conditions governing industry and finance both in America and Europe since the war, I find this illuminating statement of a matured judgment. "As a practical matter, and facing the issue, I would preach the practice of de-centralization in government and business which will in time develop the individual and accomplish the desired end. * * * Decentralization should be carried to such an extent that the units of business would be of such size that the head could again have a personal relation with each individual associated with him. * * * With the personal relation again established, unionism as at present practiced would again be unnecessary, and the unions would become once more guilds for the development and advancement of the individual." It is this nullification of the human element, of the person as such, the introduction of the gross aggregate with its artificial corporate quality, and the attempt to establish a correspondence between these unnatural things, the whole being intensified by the emotions of fear, distrust and hate, which produces the contemporary insistence on "rights" and the rank injustice, cruelty and disorder that follow the blind contest. To quote again from the soldier who achieved illumination through the recent war, "My friends, there is no protection of rights in heaven. When we speak of rights we are blinded by the light of this world of rule and order and intellectual conceits. It is not justice we need, it is mercy."

If we honestly endeavour to bring about something more nearly approaching the Kingdom of God on earth, we should do well to achieve a little more of the quality of child-like trust which knows that through the petition to father or mother, or to a guardian angel, or directly to God, the result will surely follow. We long passionately to see a good, our good as we see it, accepted here and now, but whatever we offer, no mater how righteous or how salutary, is but a small part of the great good, a limited and partial showing forth of only one element, while the final and comprehensive good is the result of many contributions, and in the end is not ours, but God's, and by His overruling providence it may look very unlike what we had predetermined and anticipated. Moreover, the condition even of our own small good becoming effective, is faith, and neither sight nor action. There is a faith that can move mountains, and it is faith in fellowship, in the underlying, indestructible good in man, above all in the desire and the intent of God to deal mercifully with us and beyond the dictates of justice and the claims of our own deserts. When we know and accept this power of faith, placing it above the efficiency of our own feeble works, then indeed we may become the patient, hopeful, joyful and faithful Christians we were intended to be, and therefore the creators of the spirit of peace. Nothing permanent can be achieved except in cooeperation with God; any work of man alone (or of the devil) has in it the seed of decay and must perish, This knowledge relieves us of the gloomy responsibility of destroying or trying to destroy every evil thing we see or think we see. If it is really evil it is already dying unless nourished by evil within ourselves. Here is a Buddhist legend which has a lesson for each of us—"The watcher in the shrine of Buddha rushed in to the Holy Fathers one morning with tidings of a horrible demon who had usurped the throne of our Lord Buddha. The Fathers ran to the throne room, each one more infuriated than the other, and declaimed against the insolence of the demon, who grew huger and more hideous at every angry word that hurtled through the air. At last arrived the oldest and most saintly of the monks and threw himself on his knees before the demon and said, "We thank thee, O Master, for teaching us how much anger and wrath and jealousy was still hidden in our hearts." At every word he said, the demon grew smaller and smaller and at last vanished. He was am Anger-Eating Demon, and anger-rousing words and even thoughts of ill-feeling nourished him.

The belief that in comparison with the depth of good in the world the evil is shallow may also be expressed in the statement that God is Lord of Eternity while the devil is prince only of this world. As this evil spirit has power, and as a part of this power is the ability to appear as an angel of light, so to deceive us, we are bound by self-examination, constantly indulged in, to scrutinize those things, so common in our own lives we do not notice them, which may be but the illusions of this spirit of darkness showing as a fictitious spirit of light: Hurry and carelessness both in thought and in action; snap-judgment at short range; compromise with the spirit of the time in the interest of "good business," "practical considerations" or "sound policy"; worship of the doctrine of "get results," acceptance of the horrible principle: that it is every man's business to "sell" something to another, from a patent medicine or "gilt edged" bonds to a new philosophy or an old religion; the estimating of values by size, number, cost. It is common parlance among Christian people to speak of what a man "is worth" meaning how much money he has. We speak of a man's "making a living" meaning only how much money he makes, when by making only money he would be killing his living. Do we not speak of the call of a missionary from an unshepherded flock to a large city parish as a call to "a wider sphere of usefulness"? When you or I conceive of any piece of work as "important" is it not because it involves either great numbers or great sums of money? Then we hear much today of the need for leaders. The need could not be exaggerated, but does not this lack exist, in part, because we have forgot that the Christian's first duty is to be a follower, and that only from amongst real followers can God (not man, least of all the man himself) raise up a leader? These are small matters, you may say, but "straws show which way the wind blows," and the spirit, like the wind, manifests itself first in small matters. Every life is made up largely of small things, "the little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love" which some one has called "the noblest portion of a good man's life."

With this brief glance at some of the possible manifestations of the spirit of evil which we believe to be temporary and therefore of secondary importance only, let us consider some of the requisites of the Christian life as exemplified in the life of Christ, especially those of which we need to be reminded today. We have already spoken of that child-likeness which takes the faith simply and applies it to the common things of daily life—Christ's life of ministry, of good works (which was, in proportion to the time given to preparation for activity and preaching, of very short duration), full of injunctions to those who were with him to "tell no man"; therefore the good works which are done "in His likeness" must not be done in public. If we are "seen of men," verily we have our reward. Christ's life ended in apparent failure, in ignominious death on the cross. The world worships today's success and immediate publicity, the Christian, to be worthy of his Lord, must accept apparent failure and must offer his best work in secret: "And my Father which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly." A touching poem of Francis Thompson's pictures the marveling of a soul on his rewards in Paradise which, in his humility, he thinks undeserved. The man asks of God:

O when did I give Thee drink erewhile, Or when embrace Thine unseen feet? What gifts Thee give for my Lord Christ's smile, Who am a guest here most unmeet?

and is answered

When thou kissedest thy wife and children sweet (Their eyes are fair in my sight as thine) I felt the embraces on My feet. (Lovely their locks in thy sight and Mine.)

A necessary reminder of the fact that for each of us, charity, which is love, begins at home, and that we love and serve God best in His holy human relationships—if we love not our brother whom we have seen how can we love God whom we have not seen?

Again, the individual Christian life must, like its Great Original, suffer for others. When we suffer as a result of our own wrongdoing we are but meeting our just reward; but if patiently and humbly and voluntarily we bear pain, even unto death, for others, we are transcending justice, the pagan law, and exemplifying mercy, the Christian virtue. No sensitive soul in this generation, conscious of the sacrifice of the millions of young lives who "stormed Heaven" in their willingness to die that others might live, can doubt this. The essence of love is sacrifice; voluntary, nay eager sacrifice. Before our Blessed Lord died He was mocked and ridiculed, He suffered physical hardship, falling under the weight of the cross, and He was lifted up, crucified, to suffer the ignominious death of a felon. He was made a spectacle for the jests and laughter of the multitude. In our own time and amongst ourselves, except for periods of war, there is little necessity for physical suffering for our faith, but the need to endure ridicule is as great as ever, perhaps even greater because of the absence of physical suffering. Since we are trying to apply these things in small and simple ways to the individual life let us each one consider how much moral courage it takes to defend Christian virtues when they are sneered at under the guise of "jokes." Let us exercise charity by not quoting instances, but let us be watchful of our laughter and our fellowship, which are both gifts of God, and see that we do not confuse pagan pleasure with Christian joy, the evil sneer with the tender recognition of the absurd in ourselves and in others. It is Mr. Chesterton again who points out the fact that the pagan virtues of justice and the like which he calls the "sad virtues" were superseded, when the great Christian revelation came, by the "gay and exuberant virtues," the virtues of grace, faith, hope and charity; and who says, "the pagan virtues are the reasonable virtues, and the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity are in their essence as unreasonable as they can be. Charity means pardoning what is unpardonable or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible or it is no virtue at all." If you say this is a paradox I reply: it must be so, since it requires faith to accept a paradox. The realm of reason is the one in which we walk by sight, and of this fact our age in its pride of intellect has need to be reminded. If Christ be not the Son of God, and His revelation of the "faith once delivered" be not the divine and final guide, fulfilling, completing and at the same time reversing every other ethic, religion and moral code, then these things be indeed foolishness, for there is no explaining them on the ground of logic or philosophy. But if, by the gift of grace, we have faith, we remember "I thank Thee, Father, that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes: even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight."