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.