Towards the Great Peace eBook

Ralph Adams Cram
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 238 pages of information about Towards the Great Peace.

Towards the Great Peace eBook

Ralph Adams Cram
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 238 pages of information about Towards the Great Peace.
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

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Towards the Great Peace from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.