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