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.
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

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Towards the Great Peace from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.