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.