straining rich men from luxury, moulding the young to asceticism, comforting the aged with holiness; sending forth soldiers to die and anointing generals to conquer. You may call it angelic or you may call it satanic, but if you choose the latter term you must carefully remember that Satan was also an archangel, though a ruined one.

Naturally, when so complete a system as Calvinism had come into being there was no sense in trying to identify it with so complete a system as Catholicism. The two produced an antithesis.

Gradually, too, the earlier High Church Protestantism yielded to Calvinism. Calvinism pervaded the English Church and exerted a great influence in North Germany, until the national (1839) Unionskirche of Frederick William III turned over German Lutheranism to Calvinism, bound hand and foot. The Caroline divines seem to have rescued the Church of England, but, on the continent, south of the Main, there was nothing but Calvinism. Into the very democratic dregs of Anabaptistry Calvinism penetrated. Calvinism, in most countries, came to be the real Protestantism. Catholicism, which Lutheranism and Anglicanism clung to earnestly enough, was spurned by triumphant Calvinism. It was not logically needed. Calvinism was intellectually as whole as Catholicism itself. So there arose, in the early third stage of the religious revolution, the antithesis Protestantism vs. Catholicism, meaning by Protestantism, Calvinism.

This antithesis of Protestantism vs. Catholicism continues. It is wrought into the marrow of those communities, continental and Anglo-Saxon, that passed through Calvinism. Protestantism as a whole is forever lost to Catholicism. Broken remnants of the old early High Church Protestantism do cling to the Catholic tradition. They even develop the tradition. The Catholic movement seeks

to prevail in two or three of the older religious bodies. Perhaps Catholicism will prevail in Anglicanism, or in Scandinavia, or even, eventually, among the more conservative Lutherans. But just so far as the High Church, or Catholic movement prevails, these religious bodies are definitely and forever cut off from the Protestant world. Individual Protestants of course may become High Lutherans or High Anglicans or even Roman Catholics. In that case, however, they cease to be Protestants. Protestantism, so long as it exists at all, exists as Anti-catholic. There can be no Church unity or confederacy or any other approach between the two. The antithesis has been wrought into the marrow of the bones of men. Any union with Protestant denominations means, for the religouis bodies of that older, earlier Protestantism, a complete transformation. Any catholicizing of Protestant denominations of the later sort is unthinkable. The High Church denominations must resist the tentatives of union or they perish. The denominations whose history leads through Calvinism are so deeply anti-Catholic that their conversion to High Church principles is unthinkable.

Yet a terrible tragedy befell this Anti-Catholic Protestantism about one hundred years ago. Calvinism died.

Why Calvinism died is another story, but the fact is patent. Today there is about as much true Calvinism in existence as there is Druidism.

For one hundred years the grey waves of the great shapeless sea of denominational Protestantism have tossed and moaned to every wind of current thought. It is a vast and moaning sea. There is no unity therein nor system nor current nor stream. Only this is apparent. It is the sea. It is not the shore.

The mighty logic of Geneva is no more. Only the negative result remains. That negative is the negation of Catholicism.

The Causes of Division in Christendom

REV. JOHN EDWARDS LE BOSQUET, Ph. D.

HURCH unity must be built up, if it is to mean any

be expected to come out of the clouds of a vague desire and expectation. And if we are to be in touch with the facts it will be necessary to know the "unhappy divisions" between us for what they are, and not to be hastily assuming them to be what they are not. Knowledge, here too, must precede action. In that sense our differences will prove the bases from which the unifying of those differences must develop.

Our discussions and resolutions looking toward Church unity are proceeding from the assumption that the dividing lines between Christians are their denominational affiliations-Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, etc. The moment one pauses to think, however, that moment one must realize that these are superficial. Important though they are, materially speaking they seldom represent profound spiritual distinctions between different sorts and conditions of earnest believers.

As matter of fact, our various imposing religious bodies arose mostly from considerations which, however vital they seemed at the time, are very minor matters to us and even to themselves in this present: controversies over whether baptism should be in one fashion or another, and when; over the date of Easter; or whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son. Some denominations have split off because of purely geographical reasons, like the Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on.

It is true that there are governmental differences often working themselves out in differing organizations—dif

ferences which would indicate deep-lying temperamental types; but these are less and less distinctive of denominations as time goes on. The hierarchical have far more independence, and the independent-minded far more oversight than even a few decades ago.

As for doctrinal disagreements, they exist, beyond a doubt, but they run little if at all on denominational lines. In any case the rank and file of Christians display no absorbing interest in theological niceties. The one theological conflict which is visible to the naked eye is that between progressives (liberals) and conservatives (Fundamentalists, as they are liking to call themselves), but this is responsible for no cleavage of denomination from denomination. In varying ways it is a struggle which each body of Christians knows not as against other such bodies, but within itself.

We shall ignore such superficial separations as denominations are, then, in any significant seeking for Church unity, and dwell rather upon what are really fundamental individual and social psychological differences.

The writer has no desire to be dogmatic, but he wonders, and he asks the reader to wonder for a little with him, whether religious people are not rather fully contained in four classes or varieties of religious attitude. I leave out here the progressive-conservative line of demarcation as being (though immensely important) on a different plane from the four here considered.

1. Certainly no person widely conversant with the religious life of Protestant America will fail to set down as our most obvious Christians those who enjoy popular warm unconventional religion; gathering for it in comfortable but "carpenter-built" edifices; hearing music which is "bright" and nothing more (the religious analogue of jazz); aspiring in prayers which, though spon

etc.

taneous and fervid, are undignified and at best mediocre; groping for instruction from sermons in which a few needles of divine truth are lost in whole haystacks of illustration and anecdote and words, words, words, in interminable filling. The minister of such a church will be interspersing remarks of any kind that may occur to him throughout the service. He will speak publicly to organist or usher or sexton. He will turn to others on the platform for corroboration of this or that statement-as a rhetorical device. He will comment freely on the weather, his family, his boyhood, his schooldays, his cold of the past week affecting his voice he fears today, etc., He overflows his office, in a word, in an extreme contemporaneousness and especially extemporaneousness. Merely to depict in detail this way of worship is to caricature it, but this is, I submit, no inaccurate depicting of what throngs flock to, Sunday by Sunday, in every part of our country. Such services are not to be blamed as evidencing the sloth or innate slovenliness of the preachers in question. These men are, practically all of them, earnestly striving in all sincerity to carry their congregations with them to the great truths and lives they lack. Such atrocities of music and architecture and taste generally are not foisted on the people; they are what the people— these people, at all events-want. The fact is that this hail-fellow-well-met sort of worshipping puts them at their ease as a more dignified worship which would puzzle and over-awe them would not do. Whatever its defects it breathes friendliness and social opportunities (their only social opportunities, in many cases) and beneath all, religion. Here is a variety of religion not very pleasing to some, but needing to be borne in mind most of all (if we are ever to have Christian unity) by those at the furthest remove from it.