ONVERSION OF THE CHURCH

While a purer spirit is visibly awakening in ailing humanity and turning
it again to Christ, the religion of Christ is rejuvenating. His church
is no longer motionless. Thus, in the midst of a great confusion, two
religious movements which correspond with one another are defining
themselves with sufficient clearness.

On the one side, men without any precise faith, and who thought
themselves without any faith, have perceived that they carry within
themselves that which they sought: an explanation of themselves, say a
principle of salvation. At whatever point these thinking men arrive, it
is apparent at the present that they are progressing in the way of the
Evangel, and following the path of the cross.... On the other side, the
Roman Catholic Church, governed by a vigilant Pope, has declared
herself. She has spoken of love, at the moment when all were thirsty for
love and self-forgetfulness; she intercedes for the suffering masses, at
the moment when others were going to do it outside of her, perhaps
against her. And more, she is resolutely to-day accenting spirituality,
after having so long accented ritual or policy. The new spiritualists
and the renewed Christians are thus pushed forward to a meeting with one
another by the need of their practical co-operation, and also perhaps by
the consciousness of their intimate kinship. They are marching from both
sides, with the same rallying cry, Fraternity and sacrifice! Here they
are flying from the city of the plain, where a material civilization
reigns, and claiming to suffice all; they are emigrating, they know not
whither, if it be only towards the heights; there they are descending
from their high, narrow, clerical, shut-in fastness.

The conversion that the Church should make is a conversion of the heart.
It must become again a school of true liberty and love. Herein lies all
the anxiety of the moment; and the great Catholic question lies not
between the Church and the Republic, but between the Church and the
People, or rather between the Church and the pure Spirit. By loving the
people in truth, and by making itself the people, it is clear that the
Catholic Church would simply be returning to its original source. Now,
returning to its original source is, in a word, all that the Church
should do; and that which, following her example, all old institutions
should do so as to live and to make us live. To last, means to be
re-born perpetually.