d all
our manifold difficulties, can be resolved, and that is through the
achieved enlightenment of the individual. As I have insisted in each of
these lectures, salvation is not through machinery but through the
individual soul, for it is life itself that is operating, not the
instruments that man devises in his ingenuity. Yet the mechanism is of
great value for even itself may give aid and stimulus in the personal
regenerative process, or, on the contrary, it may deter this by the
confusing and misleading influences it creates. Therefore we are bound
to regard material reforms, and of these, as they suggest themselves in
the field of organized religion, I propose to speak.

No one will deny the progressive alienation of life from religion that
has developed since the Reformation and has now reached a point of
almost complete severance. Religion, once a public preoccupation, has
now withdrawn to the fastnesses of the individual soul, when it has not
vanished altogether, as it has in the case of the majority of citizens
of this Republic in so far as definite faith, explicit belief,
application, practice and action are concerned. In the hermitage that
some still make within themselves, religion still lives on as ardent and
as potent and as regenerative as before, but in general, if we are to
judge from the conduct of recent life, it is held, when it is accepted
at all, with a certain formality, and is neither cherished with
conviction nor allowed to interfere with the everyday life of the
practical man. As a great English statesman remarked in the last
century, "No one has a higher regard for religion than I, but when it
comes to intruding it into public affairs, well, really--!"

The situation is one not unnaturally to be anticipated, for the whole
course of religious, secular and sociological development during the
last few centuries has been such as to make any other result improbable.
I already have tried to show what seem to me the destructive factors,
secularly and sociologically. As for the factors in religious
development that have worked towards the same end, they are, first, the
shattering of the unity of Christendom, with the denial by those of the
reformed religions of the existence of a Church, one, visible and
Catholic and infallible in matters of faith and morals; second, the
denial of sacramental philosophy and abandonment of the sacraments (or
all but one, or at most two of them) as instruments of Divin