y Sacrifice of the altar, to make
confession of his sins and receive absolution, and to nourish and
develop his spiritual nature by the use of the devotions that have grown
up during nineteen hundred years, he will renounce his Protestantism,
when his self-respect would not permit him to do this just because he
had been assured that he need not really change any of his previous
beliefs in order to ally himself with a Church that had better
architecture and a more artistic ceremonial, and locally a higher social
standing. When Anglicans or the Eastern Orthodox come to believe that a
vernacular liturgy and a married priesthood and provincial autonomy are
of less importance than Catholic unity, and when Roman Catholics can see
that the same is of greater moment than a rigid preservation of
Renaissance centralization and a cold _"non possumus"_ in the matter of
Orders, then the way will be open for the reunion of the West, where
this operation cannot be affected by formal negotiations looking towards
some form of legalistic concordat.

The evil heritage of the sixteenth century is still heavy upon us, and
this heritage is one of jealousy and hate, not of charity and
toleration. It is an heritage of legalism and technicalities, of
self-will and individualism, of shibboleths that have become a dead
letter, of prejudices that are fostered on distorted history and the
propaganda of the self-seeking and the vain. The spirit of Christ is not
in it, but the malice of Satan working upon the better natures of men
and justifying in the name of conscience and principle what are
frequently the workings of self-will and pride and intellectual
obsession. This is the tragedy of it all; that Protestants and Anglicans
and Roman Catholics are, so far as the majority are concerned, honestly
convinced that they are right in maintaining their own divisiveness; in
perpetuating an hundred Protestant sects on the basis of some variation
in the form of baptism or church government or the method of conversion;
in splitting up the Catholic Church because of a thousand year old
disagreement as to a clause in the Creed which has a technical and
theological significance only, or because one sector is alleged to have
added unjustifiably to the Faith while the other is alleged to have
unjustifiably taken away. Self-will and lack of charity, not love and
the common will as these are revealed to the world through the Divine
Will of Christ, are working here.