cramentalism as superstitions, or
retained some of them in form and as symbols while denying to them all
supernatural power. If we would aid the individual soul to regain this
lost faith we could do no better than to restore the seven sacraments of
the historic Christian faith, and Christian Church to the place they
once held for all Christians, and still hold in the Roman Catholic
Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and (with limitations) in the
Anglican Church. Faith begets faith; faith in Christ brings faith in the
sacraments, and faith in the sacraments brings faith in Christ.

It is disbelief in the efficacy of the sacraments and in the sacramental
principle in life that is the essential barrier between Protestantism
and Catholicism, and until this barrier is dissolved there can be
neither formal unity nor unity by compromise. This is already widely
recognized, and as well the actual loss that comes with the denial and
abandonment of the sacraments. There is in the Presbyterian church of
Scotland a strong tendency towards a reassertion of the full sacramental
doctrine; the "Free Catholic" movement throughout Great Britain is made
up of Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, and other
representatives of Evangelical Protestantism, and it is working
unreservedly for the recovery and application of all the Catholic
sacraments, with the devotions and ritual that go with them. Dr.
Orchard, the head, and a Congregational minister, maintains in London a
church where, as a Methodist member of the "Free Catholic" organization
wrote me the other day, "the Blessed Sacrament is perpetually reserved
and 'High Mass' is celebrated on Sundays with the full Catholic
ceremonial." In my own practice of architecture I am constantly
providing Presbyterian, Congregational, and even Unitarian churches, by
request, with chancels containing altars properly vested and ornamented
with crosses and candles, while the almost universal demand is for
church edifices that shall approach as nearly as possible in appearance
to the typical Catholic church of the Middle Ages. Of course some of
this is due to a revived instinct for beauty, that almost sacramental
quality in life which was ruthlessly destroyed by Protestantism, and
also to a renewed sense of the value of symbol and ritual; but back of
it all is the growing consciousness that, as Dr. Newman Smythe says,
Protestantism has definitely failed, or at least become superannuated;
that the e