ne? What is an immortal and immortalizing
body? What is substance separated from the accidents? Nowadays we have
greatly refined our notion of materiality and substantiality; but there
were even some among the Fathers of the Church to whom the immateriality
of God Himself was not a thing so clear and definite as it is for us.
And this sacrament of the Eucharist is the immortalizing sacrament _par
excellence_, and therefore the axis of popular Catholic piety, and if it
may be so said, the most specifically religious of sacraments.

For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not
justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical.
It was from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of
him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions--namely,
that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in
Catholicism.

The preoccupation of sin has never been such a matter of anguish, or at
any rate has never displayed itself with such an appearance of anguish,
among Catholics. The sacrament of Confession contributes to this. And
there persists, perhaps, among Catholics more than among Protestants
the substance of the primitive Judaic and pagan conception of sin as
something material and infectious and hereditary, which is cured by
baptism and absolution. In Adam all his posterity sinned, almost
materially, and his sin was transmitted as a material disease is
transmitted. Renan, whose education was Catholic, was right, therefore,
in calling to account the Protestant Amiel who accused him of not giving
due importance to sin. And, on the other hand, Protestantism, absorbed
in this preoccupation with justification, which in spite of its
religious guise was taken more in an ethical sense than anything else,
ends by neutralizing and almost obliterating eschatology; it abandons
the Nicene symbol, falls into an anarchy of creeds, into pure religious
individualism and a vague esthetic, ethical, or cultured religiosity.
What we may call "other-worldliness" (_Jenseitigkeit_) was obliterated
little by little by "this-worldliness" (_Diesseitigkeit_); and this in
spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its
earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious
coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in
the age of the Enlightenment, of the _Aufklaerung_, and which pietism,
infusing into it something o