Modern Religious Cults and Movements | Page 9

it has been rather the appeal of the Church to the
individual to escape his sinful and hopeless estate either through an
obedient self-identification with the Church's discipline and an
unquestioning acceptance of the Church's authority, or else through an
intellectual acceptance of the scheme of redemption and a moral
surrender to it. Here are really the two lines of approach through the
one or the other of which Christianity has been made real to the
individual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the early
formative period of the Church it was a matter between the individual
and his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the Pauline
Epistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought and
method of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant theology fairly
interprets St. Paul. Faith--a big enough word, standing for both
intellectual acceptance and a kind of mystic receptivity to the love and
goodness and justice of God revealed in the Cross of Christ--is the key
to salvation and the condition of Christian character. It is also that
through which religion becomes real to the individual. But since all this
lays upon the individual a burden hard enough to be borne (as we shall
see when we come back to Protestantism itself) the Church, as her
organization became more definite and her authority more strongly
established, took the responsibility of the whole matter upon herself.
She herself would become responsible for the outcome if only they
were teachable and obedient.
The Catholic Church offered to its communicants an assured security,
the proof of which was not in the fluctuating states of their own souls
but in the august authority of the Church to which they belonged. As
long, therefore, as they remained in obedient communion with their
Church their souls were secure. The Church offered them its

confessional for their unburdening and its absolutions for their
assurance, its sacraments for their strengthening and its penances for
their discipline and restoration. It took from them in spiritual regions
and maybe in other regions too, the responsibility for the conduct of
their own lives and asked of the faithful only that they believe and obey.
The Church, as it were, "stepped down" religion to humanity. It did all
this with a marvellous understanding of human nature and in answer to
necessities which were, to begin with, essential to the discipline of
childlike peoples who would otherwise have been brought face to face
with truths too great for them, or dismissed to a freedom for which they
were not ready.
It was and is a marvellous system; there has never been anything like it
and if it should wholly fail from amongst us there will never be
anything like it again. And yet we see that all this vast spiritual edifice,
like the arches of its own great cathedrals, locks up upon a single
keystone. The keystone of the arch of Catholic certainty is the
acceptance of the authority of the Church conditioned by belief in the
divine character of that authority. If anything should shake the
Catholic's belief in the authority of his Church and the efficacy of her
sacraments then he is left strangely unsheltered. Strongly articulated as
this system is, it has not been untouched by time and change. To
continue our figure, one great wing of the medieval structure fell away
in the Protestant Reformation and what was left, though extensive and
solid enough, is still like its great cathedrals--yielding to time and
change. The impressive force and unity of contemporaneous
Catholicism may lead us perhaps to underestimate the number of those
in the Catholic line who, having for one reason or another lost faith in
their Church, are now open to the appeal of the newer movements. For
example, the largest non-Catholic religious group of Poles in Detroit
are Russellites. There are on good authority between three and four
thousand of them.
The Protestant Church Made Faith the Key to Salvation with
Conversion the Test for the Individual of the Reality of His Religious
Experience

If religion has been made real to the Catholic through the mediation of
his Church, Protestantism, seeking to recreate the apostolic Church, has
made the reality of religion a matter between the individual and his
God. And yet Protestantism has never dared commit itself to so simple
a phrasing of religion as this, nor to go on without authorities of its own.
Protestantism generally has substituted for the inclusive authority of the
Catholic Church the authority of its own creeds and fundamentally the
authority of the Bible. As far as creeds go Protestantism carried over
the content of Latin Christianity more largely than we have generally
recognized. Luther was in direct line with Augustine as Augustine