Aubrey Moore, writing in 1889, connected the Catholic revival with the abandonment of atomism in natural philosophy and of Baconian metaphysics.  These were, he thought, the counterpart of individualism in politics and Calvinism in religion.  The adherents of mid-Victorian science and philosophy were bewildered by the phenomenon of ’men in the nineteenth century actually expressing a belief in a divine society and a supernatural presence in our midst, a brotherhood in which men become members of an organic whole by sharing in a common life, a service of man which is the natural and spontaneous outcome of the service of God.’[90] In the view of this learned and acute thinker, Catholicism, or institutionalism, is destined to supplant Protestantism, as the organic theory is destined to displace the atomic.

More recently Troeltsch, writing as a Protestant, has emphasised the institutional side of religion in the most uncompromising way.

’One of the clearest results of all religious history and religious psychology is that the essence of all religion is not dogma and idea, but cultus and communion, the living intercourse with the Deity—­an intercourse of the entire community, having its vital roots in religion and deriving its ultimate power of thus uniting individuals, from its faith in God....  Whatever the future may bring us, we cannot expect a certainty and force of the knowledge of God and of His redemptive power to subsist without communion and cultus.  And so long as a Christianity of any kind shall subsist at all, it will be united with a cultus, and with Christ holding a central position in the cultus.’[91]

From America, the last refuge of individualism, there has come a pronouncement not less drastic.  Professor Royce, the author of the admirable metaphysical treatise entitled ‘The World and the Individual,’ has recently published a double series of Hibbert Lectures on ’The Problem of Christianity,’ in which he affirms the institutionalist theory with a surprising absence of qualification.  The whole book is dominated by one idea, advocated with a naivete which would hardly have been possible to a theologian—­the idea that churchmanship is the essential part of the Christian religion.

’The salvation of the individual man is determined by some sort of membership in a certain spiritual community—­a religious community, and in its inmost nature a divine community, in whose life the Christian virtues are to reach their highest expression and the spirit of the Master is to obtain its earthly fulfilment.  In other words, there is a certain universal and divine spiritual community.  Membership in that community is necessary to the salvation of man....  Such a community exists, is needed, and is an indispensable means of salvation for the individual man, and is the fitting realm wherein alone the kingdom of heaven which the Master preached can find its expression, and wherein alone the Christian