We have then a considerable body of very competent opinion, that a man cannot be a Christian unless he is a Churchman.  To the mystic pure and simple, such a statement seems monstrous.  Did not even Augustine say, ’I want to know God and my own soul; these two things, and no third whatever’?  What intermediary can there be, he will ask, between the soul and God?  What sacredness is there in an organisation?  Is it not a matter of common experience that the morality of an institution, a society, a state, is inferior to that of the individuals who compose it?  And is organised Catholicism an exception to this rule?  And yet we must admit the glamour of the idea of a divine society.  It arouses that esprit de corps which is the strongest appeal that can be made to some noble minds.  It calls for self-sacrifice and devoted labour in a cause which is higher than private interest.  It demands discipline and co-operation, through which alone great things can be done on the field of history.  It holds out a prospect of really influencing the course of events.  And if there has been a historical Incarnation, it follows that God has actually intervened on the stage of history, and that it is His will to carry out some great and divine purpose in and by means of the course of history.  With this object, as the Catholic believes, He established an institutional Church, pledged to the highest of all causes; and what greater privilege can there be than to take part in this work, as a soldier in the army of God in His long campaign against the spiritual powers of evil?  The Christian institutionalist is the servant of a grand idea.

There are, however, a few questions which we are bound to ask him.  First, is his idea of the Church Christian?  Did the Founder of Christianity contemplate or even implicitly sanction the establishment of a semi-political international society, such as the Catholic Church has actually been?  Orthodox Catholicism maintains that He did.  Modernism admits that He did not, but adds that if He had known that the Messianic expectation was illusory, and that the existing world-order was to continue for thousands of years, He would certainly have wished that a Catholic Church should exist.  And, argues the Modernist, if it is a good thing that a Catholic Church should exist, it is useless to quarrel with the conditions under which alone it can maintain its existence.  The philosophical historian must admit that all the changes which the Catholic Church has undergone—­its concessions to Pagan superstition, its secular power, its ruthless extirpation of rebels against its authority, its steadily growing centralisation and autocracy—­were forced upon it in the struggle for existence.  Those who wish that Church history had been different are wishing the impossible, or wishing that the Church had perished.  But this argument is not valid as a defence of a divine institution.  It is rather a merciless exposure of what happens, and must happen,