I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea.  To come from that idea to the world of present realities is to come to a tangle of difficulties.  Is the Catholic Church merely the Roman communion or does it include the Greek and Protestant Churches?  Some of these bodies are declaredly dissentient, some claim to be integral portions of the Catholic Church which have protested against and abandoned certain errors of the central organization.  I admit it becomes a very confusing riddle in such a country as England to determine which is the Catholic Church; whether it is the body which possesses and administers Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, or the bodies claiming to represent purer and finer or more authentic and authoritative forms of Catholic teaching which have erected that new Byzantine-looking cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield’s Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized and independent bodies.  It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church in America among an immense confusion of sectarian fragments.

Many people, I know, take refuge from the struggle with this tangle of controversies by refusing to recognize any institutions whatever as representing the Church.  They assume a mystical Church made up of all true believers, of all men and women of good intent, whatever their formulae or connexion.  Wherever there is worship, there, they say, is a fragment of the Church.  All and none of these bodies are the true Church.

This is no doubt profoundly true.  It gives something like a working assumption for the needs of the present time.  People can get along upon that.  But it does not exhaust the question.  We seek a real and understanding synthesis.  We want a real collectivism, not a poetical idea; a means whereby men and women of all sorts, all kinds of humanity, may pray together, sing together, stand side by side, feel the same wave of emotion, develop a collective being.  Doubtless right-spirited men are praying now at a thousand discrepant altars.  But for the most part those who pray imagine those others who do not pray beside them are in error, they do not know their common brotherhood and salvation.  Their brotherhood is masked by unanalyzable differences; theirs is a dispersed collectivism; their churches are only a little more extensive than their individualities and intenser in their collective separations.

The true Church towards which my own thoughts tend will be the conscious illuminated expression of Catholic brotherhood.  It must, I think, develop out of the existing medley of Church fragments and out of all that is worthy in our poetry and literature, just as the worldwide Socialist State at which I aim must develop out of such state and casual economic organizations and constructive movements as exist to-day.  There is no “beginning again” in these things.  In neither case will going apart out of existing organizations secure our ends.  Out of what is, we have to develop what has to be.  To work for the Reformation of the Catholic Church is an integral part of the duty of a believer.