It is curious how misleading a word can be.  We speak of a certain phase in the history of Christianity as the Reformation, and that word effectually conceals from most people the simple indisputable fact that there has been no Reformation.  There was an attempt at a Reformation in the Catholic Church, and through a variety of causes it failed.  It detached great masses from the Catholic Church and left that organization impoverished intellectually and spiritually, but it achieved no reconstruction at all.  It achieved no reconstruction because the movement as a whole lacked an adequate grasp of one fundamentally necessary idea, the idea of Catholicity.  It fell into particularism and failed.  It set up a vast process of fragmentation among Christian associations.  It drove huge fissures through the once common platform.  In innumerable cases they were fissures of organization and prejudice rather than real differences in belief and mental habit.  Sometimes it was manifestly conflicting material interests that made the split.  People are now divided by forgotten points of difference, by sides taken by their predecessors in the disputes of the sixteenth century, by mere sectarian names and the walls of separate meeting places.  In the present time, as a result of the dissenting method, there are multitudes of believing men scattered quite solitarily through the world.

The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the Catholic Church lies still before us.  It is a necessary work.  It is a work strictly parallel to the reformation and expansion of the organized State.  Together, these processes constitute the general duty before mankind.

3.14.  Of secession.

The whole trend of my thought in matters of conduct is against whatever accentuates one’s individual separation from the collective consciousness.  It follows naturally from my fundamental creed that avoidable silences and secrecy are sins, just as abstinences are in themselves sins rather than virtues.  And so I think that to leave any organization or human association except for a wider and larger association, to detach oneself in order to go alone, or to go apart narrowly with just a few, is fragmentation and sin.  Even if one disagrees with the professions or formulae or usages of an association, one should be sure that the disagreement is sufficiently profound to justify one’s secession, and in any case of doubt, one should remain.  I count schism a graver sin than heresy.

No profession of faith, no formula, no usage can be perfect.  It is only required that it should be possible.  More particularly does this apply to churches and religious organizations.  There never was a creed nor a religious declaration but admitted of a wide variety of interpretations and implied both more and less than it expressed.  The pedantically conscientious man, in his search for an unblemished religious brotherhood, has tended always to a solitude of universal dissent.