182 CHURCH UNITY 



nion was just this. It was his magic charm 

 in his intellectual dark, and it is the 

 Apologia of almost all who have followed 

 him. The Roman obedience was not a 

 faith, but an escape from thought. And 

 we need not therefore imagine that it is 

 very soon to be extinguished. It may be 

 long before it loses its hold upon the half 

 instructed intelligence, the imaginative 

 and the credulous worship of the world." 



But we turn back from this essentially 

 modern or mediaeval conglomerate of 

 audacity and superstition, and sectarian 

 intolerance, to that clear and simple 

 portraiture of the Catholic Church which 

 is given to us in apostolic history, and 

 we feel instinctively that, sooner or later, 

 that simpler and nobler ideal is to be 

 redeemed out of the rubbish and error of 

 the past and to be the ruling force in 

 that which shall be the Church of a gloiious 

 future ! Least of all need we fear for the 

 essential unity of the Church of God. 

 " We must resist," as that brilliant essay 

 upon the Latin age from which I have just 

 quoted reminds us, 1 " the discords and the 

 loose unbelief which now as always 



1 Washburn, Epochs in Church History, p. 74. 



