y coming into our
tradition.

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 Chu