iaeval system; and Protestantism was a reaction. It was a reaction
based on truth, as Luther seemed to himself to re-discover it in the
epistles to the Romans and the Galatians. But the reaction broke up
the communion of Christians. It thus impaired the sense of the one
body, and very often resulted in obliterating the perception of any
obligation to the visible body of Christ at all. It became
individualist, and disparaged the sacraments which are at once both the
outward means of union with Christ and the bonds of cohesion for His
body, the Church. But as we now look back upon the matter, we can see
as clearly as it is possible to see anything, that both mediaeval
Catholicism and Lutheran Protestantism (or modern English
Protestantism) represent one-sided developments in which thoughtful men
cannot permanently acquiesce. The preliminary justifying {37} faith of
the individual does but warrant his admission into the body of Christ,
the divine society, by baptism. And once admitted into the body, and
instructed in her tradition, faith finds its function intellectually in
meditating upon and appropriating the full meaning of the mystery of
God, and spiritually in appropriating and digesting the powers of that
divine and human life into which baptism admits us, and in which the
sacramental feast and sacrifice continually makes us anew
participators. The Church with its sacramental gifts, and the personal
faith of the converted heart, are no more to be set in antithesis than
food and digestion, or the 'virtue which went out of Christ' and the
faith in Him which made men whole. The sacraments certainly do not
save us without conversion and faith, and faith which leaves us
voluntarily isolated from the visible communion of the one body is not
what St. Paul meant by 'justifying faith.'

'Ah, yet consider it again!' is what we are continually tempted to
exclaim to some of our modern controversialists who appear to be still
repeating the watchwords of the sixteenth century. For in fact the
famous controversial positions of the period of the Reformation were
{38} intensely one-sided, and have been antiquated by completer and
maturer study--not least in the matter of justification.

Thus Calvin's position on the subject was based upon and permeated by a
conception of God as predestinating and creating and internally
constraining some men to eternal life, and equally predestinating and
creating and abandoning other men,