lf in the Mediterranean lands, but it did
not restore its old spiritual power in its entirety. Amongst the peoples
that accepted the Reformation the new religion assumed for a time the
authority of the old, but the centrifugal force inherent in its nature
soon split the reformed churches into myriad fragments, so destroying
their power of action, while the abandonment of the sacramental system
progressively weakened their dynamic force. As it had from the first
compounded, under compulsion, with absolutism and tyranny, so in the end
it compromised with the cruelty, selfishness, injustice and avarice of
industrialism, and when finally this achieved world supremacy, and
physical science, materialistic philosophy and social revolution entered
the field as co-combatants, it no longer possessed a sufficient original
power either of resistance or of re-creative energy.

Religion is in itself not the reaction of the human mind, under process
of evolution, to certain physical stimuli of experience and phenomena,
it is supernatural in that its source is outside nature; it is a
manifestation of the grace of God, and as such it cannot be brought into
existence by any conscious action of man or by any of his works. On the
other hand, it can be fostered and preserved, or debilitated and
dispersed, by these human acts and institutions, and in the same way man
himself may be made more receptive to this divine grace, or turned
against it, by the same agencies, the teachings of Dr. John Calvin to
the contrary notwithstanding. This is part of the Catholic doctrine of
free-will as opposed to the sixteenth-century dogma of predestination
which, distorted and degraded from the doctrine of St. Paul and St.
Augustine, played so large a part in that transformation of the
Christian religion from which we have suffered ever since. God offers
the free gift of religion and of faith to every child of man, but the
recipient must cooperate if the gift is to be accepted. The Church, that
is to say, the supernatural organism that is given material form in time
and space and operates through human agencies, is for this reason
subject to great vicissitudes, now rising to the highest level of
righteousness and power, now sinking into depths of unrighteousness and
impotence. Nothing, however, can affect the validity and the potency of
its supernatural content and its supernatural channels of grace. These
remain unaffected, whether the human organism is exal