Untitled - Rore Sanctifica

90 The Difficulties of Re-union.
Colonies, a precarious existence in the midst
of the busy., powerful Anglo-Saxon race.
The vision we have had before us, and of
which the late Cardinal Wiseman spoke in his
Letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury some five and
twenty years ago, has been that of the venerable
and wealthy Established Church of England,
really representing the religion of the great
majority of the nation, and supported by her
daughter Churches in America and the
Colonies, re-entering in one great body, with all
the prestige
of social order and political power,
into the one great Catholic family, attracting
others to herself, as much as being herself
drawn to others.
A fair vision certainly, but there is this little
obstacle to its fulfilment ; England is Protestant
to the backbone Protestantism is ingrained
into her Constitution, her laws, her social system,
and her religious habits. It has all but invaded
the Ritual of her Church, as it certainly has full
possession of the minds of the vast majority of
her Clergy ; yet England must be Catholicized
before we can have the remotest prospect
of the
restoration of her Church to Catholic unity.
I do not say that England must merely be un-
Protestantized before this can be, but I say more,
she must be Catholicized. Our country may
cease to be Protestant, in the religious sense of
that word, without becoming Catholic, she