Untitled - Rore Sanctifica

The Difficulties of Re-union. 91
may lose -her faith in the Bible, as well as in
the Church and then a dark day indeed, be it
long, or be it short, a dismal gloom indeed, till
faith revives. Certainly the hour of a nation s
faithlessness will not be the time for the blessed
gift of Unity to that nation s Church ; even if
it retain the outer shell and semblance of a
Church at all.
England ~ then must be Catholicized before
her Church can be restored to Unity. This is
the work before
must be gained.
us, the first very step
that
We shall afterwards, though
it may doubtless be simultaneously, have to
overcome the rigidity of the unchanging East,
and the hitherto unbending claims of the
Western Patriarch.
What then are the difficulties in the way of this
first step ? We all know that notwithstanding
the Catholic form of her Liturgy taken as a
whole the Church of England presents herself
in most un-Catholic guise to the scrutiny of her
sister Churches. In outward form she is not of
them ; nor is she of them in the teaching of
her clergy, or the faith of her people. To
those sister Churches she seems to have lost
the first principle of Christian worship the
sacrifice of the altar. It is in vain that we
point to the words of a book : the answer is,
" The
sacrifice may indeed exist under the
forms of this book, but the book does not in