Lectures on the Church and the Sacraments

There is something which Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in their extreme forms underprize, and that is the Gospel as the power of a Holy God for our moral redemption in a kingdom. The Free Churches have tended to idolize liberty at the cost of the truth and power which makes liberty—at the cost therefore of reverence, penitence, and humility. The Catholic Churches have tended, on the other side, to idolize unity, to sacrifice the Church’s holiness to her catholicity, and to lose the moral power of the Gospel in a type of piety or in canonical correctness of procedure. They have sought unity in polity. That principle is here held to be fundamentally as wrong as the other, which seeks unity objectively in a mere moralism, or subjectively in a frame of mind. “As to the sacraments, it may be surmised that the writer holds a mere memorialism to be a more fatal error than the Mass, and a far less lovely.” This volume contains seven lectures on the church and seven lectures on the sacraments.