What is needed to-day is another leader, a leader for the ordinary man. The ordinary man is neither saint nor fanatic, neither preacher nor monk; he would be bored to death if he had to sing or pray or meditate all day; his joy is in building bridges and planning railways and ripping up the matted prairie sod with gasoline engines; he likes his wife and children and does not feel called upon to become a missionary to China or Central Africa. The need is for the leader who can show this ordinary man how to bring the truest love and the deepest piety into the ordinary, commonplace, work-a-day life, revealing the glory of God, not alone as gilding the cold snows of Alpine peaks or bathing the distant desert with unearthly beauty, but transfiguring the city street, the cozy home, the quiet fields where lovers walk at even.
Francis, Wesley, Booth--the time has come for each section of the Christian Church to remember that "all things are hers: whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas." We Protestants may think the Roman Catholic Church less likely to appropriate our saints than we theirs. This judgment of ours may be right or wrong, but we have no right to pass it until we ourselves have recognized the limitations of Protestantism and set ourselves heartily to appropriate the great elements of the Christian life that are the distinctive glories of Latin Christianity. Protestantism, too, has its own peculiar glories. Neither great division of Christendom is adequate to meet the religious needs of to-day. The hour has struck for the great Christianity.
The future belongs neither to Roman Catholicism nor to Protestantism. Roman Catholicism is too aristocratic and distrustful of freedom. The modern man will no more go back to medieval Christianity than to medieval feudalism. There is a drift from Protestantism to-day, but the drift from Roman Catholicism has been far greater. To fulfil its destiny, Roman Catholicism must accept freedom of thought; magnificently democratic as it has been from the beginning in some respects--the chair of St. Peter being accessible to the humblest peasant's son--it must accept a deeper and wider democracy.
Protestantism, on the other hand, must become heart-broken over its divisions, religious and social. It must become more brotherly, more lowly, more worshipful, in a word, more childlike.
It is unthinkable that either of these great forms of Christianity will pass away. They will change. They are already changing, and each, as it changes, moves toward the other.
Thought and life move through conflict to unity. Thesis--antithesis--synthesis--that is the great law. The great and, perhaps, inevitable stage of antithesis that has divided Christendom for four centuries is drawing to a close. Latin Christianity needed Protestantism. It was the Protestant Reformation that inspired the counter-reformation. Roman Catholicism owes to Luther and Calvin a purer faith and a new lease of life. To-day the noblest and most energetic types of Roman Catholicism are found in Protestant lands, and the service of Protestantism to Roman Catholicism is not yet finished.
Just as certainly, Protestantism needs Roman Catholicism. Some exposition of this has already been attempted. It is hard to see how any one who believes Roman Catholicism to be a tissue of errors can account for its extraordinary tenacity of life. Why should God preserve it unless because its mission is not yet accomplished?
Far apart and deeply antagonistic these two great forms of Christianity may seem, but, after all, it is an inescapable law on this earth that two people who try to get as far away from each other as possible must meet at last; and hatred is nearer love than is indifference. Human nature wearies of antagonism, and the longer it lasts the warmer the welcome for its passing.
Like denominationalism, this four hundred year old antagonism seems a mighty tree but, like denominationalism, it is hollow within. Some day the great winds of God will arise, and when they begin to blow, this tree, too, will fall.
The thirteenth century was one of the great centuries of Christian history. In it feudalism reached its height, and chivalry its fullest flower. In it Gothic architecture and medieval philosophy reared their noblest monuments. It was the century of the greatest of medieval, or, perhaps, of distinctively Christian, poets, Dante, the greatest of Christian theologians, Aquinas, the greatest of Popes, Innocent III., the two most winsome of saints, St. Francis and St. Louis of France. In all its greatness, the thirteenth century is distinctively Roman Catholic. The nineteenth century, also, is another of the less than half a dozen of the greatest of Christian centuries, and it is distinctively a Protestant century. Its great achievements in geographical and astronomical discovery, scientific investigation, increase of human comfort and wealth, and above all its unparalleled extension of liberty--bear all of them the Protestant stamp.