"If you gents 'll fetch some twine, I'd like for to tie this up," said High Low Jackson, breathing a little fast.

At the words Baca went out, returning in a moment with a coiled lariat. Working silently, he trussed the helpless captain and gagged him with a brilliant-hued silk handkerchief.

"You're sure an artist, Pablo," declared High Low, depositing Sandoval in a chair and gazing at his bonds admiringly.

But the tall Mexican was talking rapidly to the girl.

"Ah, señorita, I feared this would be the end," he said. "The master knows I warned him he could not help these poor priests and nuns. Now, they will take this house-destroy all, perhaps. But you you must go-now, before it is too late."

"Santa Maria, my home!" the girl sobbed. "My home, my father!"

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Señores," said Pablo, " your horses and another are in a place I shall show you. You can overtake my little Pablo and the

Sisters."

"Señorita Inés," Tom said very gently, "we will carry you safely. I promise you that."

Inés looked at him with tender, tear-dimmed eyes.

"God has not forsaken me, señor," she said simply.

The fragrance of the patio stole in through the open door. Indistinct sounds, as of revelry and fitful flares of light came to them from the huts beyond.

Silently they slipped out into the night-the reddened, weasel eyes of Captain Sandoval y Ribera watched them go.

CATHOLIC UNITY AND PROTESTANT DISUNION.

BY F. A. PALMIERI, O.S.A.

HE most pressing problem of the Church in our day is that of Christian unity; beside it all others fade into insignificance. The energies of Christendom are being frittered away in the competitions, controversies, jealousies and frictions engendered by its unhappy divisions, and this in the face of such demands upon the Church and such opportunities for service as have never been presented before in its history. This era, that might be most glorious in the career of the Church, may be compelled to record the story of its degeneration and defeat. The loss of influence that institutional Christianity is suffering to-day may be ascribed to many causes, but to none is it due in so large a measure as to disunion. There is no task confronting it anywhere in the world which the Church might not accomplish, if it could approach that task with a united front; and there is none to which it is fully equal so long as its forces are divided and its energies dissipated."

Thus writes in a recent book1 Robert A. Ashworth, a pastor of the First Baptist Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The book won the prize of one thousand dollars offered by the American Sunday-school Union, and it may be considered as a representative exposition of the aims of Protestant denominations for healing the wounds inflicted upon the mystical Body of Christ by schisms and heresies, or, to use a milder expression, by the divergencies of creeds. From a Catholic point of view, the above-quoted words of pastor Ashworth deserve to be appreciated as a justified complaint of an unhappy state of things which paralyzes the most powerful energies of Christianity, and greatly endangers its future mission in a society dissolved by the corrosive acids of materialism and skepticism. The Catholic Church is aware of the repeated failures of Christianity in its attempts to enlarge the frontiers of the kingdom of Christ upon earth, and over and over again, as a loving mother, she invites her dispersed sons to reënter the fold of the divine Shepherd. There has been no Pope in the

Union of Christian Forces in America, p. 3.

chair of Peter who did not devote a considerable part of his apostolic cares and of his unselfish desires to the great and exceedingly difficult task of restoring the unity of Christianity, of making up the differences which have introduced a principle of dissolution into the amorphous bodies separated from the true Church of Christ. It is, then, with a joyful feeling of Christian brotherhood that we meet Protestant aspirations towards unity, that we greet the yearnings of wandering members of the Christian family to turn back again to the deserted paternal house.

But what are the secret motives of this Christian homesickness which is apparently affecting Protestant denominations? What kind of unity are they longing for in their passionate pleas for Christian unity? Is the Catholic Church able to give her support to those aspirations without drying up the sources of her supernatural life, without betraying the mission intrusted to her by her invisible Head? An answer to these questions is the subject we propose to approach in the present article.

An appeal to unity, in our opinion, and from a Catholic point of view, ought to be the product of the spirit of love which permeates the mystical Body of Christ. As Christians, we are to be united not for the sake of human advantages, or of social welfare. Christ alone is, and He must always be, the unitive force of the Christian family, the bond of union amongst His followers. The unity of the Church is the visible manifestation of the will of Christ, and the will of Christ does not take heed of human interests or of material benefits. The divine Teacher orders His disciples to be united, because He preaches to us the supreme law of love, and the logical and natural inference of love is unity. Now it seems to us that Protestant yearnings for unity start from human points of view, rather than from the impulse and love of the spirit of Christ. They are afraid of the progressive division of their disjecta membra; they repine at being classified, as one of them humorously said, into sects and insects. But in their laments they lay a great stress upon the material losses produced by the ceaseless scattering of their believers. The divisions. and subdivisions of Protestantism threaten a bankruptcy of its economical resources. To them they are indebted for the distress of ministers, whose wages are far below the average paid to mechanics. It will be enough to say that the average yearly wages paid to ministers of the Southern Baptist Convention are three hundred and thirty-four dollars. "The evils of overchurching, the

loss of spiritual fellowship between the various bodies of Christians who are forced into competition with one another, together with the waste of equipment and unnecessary expense of Church maintenance, and the handicapping of ministers through the payment of inadequate salaries, are a part of the price that Protestantism is paying for the luxury of its divisions. Add to this an incalculable loss in national and local prestige and leadership."2

It cannot be denied that the aims of the Church of England, and of its daughter, the American Episcopal Church, for the reunion of Christianity are higher. Divines of both communions recognize that the unity of the Church is the earnest wish of the Saviour, and that the spiritual action of the Christian apostleship is greatly hampered by the unhappy divisions of Protestantism. "At home, Christianity is faced on the one side with materialism, and on the other side with apathy and indifference, and the witness of our religion is seriously weakened. Abroad the active work of Christianity in casting down strongholds, and in attacking heathenism is similarly impaired by the various and often rival manners in which the Christian religion is presented to the heathen for their acceptance."

But what kind of unity is proposed to Catholics by Protestant denominations? Generally, Protestants boldly deny the institutional character of the Church of Christ. "Jesus dealt in principles," says pastor Ashworth, "not programmes; in ideals, not institutions. We shall be disappointed if we approach the teachings of Jesus with the hope of finding there a specific plan for the attainment of the unity of the Church. He has nothing to say of comity or coöperation, or federation, or organic unity. When Jesus prayed for His disciples that they might be one, He was thinking, not of organic church union, nor of any formal unity expressed in organization, but of a vital unity springing from the possession of a common spirit and of a common purpose. He was not thinking of the Church, nor of Sacraments, nor of ecclesiastical polities, nor of creeds. Jesus never thought out a system of theology, nor ordained a priesthood, nor even an official ministry, nor organized a church. The purpose of Jesus was to propagate a spirit, not to establish an institution."4

'Ashworth, p. 34.

'Rev. H. J. Clayton, Studies in the Roman Controversy, Milwaukee, 1914, pp. 1, 2. The conception of the reunion of Christendom by higher motives than those of the Protestant denominations is to be found in many pamphlets of the so-called "World Conference," to which I shall have occasion to refer again in detail.

'Ashworth, pp. 40, 41.

But what are the characteristic features of the ecclesiastical unity, which is claimed by the preachers of the above-described religious nihilism, by the forgers of a Christianity divorced from Christ, and resting upon individual vagaries? "The unity set forth by Christ was the unity of the spirit of love. It was a moral unity cemented by the possession in common of a single moral ideal; a vital unity, springing from the possession of a common spiritual experience. The unity of the Apostolic Church was one of spirit and not of organization. The scattered Christian communities were held together, not by any scheme of organization, or governmental authority exercised from without, nor by subscription to a single creedal statement, but by possession, in common, of the ideal of a united Church. There was no central government, no ecclesiastical hierarchy, no compulsion but the compulsion of love."

How can, then, the unity of the Church be preserved, if the Church is a heaping up of disjecta membra, isolated in their own spiritual life, in their own intellectual vision of Christian truth, in their own outward manifestation of their allegiance to Christ? The unity of the Church, it is answered by Protestant dreamers of reunion, is to be found not in the field of doctrine, government or ordinances, but in the field of spiritual experiences, in a living experience of God, in Christ, in the heart of the believer. Creed must be reduced to the irreducible minimum as a requirement for membership in the universal Church. Hence it follows that neither the Roman ideal of formal unity under the absolute authority of the Pope and the Roman Curia, nor what may be called the Greek ideal, based upon a rigid orthodoxy, goes deep enough to serve as the foundation of a unity that shall be spiritual and vital.8

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Even Anglican theologians look upon Rome as the stone of stumbling and the rock of offence which the builders of the new ecclesiastical unity ought to reject. "In our attempts towards unity," writes Rev. H. J. Clayton, one religious organization cuts across the path, the Church of Rome. Rome, indeed, is just as keen as others for reunion, but, for her, reunion and submission are synonymous terms. She refuses to regard any other religious organization as a sister Church, but treats its members as rebels, whose duty it is to return to the one fold, the Holy Catholic