Contemplation and the Modern World

The obliteration of familiar landmarks and the destruction of an old and accustomed order seem to produce a twofold effect. The majority of those who come afterwards seems quickly to adapt itself to the new outlook and new ways, while a minority clings with determination to what it can remember of the days gone by, and, filled with an intense desire to preserve the values of the past, canonizes both the bad and the good in the old order. It was thus with the Reformation. The forces which produced it had slowly been gathering for centuries. The scandals of the late medieval church were but the manifestation of far deeper ills, of which perhaps the most deadly of all had been, in practice, anv almost complete loss of the sense of the oneness of all Christians with the triumphant and risen Christ. In consequence, a spirit of gloom and insecurity, coupled with an unconstructive puritanism in morals, had prevailed among the devout and had tended to make salvation depend almost entirely upon the precariousness of subjective intention.