THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22976, 2 March 1938, Page 17

THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD

Sir, —The centenary celebrations of tho Unman Catholic Church cannot he without inspirational interest to the student of history. He cannot but reflect that, on the fall of Rome in 410, when Goths and Vandals threatened the existence of the Church, when heresies, Pelagian, Manichaean and others in course assailed it in its weakness, it was the great Christian leader Augustine who in Divine mercy saved the Church, through the persistence and determination wherewith he clung to the doctrine of the Grace of God as the crowning mercy of the Almighty in the salvation of the sinner and a sinful world. Troubles came to the Church through the centuries, and in time came the division into Greek and Roman, otherwise Eastern and Western, Churches. .In the full tide of the sixteenth came the great upheaval in Christendom associated with the Augustinian monk Martin Luther. It is remarkable that this reformer within the Roman Church was as deeply apprised of the doctrine of Grace as the great Augustine himself had been; for he tells us that, when in great agony enduring penance to clearly discern the mind of God as to forgiveness, the words of Scriptur?, "The just shall live bv faith." came to him with a rare sense of liberty. Looking back through four centuries of time, with many another Catholic churchman, Roman, Greek. Anglican or otherwise, as he may be, 1 doubt not many of us see that, had there been no such reform movement, there might have been no Protestant Church to-day; but as surely then there might have been no Church at all. For what was the Reformation but n great reform in the Western Church, such as might have delighted the heart of the evangelicalminded Augustine, as the spirit escaping for its life. Think what this view should mean for Christendom and the advancement of the Kingdom of God if adopted by the Roman Catholic Church of to-day! The Mother Church oi ( hristendom has an organisation which is world-wide. Surely the spirit of Augustine within it. after but four centuries, is not dead. Meantime, a blind and blundering, a sin-racked and dread-of-war world, cries out as probably never before for the testimony of a United Church in Christendom that the world may believe that Jesus Christ was sent of God. Testimony, oy Histoey.