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Barry was walking round the conservatory, eager and full of faith and hope and fire, talking rapidly, the educational enthusiast, the ardent citizen, the social being, the institutionalist, all over. He was all these things; he was rooted and grounded in citizenship, in social ethics.
And so far was his masterly policy from mere opportunism, that his correspondence has been 'Holy Scripture' for fifty generations of Christians, and there has been no religious revival within Christianity that has not been, on one side at least, a return to St. Paul. Protestants have always felt their affinity with this institutionalist, mystics with this disciplinarian.
In his heart of hearts he would appear to be a fervent institutionalist, a lover of ceremonial, and a convinced sacerdotalist. To hear him use the word Catholic is to make one understand how the Church of Rome dazzles certain eyes, and to hear him claim that he is in the apostolical succession is to make one realise afresh how broad is the way of credulity.
For the institutionalist, happenings in time have a meaning and importance far greater than the mystic is willing to allow to them. Like most other great philosophical problems, this question is largely one of temperament. Christianity has found room for both types.
With this object, as the Catholic believes, He established an institutional Church, pledged to the highest of all causes; and what greater privilege can there be than to take part in this work, as a soldier in the army of God in His long campaign against the spiritual powers of evil? The Christian institutionalist is the servant of a grand idea.
These claims may be admitted; but they come very far short of the glorification of institutionalism which we found in the authors quoted a few pages back. The institutionalist, however, may reply that he by no means admits the validity of Sabatier's antithesis between religions of authority and the religion of the Spirit.
On the institutionalist hypothesis, it might have been expected either that there would have been no divisions in Christendom, or that all seceding bodies would have shown such manifest inferiority in wisdom, morality, and sanctity, that the exclusive claims of the Great Church would have been ratified at the bar of history. This is, in fact, the claim which Roman Catholics make.
Professor Royce, the author of the admirable metaphysical treatise entitled 'The World and the Individual, has recently published a double series of Hibbert Lectures on 'The Problem of Christianity, in which he affirms the institutionalist theory with a surprising absence of qualification.
I can see no other fate in store for the soma of Catholicism; the germ-cells of true Christianity live their own life within it, and are transmitted without taint to those who are born of the Spirit. We must further ask the institutionalist what are his grounds for identifying the Church of God with the particular institution to which he belongs.
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