The Letter and the Spirit

Extract

There is one significant mark of our declining culture which deserves particular notice—the separation of the external side of religion from the internal. Just as a man in his prime finds no opposition between his body and soul, but rather lives as a single yet complex whole, so a healthy civilisation-finds its highest expression in a religion which harmonises into a single whole tire interior spirit of charity with the exterior structure of rubric, law and hierarchy. But when decay sets in these necessarily complementary elements begin to separate out into opposition and falsehood. The legalism of the pharisee is set over against the puritanism of the communist. ‘I hus at the beginning of the thirteenth century the external life of the Church was seriously encrusted with comfortable clergy, while the interior spirit seemed to be limited to groups of the laity, fermenting in a way that often resulted in schism or heresy. Hence the friars were sent to re-establish unity in religion. The rise of Puritanism in the seventeenth century reveals the separation of the two elements still more clearly. ‘When religion ceases to give life tc a people those for whom it represents a vested interest overemphasise the external rules of worship and ecclesiastical etiquette, while those who see a need for new vitality attempt a short cut to the good life by means of some sort of mysticism and fraternity which sidesteps formal religion.