Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/274

284 church. She forgets more and more—at least in Rome—that symbols, dead works and ceremonies, are not the chief thing. She takes the shell for the kernel. She builds beautiful churches and permits humanity to decline.

The Protestant church, which, with infinite energy, broke the shell of forms and dead works, in order to come at life and truth, established for its church a principle of inexpressible depth: “faith, alone makes holy;” established the right of free inquiry. But whilst renewing the religious consciousness and striking deeper into the primal relationship of God with man, its view also became one-sided and its invisible church was not able to retain the conception of the kingdom of God.