Reunion

New Zealand Tablet, 31 December 1908, Page 22

Reunion

The Rev. W. Gray Dixon (Presbyterian) has been contributing to an Auckland contemporary an interesting series of articles on ' Church Union.' Catholics view with sympathetic interest every effort of our separated brethren to undo the work of disintegration that has reft Reformed Christianity into so many mutually repellent fragments. Goyau, in his VAlhmagne Religieuse (p. 282), briefly relates the rather sumnary methods by which Frederick William 111. of Prussia joined together in a willy-nilly union the Lutherans and the Reformed Party in his kingdom. He imposed on all a common ecclesiastical institution and a common liturgy (Agenda), and enforced his measures by the aid of the military and . police. Such methods of binding up religious rifts are not feasible under free Constitutions. The path of Reunion is, no doubt, beset with many difficulties. But time's gentle anodyne .keeps steadily assuaging old religious bitterness, and the Oxford Movement is still going on, levelling up doctrine and ritual and leavening other creeds with Catholic thought and teaching and feeling, and gently bringing nearer and nearer the dawning of tlie day when 'there shall be one Fold and t.nc Sheoherd.'