Rebuilding a Lost Faith

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 27, 12 July 1923, Page 46

Rebuilding a Lost Faith

BY AN AMERICAN AGNOSTIC Second Edition Peice 10/This work, of which a large first edition has been sold, and which has already been translated into German, is the story of a man who, after having entered college to study for the Congregational ministry, spent forty years as an Agnostic, and at last found security and peace in the communion of the Catholic Church. The author, in the course of his book, examines and rejects the claims of the divers sections of Protestantism to represent the Christianity of tlie Apostolic age, and sets over against them the unbroken continuity of the Catholic Church, explaining and defending its controverted doctrines and distinctive practices with masterly hand. "I feel," he says, "that this One, Holy, Catholic, Apos tolic Church has given mo certainty for doubt, order for confusion, sunlight for darkness, and substance for shadow." "The treatment," says a reviewer, "is very discursive, and wanders over many wide fields; and is full of side-lights, historical and philosophical and other. The course is consecutive and in logical order: belief in God, conscience, and the immortality of the soul. Then revelation and the Church. Then the Church historically and doctrinally considered. Then the Church's relation to the sects. Then the distinctive Catholic doctrines which separate her from the sects; ending in conviction all round and reception into the fold."