This must be once again the task of the Church, as it was in the best days of the monasteries, the guilds and confraternities of the middle ages. We need to have a fresh Crusade, not to conquer any far-off enemy, but against our apathy towards the social evils in our midst. Can we not hope to see a network of new guilds and brotherhoods, settlements, houses of peace and healing, covering the length and breadth of the land, where men and women will sacrifice some portion at least of their lives, giving of their work and leisure to this task? Some will afford a shelter to the outcasts of society, who are driven now from prison to casual ward, and from workhouse to jail, for whom the commercial world has no use, to whom the law offers nothing but threats and penalties: others will provide training for boys or girls who have been committed to industrial schools, or will offer a fresh start to those who have fallen into serious crime: there will be some which will try to provide a home and work for the weaklings, or those who are prevented by mental or physical defect from [p.156] holding their own in the ordinary streams of life. Others again will offer an asylum to sickness, helplessness and old age. Centres of prayer, as well as centres of work, they will be the schools of saints, where men in serving the needy in many different ways, will all the while be brought nearer to the ultimate reunion of Christendom and of humanity.
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[1] The words of Celsus ring strangely in our ears after these seventeen centuries and more: "You may hear all those who differ so widely, and who assail each other in their disputes with the most shameless language, uttering the words, 'The world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world'" (Origen, "Contra Celsum," v. § 64; and cf. iii § 12).
[5] [Greek: I will appoint their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in faith]
[7] The earliest Latin versions of the Bible seem often to have used the word sacramentum to translate the Greek μυστήριον, thus in St. Matthew xiii. 11, in reply to the disciples' query "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?" is given the response "To you is given to know the sacraments of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it is not given" (Cod. Bobbiensis). Even the Vulgate retains this rendering in a number of passages (Eph. i. 9; iii. 3; v. 32; Revelation i. 20), and one cannot help wishing that our English version might have retained so beautiful a rendering as "the sacrament of His will," or the reference to the mystical union of Christ and His church as "the great sacrament." Similarly, it is interesting to hear the Vulgate speak of "the sacrament of the seven stars," in the Apocalypse, and to read in i Tim. iii. 16, "great is the sacrament of godliness."