Many people will more or less rely on the Church, who will somehow, and from the outside, as it were, share her inner life. The parish will remain the essential cell of community life, but it will scarcely be possible to keep up the entire parish system as it now exists (a system that is of rather recent date). We will have to learn how to come together, and that will be an enrichment. In the astonishing diversity of Christian forms of life today, the Church tomorrow is already very clearly among us.

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So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear… The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels… never concealed His tears. Yet He concealed something… He never restrained His anger… Yet He restrained something… There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or imperious isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that is was His mirth.

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