Ibanbboot^g of 
 Catboltc jfattb anb Ipracttce 
 
 EDITED BY W. J. SPARROW SIMPSON, D.D. 
 
 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES
 
 HANDBOOKS OF 
 CATHOLIC FAITH AND PRACTICE 
 
 Cloth, each 2s. Bd. net. 
 MONASTICISM. By the Rev. Father Denys, M.A. 
 CHURCH MUSIC. By the Rer. A. S. Duncan-Jonks, M.A. 
 DEFECTS IN ENGLISH RELIGION. By th« Rev. J. Nkvillk 
 
 Figgis, D.D, 
 THE INTERMEDIATE STATE. 
 CATHOLIC OR ROMAN CATHOLIC? By th« Rev. T. J. 
 
 Hardy, M.A. 
 CONSCIENCE OF SIN. By the R»v. T. A. Lacky, M.A. 
 THE LATER TRACTARIANS. By the R«v. Canon S. L. Ollard, 
 
 M.A. 
 THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. By th» Rev. H. Leonard 
 
 Pass, M.A. 
 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES. By th« Rer. G. C. Rawlin- 
 
 SON, M.A. 
 CHRISTIANITY AND THE ARTIST. By R. Ellis Robf.rts. 
 THE PRAYER OF CONSECRATION. By the Rev. \V. J. 
 
 Sparrow Simpson. Introduction by the Lord Bshop or 
 
 Oxford. 
 THE RESERVATION OF THE SACRAMENT. By the Rev. 
 
 Darwell Stone, D.D. 
 EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE. By the Rev. Darwell Stone, 
 
 D.D. 
 THE SACRAMENT OF PENANCE. By the Rev. H. U. Whilp- 
 
 TO.v, M.A. 
 THE EPISCOPATE AND THE REFORM.\TION. By the 
 
 Rev. Professor J. P. Whitney, D.D. 
 
 LONDON : ROBERT SCOTF, 
 ROXBURGKE HOUSB, Patkknostbr Rcv, E.G.
 
 RECENT FRENCH 
 TENDENCIES 
 
 FROM RENAN TO CLAUDEL 
 
 A STUDY IN FRENCH RELIGION 
 
 By 
 G. C. RAWLINSON, M.A. 
 
 LONDON: ROBERT SCOTT 
 
 ROXBURGHE HOUSE 
 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G. 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: 
 
 THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO., 
 
 MILWAUKEE, WIS. 
 
 M CMXVI I 
 All rights reserved 
 
 S945G
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ^ CHAP. PAGE 
 
 ^ I. Fin de Siecle .... 7 
 
 ^^ i. The Shadow of Renan . • lo 
 
 ii. Hippolyte Taine . • • ^9 
 
 iii. Signs of Spring ... 25 
 
 II. Modernism . . . . • 37 
 
 i. The Origins of Modernism . 39 
 
 ii. L'Abbe Loisy ... 46 
 
 iii. L'Evangile et L'Eglise . . 50 
 
 iv. Per ignem et aquam . • 5^ 
 
 V. The failure of Modernism . 70 
 
 III. The Catholic Renaissance . . 75 
 
 i. The dawn of a new day . 7^ 
 ii. A voice from the past : 
 
 Anatole France ... 89 
 
 iii. The influence of Bergson . 93 
 
 V
 
 vi CONTENTS 
 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 IV. Lbs Jeunes 
 
 . lOI 
 
 i. Patriots and Catholics 
 
 . I02 
 
 ii. Ernest Psichari 
 
 . 112 
 
 iii. Charles Peguy 
 
 . ii8 
 
 iv. Paul Claudel 
 
 • 123 
 
 Epilogue 
 
 . 133
 
 RECENT FRENCH 
 TENDENCIES 
 
 I 
 
 Fin de Siecle 
 
 THERE is no reason in the world 
 why the end of a century should 
 mean the end also of an intellectual 
 era, but it is an undoubted fact that the 
 two often coincide. The last years of 
 a century seem to look back to what 
 has gone before rather than forward to 
 what is to come after. Certainly there 
 was something very elderly about the 
 close of the nineteenth century. It ap- 
 peared to have exhausted itself with the 
 magnificent achievements of its prime. 
 
 7
 
 8 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 There was nothing of the vigour of 
 youth about the eighties and the nine- 
 ties. Like an aged roue they knew 
 everything, and were tired and rather 
 bored with everything, and could feel 
 no fresh interest or raise no new enthusi- 
 asm except over trifles. There was more 
 than a suspicion of decadence, a 
 decadence which was most marked in 
 literature. In England the century 
 which had produced Dickens and 
 Thackeray and Meredith ended in the 
 Yellow Book and the cult of Oscar 
 Wilde ; while in France the bois- 
 terous young century which produced 
 Balzac produced at the end, by way of 
 Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola and Ana- 
 tole France. Religion also seemed in a 
 bad way. Huxley and his friends were 
 joyfully belabouring bishops and deans 
 in the pages of the monthly reviews, 
 fully confident that they were extin- 
 guishing the lights of heaven, and with- 
 out the smallest suspicion that the ideas 
 which seemed to them so incontrovertible
 
 FIN DE SIECLE g 
 
 would in a few years be considered as 
 antiquated as the crinoline and other 
 Victorian oddities, and would only be 
 living a precarious death in life in the 
 columns of the Freethinker and the books 
 of the ex-Franciscan, Mr. Joseph McCabe. 
 What were then the convictions of the 
 educated scientist in matters of religion 
 are now simply the prejudices of the 
 semi-educated artizan. But at the end 
 of the nineteenth century these attacks 
 on religion, combined with the menace of 
 German criticism, seemed very serious. 
 It was the same in France. There were 
 many who thought that the Catholic 
 religion had lived and that it only 
 remained to give it a decent burial. The 
 literary classes had almost entirely lost 
 the belief in and abandoned the practice 
 of religion. But the unbelief was some- 
 thing very different from the shouting 
 hostihty of Huxley. It sought to kill, 
 not with a cudgel but with a smile. A 
 kindly pity took the place of ferocity. 
 There was an absence of seriousness of
 
 10 RECENT FRENCH T ENDENCIES 
 
 which nobody could accuse Huxley, who 
 loved to dance upon the bodies of his 
 episcopal victims, like a scientific Dr. 
 Hyde. In France at the beginning of 
 the century we find a splendid rebel like 
 Lamennais, at the end only a tawdry 
 rebel like Renan. It is like the difference 
 between a fallen archangel and a dis- 
 respectful Parisian gamin. But in those 
 twenty years which closed the century 
 the shadow of Renan lay over the 
 intellectual life of the country and, 
 unlike the shadow of Peter which 
 cured, the shadow of Renan was like a 
 blight on everything it ' touched : on 
 religion, on patriotism, and on the belief 
 in good. 
 
 i. The Shadow of Renan 
 
 Pauvre enfant, tes idees te mettront stir 
 le pave, Henriette Renan used often to 
 say to her brother in his youth. Intelli- 
 gence does not make a prophet, and in 
 this matter Henriette was entirely wrong.
 
 FIN DE SIECLE ii 
 
 The ideas of Ernest Renan brought him 
 name and fame and probably a reasonable 
 competence. During the later years of 
 his life he ruled as intellectual King of 
 France, and his dominating influence 
 lasted for several years after his death. 
 It was not till the twentieth century had 
 dawned that men began to examine the 
 idol they had worshipped. They soon 
 discovered the feet of clay. But that 
 was after his death. During the last 
 fifteen years of his life he reigned as 
 serenely as Voltaire in his old age at 
 Ferney or Dr. Johnson in the taverns of 
 Fleet Street. What he said was law. His 
 philosophy of life became the fashionable 
 philosophy of life in the intellectual 
 coteries of Paris, and some of those who 
 have now emancipated themselves from 
 his influence must look back to the time 
 when they too were under the wand of 
 the magician. For Renan was truly a 
 magician. There was magic not only in 
 his style but, seemingly, in his personality 
 too. When one looks at his portrait
 
 12 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 by Bonnot, and notices the shapeless and 
 unwieldy body, the short arms, and the 
 large face, partly the face of an arch- 
 bishop and partly of a Long John Silver, 
 it is evident that Renan was no ordinary 
 man. A perfectly uncanny intelligence 
 is visible in every line of the counten-| 
 ance, and as nothing appeals to the|, 
 French like intelligence it is only natural | 
 that his influence, either for good or ? 
 evil, was very great. 
 
 Unfortunately it was for evil. If one 
 believes in the principles of dilettanteism, 
 that nothing matters very much, and 
 that the highest wisdom is to caress one's 
 own thought in some quiet comer in 
 peace without worrying over much about 
 the world at large, it is evident that 
 ideas like these are likely to be a solvent 
 of both religion and patriotism, and 
 perhaps of much else as well. _And.il 
 one is convinced that nothing is of 
 importance in the world except the things 
 of intelligence it is quite clear that 
 action will be discountenanced and that
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 13 
 
 men of action will be considered to belong^ 
 to an inferior class. It was not a momen- 
 tary feeling of irritation, nor a desire to 
 snub the patriotism of his companions, 
 that made Renan say when he was 
 watching a French regiment in 1870 
 on its departure to the front : "In all 
 those men there is not one capable of 
 an act of virtue " ; it was the expression 
 of the most heartfelt conviction that 
 perhaps Renan ever had. No one was 
 ever more aristocratic in mind or more 
 contemptuous of the vulgar herd who, 
 after all, were doing the work of the 
 world in the main field of action. It 
 
 seems that the feeling was accentuated , 
 
 in his later years. It is perhaps worth 
 while to notice in passing that such a 
 philosophy is the philosophy of a defeated 
 nation. If one is beaten in battle it 
 is some consolation to hold that brute 
 strength is a matter of no importance and 
 proves nothing except its own strength, 
 and that it is the things of the spirit alone 
 that matter. This enables a man to-^
 
 14 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 preserve his self-respect and to look 
 down upon his conquerors as the agile- 
 minded Greek looked down upon the 
 Roman and the Roman of the decadence 
 looked down upon his Barbarian master. 
 Renan would not have agreed with Dr. 
 Johnson that patriotism was the last 
 refuge of a scoundrel ; he merely despised 
 it as the refuge of the unintelligent. 
 Consequently, in the years of his empire 
 over men's minds, French patriotism 
 notoriously lessened ; Alsace-Lorraine was 
 forgotten ; the German Empire increased 
 in arrogance and strength; and Paul 
 Deroulede ate his heart out in fruitless 
 toil and undeserved neglect. It began 
 to look as if France in a few years' time 
 would disappear from the rank of a 
 first-rate power, and, worse than all, it 
 seemed as if many of the most influential 
 people, especially among the professorial 
 class, did not care. The way was open 
 for the humiliation of Tangier. 
 
 No less disastrous was the influence of 
 Renan on religion. It was not only that,
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 15 
 
 by the magic of his style and the clarity 
 of his thought, he made the higher 
 criticism popular and brought it to the 
 notice of those who, if it had remained 
 in German, would never have paid any 
 attention to it, though he did that. He 
 managed, as Brunetiere has said, to 
 disengage it from the pedantry with 
 which it had been surrounded in Germany, 
 and there was no one more capable of 
 this task. Whatever hard names Renan 
 may be called he can never, by any 
 possibility, be accused of pedantry. 
 But he did more than popularize the 
 higher criticism. Religion has seen this 
 done often since and has survived. Far 
 more deadly was the tone he adopted 
 with regard to religion. He did not 
 violently attack it ; he treated it often 
 with a patronizing kindness. He said 
 he had never known any but good 
 priests. But Renan' s sympathy was in 
 itself an insult. The superior and self- 
 satisfied manner in which he treated the 
 person of our Lord and the story of " the
 
 i6 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 Galilean idyll " was far more exasperating 
 than the bludgeonings of other foes of 
 the Catholic faith. He thought that 
 Christianity was in its last agony, and 
 he gave the impression of a kindly 
 doctor at the bedside of a dying man, 
 insisting that the patient should be left 
 alone and not worried, as being beyond 
 all human power to help. But as the 
 patient was quite sure he was not dying, 
 and was not even sure that he was ill, 
 there was something peculiarly irritating 
 in the calm assumption of approaching 
 extinction. Renan found it very difhcuiF 
 to believe that any intelligent person 
 could really believe the Christian creeds. 
 He liked, he said, to imagine St. Pauriri 
 his old age abandoned by his friends, a 
 prey to scepticism and disillusion, with 
 the scales a second time fallen from his 
 eyes, sitting by some road-side in Spain 
 and acknowledging that he had wasted 
 his life. The truth is, that Renan was 
 never really a Christian. He was a pagan 
 in a cassock in his youth, and a pagan
 
 FIN DE SINGLE 17 
 
 in a frock-coat in his age ; that was the 
 only difference. He Hked to think of 
 himself as having undergone a terrible 
 crisis when he left Saint Sulpice, and no 
 doubt the crisis was *'great, entailing an 
 entire break with his past, but the pain 
 he felt was not the pain of finding an 
 empty heaven. It need not be supposed 
 that Renan imagined that in a few years 
 the Christian religion would disappear 
 from the face of the earth. His contempt 
 for the intelligence of the mass prepared 
 him to expect that it might last for some 
 time yet, but the Church of the future, 
 as he conceived it, would consist of two 
 classes of faithful : those, in the first 
 place, who believed as in the middle 
 ages ; the others sacrificing the letter 
 but holding to the spirit. Renan could 
 never away with the doctrine of an 
 intellectual elite. It is always cropping 
 up in his books . This was extraordinarily ^ 
 attractive to those who valued intelligence i; 
 above everything, as was fashionable \t^x 
 the intellectual world of Paris at the end \
 
 i8 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 of the last century. Renan was chiefly [ 
 responsible for the destruction of Christian \ 
 faith in a whole generation of you p^ ^ 
 Frenchmen. 
 
 Intellectually Renan was always a 
 Germanophile and owed almost every- 
 thing to the Germans. When he was 
 original, as in parts of his Vie de Jesus, 
 it was rather objectionable and was 
 entirely " in the direction of frivolity. 
 That certainly did not come from the 
 humourless professors of Jena or Berlin. 
 We perhaps hardly realize the dominance 
 of German thought, in the concluding 
 fifteen years of the last century and the 
 first few years of this, both in England and 
 in France. Oxford and the Sorbonne 
 were alike under the spell. Renan came 
 under the influence far earlier, and he 
 never emancipated himself from it. Ger- 
 many was his spiritual home, and in his 
 heart he worshipped the Germans with 
 the same docility as Dr. Sanday. 
 
 Nor was the influence of Renan unfelt 
 within the Catholic Church. During
 
 FIN DE SIKCLE 19 
 
 these years of his unquestioned tyranny 
 over thought there were clever young 
 abbes reading his books and the books 
 of the Germans and saying that some- 
 thing must be done if France was not 
 to be lost to the Church. In the minds 
 of a few of them it seemed that a new 
 apologetic was needed, an apologetic 
 acknowledging that there was a great 
 deal of truth in the new teaching. It 
 was the refusal to admit this, they 
 thought, and the resolute walking in 
 old ways, that lost Renan to the Church. 
 Lacordaire and Dupanloup were out of 
 date. This was the seed which flowered 
 a few years later in the Modernist move- 
 ment. 
 
 ii. HiPPOLYTE Taine 
 That the generation which grew up ta 
 manhood in the twenty years which 
 closes the nineteenth century grew u^ 
 almost entirely destitute of religion wa^ 
 due not only to Renan. Taine likewise; 
 had his share in the dechristiani«ifi'
 
 20 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 proces§. But his influence was very 
 different from that of Kenan. For one 
 thing, he was intensely serious. The 
 Hght-hearted dilettanteism of Renan 
 had no attraction for him, and where 
 Renan waved aside rehgion with a 
 smile Taine dismissed it with an ex- 
 planation. Taine was ready to explain 
 anything by the help of his theory of 
 the race, the milieu, and the moment, 
 whether it was the genius of a Shake- 
 speare or the sanctity of a Saint Teresa ; 
 and those who love a theory (and what 
 Frenchman does not ?) were naturally 
 fascinated by such an attractive one as 
 this. Besides Taine was the ideal scholar. 
 He lived laborious days for the sake of 
 his work. The usual pleasures and de- 
 lights of youth he put away and would 
 not touch. He was perfectly happy in 
 the company of his books, as many pas- 
 sages in his letters testify. He reminds 
 us of the great scholars of the Renais- 
 sance rather than the scholars of the 
 nineteenth century. He served know-
 
 FIN DE SlECLE 21 
 
 ledge with a true devotion ; the devotion 
 of a lover to his mistress or of a worshipper 
 to his god, and it was this single-minded- 
 ness as much as his brilliant genius and 
 wide range of learning that gave him 
 his influence over the intellectuals of his 
 country. There was also a curious 
 aloofness about Taine. He regarded the 
 world from the point of view of a curious 
 Martian, and in the presence of the 
 great masterpieces of human genius or 
 devotion he was like a medical student 
 dissecting a corpse. It was all purely 
 scientific, and Taine discussed the affairs 
 and the productions of man with the 
 same interest and the same lack of 
 passion with which M. J. H. Fabre 
 described the loves and quarrels of the 
 insects. 
 
 Naturally such a mind would have 
 little sympathy with religion, and prob- 
 ably there has seldom been a man with 
 less. For him the unseen world did not 
 exist. He has told us how in his boyhood 
 he abandoned all belief in Christianity,
 
 22 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 and how the loss did not cause him the 
 shghtest pang. We can easily believe 
 it. It is not to minds like his that 
 religion appeals. It appeals to those 
 who have a sense of the mystery of 
 things and who understand something 
 of the great world around them from 
 experience, who have known danger and 
 remorse and the agony of unsatisfied 
 desire ; in a word, to those who know 
 something at first hand of what life 
 really is. It appeals far less to quiet 
 men in studies whose knowledge is gained 
 almost entirely not from the world of 
 life but from the world of books. For 
 these, however, there often comes an 
 awakening, and such an awakening came 
 to Taine. The Commune of 1871, it 
 seems, changed his whole outlook, and 
 his intellectual loyalty drove him to 
 express his new views in his series of 
 books upon the Revolution. This gave 
 great offence to many people ; he was 
 looked upon by some as a renegade to 
 the causes he had hitherto supported,
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 23 
 
 but if he lost disciples in one camp he 
 probably gained them in another. Even 
 his life-long enemies were compelled to 
 acknowledge his sincerity and to treat 
 him with respect, and in certain strongly 
 Catholic quarters he was treated before 
 his death with something very like sym- 
 pathy. It was entirely different with 
 Renan. The Church thought it knew 
 better and often did not hesitate to 
 say so, while Renan retaliated by gently 
 excusing their prejudices on the ground 
 of invincible ignorance. 
 
 Still, though Taine to the end of his 
 life was never within leagues of returning 
 to the Catholic fold, his hostility to 
 religion was so far lessened as to make 
 him show a certain amount of sympathy 
 with protestantism. And there was all 
 the difference in the world between his 
 influence and that of Renan. The in- 
 fluence of Renan produced a type of 
 mind which was entirely incompatible 
 with any Christian belief, for it was the 
 mind of the intellectual mandarin thank-
 
 24 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 ing the Positivist God that he was not 
 even as the poor Cathohc. The influence 
 of Taine, on the contrary, favoured a type 
 of mind that was disposed to Christianity 
 because it insisted on the need of serious- 
 ness and sincerity and avoidance of pre- 
 judice. It is even possible to see in 
 Taine, as in Nietzsche, a good Christian 
 gone wrong and to argue that he had, 
 despite himself, the anima naturaliter 
 Christiana. Some may even think that, 
 if he had been born thirty-five years 
 later, there would have been a more 
 eclatant conversion than that of Brune- 
 tiere ; but this is hardly likely. Taine 
 appears to have been born with an 
 atrophied religious instinct. Fortunately 
 for his happiness he never even suspected 
 his defect and, like the blind men in Mr. 
 H. G. Wells's story, despised those who 
 were better endowed. He ought to have 
 been a good Catholic, but no one was 
 ever further away from the Church.
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 25 
 
 iii. Signs of Spring 
 
 When Renan died in 1892 and Taine 
 in 1893 nothing seemed more unhkely 
 than a Christian, let alone a Catholic, 
 renaissance. The tide seemed to have 
 set strongly against the Church all over 
 Western Europe. The scientific move- 
 ment associated chiefly with the name 
 of Darwin, and the biblical critical 
 movement, whose chief home was in 
 Germany, both seemed to be in the 
 main hostile to revealed religion. It is 
 true that there were some whose faith 
 was stronger, and who had studied both 
 these subjects, and who thought that 
 they might be baptized so as to become 
 helps and not hindrances to faith, but 
 in practice this was not generally found 
 to be the case. The majority of students, 
 if they did not abandon all belief in 
 religion, at any rate became lukewarm 
 supporters and anticipated considerable 
 changes in the Catholic creeds. Conse- 
 quently the Church no longer confronted
 
 26 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 the world with the same confidence 
 and majestic port as of old. She was 
 inclined to become apologetic and retir- 
 ing, like a timid classical scholar in the 
 company of a number of noisy and rather 
 bumptious scientific men. And what 
 Renan and Taine began among the 
 educated, the anti-clerical movement 
 completed among the uneducated. Anti- 
 clericalism, from the days of Moliere, 
 has always been popular in France 
 among those of irreligious tendency, for 
 if your own morals are bad it is delightful 
 to be able to argue that those of your 
 neighbour are worse because he is a 
 hypocrite as well. In the later years of 
 the nineteenth century anti-clericalism 
 seemed dominant in France. Through 
 great districts of the country hardly 
 anyone went to mass ; the local govern- 
 ment almost everywhere was in the 
 hands of the anti-clericals, and local, and 
 often national, politics were dictated in 
 secret sessions of the Masonic lodges. 
 M. Homais was the real ruler of France,
 
 FIN DE SIliCLE 27 
 
 and the Army and the Church shared in 
 an unpopularity that drew them closer 
 together. They bowed low before the 
 anti-clerical blast and hoped for better 
 times in the future when France should 
 come to herself again and become once 
 more the France of St. Louis and Jeanne 
 d'Arc. 
 
 But Renan and Taine were hardly in 
 their graves before there began to appear 
 signs of a change. And, curiously enough, 
 these signs began to appear in the edu- 
 cated classes ; among those, in fact, whom 
 an unprejudiced observer would prob- 
 ably have described as lost for ever to 
 the Catholic faith. Several startling con- 
 versions took place. It they did not 
 show which way the wind was blowing, 
 at any rate they indicated a possible 
 change of wind. Two of the most 
 remarkable were those of Joris Karl 
 Huysmans and Ferdinand Brunetiere. 
 
 Huysmans was a novelist who had 
 graduated in the school of Zola and had 
 attained considerable fame as a stylist.
 
 28 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 He had tasted life in many ways and had 
 even dabbled in diabolism. He seemed 
 the most unlikely man in the world to 
 become a Christian, for he had no 
 Christian experience in his boyhood to 
 fall back upon. He was brought up, 
 he has told us, at a lycee, in entire indif- 
 ference to all religion. Thus his conver- 
 sion cannot be explained by the rising 
 to the surface of ideas long hidden in the 
 depths of the subconsciousness and only 
 awaiting a favourable opportunity to 
 assert themselves. It was very different, 
 therefore, from the return of Frangois 
 Coppee to the practice of religion, for, 
 in that case it was obvious that a severe 
 and dangerous illness awakened what was 
 merely dormant in the soul. With Huys- 
 mans, apparently, there were no such 
 dormant ideas. His own explanation 
 would certainly have been that it was 
 his intense appreciation of the medieval 
 art and music of the Church which 
 forced him to believe that the religion 
 which produced that art and that music
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 29 
 
 was true. In his novel, En Route, under 
 the thin disguise of Durtal, he has 
 practically described how belief came to 
 him, and his next book, La Cathedrale, 
 is simply a long paean of praise of Chartres 
 Cathedral and medieval art. No doubt 
 there are many roads to God, and if 
 some, like Wordsworth, are led by their 
 love of nature, there is no reason why 
 others should not be led by their love 
 of art. But perhaps there was more 
 behind which Huysmans himself did not 
 guess at. It is not fantastic to see in 
 him an example of the natural hunger of 
 the soul for God. He wandered long 
 in a far country, but he was oppressed 
 by the boredom and flat unprofitableness 
 of it all, and it is plain that sin had 
 induced in him a deep disgust. There 
 were some who sneered at his conversion 
 as merely that of a decadent literary 
 man in search of a new sensation, but 
 this is not fair. His religion became 
 everything to him, and in the last days 
 of his life, when he was slowly dying of
 
 30 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 a terrible and painful malady, it gave 
 him both the strength and the consola- 
 tion which he needed. No doubt there 
 was little that was intellectual about 
 the religion ot Huysmans, but his con- 
 version is at least evidence of the 
 inability of the negations of atheism or 
 agnosticism to satisf}^ the needs of the 
 soul and is, consequently, a true sign of 
 the coming spring. 
 
 If it was possible to depreciate the 
 importance of the conversion of Huys- 
 mans, no such insinuation could be made 
 in the case of Brunetiere. Ferdinand 
 Brunetiere held an unique position in 
 the intellectual world of Paris. Almost 
 the foremost of French men of letters ; 
 the resolute opponent of the naturalist 
 school ; an opponent, no less, of dilet- 
 tanteism in all its forms, and the director 
 of the famous Revue des Deux Mondes, 
 he had long been known as a fearless 
 critic and a doughty controversialist. 
 Some religion was necessary for him, and 
 he tried for a time to find satisfaction in
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 31 
 
 Positivism. But this would not do. 
 He could not stay where he was, and 
 the devotees of natural science were one 
 day scandalized to find Brunetiere shout- 
 ing from the house-tops that science was 
 bankrupt. And when Brunetiere shouted 
 the world had to listen. He could make 
 out a very good case for himself too. 
 Science had unquestionably made all 
 sorts of promises concerning the golden 
 age that the reign of science would 
 bring in, and, as unquestionably, these 
 promises had not been fulfilled. Perhaps 
 it was not an argument that proved 
 anything very much except that men 
 of science could be bad prophets. But 
 there is authority for the statement that 
 we should not be afraid of bad prophets, 
 and, after Brunetiere, men ceased to be 
 afraid of the men of science. With one 
 blow he had destroyed much of their 
 prestige, and devout Christians who 
 would never have dared themselves to 
 speak irreverently of the scientists, 
 breathed again as when a tyranny is
 
 32 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 overthrown. Nor was this all. News 
 presently came to Paris that Brunetiere 
 was in Rome and had been received by 
 Pope Leo XIII, and before the anti- 
 clericals had recovered from the shock, 
 they heard that he had submitted to 
 the Church and had become a Catholic. 
 It looked as if they would have to revise 
 their belief that Catholicism was 
 a faith which could be " held by no 
 sane man," for while it was quite pos- 
 sible to impugn M. Brunetiere's critical 
 judgment it was quite impossible to 
 question either his sanity or his intellec- 
 tual ability. 
 
 It was apparently the social side of 
 Christianity that appealed to Brune- 
 tiere. The Catholic religion is not only 
 a method of individual salvation, it is 
 also a great social and political power 
 in the world. It is of course possible 
 to differ, and to differ honestly, in 
 opinion with regard to the beneficence 
 of this power. There are some who 
 believe that it has been exercised for
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 33 
 
 evil and not for good, and that the 
 Church has been the great enemy of all 
 human progress and enlightenment, and 
 however much we may wish to feel the 
 bumps of the gentlemen who believe 
 this, their hostility is a thing tc be 
 reckoned with. In France especially 
 their numbers are not small, and a good 
 political machine will atone for many 
 intellectual shortcomings. But there are 
 others who believe that it is only the 
 power of religion and the Church that 
 keeps human society together, and that 
 if the Church is destroyed or greatly 
 weakened the future of European civiliza- 
 tion is dark. The disintegrating forces 
 would be too strong. Certainly the 
 history of France, especially the recent 
 history, can be quoted in favour of this 
 idea. The growth of irreligion and anti- 
 clericalism has coincided with a decline 
 in national power and with the growth 
 of anti-national forces. Brunetiere be- 
 came strongly convinced that the role 
 played by the Catholic religion in the
 
 34 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 national life was indispensable, and this 
 was perhaps the chief cause of his 
 conversion. He became a tower of 
 strength to the Church and was inde- 
 fatigable in writing and speaking on her 
 behalf. His conversion and his advocacy 
 were sources of enormous support to her 
 cause. If there were some who thought 
 that a new convert might be a little 
 more modest and a little less ready to 
 lay down the law and tell others their 
 duty, they might have remembered that 
 Brunetiere was a dogmatist by nature, 
 and that he could no more help lecturing 
 than he could help breathing. He knew 
 he had something to say and he meant 
 to say it. But there were always some 
 who suspected his orthodoxy up to the 
 day of his death. 
 
 Before the end of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, then, there were signs that the 
 Catholic religion was beginning to re- 
 assert its sway over the minds of the 
 highly educated. But the majority still 
 held aloof. In the opinion of a good
 
 FIN DE SIECLE 35 
 
 many it seemed that the chief cause of 
 this was the intransigence of the Church 
 and the attitude she had taken up with 
 regard to the new scientific and historical 
 knowledge. They hoped that a recon- 
 ciliation between the Church and modern 
 learning was not impossible. So was 
 born the Modernist movement.
 
 II 
 
 Modernism 
 
 THE Modernist movement,^" while it 
 lasted, commanded the loyalty 
 and the heartfelt allegiance of some of 
 the best brains of the French clergy and 
 of a handful of the laity. It never 
 succeeded in making much impression 
 upon the Church as a whole, which went 
 on its way serenely indifferent to the 
 new ideas. In one sense there was no 
 movement at all, for the Modernists were 
 not organized and had no common body 
 of beliefs. Some approached the matter 
 from the historical, some from the 
 philosophical point of view, and there 
 was no guarantee that the conclusions 
 each reached would be in agreement 
 with the conclusions of the rest. The 
 
 37 
 
 8945G
 
 38 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 one point all had in common was the 
 feeling that something was wrong ; that 
 the Church was out of touch with modern 
 learning, and that the solution was not 
 to be found in the direction of Liberal 
 Protestantism. The real point of interest 
 in the movement was this: Was it the 
 last dying quiver of the theological 
 thought of the nineteenth century, or 
 the first vigorous kick of the twentieth ? 
 For some time this was in doubt, and 
 there were some who thought the Mod- 
 ernists were men born before their time, 
 and some who thought they were men 
 who were born after. Another question 
 was : What was the relation of the 
 movement to German thought ? Here 
 again there was disagreement, for while 
 there were some who held that the 
 movement was really hatched in Germany 
 and consequently entirely dependent upon 
 the Germans for its intellectual artillery, 
 there were others who claimed that it 
 meant the emancipation of criticism 
 from Teutonic domination. These ques-
 
 MODERNISM 39 
 
 tions can be answered now in the light 
 of the later history of the movement, but 
 at the time they were not so easy to 
 answer. 
 
 i. The Origins of Modernism 
 
 The origins of Modernism may be 
 sought far back in the history of the 
 Church if the movement is regarded 
 simply as one chapter in the long at- 
 tempt of Liberal Catholicism to vindicate 
 its right to at least a place in the Church. 
 If this view is taken one precursor will 
 undoubtedly be Erasmus, and another, 
 as undoubtedly, Richard Simon, the 
 Oratorian, who lived in the last half of 
 the seventeenth century, who was the 
 father of Old Testament criticism, and 
 whose name has probably been preserved 
 mainly owing to his controversies with 
 Bossuet. It is possible that Simon's 
 character was not equal to his ability 
 (even his friends, it is said, had the poorest 
 opinion of him) but theological con- 
 troversy was merciless in those days, and,
 
 40 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 maybe, Simon was not so black as he 
 was painted. Theologians, he said him- 
 self, never bit anybody sans emporter 
 la piece. Things are different nowadays ; 
 theological opponents are on the whole 
 civil, and theological quarrels are not 
 to be compared, for zest of battle, with 
 antiquarian. Whatever Simon's charac- 
 ter he was the pioneer of a new line of 
 study. His Histoire critique was an 
 effort at the reconstruction of the literary 
 history of the Jewish people ; he insisted 
 on the composite character of the Pen- 
 tateuch ; denied the Mosaic authorship ; 
 (though he seems to have thought it may 
 have been written under the direction of 
 Moses) and anticipated many of the 
 critical conclusions of a later day. His 
 name has been unfairly neglected, for 
 he, more than anyone else, was the parent 
 of the higher criticism. In this, as in 
 his long battle with the ecclesiastical 
 authorities, he too was a precursor of 
 the Modernists. And they were never 
 slow to acknowledge their debt to him.
 
 MODERNISM 41 
 
 But the immediate parent of the 
 movement was Renan. It was his in- 
 fluence that awoke some Cathohcs to 
 the need of a new apologetic, for, after 
 his works, it seemed to them that it 
 would be impossible for men ever to be 
 again satisfied with the old. Renan's 
 fatal dilettante influence on the youth of 
 France has been already mentioned, so 
 it is only fair to mention that he had 
 another influence over some, namely, 
 that of the devoted scholar, preoccupied 
 with the search for truth. Men, after 
 reading his books, felt that a new world 
 in the realm of learning was opening 
 before them, and that they could never 
 look on things in the same way again. 
 And at the same time there came a 
 further thought. Was it necessary for 
 an honest man, as Renan thought it was, 
 to leave the Church directly he became 
 convinced of the truth of the new ideas ? 
 Might not Renan, if he had lived a 
 generation later, have been saved to the 
 Church ? Was it not rather the anti-
 
 42 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 quated theology and philosophy of his 
 teachers that drove him out, and not 
 any real incompatibility or contradiction 
 between the old faith and the new 
 learning. These and similar ideas were 
 in the air as the nineteenth century 
 drew to its close, and the scheme of a 
 new apologetic which would provide a 
 new defence for the Catholic religion 
 without falling out with what seemed 
 the tolerably certain conclusions of mod- 
 ern science began to take shape in some 
 minds. It looked indeed like a forlorn 
 hope. Catholics on the whole did not 
 want it ; Protestants asserted its im- 
 possibility, and free-thinkers smiled. But 
 now that the movement has ended in 
 ruin and disaster it is only fair to remem- 
 ber the disinterested spirit, the noble 
 aims, and the single-minded enthusiasm 
 for truth with which it started. 
 
 The cradle of the movement was the 
 Institut catholiqiie of Paris, of which in 
 1880 Mgr. d'Hulst became rector. The 
 Institut catholique was a small Catholic
 
 MODERNISM 43 
 
 university to which Catholics might go 
 and be prepared for their examinations 
 without imperilhng their faith in the 
 State institutions. Mgr. d'Hulst was a 
 good priest of considerable learning, 
 widely read, sympathetic to new ideas, 
 and very desirous of making the Institute 
 over which he ruled of real service to the 
 Church of France. He was very anxious 
 not to appear obscurantist, but he could 
 be counted upon never to rebel against 
 ecclesiastical authority. He perhaps 
 hardly understood the difficulties of his 
 task, and it is almost certain that he 
 underrated the difficulties he would have 
 to face. At his doors was the famous 
 seminary of St. Sulpice, the students of 
 which formed no inconsiderable part of 
 the pupils of the Institut. This gave the 
 superior-general of St. Sulpice a certain 
 power of which M. Icard, the then holder 
 of that position, was not slow to take 
 advantage. By merely withdrawing his 
 students from any lectures which he 
 considered dangerous in tendency he
 
 44 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 could at once throw a cloud of suspicion 
 over the orthodoxy of the teaching given 
 at the Institut. This power he exercised 
 first in the case of the abbe Duchesne. 
 M. Duchesne, as all the world now knows, 
 is a historian of the first rank, with a 
 Gallic gift of irony, and a taste for 
 iconoclasm. This taste he satisfied by 
 gaily destroying the legends of the 
 apostolic origin of the Church of France. 
 M. Icard was really shocked. It was 
 bad enough if it was done with decent 
 regret ; it was deplorable if it was done 
 in the spirit of a boy at a cocoa-nut shy. 
 And there was worse behind, for M. 
 Duchesne's lectures on the ante-Nicaean 
 Church seemed to hint pretty plainly 
 that all the Fathers were not orthodox 
 on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 
 But the storm passed over and Mgr. 
 d'Hulst refused to throw Duchesne to 
 the wolves. 
 
 A more serious controversy broke out 
 immediately afterwards ; more serious 
 because it was connected, not with
 
 MODERNISM 45 
 
 ecclesiastical history, but with the his- 
 tory of the Bible. It seemed that Mgr. 
 d'Hulst was willing to go some lengths 
 in the direction of the higher criticism. 
 When Renan died, in 1892, he seized 
 the opportunity to publish a long article 
 on his life and career in the Corre- 
 spondant, suggesting that perhaps the 
 teaching he had received at St. Sulpice 
 had helped him to lose his faith, and 
 asking, practically, what would have 
 happened if the less timid teaching of 
 the Institut catholiqiie had been available 
 in those days. One can imagine the 
 consternation of M. Icard, wounded not 
 only in his own beliefs but in the insinua- 
 tion against the seminary of which he 
 was the head. It is probable, however, 
 that he recognized the real position of 
 affairs. Mgr. d'Hulst had fallen under 
 the influence of a young professor whom 
 he had brought up from the country, a 
 former student at the Institut, the Abbe 
 Alfred Loisy. The real danger came, not 
 from Mgr. d'Hulst,but from M. Loisy.
 
 46 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 ii. L'Abbe Loisy 
 
 Alfred Loisy was born in 1859 ^^ the 
 region of the Marne in Eastern France. 
 He came of a family of small cultiva- 
 teurs, and had it not been for his delicate 
 health and fragile figure there is every 
 probability that he would have lived 
 and died as a small farmer in the Cham- 
 pagne. He had no other wishes for him- 
 self, and all his life he has been a man 
 of singularly small ambitions. His dis- 
 abilities for a country life seemed to 
 mark him out for a career in the Church ; 
 he followed this as the line of least 
 resistance, and presently found himself, 
 after a very short experience of pastoral 
 work, in the position of lecturer at the 
 Institut catholique of Paris. Long before 
 this his remarkable ability had been 
 discovered by his masters, who looked 
 upon him as one of the rising hopes 
 among the younger clergy. It seemed 
 possible that high preferment in the 
 Church awaited him. But Loisy, if he
 
 MODERNISM 47 
 
 could not be a farmer, was determined 
 to be a savant. He devoted himself 
 particularly to the study of Oriental 
 languages, and was advised by his 
 teachers to attend the lectures of Renan 
 at the College de France. Priests were 
 not infrequent members of the audience, 
 and Loisy has told us the story of a tall 
 ahhe, horrified at the lecturer's suggestion 
 that Jeremiah might have had something 
 to do with the composition of Deuter- 
 onomy, who dashed out of the room and 
 banged the door. Loisy distinguished 
 himself by no such display of ecclesiastical 
 zeal ; he sat quietly in his corner and 
 attended to what the professor said. 
 Already an idea was taking possession 
 of his mind. Mon ambition etait de 
 vaincre un jour Renan par ses propres 
 armes, par la critique dont je m'instruisais 
 a son ecole, he wrote later, commenting 
 on these days ; but in the event, alas ! 
 it was Renan who won. 
 
 From the beginning Loisy appears to 
 have been an advanced critic, and this
 
 48 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 soon brought him into hot water with the 
 authorities. His early pubhcations were 
 regarded with grave suspicion ; M. Icard 
 again gave trouble, and poor Mgr. d'Hulst 
 was worried nearly to death. He seems 
 to have been mistaken in his estimate of 
 Loisy's character, thinking him peaceable 
 and pliable, whereas in reality the frail 
 body of the little ahhe concealed a 
 determination of iron. And Mgr. d'Hulst 
 little knew the travail that was going on 
 in Loisy's mind, for Loisy was not a 
 man of easy confidences. Ni M. Du- 
 chesne, ni per Sonne autre de mes amis 
 ou relations n'a connu le drame qui se 
 passait dans ma conscience. J'ai pu 
 discuter avec tel ou tel les prohlemes de 
 critique hihliqiie ou de theologie : mil ne 
 savait ce que fen pensais au plus intime 
 de moi-meme. Mgr. d'Hulst, as has been 
 said, was not an obscurantist, but all 
 he desired at the present was to make a 
 reconnaissance in force, ready to retreat 
 at once if he found the opposition strong, 
 and he was horrified to discover that
 
 MODERNISM 49 
 
 Loisy intended to give battle and would 
 not withdraw a yard. He was torn in 
 two. On the one hand the reputation 
 for orthodoxy of his beloved Instihd was 
 at stake ; on the other, he liked Loisy 
 and desired to save him, and, probably, 
 in the main, believed that Loisy was 
 right. But Mgr. d'Hulst was one of 
 those men who, if conscience is not 
 involved, will always yield if enough 
 pressure is brought to bear, and in the 
 end Loisy was sacrificed. He seems to 
 have resented very bitterly this action of 
 his superior, and certainly it was not 
 easy to defend. It bore the unheroic 
 appearance of the sacrifice of another in 
 order to save his own position. Loisy 
 left the Institiit catholiqtte and spent the 
 next few years as chaplain of a girls' 
 school kept by Dominican nuns at 
 Neuilly.
 
 50 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 iii. L'EVANGILE ET L'EgLISE 
 
 It was dangerous to turn the thoughts 
 of Loisy to the subject of Cathohc 
 dogma, and especially to get him to teach 
 it. But this is what Cardinal Richard 
 did. At Neuilly part of his duties was 
 to give instruction in doctrine, and he was 
 soon preoccupied with the subject. Reli- 
 gion appeared to him more and more as 
 the most important force in the world ; 
 the Catholic Church had played a great 
 and commanding part in the past and 
 might do so again, but the usual Catholic 
 teaching concerning our Lord, the Church, 
 and the sacraments, seemed impossible. 
 He no longer believed literally in a single 
 article of the Creed except that one 
 which said that Jesus Christ was " cruci- 
 fied under Pontius Pilate." It was not 
 long after this that Harnack's famous 
 book on the essence of Christianity was 
 published in Berlin. It gave an oppor- 
 tunity to Loisy to speak his mind. 
 
 Harnack's position was comparatively
 
 MODERNISM 51 
 
 simple. He asserted that the important 
 thing for the Christianity of to-day was 
 to get back to the teaching of Jesus, and 
 he set out to discover what the teaching 
 of Jesus really was. A study of the 
 Gospels convinced him that this was 
 simply the teaching of the Fatherhood of 
 God. He argued therefore that every- 
 thing else (Christology, the doctrine of 
 the Church, the sacraments) was accre- 
 tion and must be abandoned. Luther 
 had only half done his work ; it remained 
 for the Germans of the nineteenth and 
 twentieth centuries to complete it, and 
 to purge Christianity from all its patristic 
 and medieval accretions. The book at- 
 tracted much attention, not in Germany 
 alone but throughout Europe, and the 
 fire of controversy was soon well alight. 
 Loisy determined to answer Harnack's 
 book. But his answer would be very 
 different from the answer of most Catho- 
 lic controversialists who contented them- 
 selves with denying Harnack's facts. 
 Lois}^ admitted many of his facts but
 
 52 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 denied his inferences. He was not, how- 
 ever, wilHng to admit all his facts ; for 
 Harnack's theory that our Lord's teach- 
 ing was solely the proclamation of the 
 Fatherhood of God seemed to him mis- 
 taken. His reading of the Gospels had 
 led him to believe that the burden of 
 our Lord's teaching was not the Father- 
 hood of God but the Kingdom of God. 
 Loisy was already convinced of the truth 
 of what is now called the eschatological 
 theory of the Gospels, a theory first 
 mooted by Johannes Weiss and popu- 
 larized later by Albert Schweitzer. This 
 was his first grief against Harnack ; 
 his second was against Harnack's in- 
 ferences. He would not allow that be- 
 cause a doctrine was not found in the 
 Gospels and was not known by the first 
 generation of Christians that therefore it 
 must be thrown overboard. Harnack 
 said : These things were not part of the 
 Christian Creed in the earliest ages, 
 therefore they are false and must go ; 
 Loisy said : It is true that they are not
 
 MODERNISM 53 
 
 to be found there, but it does not follow 
 that they are not a true development. 
 It was in the direction of a radical theory 
 of development that he thought he 
 might find light. 
 
 Of course the theory of development is 
 not new, though it has never been looked 
 upon by the authorities at Rome with a 
 favourable eye. The best known of all 
 such theories is that of Newman, and 
 there can be little doubt that it was the 
 study of Newman which suggested the 
 idea to Loisy. The commonest theory 
 of development is that which regards all 
 doctrine as implicit, though not neces- 
 sarily explicit, from the beginning. The 
 only development that takes place is the 
 becoming explicit, under the guidance of 
 the Holy Spirit, of what was previously 
 implicit. The faith, then, as time went 
 on, would grow, but there would never 
 be any abandonment of any doctrine ; 
 everything would become fuller and 
 rather more complicated ; that was all. 
 Loisy' s theory was different from this,
 
 54 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 as became evident when in 1913 he gave 
 L'Evangile et L'Eglise to an astonished 
 Church. The Gospel, according to him, 
 was bound to take an outward form if it 
 was to hve, and the outward form it took 
 was the Church. The truths of the 
 Gospel are preserved through the ages 
 by taking a symbolical form, and these 
 symbolical forms may change. The sym- 
 bols that were best adapted to one 
 century might not be equally adapted 
 for another, and new symbols might have 
 to be discovered if the truth of the Gospel 
 was to be preserved. The truth would 
 always remain the same, but the symbols 
 would change. The Church must always 
 be prepared to restate her creeds. So, 
 far from it being cause of valid objection 
 against the Church because she has 
 changed and is very different from the 
 Church of the Upper Room, or the Church 
 of the Catacombs, these differences are 
 really the sign of life. Life implies 
 development and implies change. 
 
 It may be imagined the consternation
 
 MODERNISM 55 
 
 which this book caused. While to a few 
 it appeared as a ray of Ught in a dark 
 room, by most it was intensely disliked. 
 What would a priest moulded in the 
 traditional teaching of his diocesan 
 seminary have thought of the following ? 
 
 On pent dire que Jesus, au cours de son 
 ministere, n'a ni present d ses apotres ni 
 pratique lui-meme micun reglement de 
 culte exterieur qui aurait caracterise 
 rEvangile comme religion. Jesus n'apas 
 plus regie d'avance le culte chretien qu'il 
 n'a regie formellement la constitution et 
 les dogmes de VEglise. 
 
 Or what would he say when he was 
 told that none of the sacraments, not 
 even the Eucharist, were instituted by 
 our Lord Himself ; or when he began to 
 suspect the many things which the book 
 seemed to imply but did not expressly 
 state ? 
 
 Nor was the argument likely to be 
 more welcome to Protestants. They 
 would not like to be told that l' esprit 
 chretien a vivifie et vivifie encore des
 
 56 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 pratiques mesquines en apfarence et qui 
 peuvent devenir aisement siiperstiteitses, 
 or to find a new defence for the cult of 
 Mary and the Saints. It was exceedingly 
 annoying just when they were rejoicing 
 in the blows that Harnack had delivered 
 against their old enemy, to find his 
 weapons being calmly turned upon them- 
 selves. 
 
 His book was also highly unwelcome 
 to the moderate critics. They were 
 persuaded that certain questions were, 
 if not entirely closed, at any rate practi- 
 cally decided in their favour. They had 
 become accustomed to tell their pupils 
 that the higher criticism had sown its 
 wild oats, and that the attack it had 
 made on certain positions was now 
 finally repelled. The authenticity of the 
 Fourth Gospel, for example, or the 
 character of St. Mark as an original 
 authority, were, they imagined, now 
 finally decided in favour of the orthodox 
 view. It was very annoying to find 
 that everything was again questioned,
 
 MODERNISM 57 
 
 and that the new criticism was even more 
 revolutionary than the old. Naturally 
 they did not like it. They were at ease 
 in their comfortable house when Loisy, 
 like a tiresome boy, sent a stone crashing 
 through the window. 
 
 Nor was there much sympathy to be 
 found abroad. The Germans were not 
 particularly pleased at his invasion of 
 their territory, nor with his free criticism 
 of German Protestant ideas. They ex- 
 pected foreigners to bring incense and 
 Loisy came with a sword. At the same 
 time English critics, not expecting any- 
 thing new from outside Germany, were 
 bewildered at first. That they had any- 
 thing to learn from a Frenchman and a 
 Roman Catholic was a strange idea and 
 one not assimilated at once. It is true 
 that Auguste Sabatier had written a 
 book on the religions of authority and 
 the religion of the spirit which adopted 
 very much the same position as Harnack 
 and was undoubtedly a work that 
 counted, but he was not well known in
 
 58 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 England and probably a fair number of 
 English scholars would have had some 
 difficulty in distinguishing between him 
 and his cousin Paul. 
 
 There were some, it is true, both 
 in France and abroad who welcomed 
 L'Evangile et L'Eglise on its appearance 
 like a new gospel, and thought they saw 
 a vision of a new and more powerful 
 Catholicism released from the trammels of 
 her past, reconciled with science, and 
 going forth to new conquests. But they 
 were not many in number, and that 
 these ideas were perilous guests in the 
 mind the history of the next few years 
 was to show. 
 
 iv. Per ignem et aquam 
 
 It is true that the Modernists (to give 
 them now the name which they were 
 given later) were few in number, but 
 what they lacked in quantity they made 
 up in quality. Among them were some 
 of the best Drains of the Catholic Church,
 
 MODERNISM 59 
 
 and they carried into the battle the 
 learning of the scholar coupled with the 
 enthusiasm of the missionary : a formid- 
 able combination which carried dismay 
 into many episcopal palaces ; the more 
 particularly because the strength of the 
 movement was not yet known and it 
 was suspected that there were sym- 
 pathisers in every seminary. It must 
 again be mentioned, however, that, at 
 this time at any rate, there was no com- 
 mon body of opinions held by Modernists. 
 They were agreed on certain principles, 
 that was all. Many, perhaps most, of 
 them did not agree with the extreme 
 critical conclusions reached by Loisy, 
 and Loisy himself seems to have had 
 scant sympathy with the philosophers of 
 the movement. 
 
 Thus in England the Modernist aims 
 attracted the sympathy and enlisted the 
 support of Baron Frederick von Hiigel, 
 that type of the ideal student, the 
 authority on mysticism, a brilliant lin- 
 guist and a scholar of perhaps wider and
 
 6o RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 more varied attainments than anyone 
 else in this country, and, at the same 
 time, through evil report and good 
 report, a devoted son of the Catholic 
 Church. Others might lose faith and 
 patience, or be betrayed into temper 
 and irritability, but von Hiigel never. 
 Then there was George Tyrrell, the 
 Jesuit, an impulsive Irishman, a gifted 
 writer, and a man of attained reputation 
 as a spiritual guide, who was at this time 
 finding his way to a position more and 
 more incompatible with the received 
 teaching of the Church. In Italy there 
 was Romolo Murri, whose interests were, 
 however, more social than intellectual, 
 and the clever group of young laymen 
 who were associated in the foundation of 
 that brilliant and short-lived review, // 
 Rinnovamento, together with the novelist, 
 Antonio Fogazzaro. Those who wish 
 to understand the ideals of the Italian 
 movement cannot be better advised than 
 to read his novel, // Santo. In France 
 there was, in addition to the critical
 
 MODERNISM 6i 
 
 school of Loisy, the philosophical school 
 associated with the names of Maurice 
 Blondel, of Laberthonniere, and of Le 
 Roy ; a school laying great stress on 
 the value of experience, and, though not 
 pragmatist, not uninfluenced by the 
 pragmatism of William James and 
 Schiller. Le Roy, it is true, was mainly 
 indebted to Bergson, and his book to 
 explain what dogma really is was a 
 gallant attempt to enlist the philosophy 
 of Bergson into the service of the Church. 
 During these years the brilliantly-con- 
 ducted periodical, Demain, from its home 
 at Lyons, did its best to bring the know- 
 ledge of the new theories to a wider 
 circle, an object which was more success- 
 fully achieved by the extremely clever 
 but malicious books of the Abbe Houtin 
 on the relations between scientific know- 
 ledge and theology in the nineteenth 
 and twentieth centuries. And during 
 all this period M. Paul Sabatier was 
 busy as a kind of commis-voyageur of 
 the new ideas in foreign countries and
 
 62 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 bringing their scattered sympathisers, 
 Cathohc, Protestant, and free-thinking, 
 into relations with one another. 
 
 But the chief interest of Modernism 
 centred in France and in Loisy, and 
 Loisy by this time was in mood of battle. 
 He was a dangerous opponent. He 
 never lost his temper or said anything 
 he was sorry for later, and he never 
 forgot to be ironical. He followed up 
 the publication of L'Evangile et L'Eglise 
 with an additional and explanatory 
 volume, retracting nothing and calcu- 
 lated to increase the anxiety of the 
 bishops, Autour d'un petit livre, together 
 with a huge volume on the Fourth Gos- 
 pel, setting forth his views on its allegori- 
 cal and non-historical character. By 
 this time he had probably made up his 
 mind regarding the inevitable end of 
 his sacerdotal career, though he would 
 do nothing, beyond the publication of 
 his books, to precipitate it. He had 
 now left Paris, and after a short time at 
 Bellevue, in the diocese of Versailles,
 
 MODERNISM 63 
 
 had retired to the country (his health 
 being more than indifferent), and was 
 Uving in seclusion at Garnay, a village 
 a few miles from Dreux. 
 
 But Rome also was in the mood of 
 battle. With the accession of Pius X 
 to the see of Peter a new spirit reigned 
 at the Vatican. And this spirit was in 
 entire accord with the general temper of 
 the Church. While Father Billot at 
 Rome was utilizing his majestic learning 
 to destroy the teaching of the Modernists, 
 the French bishops, awakened to a 
 sense of the peril threatening the Church, 
 were issuing charge after charge against 
 the new heresy. It was perhaps un- 
 fortunate for the Church that the bishop 
 who was mostly brought into relation 
 with M. Loisy was Cardinal Richard, 
 the Archbishop of Paris. Loisy has de- 
 scribed him as a man |of another age, 
 la langiie qu'il parlait ne me disait Hen, 
 et il n'entendait pas celle dont f avals 
 appris d me servir. He was the last man 
 in the world to understand the difficulties
 
 64 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 or the mentality of a man like Loisy. 
 He was shocked at the very idea 
 of independent thought. Nourrir une 
 pensee propre, qui ne s'accordait pas avec 
 la pensee de I'Eglise, Halt le fait d'un 
 esprit orgueilleux, livre a Satan. One 
 is inclined to wonder sometimes, as the 
 early Modernists wondered about Renan, 
 whether the later history of Loisy might 
 not have been different if the see of Paris 
 in those critical years had been occupied 
 by a more enlightened and sympathetic 
 prelate. But it is not likely. 
 
 By the time that Loisy had retired to 
 Garnay the matter was practically out 
 of the hands of the bishops. Rome was 
 really alarmed and was contemplating the 
 severest measures against the Modernists. 
 The danger was probably exaggerated, 
 but there was a spirit of mutiny abroad 
 that justified uneasiness. Some men were 
 talking rebellion, and there was obviously 
 a great deal of discontent below the 
 surface which showed itself in a number 
 of anonymous publications. No Govern-
 
 MODERNISM 65 
 
 ment could afford to neglect these symp- 
 toms, and the Church of Rome has 
 always had a short way with revolution- 
 aries. Loisy barely escaped excommuni- 
 cation after the publication of L'Evangile 
 et L' Eglise 3.nd A utotir d'lin petit livre, but 
 it was evident that it would not be long 
 delayed unless he were willing to retract 
 his errors and condemn himself to future 
 silence. It is not even certain if silence 
 would have saved him, and that he would 
 not have been expected, as the price of 
 peace, to burn what he had adored and 
 adore what he had burned . And Loisy was 
 the last man in the world to retract, unless 
 it were proved to him that he was wrong. 
 The method of condemnation left him un- 
 convinced. During the four years from 
 1904 to 1908 he was, in his own phrase, 
 en marge de VEglise. He still wore the 
 soutane and, until the autumn of 1906, 
 when he failed to obtain a renewal of the 
 permission, continued to say mass pri- 
 vately in his own room. But he regarded 
 himself as not only on the extreme edge
 
 66 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 of the Church but as on the extreme edge 
 of the Christian reUgion. He did not set 
 himself up against the Church in matters 
 which he considered the Church had the 
 right to decide. He could only be a 
 Christian on certain terms, and if the 
 Church refused to have him on those 
 terms he would not rebel against her 
 decision and he would cease to be a 
 Christian. There was never anything of 
 the Protestant about Loisy. It was the 
 Catholic Church or nothing. Nor would 
 he defy the authorities. An AngHcan 
 would have cheerfully entrenched him- 
 self in a cathedral stall, provided by a 
 kindly State, and laughed at all attempts 
 to dislodge him. But such a position 
 would have been inconceivable to Loisy. 
 He wanted his ideas to be accepted, or at 
 least tolerated, by the Church, not to be 
 able to maintain them in defiance of his 
 ecclesiastical superiors. 
 
 It was not long before Rome struck, 
 first with the decree Lamentahili, then 
 with the Encyclical Pascendi. Nothing
 
 MODERNISM 67 
 
 now could avert the storm, and Loisy no 
 longer saw any reason for withholding 
 the publication of his two mighty volumes 
 on the S3'noptic Gospels, which therefore 
 appeared in January 1908, together with 
 two small volumes, one a criticism on 
 recent papal utterances, Simples reflex- 
 ions siw le decret Lamentahili et stir I'ency- 
 cliqiie Pascendi, and the other a collec- 
 tion of letters written at different times 
 in the previous half-dozen years and 
 published now as a measure of self- 
 defence. If he had not already burnt his 
 boats these publications would have been 
 amply sufficient to entail condemnation. 
 They also lost him many friends, for the 
 commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, 
 especially the chapter in the introduction 
 entitled La carriere de Jesus, showed how 
 very large a part of the story of our 
 Lord's life was, in Loisy' s opinion, legen- 
 dary and unhistorical. Except for the 
 theories, such as those of Drews, which 
 denied any historical character to the 
 person of Jesus, destructive criticism
 
 68 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 could hardly go further. Loisy effect- 
 ively shut the mouths of many friends 
 who had hitherto supported him. 
 Rome herself had probably long ago 
 lost all hope of keeping him. It only 
 remained to get rid of him in the 
 way that would do least harm to the 
 Church. So no one was surprised 
 (himself least of all) when, on March 7, 
 1908, the sentence of major excommuni- 
 cation was decreed against him. Loisy, 
 who was now living quietly at Ceffonds 
 in his own Champagne country, ceased 
 to wear the cassock and remained where 
 he was until later in the year he became 
 the successful candidate for the chair of 
 the history of religions at the College de 
 France in succession to Jean Reville. He 
 thus passed out of the history of the 
 Modernist movement. 
 
 Loisy was not the only victim. Others 
 were silenced and their books condemned 
 and the severest of measures were taken 
 to stamp the Modernist poison out of the 
 seminaries. To be suspected of Modern-
 
 MODERNISM 6g 
 
 ist leanings was to shut the door on all 
 hope of ecclesiastical promotion. Men had 
 to declare themselves. It was a time of 
 great anxiety and distress. The loss of 
 Loisy was a blow comparable to the blow 
 caused to the Oxford movement by the 
 defection of Newman. The movement 
 broke in two. There were some who 
 perhaps for a considerable time had been 
 riding for a fall, and there was a small 
 exodus from the Church. But on the 
 whole the number of these was insignifi- 
 cant. The majority, broken-hearted at 
 the collapse of all their hopes, remained, 
 because they were convinced that no 
 advance was possible outside the Church. 
 If the Church ordered silence they would 
 obey. Nothing was further from their 
 minds than secession or schism. Pro- 
 testantism with its liberty and its many 
 voices attracted them not at all. Theirs 
 was a position which deserved much sym- 
 pathy. Most of them had probably 
 never followed Loisy in the extreme 
 lengths to which he carried his criticism,
 
 70 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 but now they found themselves tarred 
 with the same brush. For the remainder 
 of the pontificate of Pius X their posi- 
 tion was deplorable. Their only con- 
 solation lay in the hope of brighter days 
 to come. Within the Church the move- 
 ment went underground ; outside it be- 
 came a branch of Liberal Protestantism or 
 of free-thought. 
 
 V. The Failure of Modernism 
 
 If we ask what were the causes of the 
 failure of Modernism the first answer to 
 be given is that the Modernist leaders 
 were offering to supply something of 
 which very few people apparently felt 
 the need. It started on the assumption 
 that there was a number of persons who 
 were much distressed in their faith by 
 the irreconcilable line taken by the Church 
 with regard t ) modern science. It was 
 possible, they pointed out, to place a 
 stumblingblock in the way of the intelli- 
 gent and educated as well as in the way 
 of the simple, and this they imagined the
 
 MODERNISM 71 
 
 Church was doing. There was some 
 reason for the beUef , as in the last years of 
 the nineteenth century it was plain that 
 the majority of those belonging to the 
 intellectual classes were alienated from 
 the Church. Nevertheless the diagnosis 
 was not correct. It is quite clear now 
 that, whatever were the causes of this 
 almost complete abandonment of reli- 
 gious practice, dissatisfaction with the 
 traditional teaching of the Church was 
 not one of them, except in so far as this 
 was part of the teaching of revealed 
 religion as a whole. There was no de- 
 mand, except among a few, for a new 
 Catholicism. When men began to return 
 to the Church they were quite contented 
 with the traditional teaching and were 
 strongly anti-modernist in tone and 
 temper. The movement was singularly 
 unable to make disciples among the 
 young intellectuals. 
 
 The fact is that the difficulties of the 
 Modernists were nineteenth-century diffi- 
 culties and were not felt by those who
 
 72 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 were growing to manhood in the early 
 years of the twentieth century. They 
 were the difficulties felt by those who had 
 lived in their youth under the shadow of 
 Renan and Taine, and who thought that 
 their own difficulties would also be the 
 difficulties of their children. But this is 
 seldom the case. The Church moves on, 
 and out of the reach of hostile attacks, 
 like a liner distancing a submarine. Con- 
 sequently to the younger men the 
 Modernists seemed, not the procession of 
 a twentieth century Catholicism, but 
 simply rather old-fashioned. The Mo- 
 dernist movement really belongs to the 
 history of the nineteenth century. 
 
 There was another reason for the fail- 
 ure. Modernism seemed to the young 
 men to be too intellectual and too Ger- 
 man a thing, and intellectualism and 
 Germanism they were out to destroy. 
 Some ages are mainly ages of thought 
 while others are mainly ages of action. 
 The early years of the twentieth century, 
 especially after 1905, have been years
 
 MODERNISM 73 
 
 when most respect is paid to action. It 
 was action, then, men thought, that 
 would restore France and free her from 
 the German peril. And to help them 
 in this they wanted a church that 
 was strong. France had become great 
 through the Catholic religion and they 
 believed she would not retain her place 
 among the nations without it. This was 
 felt by Brunetiere before the end of the 
 nineteenth century ; it was felt with far 
 greater force by the men of the twentieth. 
 And the tendency of Modernism was, it 
 seemed to them, to undermine her power. 
 Consequently they regarded it with dis- 
 favour. They were not overmuch trou- 
 bled with the intellectual difficulties of 
 the nineteenth century and they did want 
 very much a Church that should be an 
 inspiration and a rallying point in the 
 anxious years which they truly saw lay 
 ahead for their country. It is not to be 
 wondered at that Modernism in its later 
 years lost many of its earlier disciples and 
 made no new ones. The interest had 
 shifted.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Catholic Renaissance 
 
 IN the opening years of the twentieth 
 century nothing looked more un- 
 Hkely than a Cathohc revival. Many 
 people at home, and most abroad, 
 thought that the CathoUc religion had 
 not borne a very creditable part in the 
 affaire Dreyfus ; the Modernist movement 
 appeared formidable because no one knew 
 to what extent Modernist principles had 
 spread ; while anti-clericalism appeared 
 to have gained greatly in power and to be 
 meditating a new offensive against the 
 Church. Altogether it was a dismal 
 prospect, and no one can wonder that 
 there was a feeling of depression among 
 Catholics and a gnawing fear that the 
 
 75
 
 76 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 Catholic Veligion had hved in France and 
 that the principles of the Revolution were 
 on the eve of their final triumph. 
 
 i. The Dawn of a New Day 
 
 They were evil days for France as 
 well as for Catholicism. The Dreyfus 
 affair had left behind it a bad legacy of 
 hatred, suspicion and mistrust. The tem- 
 per that produces civil war was in the 
 air, and perhaps few people would have 
 been surprised if it had broken out. 
 Young Frenchmen as they grew up were 
 taught to look upon other young French- 
 men as their chief foes, and the hatred of 
 clerical for anti-clerical and anti-clerical 
 for clerical was greater than the hatred 
 either felt for the German. In those 
 years the anti-clerical was at the top. 
 He had gained possession of the govern- 
 ment machine and was supported by the 
 majority of the electorate of the country. 
 He found it was excellent to have a 
 giant's strength because it enabled him 
 to use it like a giant.
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE ^^ 
 
 A series of smashing blows was con- 
 templated against the Church. The re- 
 ligious orders were first marked down for 
 destruction. They had increased enor- 
 mously in France, and their wealth was 
 popularly supposed to be very great. 
 Unfortunately some of them, the Jesuits 
 and Assumptionists in particular, had 
 been exceedingly active in the anti- 
 Dreyfusist campaign, and there was ex- 
 cuse for regarding them as mainly political 
 agencies, plotting for the overthrow of 
 the Republic. A cleverly engineered 
 campaign succeeded in extending the 
 odium to the religious orders as a whole. 
 Nothing could have been more unfair. 
 Even if the charges against the Jesuits 
 and the Assumptionists were true (and 
 even in these cases there is little doubt 
 there was exaggeration) there was no 
 excuse whatever for extending the 
 charges to others. The majority of the 
 monks and nuns were either contempla- 
 tives, engaged almost wholly in prayer, 
 or were employed in useful work such as
 
 78 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 teaching the young, or tending the poor, 
 or nursing the sick. Almost all the 
 hospital nursing in France was in the 
 hands of religious. But their merits and 
 the fact that they were serving their 
 country as well as the Church did not 
 save them. No one is more merciless 
 than a politician. With the passing of 
 the Associations Act the decree of expul- 
 sion was made, and thousands of poor 
 women, who had never touched politics 
 with one of their fingers, and whose only 
 crime it was that they desired to serve 
 God and their country in peace, were 
 driven out of their homes to begin a new 
 life in exile among strangers in a foreign 
 land. For in the eyes of such a Govern- 
 ment as that of M. Combes it was a 
 crime to desire to serve God. Clericalism 
 was the enemy to be stamped out at 
 whatever cost of suffering to individuals. 
 But there was the prospect of worse to 
 come. The tiger had tasted blood and 
 was not likely to remain satisfied. 
 Hitherto no one had dreamed of the
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 79 
 
 suppression of the concordat. Whatever 
 else was likely to go, few people believed 
 the connexion between Church and 
 State was doomed. But the Government 
 thought otherwise. Since Napoleonic 
 days the Church had enjoyed, in return 
 for the lands alienated at the Revolution, 
 a pittance for her bishops and clergy. 
 The temptation to put the cure out into 
 the street was too strong to be resisted. 
 It is true that some of the wiser anti- 
 clericals saw that the existence of the 
 concordat, securing as it did the nomina- 
 tion of bishops to the French State, was 
 far more a source of weakness than of 
 strength to the Church, and suspected 
 consequently the wisdom of its overthrow. 
 But the majority did not agree with them. 
 They knew that the Church did not desire 
 the separation between itself and the 
 State, and that was enough for them. 
 They were, besides, entirely convinced 
 that the Church's day was over, and the 
 last idea that crossed i\w\i minds was the 
 possibility of a Catholic renaissance. So
 
 8o RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 the work of Napoleon was undone ; the 
 concordat was abolished, and the con- 
 nexion terminated between the French 
 Church and State. The clergy were 
 robbed of their tiny stipends, and even 
 their possession of their churches was 
 rendered insecure. It was an age of 
 persecution. Every annoyance that 
 could be given was resorted to. In the 
 Army an officer going to mass knew that 
 by doing so he was risking all chance of 
 professional advancement, and no Radical 
 politician would ever have dared to do so. 
 From the death of MacMahon to the 
 outbreak of the war no practising Catholic 
 has been President of the French Repub- 
 lic. 
 
 The outlook for France, then divided 
 in two by these bitter religious animosi- 
 ties, was gloomy enough. But in the 
 very hour of the anti-clerical triumph the 
 German menace, that nightmare which 
 ever since 1871 had oppressed the waking 
 dreams of Frenchmen, revived. The 
 Tangier incident of 1905 showed France
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 8i 
 
 that she was within measurable distance of 
 war. It was more than a shock ; it was 
 an awakening. The majority had come 
 to disbeUeve in the possibihty of a new 
 European war. They were determined 
 not to provoke one themselves, and they 
 did not beheve in the warlike ambitions 
 of the German Emperor. Probably the 
 chief reason why, in election after elec- 
 tion, an anti-clerical majority was re- 
 turned to the Senate and the Chamber 
 of Deputies, was that the people knew 
 that they would, under no circumstances, 
 provoke war. They were not so certain 
 of the Nationahst party and less certain 
 still of the monarchical party. It was 
 feared that these might engage in warhke 
 schemes abroad in order to further their 
 political aims at home. Consequently 
 again and again the electorate, often even 
 in CathoHc districts, returned the anti- 
 clerical candidate to the Chamber of 
 Deputies. Nous ne voulons pas les Alle- 
 mands chez nous was the principle on 
 which they gave their votes. They
 
 82 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 would run no risk whatever of counte- 
 nancing French aggression. Even Alsace- 
 Lorraine was almost forgotten. But now 
 it began to appear in a perfectly unmis- 
 takable way that there was a real danger 
 of German aggression. They might be 
 willing enough to let Germany alone, 
 but that would not help them much if 
 Germany was determined not to let them 
 alone. In the affairs of nations it does 
 not take two to make a quarrel. France 
 was at ease in her own house, unsuspicious 
 of any danger from abroad, with pacifist, 
 internationalist, and syndicalist opinions 
 every day gaining ground, when the 
 horrid spectre of war suddenly lifted up 
 its head and looked at them. The danger 
 passed away ; things soon settled down 
 again, and the politicians, after the way 
 of politicians, decided that it was a false 
 alarm, and that their abilities would be 
 sufficient in the future, as in the past, to 
 ward off the peril of war. Many of them 
 believed, like so many politicians in Eng- 
 land, that another great European war
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 83 
 
 was inconceivable. But there were some 
 who had learned the lesson. 
 
 It soon became evident that there was 
 a new spirit abroad in France, especially 
 among the young. The details of it may 
 be read in M. Dimnet's pages. Some 
 would qualify this new spirit as purely 
 reactionary, because it set up again for 
 admiration the things that men had 
 come to think lightly of, especially the 
 Army and the Church, and did not bow 
 the knee to science, or socialism, or the 
 spirit of the Revolution. The unhappy 
 anti-clerical began to find himself in a 
 new world, and a world not at all to his 
 liking, where the principles which he had 
 come to believe were incontestable were 
 treated as the follies of the past. It 
 must have seemed to him a topsy-turvy 
 world. He had always posed as the man 
 of the future, and here were these young 
 men treating him disrespectfully as a 
 relic of the past. And the worst of it was 
 that he could not laugh them out of 
 court as unintelligent or unlearned, as
 
 84 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 they were plainly the pick of the younger 
 generation. Consequently in the sheep- 
 folds of the masonic lodges there were 
 great searchings of heart. Notwith- 
 standing their pacifism they might not 
 have minded so much the revival of 
 patriotism ; it was the revival of religion 
 that caused consternation. 
 
 The cause of the Catholic renaissance 
 was, as has been said, largely due to the 
 political situation. Men turned to Rome 
 because they felt that the Church could 
 give what France needed. Scepticism 
 and dilettantism had eaten deeply into 
 the character of the nation and there was 
 a spirit abroad of unrest and dissatisfac- 
 tion. Disbelief in everything had been 
 almost the fashion. What France needed 
 was a faith and a discipline. Without 
 these the nation was on the high road to 
 ruin, and these, it seemed, the Church 
 alone could supply. That meant that it 
 was the Church alone that could save 
 France. These were the ideas which the 
 logic of events was forcing upon the
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 85 
 
 notice of the French people, especially 
 upon the notice of the young. 
 
 But there were some among the older 
 men who had been preaching this for 
 some time, notably among them being 
 the novelists Paul Bourget and Maurice 
 Barres. The Englishman as a rule refuses 
 to take either the novel or the play seri- 
 ously. He regards them as intended 
 solely to amuse and to while away an idle 
 hour. Their chief end is to serve as 
 recreation for the tired business man who 
 has spent the day upon the really im- 
 portant business of life at his office, and 
 does not want to be made to think in 
 the evening. England is therefore the 
 paradise of the sentimental and the 
 sensational novelists. The French do not 
 despise this class of work ; they have 
 their Georges Ohnet and their Maurice 
 Leblanc ; but they regard the best novels 
 as vehicles of ideas and expect them to be 
 serious contributions to the thought of 
 the day. The result is that novelists in 
 France have a great influence on the
 
 86 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 intellectual life of the country, and the 
 support of a great novelist such as 
 Maurice Barres or Paul Bourget is a 
 tremendous asset to a cause. 
 
 Maurice Barres, who at the present day 
 is one of the chief influences in France, 
 began his literary career by writing 
 decadent novels of a Nietzschean type, 
 proclaiming the culte du moi. But he 
 soon outgrew this and for many years 
 past has been a serious politician and 
 writer. He is a Frenchman of the East, 
 sprung from Lorraine, and the martyred 
 provinces have always had in him the 
 staunchest of friends. When others for- 
 got, he remembered. In politics he has 
 long been deputy for one of the divisions 
 of Paris ; he first entered upon a political 
 career during the Boulanger episode in the 
 later eighties of the nineteenth century, and 
 he has all along been one of the mainstays 
 of the Nationalist party. Although not 
 himself a believer he has always been on 
 the side of the Church and has rendered 
 her most valuable support in the Chamber
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE ^y 
 
 of Deputies. His eloquent plea on behalf 
 of the village churches of France, which 
 in many cases were being allowed by the 
 State or local authorities to fall into ruin, 
 is an instance in point. Even if he is not 
 a Catholic writer his voice has always 
 been raised on behalf of the right, on 
 behalf of freedom, patriotism and justice. 
 It is very hard to overestimate what 
 France owes him; a debt, moreover, 
 much increased since the beginning of the 
 war. His indirect influence on the Catho- 
 lic revival has also been considerable. 
 Like Charles Maurras, and the writers of 
 the Action Frangaise, he may not believe 
 in Jesus Christ, but he does believe in the 
 Church. 
 
 Paul Bourget, on the other hand, is a 
 Catholic novelist, though he too did not 
 begin as one. But for a good many years 
 now he has been an ardent missionary of 
 Catholic ideas. In L'Etape he proclaimed 
 the value of a Christian education, 
 contrasting it with the evil results which 
 sprang from an education without God ;
 
 88 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 in Un divorce he put forward a powerful 
 plea for the Christian view of marriage, 
 while in Le demon du jnidi, published on 
 the eve of the war, he set himself to show 
 the disastrous results which follow from 
 the adoption of Modernist principles. 
 And the book he has produced since the 
 war began, Le sens de la mort, is a power- 
 ful contrast between suffering and death 
 as they appear to a devout Catholic and 
 suffering and death as they appear to an 
 atheistic man of science. A war hospital 
 forms the background to the story, the 
 poignant sadness of which is only relieved 
 by the picture it gives of strong Christian 
 faith triumphant over pain and death. 
 Bourget is probably the most popular of 
 French novelists and the most widely read, 
 and it would not be easy to exaggerate 
 the influence of his persistent advocacy 
 of the value of religion. But Bourget' s 
 religion is entirely of the traditional 
 type ; he accepts the Catholic faith 
 wholly and without question, and has no 
 sympathy for any form of Modernism.
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 89 
 
 It is to him something that the world, 
 and especially France, needs, for the con- 
 sequences of its rejection are disastrous. 
 He is not so much interested in Chris- 
 tian thought as being the truth among 
 many conflicting intellectual systems ; 
 what he cares for is the Christian life as 
 the great practical need of the world. 
 It is likely that this attitude has had 
 considerable influence among the younger 
 men, and it would be an interesting study 
 to estimate the amount of pragmatism 
 there is in the recent religious revival. 
 There is more perhaps than some would 
 be wilHng to allow. 
 
 ii. A Voice from the Past : Ana- 
 TOLE France 
 
 While Barres and Bourget have both 
 greatly changed since the days some 
 thirty years ago when they published 
 their first books, Anatole France remains 
 exactly where he was and survives in 
 the twentieth century as a relic of the
 
 90 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 nineteenth. He is a true child of Renan, 
 both in his ideas and in his style, though 
 what Renan would have thought of his 
 incursions into anarchical politics it is 
 impossible to guess. From a purely 
 literary point of view he is beyond ques- 
 tion the most gifted of French writers. 
 A master of perfect French, worthy to be 
 ranked with the most famous names in 
 French literature, he is a stor3/-teller of 
 nothing less than genius and a critic who 
 has done very fine and delicate work of a 
 highly subjective character. Criticism 
 is not to him, as to Brunetiere, the 
 application of rules to an individual 
 case ; it is simply " the adventures of the 
 soul among masterpieces." With these 
 endowments M. France might have 
 played a greater part than either Barres 
 or Bourget in the regeneration of his 
 country if he had chosen ; as a matter 
 of fact it is not his fault that the youth 
 of France did not become entirely de- 
 generate and corrupt. He has been the 
 bitter foe of both religion and patriotism.
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 91 
 
 His attitude to religion is a combination 
 of the velvet-gloved hostility of Renan 
 with the naked animosity of M. Combes. 
 Or, rather, it is not a combination of the 
 two ; it is sometimes the one and some- 
 times the other. His stories are generally 
 in the vein of Renan, his political writings 
 in the vein of Combes. Some of his 
 books give one the impression of an 
 elderly satyr trampling on a crucifix. 
 He loses no opportunity to depreciate 
 religion. Thus in one of his short stories, 
 Le FrocuraieuY de Judee, he describes the 
 last days of Pilate, grown old and enor- 
 mously fat, at an Italian watering place. 
 There arrives an old friend of Judaean 
 days, and they begin to talk of old times. 
 The conversation turns on a girl they 
 had known, and the friend mentions that 
 the last time he saw her she had become 
 a disciple of a man named Jesus whom 
 Pilate had crucified. Did Pilate remem- 
 ber anything about it, he asks ? And 
 Pilate, after a moment's search among his 
 memories, replies : ' No, I don't remem-
 
 92 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 ber it at all." This is the sort of thing 
 to wound Christian sentiment, and M. 
 France was never happier than when he 
 was so employed. He has even gone so 
 far as to suggest that there was an 
 element of deliberate fraud in the 
 introduction of Christianity. The whole 
 tendency of his books is to destroy belief 
 in religion and to leave nothing in its 
 place except an arid scepticism and a 
 disbelief in everything. He could destroy 
 (no one could do that better) but he 
 had nothing to give in return for what he 
 took away. 
 
 If M. France's influence has been bad 
 for religion, it has been no less evil for 
 patriotism. The glories of his country's 
 past leave him cold. Since the outbreak 
 of war he has shown some signs of 
 penitence and has, we are told, applied 
 for the right to wear the uniform of the 
 army which he had persistently defamed. 
 But his past speaks for itself. His Life 
 of Jeanne d'Arc was an endeavour to 
 depreciate the maid whom the younger
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 93 
 
 men have united to honour, and his 
 satirical history of France, Ulle des 
 Pinguins, is a diabolically clever attempt 
 to cover his country's past with ridicule. 
 It is impossible to exaggerate the disas- 
 trous amount of harm which this book 
 was calculated to do. We may believe 
 in M. France's tardy conversion to 
 patriotism when he has withdrawn it 
 from circulation, not before. It is the 
 sort of book to make a Frenchman feel 
 hot with shame that another French- 
 man should have written it. There was 
 no need for the Germans to throw mud 
 at France when M. Anatole France was 
 doing it for them. It has done the less 
 harm, however, because for some years 
 now M. France has ceased to be an 
 influence among the younger men. He 
 has proved singularly powerless to arrest 
 the Catholic revival. 
 
 iii. The Influence of Bergson 
 
 Meanwhile a strong influence in favour 
 of religion, and an influence that has
 
 94 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 counted for much in the change of spirit 
 that has taken place among the young, 
 is the philosophy of Henri Bergson. ~Df 
 course, as is well known, M. Bergson is 
 not a Christian himself, but he is certainly 
 not entirely without sympathy for 
 Christian aims or contemptuous of Chris- 
 tian beliefs. Seldom has a philosopher 
 obtained so great and so startling a 
 success in his own lifetime. His lectures 
 are attended and he is eagerly read not 
 only by professed students of philosophy, 
 but by men of letters, men of action, 
 men and women of the world. His 
 lecture-room at the College de France is 
 as popular as a theatre, and in London 
 and Edinburgh he won similar successes. 
 Nor is this owing to any playing to the 
 gallery or to one of those inexplicable 
 fashions which last a year or two and 
 then disappear. It is possible that Berg- 
 son's is the greatest name that has 
 appeared in the history of philosophy 
 since Kant, and certainly it will always 
 remain among the number of the few
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 95 
 
 really original philosophers. The only 
 concession he has made to popularity 
 has been to write with a limpidity and a 
 colour that are French in the best sense 
 of the word, and his books are literature 
 as well as philosophy. He has a magical 
 power of apt illustration, so much so that 
 some have thought he is liable to be 
 carried away by his analogies. 
 
 It would be easy to exaggerate the 
 direct influence of Bergson's philosophy in 
 favour of religion, for it certainly seems 
 doubtful if, taken as a whole, it leaves 
 much room for the Christian God. Where 
 he has helped has been in his criticisms 
 of the statements which, till he began to 
 write, had been taken for granted. Thus, 
 since Kant, it has generally been taken 
 for granted that there is no real 
 knowledge except scientific knowledge, 
 and no means of knowledge except the 
 intellect. Bergson denies both these 
 statements. He teaches that the mind 
 is something much greater than the 
 intellect, which is only a part of the
 
 96 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 whole, the part, that is, formed by 
 evolution for the purpose of dealing with 
 matter. The intellect has been devel- 
 oped for certain purposes, and if it 
 trespasses outside these limits it is likely 
 to lead astray. For dealing with matter 
 it is our only instrument, but for dealing 
 with movement and life there is intuition. 
 Bergson has been accused of depreciating 
 intellect. This is not true. All he has 
 done is to put intellect and science into 
 their place, and to warn them off the 
 territory over which they had usurped 
 dominion. For those who had long 
 groaned under the lash of scientific 
 tyranny his books came as a veritable 
 emancipation from an odious slavery. 
 The extent of his success may be mea- 
 sured by the childish anger of some of the 
 men of science who discovered to their 
 horror that the ground which they be- 
 lieved to be so firm beneath their feet was 
 but quicksand after all, and that their 
 religious house, in whose stability they 
 had so trustingly believed, was not built
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 97 
 
 upon a rock. Moreover, Bergson's criti- 
 cism of the determinism which had for so 
 many years been taken for granted was 
 very effective. Even if one did not 
 accept his own rather extreme theory of 
 free-will he had at least shown that the 
 deterministic fortress was vulnerable 
 if it was attacked from any but a strictly 
 scientific point of view. 
 
 It was not so much, then, that Bergson 
 provided a philosophy that might be a 
 Christian philosophy qfjife^ as that, like 
 a modern Jack the Giant Killer, he has 
 mortally wounded the giant who had held 
 us all in thrall. The climate has changed. 
 He -has created a philosaphical atmo- 
 sphere in which it is possible for a Chris- 
 tian to breathe. To take one instance. 
 According to the scientific hypothesis, 
 miracles were impossible. They did not 
 happen. This was a dogma which you 
 could not deny without forfeiting your 
 claim to be a man of the modern world. 
 But Bergson's philosoph}.^ leaves room 
 for the occurrence of miracles. Again, 
 
 G
 
 98 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 it does more than leave room for mysti- 
 cism ; it is almost a philosophy of 
 mysticism in itself. What wonder then 
 that many young men became his 
 enthusiastic disciples, welcoming in him 
 the deliverer from a soul-destroying 
 tyranny. 
 
 To this we can add the blow he 
 delivered against the dominion of 
 Germanism in France. For many years 
 German thought had been supreme. In 
 the learned world, in history and exegesis, 
 German methods and principles were 
 almost blindly worshipped and were 
 taught at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des 
 Chartes as the last word of human 
 wisdom. Mommsen reigned in history 
 as the German higher critics laid down 
 the law in exegesis. In philosophy 
 Hegelianism exercised the same un- 
 doubted sway as it did at Oxford. 
 Bergson pricked the bubble in one direc- 
 tion, and in this the young men were 
 his eager disciples. Those who later 
 took up arms so readily to resist German
 
 THE CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE 99 
 
 domination and arrogance in the world of 
 affairs had already some years previously 
 rebelled against the same arrogance and 
 domination in the world of thought. 
 
 They were also grateful to him for the 
 support his philosophy gave to religion. 
 For some of them it was the gate through 
 which they came to the Church. One of 
 them has written : " Je ne sais plus 
 quel Athenien, dans le Banquet de Platon, 
 declare qu'il ne vit vraiment que depuis 
 qu'il a connu Socrate ; j'en diraisautant 
 de Bergson, si, depuis que je I'ai connu, 
 je n'etais redevenu Chretien. C'est 1' etude 
 de sa philosophic, etude que j'ai com- 
 mencee dans le plus epais materialisme, 
 qui m'a ouvert le chemin de la delivrance. 
 Jusqu'en 1902, j'eus I'esprit boucle par 
 Taine et Renan : c'etaient les dieux de 
 ma jeunesse." 
 
 Nor would M. Bergson himself object 
 to this. He has himself proclaimed the 
 religious tendency of his philosophy. 
 " Les considerations exposees dans mon 
 Bssai SHY les donnees immediates aboutis-
 
 100 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 sent a mettre en lumiere le fait de la 
 liberte ; celles de Matter c et memoir e 
 font toucher de doigt, je I'espere, la 
 realite de 1' esprit ; celles de V Evolution 
 creatrice presentent la creation comme un 
 fait : de tout cela se degage nettement 
 ridee d'un dieu createur et libre, genera- 
 teur a la fois de la matiere et de la vie, 
 et dont r effort de creation se continue 
 du cote de la vie, par revolution des 
 especes et par la constitution des per- 
 sonnalites humaines." 
 ^o Bergson, standing outside, held a 
 lantern which showed men the way back 
 to the Church.
 
 IV 
 
 Les Jeunes 
 
 IF the ghost of Renan were to revisit 
 the scenes he knew when he Hved 
 on earth he would find himself in a new 
 world. Nor is it a world which he would 
 appreciate. When he died in 1892, the 
 young men of that day were his devout 
 disciples, contemptuous of religion and 
 patriotism, and considering the chief 
 joys of life to be the joys of thought^ 
 The average young Frenchman of to-day 
 has abandoned the attitude ; he is 
 intensely patriotic and probably religious 
 as well, and rates the joy of action far' 
 above the joy of thought. 
 
 It has already been mentioned that 
 the Tangier incident of 1905 first awoke 
 101
 
 102 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 Frenchmen to an immediate sense of the 
 imminent German peril. The Agadir 
 incident of 191 1 was a second intimation, 
 and a graver one, of the nearness of the 
 danger, and probably after that there 
 were few who thought that war could be 
 ultimately averted. But in 191 1 France 
 was readier to meet it than in 1905. 
 The intervening years had witnessed a 
 revolution which was carried still further 
 in the three years that elapsed before the 
 outbreak of the European conflict. 
 
 i. Patriots and Catholics 
 
 In the iirst place these years showed a 
 wonderful recrudescence of patriotism. 
 The young men of the beginning of the 
 century thought they believed in inter- 
 nationalism and did not love their mother 
 country. But they found out they did 
 when Germany kicked her, just as M. 
 Gustave Herve discovered, when war 
 broke out, that he was a Frenchman first 
 and a pacifist and anti-militarist after-
 
 LES JEUNES 103 
 
 wards. Renan had said that it did not 
 matter under what government an in- 
 telhgent man hved so long as he had a 
 quiet corner in which he could think in 
 peace, but in 1914 every Frenchman 
 found that this philosophy was false 
 because it did not work when the Prussian 
 was everywhere crossing the frontier. 
 One and all thought that under what 
 government they lived was a thing that 
 intensely mattered. 
 
 This revival of patriotism was mainly 
 the work of the young, but it owed a 
 good deal also to the work of some of the 
 older men who had long been preaching 
 in the desert and suddenly found after 
 1905 that the young men were listening. 
 Among these older men were Maurice 
 Barres, Paul Bourget, Count Albert de 
 Mun, Paul Deroulede, Frangois Coppee, 
 and others. The character of the new 
 patriotism may be known by the fact 
 that it was accompanied by an extra- 
 ordinary extension of the cult of Jeanne 
 d'Arc. CathoHcs and free-thinkers alike
 
 104 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 vied to do her honour. She inspired 
 the new patriotism far more than did 
 the memory of the age of Louis XIV, or 
 even than Napoleon himself. And this 
 was because patriotism was connected 
 in the minds of the young with the 
 military and Catholic glories of the past, 
 the past which Anatole France so 
 persistently reviled, of which Jeanne 
 d'Arc was the most splendid example. 
 In the patriotic revival she, being dead, 
 yet speaketh, and among les morts qui 
 par lent hers is the voice that is heard 
 most clearly to-day. 
 
 As one result of the revival of patrio- 
 tism there went also almost a desire for 
 war. For one thing it was believed 
 that, sooner or later, it was bound to 
 come, and anything was better than the 
 perpetual uncertainty. Plutot la guerre 
 que cette perpetuelle attente. But this 
 was not the only reason. There was 
 also something of the old mediaeval idea 
 of war as the great game of all, and a 
 suspicion, which was hardly perhaps
 
 LES JEUNES 105 
 
 a belief, that it was only in the great 
 school of war that the French spirit which 
 glowed so brightly in them would find its 
 perfect expression. Their dehght too in 
 action and the life of action made them 
 contemplate without fear the possibility 
 of war. The growing delight in sport 
 also perhaps acted in the same direction. 
 But their idea of war was the English 
 idea that it is to be played like a game, 
 in accordance with the rules of the game ; 
 it had nothing in common with the 
 German theory that it is a lapse into 
 savagery where chivalry and honour are 
 no longer virtues to be sought but 
 weaknesses to be crushed. To these 
 young men the life of action appeared 
 the one thing worth having, and they 
 envied the English the opportunity their 
 Empire gave them of satisfying this 
 desire. They have had their fill of it by 
 now, and it is only right to remember 
 that these ideas of the young men of the 
 highly educated class were never shared 
 by the mass of the nation, which still
 
 io6 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 regarded war as the worst of evils and 
 expected its statesmen to avoid it if 
 possible. But these young men, even if 
 mistaken in their view of war, lived and 
 dreamed the noble life. They were very 
 different from their elders of the previous 
 generation, sipping their absinthe on the 
 terrace of a Parisian cafe at the heure 
 des aperitifs. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that every 
 young man who cared for his country 
 was an ardent Catholic as well. This of 
 course was not the case. Some were 
 convinced free-thinkers and others shared 
 the curious position of Charles Maurras, 
 but certainly the tendency was not 
 only to respect religion, but to become 
 practising Catholics as well. Of the 
 students at the Ecole normale whereas 
 about the year 1900 there were only 
 about three or four practising Catholics 
 out of about a hundred and fifty, ten 
 years later there were forty ; all of them 
 intensely earnest and intensely proud 
 of their faith. When they went to mass
 
 LES JEUNES 107 
 
 they did not, like Balzac's Cesar Birot- 
 teau, sneak surreptitiously into church as 
 if it was a house of ill-fame ; they went 
 with their heads in the air for all the 
 world to see. 
 
 The Catholicism they wanted was 
 Catholicism of the traditional type. 
 They w^ere not troubled with intellectual 
 difhculties ; they wanted to be told what 
 to believe. Their interests were in 
 action ; they needed religion and desired 
 to practise it, but not to think about it. 
 And they needed discipline as well, both 
 discipline of life and a discipline of the 
 spiritual life. They would do as well 
 as believe what they were told, and what 
 they wanted most was a definite voice 
 speaking with authority. For such men 
 as these Modernism had no temptations. 
 It was concerned with a state of mind 
 which was not theirs at all. The diffi- 
 culties in the way of acceptance of the 
 Catholic faith which had so obsessed the 
 early Modernists were not felt by them. 
 They were good Catholics, impatient of
 
 io8 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 anything that looked anti-cathoHc. Re- 
 ligion was not in the first place an in- 
 tellectual problem, as it was to the men 
 of the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century ; it was a life to be lived. This 
 indifference to ideas was their immediate 
 strength, but may prove to be their 
 future weakness. 
 
 Secondly, their Catholicism had in it 
 a tinge of mysticism. This is especially 
 to be noticed in writers like Paul Claudel, 
 Ernest Psichari, and Charles Peguy. 
 It is this, and not the anti-intellectualism 
 of the movement, that promises most for 
 the future. The golden ages of French 
 religion, like the age of St. Frangois de 
 Sales and St. Chantal, or like the age of 
 Pascal, or like the age of Fenelon, have 
 been the times when mysticism has been 
 valued. But for many years the French 
 Church has produced no mystic of the 
 first rank and has been rather anti- 
 mystical in temper. 
 
 Thirdly, the new Catholic movement 
 has been almost entirely the work of
 
 LES JEUNES 109 
 
 laymen. This has been another source 
 of strength. The French Church hSs 
 always produced a particularly noble 
 type of Catholic layman, devout, intelli- 
 gent, and full of common sense. In the 
 past she produced men like Pascal and 
 Montalembert, and she has produced men 
 like Paul Thureau-Dangin, Etienne 
 Lamy, Albert de Mun, and Denys Cochin 
 in the last fifty years. Now she has 
 succeeded in winning the heartfelt alle- 
 giance of some of the most select souls 
 among the younger generation. 
 
 Among the latter, when August, 1914, 
 dawned there were none whose names 
 stood higher, or of whom more was 
 hoped, than Ernest Psichari and Charles 
 Peguy. Unhappily these hopes have 
 not been fulfilled. Both men fell in 
 battle in the very early days of the war : 
 Psichari on August 22, 1914, at 
 Rossignol, in Belgium, during the French 
 retreat from Charleroi, which corres- 
 ponded to the British retreat from Mons ; 
 and Peguy, a fortnight later, on the first
 
 no RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 day of the battle of the Marne. Psichari 
 was in his thirty-first and Peguy in his 
 forty-second year. They will be sadly 
 missed, but no doubt they gave their lives 
 willingly. In the previous year Psichari 
 had written, in answer to a question 
 addressed to him concerning the young 
 men of the present day : 
 
 " II me semblent que les jeunes sentent 
 obscurement qu'ils verront de grandes 
 choses, que de grandes choses se feront 
 par eux. lis ne seront pas des amateurs, 
 ni des sceptiques. lis ne seront pas des 
 tourist es a travers la vie. lis savent ce 
 qu'on attend d'eux." 
 
 These words seem almost prophetic, 
 and, indeed, the young men of France 
 have seen and done great things since 
 they were written. The retreat from 
 Charleroi, the Marne, the Aisne, Verdun, 
 are imperishable memories. It is griev- 
 ous indeed that the losses have been 
 so heavy. Literature especially has 
 suffered. Maurice Masson has gone, a 
 literary historian and critic of the first
 
 LES JEUNES III 
 
 rank, the writer of admirable books on 
 Fenelon and Mme. Guyon, on Vigny and 
 on Rousseau. Emile Clermont, perhaps 
 the most brilliant and promising of all the 
 younger novelists, who sprang suddenly 
 into fame with the publication of Laure, 
 has also fallen ; and Andre Lafon, the 
 author of that charming story L'Eleve 
 Gilles, and a delicate and true poet, died 
 at the age of thirty-two in a military hos- 
 pital at Bordeaux. Nor are these all. It 
 is true there are many left : the brothers 
 Tharaud, Robert Vallery-Radot, and 
 many more, including those of a slightly 
 older generation, like Paul Claudel and 
 Francis Jammes ; and no doubt there 
 will arise a new literature after the war, 
 a literature of purified and noble aims and 
 splendid memories. There will be young 
 men in the trenches scribbling to-day 
 their thoughts on the backs of old enve- 
 lopes, which are perhaps the first drafts 
 of some glorious masterpieces of the 
 future ; but, notwithstanding the new 
 men who will come, neither Psichari nor
 
 112 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 Peguy will be forgotten. The}^ represent 
 the spirit of young France of the last ten 
 years. 
 
 ii. Ernest Psichari 
 
 The spiritual history of Ernest Psi- 
 chari was of the strangest. The grandson 
 of Ernest Renan and the son of a deter- 
 mined foe to religion, we can easily ima- 
 gine how he was brought up. Intellec- 
 tually his surroundings were of the most 
 stimulating, but, spiritually, it was a 
 desert. The shadow of Renan lay over 
 his whole education. Anti-Catholicism 
 and anti-militarism were the psychological 
 climate of his early years, and it is won- 
 derful that he should have emancipated 
 himself so completely from family influ- 
 ences. What determined him may, how- 
 ever, be discovered from his books 
 UAppel des Armes, published in the year 
 before the war, and Le Voyage du Cen- 
 turion, which has only recently, nearly 
 two years after the writer's death, seen
 
 LES JEUNES 113 
 
 the light. Its value is increased by a 
 touching and perfectly worded preface 
 from the pen of Paul Bourget. L'Appel 
 des Armes attracted much attention on 
 its first appearance. This, perhaps, was 
 not entirely due to its great merits. Paris 
 found it very piquant that such a book 
 should come from Kenan's grandson, and 
 it was eagerly read. If Renan turned 
 uneasily in his grave the old priests of 
 Treguier had at last their revenge. The 
 book is a paean in praise of the military 
 career. It tells the story of a young 
 man, Maurice Vincent, who was brought 
 up in similar anti-religious and pacifist 
 circles to those which surrounded the 
 youth of Ernest Psichari himself, but 
 came to change his opinions through the 
 influence of an artillery ofhcer, Timothee 
 Nanges ; adopted a military career, and 
 fought through a campaign in Africa, 
 where he was wounded and incapacitated 
 for further service. Nanges himself is, 
 so M. Bourget tells us, the porte-parole 
 avout du romancier, and for him there are 
 
 s
 
 114 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 but two things that really live : the army 
 and the Catholic religion. Modernism 
 of every kind is distasteful to him. 
 
 " II sentait qu'il representait une 
 grande force du pass6, la seule, avec 
 I'Eglise, qui restat vierge, non souillee, 
 non decoloree par I'impuret^ nouvelle. 
 Les soldats ne sont pas des hommes du 
 progres. Le coeur n'a pas change, ni les 
 principes, ni la doctrine. Cette purete, 
 cette simplicite barbares qui sont a eux 
 et leur bien, Nanges les retrouvait la, 
 merveilleusement preservees de toute 
 contamination. Le progres, c'est une 
 des formes de I'Americanisme, et I'Ameri- 
 canisme le degoutait." 
 
 Nanges looks to the past, and to the 
 ancient glories of France, where he finds 
 a strict alliance between the Army and 
 the Church. L'Armee et I'Eglise ne tran- 
 sigent pas, he says, and this is the secret 
 of their attraction for him. He wishes 
 the young Vincent to become converted 
 to Catholicism as well as to militarism. 
 All seems incomplete without that.
 
 LES JEUNES 115 
 
 " Ce qu'il lui fallait alors, c'etait une 
 pensee catholique. Non point celle des 
 Fioretti. II allait a Pascal ou a J. de 
 Maistre. Tout naturellement, il se tour- 
 nait vers ces belles tiges droites, sans 
 branches adventices ni nodosites, et ou 
 toute la seve sa precipite vers le ciel, 
 jaillit, verticale, de la terre vers le zenith. 
 Voila la seule beaute qui lui con- 
 venait." 
 
 There is one other thing that casts a 
 spell over the soul of Ernest Psichari, 
 besides the Army and the Church ; it is 
 the intoxication of Africa. When Mau- 
 rice Vincent, after his wound, is invaUded 
 out of the army, he obtains a place in a 
 government ofhce. But there the home- 
 sickness for Africa pursues him. In the 
 great building on the left bank of the 
 Seine there rises before him continually 
 the vision of the dry sands and the hot 
 sun of the Sahara ; jamais il ne se gueri- 
 rait d' avoir connu VAfrique. 
 
 Africa is also the scene of his posthu- 
 mous book. It is hardly a novel. It
 
 ii6 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 describes, often in almost mystical lan- 
 guage, how an officer finds his way to the 
 belief in and the practice of the Christian 
 religion. He is already convinced of 
 much : of the worth of France and of the 
 glory of the military career. But some- 
 thing is wanting. Catholicism draws 
 him like a magnet. It is first one thing 
 and then another. A friend sends him a 
 picture postcard of the Virgin of La 
 Salette, with a few lines written on the 
 back, saying that the writer has been 
 praying for him, and begging him to 
 listen ; a Moor points to the sun at dawn 
 and says, " God is great," and these and 
 other experiences give him the impres- 
 sion of the Good Shepherd stretching out 
 to him his bloodstained hands. Resist- 
 ance becomes weaker and weaker. The 
 title of one chapter is " A finibus terrse 
 ad te clamavi," and this is really the 
 keynote of the book. It reminds one 
 very much of Francis Thompson's poem 
 The Hound of Heaven, and of the strong 
 feet which follow and will not relinquish
 
 LES JEUNES 117 
 
 the chase. The book ends, Le soldat 
 s'agenouille. 
 
 In the soHtude of the desert, Maxime, 
 the officer, communes, almost argues, 
 with God. M. Paul Bourget thinks that 
 these pages recall, by their eloquence and 
 their pathos, Pascal's Mystery of Jesus, 
 and that they are among the finest in 
 French mystical literature. This is 
 hardly an exaggeration. Psichari has 
 written nothing more beautiful, nothing 
 more instinct with true religious emo- 
 tion : 
 
 " Je veux, dit Dieu, que ta maison soit 
 en ordre, et que d'abord tu f asses le 
 premier pas. Je ne me donne pas a celui 
 qui est impur, mais a celui qui fait peni- 
 tence de ses f antes, je me donne tout 
 en tier, comme mon Fils s'est donne tout 
 entier. 
 
 " C'est une dure exigence que la votre, 
 6 Seigneur. Ne pouvez-vous d'abord 
 toucher mes yeux ? 
 
 " Ne peux-tu done me faire credit un 
 seul jour ?
 
 ii8 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 " Vous pouvez tout, Seigneur ! 
 
 " Tu peux tout, 6 Maxime. Voici que 
 dans tes mains mortelles, tu tiens la 
 balance, avec le poids juste et le con- 
 trole infaillible. Je t'ai libcre du joug 
 et de I'aiguillon. O Maxime, il n'est pas 
 de bornesa ta liberte — que mon amour." 
 
 When the German shell ended the gal- 
 lant career of Ernest Psichari, the loss to 
 French literature was equal to that sus- 
 tained by English literature when the 
 precious life of Rupert Brooke ebbed 
 away in an /Egean hospital. 
 
 iii. Charles Peguy 
 
 L'Appel des Armes is dedicated to 
 Charles Peguy, and the terms of the 
 dedication show the affectionate admira- 
 tion of the younger for the older man : 
 
 " A celui dont 1' esprit m'accompagnait 
 dans les solitudes de I'Afrique, a cet autre 
 solitaire en qui vit aujourd'hui I'ame de 
 la France, et dont I'oeuvre a courbe d'a- 
 mour notre jeunesse, a notre Maitre
 
 LES JEUNES 119 
 
 Charles Peguy, ce livre de notre grandeur 
 et de notre misere." 
 
 Peguy' s origin was very different from 
 that of Psichari. Intellectually, the lat- 
 ter was born in the purple ; Peguy, on 
 the other hand, like Loisy, sprang from 
 the people. His ancestors were vine- 
 growers in La Beauce, the great plain 
 which stretches south of Chartres, the 
 twin towers of whose cathedral, " like a 
 ship for ever a-sail in the distance," as 
 Walter Pater said, are visible for miles. 
 Although his mother was employed to 
 look after the chairs in the cathedral of 
 Orleans, the boy seems to have grown up 
 with little or no religion. He soon found 
 his way to Paris, where he became one of 
 the rising hopes of the Socialist party, 
 and started a little publishing and book- 
 selling business on the south side of the 
 Seine, near Saint-Sulpice. The famous 
 series " Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine " was 
 started by him, and he wrote many of 
 the volumes. It was in this series that 
 appeared Paul Desjardins' famous com-
 
 120 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 ments on the Abbe Loisy, Reflexions d'un 
 profane siir raffaire Loisy, and at that 
 time it is Hkely enough that this repre- 
 sented more or less Peguy's own views 
 on reUgion. But a change was at hand. 
 A friend has described how one day he 
 went to see him, and how Peguy said, 
 with his eyes full of tears : " Je ne t'ai 
 pas tout dit . . . J'ai retrouve la foi, 
 je siiis catholique." " Ah ! pauvre vieux," 
 replied the friend, with great emotion, 
 " nons en sommes tons Id." That was 
 true enough ; in those years there was a 
 great return of the jeunes universitaires 
 to the Faith. And all these young men 
 looked up to the slightly older Peguy as 
 to a master. His love of France, his 
 enthusiastic devotion to Jeanne d'Arc 
 (he said once that he could go on writing 
 books about her all his life) appealed to 
 them with irresistible force. The little 
 bookseller, with his stooping figure, short- 
 sighted eyes, and chestnut beard ; always 
 in a hurry ; always dressed in black, 
 black coat, shabby black felt hat, and
 
 LES JEUNES 121 
 
 black trousers baggy at the knees, aroused 
 a wealth of affection such as is given to 
 but few. As one of his greatest friends 
 has said, he was not France's greatest 
 writer, nor the finest of contemporary 
 poets, but he was Peguy. His memory 
 will remain fragrant ; his friends will not 
 forget him, and we shall hear more of 
 him when the war is over, and the young 
 men take up their pens again. 
 
 Peguy' s Catholicism was closely allied 
 with his love of France. Of him, as also 
 of Psichari, it might almost be said that 
 they were Catholics because they were 
 Frenchmen. A non-Catholic Frenchman 
 seemed a monstrosity, something cut off 
 from the true life of his country. Some 
 Catholicism is international or indifferent 
 to country, with almost the motto, 
 " What matters country so long as the 
 Church survives ? " But that is not the 
 Catholicism of these young Frenchmen, 
 nor the Catholicism of the recent religious 
 revival. It is intensely national, though 
 without a tinge of Gallicanism. Peguy
 
 122 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 was constantly expressing this in his 
 books and poems. In one of the finest 
 of the latter he extols the happiness of 
 those who die for their country. 
 
 " Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre char- 
 
 nelle, 
 Mais pourvu que ce fut dans une juste guerre. 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins 
 
 de terre. 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts d'une mort solen- 
 
 nelle. 
 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans les grands 
 
 batailles, 
 Couches dessus le sol a la face de Dieu. 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts sur un dernier haut 
 
 lieu 
 Parmi tout I'appareil des grandes funeral lies. 
 * * * 
 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts, car ils sont re- 
 
 tournes 
 Dans la premiere argile et la premiere terre. 
 Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans une juste 
 
 guerre. 
 Heureux les epis murs et les bles moissonnes." 
 
 Well, the opportunity came to Peguy, 
 and he will have welcomed it. He died
 
 LES JEUNES 123 
 
 for his country, in a just war, and in one 
 of the greatest battles of history. Some- 
 where north of Meaux his body hes in 
 that French soil which he loved so well, 
 and gave his life to defend. Much as his 
 friends will regret his loss, and great as is 
 the gap he has left behind him, no one 
 can deny the appropriateness of his death. 
 It is what he himself would most have 
 wished. 
 
 iv. Paul Claudel 
 
 M. Claudel is no longer one of the 
 young men, for he is approaching the 
 cinquantaine, but he has so great an 
 influence over them, and his ideas are so 
 largely their ideas, that his natural place 
 is in this chapter. The Catholic renais- 
 sance has in him a really great poet, one 
 who is perhaps not even yet as well 
 known among his countrymen as he 
 deserves, but one whose fame is likely 
 to grow rather than to diminish. Like 
 Psichari and Peguy, indeed like all those
 
 124 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 who express in literature the aspirations 
 and desires of the Cathohc revival, he 
 is moved chiefly by two things : France 
 and the Catholic religion. The latter 
 especially is his continual inspiration. 
 
 Claudel is not a man of letters by pro- 
 fession ; he has served for years in the 
 consular service of his country, and lived 
 for some years in the Far East. This 
 sojourn abroad seems to have intensified 
 both his love for his country and his 
 religion. For a Frenchman to live abroad 
 is almost always to be an exile, with the 
 thoughts continually turning towards 
 home. An Englishman will settle down 
 and will often be entirely content, without 
 forgetting the land of his birth, to make 
 a new home in a foreign land. Not so 
 the Frenchman. He counts the days 
 till he can return. Amid the old civili- 
 zation of China and the sun-baked streets 
 of a teeming Chinese town he has the 
 nostalgia for the boulevards or for the 
 cool rivers and the straight poplar-lined 
 highways of his own land. And Claudel
 
 LES JEUNES 125 
 
 felt more than this. He felt too the 
 oppression of heathenism like a weight 
 on his soul, and in the midst of the temple 
 of a strange worship he longed for the 
 dear Catholic sanctuaries of France. His 
 memory went back to hours of prayer in 
 loved Paris churches : 
 
 " O mon Dieu, je me rappellecestenebresounous 
 etions face-a-face tous les deux, ces sombres 
 apres-midis d'hiver a Notre-Dame, 
 Moi tout seul, tout en has, eclairant la face du 
 grand Christ de bronze avec un cierge de 25 
 centimes." 
 
 Or as he said at another time : 
 
 " Poeme de Paul Claudel qu'il composait en Asie, 
 Loin de la vue de tous les hommes, au temps de la 
 grande Apostasie, 
 
 Flute basse, sous le bruit profane insolente 
 
 comme une trompette, 
 Articulation dans le chaos de la phrase forte et 
 
 nette. 
 
 Vers arides et trait ardent de son coeur vers la 
 
 patrie, 
 Comme il marchait le long des murs de Cam- 
 
 baluc, ecoutant le coucou de Tartaric,
 
 126 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 Ou sous un saule vermineux, pres d'une grande 
 
 tache de sel, 
 Suruneterrekmoitiedetruite, mangeed'eausale 
 
 et de del. 
 
 Ah, que ma langue se desseche, expire en moi le 
 
 souffle meme, 
 Si mon ame jamais s'oublie detoi, Jerusalem ! " 
 
 Amid the stifling heat of Pekin he longs 
 for the sea, la mer lihre et pure, but the sea 
 itself is symbolic and represents the spirit 
 of God binding all things together : 
 
 " Ainsi du plus grand Ange qui vous voit jusq'au 
 caillou de la route et d'un bout de votre 
 creation jusqu'a I'autre, 
 
 II ne cesse point continuite, non plus que de 
 I'ame au corps ; 
 
 Le mouvement ineffable des Seraphins se pro- 
 page aux Neuf ordres des Esprits, 
 
 Et voici le vent qui se leve a son tour sur la terre, 
 le Semeur, le Moissoneur ! 
 
 Ainsi I'eau continue I'esprit, et le supporte, et 
 I'alimente, 
 
 Et entre 
 
 Toutes vos creatures jusqu'a vous il y a comme 
 un lien liquide." 
 
 Claudel is more than a poet, he is a great 
 mystic as well, and it would be possible
 
 LES JEUNES 127 
 
 to illustrate much of the teaching of the 
 mystics from his poems. Thus the mystic 
 tells us to find God within, and the day 
 he does that is always the day from which 
 he dates his start on the mystic way. 
 And Claudel tells us the same : 
 
 " Entends I'evangile qui conseille de f ermer la porte 
 
 de ta chambre, 
 Car les tenebres sont exterieures, la lumiere est 
 
 au dedans. 
 Tu ne peux voir qu'avec le soleil, ni connaitre 
 
 qu'avec Dieu en toi." 
 
 In the inner sanctuary of the soul God 
 may be found : 
 
 " Voici de nouveau pour nous une maison pour 
 
 faire notre priere, 
 Un temple nouveau dontle rage de Satan n'etein- 
 
 dra point les lampes ni ne sapera les voutes 
 
 adamantines. 
 Pour la cloture de Solesmes et de Liguge voici 
 
 une autre cloture ! 
 Je vois devant moi I'figlise catholique qui est de 
 
 tout I'univers ! " 
 
 The mystics have sometimes, through 
 the great stress they have laid on the
 
 128 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 interior, been inclined to neglect or de- 
 spise the exterior. There is a tendency 
 among some to look upon exterior rites 
 as helpful to beginners but unnecessary 
 and even harmful to those who have out- 
 grown them. Such spiritual pride has 
 always been a danger that has dogged 
 the mystic way, but there is no trace of 
 it in Claudel. He is a true mystic but 
 he is a devout and humble Catholic as 
 well. His latest book Corona Benignita- 
 tis Anni Dei is a kind of magnificent and 
 splendid Christian Year, a series of poems 
 on the great Catholic festivals, full of 
 exultation in the ritual and the liturgy of 
 the Catholic Church. Nor is there any- 
 thing of the Modernist about Claudel. 
 He wants to practise his religion, not to 
 treat it as an intellectual problem. The 
 questions that interest the Modernist he 
 simply puts aside : 
 
 " Ce n'est point mon affaire de comprendre, mais de 
 prier dans Tamour et le tremblement. 
 Faites que je vous voie, Seigneur Jesus, avec ces 
 yeux pleins de larmes, dans le jour de votre 
 second Avenement ! "
 
 LES JEUNES 129 
 
 Or again : 
 
 " Je crois sans y changer un seul point cequemes 
 peres ont cru avant moi, 
 Confessant le Sauveur des hommes et J6sus qui 
 est mort sur la croix." 
 
 It is the spiritual life that interests 
 him, and not only the adventures of the 
 soul on the mystic way, but the diffi- 
 culties, the temptations, and the trials 
 of the humble Christian. The Chemin de 
 la Croix is full of tender feeling and real 
 spiritual insight. There is a true know- 
 ledge of the spiritual life in the lessons 
 which the three Falls of our Lord are 
 made to teach. The first : 
 
 " Sauvez-nous du premier peche que I 'on commet 
 par surprise ! " 
 
 The second : 
 
 " Sauvez-nous de la seconde chute que Ton fait 
 volontairement par ennui." 
 
 And the third : 
 
 " Sauvez-nous du troisieme peche qui estledeses- 
 
 poir ! " 
 
 I
 
 130 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 Could the masters of the spiritual life 
 add anything to this ? 
 
 The three poems he has written on the 
 war are full of the enthusiasm for Catho- 
 licism and for France, la France, terrible 
 comma le Saint-Esprit. The thought is 
 continually present of a crime that brings 
 its own punishment, and of a vengeance 
 of which the dead were partly the minis- 
 ters : 
 
 " II y a une grande armee sans aucune bruit qui 
 se r assemble derriere vous ! 
 Depuis Louvain jusqu'a Rethel, depuis Termonde 
 jusques a Nomeny, 
 
 * ))c 4: 
 
 ficoute, peuple qui est parmi les autres peuples 
 
 comme Cain ! 
 Entends les morts dans ton dos quirevivent, et 
 
 dans la nuit derriere toi pleine de Dieu, 
 Le soufiEie de la resurrection qui passe sur ton 
 
 crime populeux ! 
 
 Bread, he says, will be tasteless, and 
 his thirst unassuaged. 
 
 " Armees des vivants et des morts, jusqu'a ce que 
 nous ayons bu ensemble dans le Rhin profond,"
 
 LES JEUNES 131 
 
 Patriotism with Renan was a folly, 
 with Claudel it is a religioix. So the 
 present war becomes a crusade. In this 
 attitude he is the true representative of 
 the youth of France.
 
 Epilogue 
 
 IT is a far cry from Renan to Claudel, 
 and it is difficult to realize that it 
 is not yet twenty-five years since Renan 
 died, so great is the gulf between then 
 and now. A young Frenchman attend^ 
 ing the lectures of Renan at the College de 
 France in the eighties of the last century 
 might personally be excused if he had 
 thought that religion was in its agony 
 and that in a few years it would disappear 
 entirely from amongst intelligent men. 
 He would certainly not have anticipated 
 either Ernest Psichari or Paul Claudel. 
 So the history of the last twenty years 
 makes one shy of prophesying what the 
 history of the next twenty years will be, 
 or what will be the result of the war on 
 
 133
 
 134 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 French religion. As is well known, the 
 declaration of war was followed in France 
 by a great and generous outburst in 
 religious feeling. Churches almost every- 
 where were crowded ; in certain villages 
 the whole of the population used to meet 
 every evening for Benediction, and the 
 old division between clerical and anti- 
 clerical in some places almost disappeared. 
 The courageous conduct of the bishops 
 and clergy, especially in the parts over- 
 run by the first German advance, helped 
 enormously to make people respect, if 
 not to practise, religion. In the army 
 too there was an outburst of religion, 
 helped, no doubt, by the large number of 
 priests serving in the ranks. 
 
 It is now possible to see more clearly 
 exactly what has happened. The Church 
 has gained back a large number of the 
 lapsed, but, on the whole, those who were 
 irreligious before are irreligious still. The 
 great change is a change that was growing 
 among the young in the years preceding 
 the war ; namely, a growth of toleration.
 
 EPILOGUE 135 
 
 The old bitter feeling which Frenchmen 
 felt for Frenchmen in the opening years 
 of the century has almost entirely dis- 
 appeared, and only survives among poli- 
 ticians who are too old to learn and too 
 obstinate to recognize that times have 
 changed. After the war there will 
 not be two Frances, as in the past, but 
 one ; a France welded together by suffer- 
 ing and by a respect for political and 
 religious opponents learned by sharing 
 the same dangers against a common foe. 
 But beyond this it would be dangerous 
 to say much. 
 
 Nor is it possible to say what will hap- 
 pen when the present exalted mood con- 
 cerning both religion and patriotism 
 (a mood exemplified especially in the war 
 poems of Paul Claudel) wears off. Both 
 France and Germany have been fighting, 
 in a mood of exaltation, for an idea. This 
 has not been the case with England. All 
 attempts to create such a mood in her 
 have failed. She has entered upon the 
 war not as a crusade, but with the simple
 
 136 RECENT FRENCH TENDENCIES 
 
 thought (the same thought, it may be 
 recalled, that inspired her in the conflict 
 with Napoleon) : Here's a bully to be 
 thrashed ; and anxious only to get the 
 unpleasant job over and done with as 
 soon and as thoroughly as possible. 
 Which mood will give most strength in 
 the long run remains to be seen. The 
 mood of exaltation certainly entails 
 the greater risk of reaction. This may 
 prove to be a danger to French religion in 
 the years that follow the war. 
 
 Nor is it certain that there are not 
 weaknesses in the Catholicism of the 
 younger generation in France which will 
 become more evident as the years go by. 
 Religion is for Claudel and the young 
 Frenchmen inspired by him, as it is for 
 Chesterton and the younger generation of 
 Catholics in England, a glorious and satis- 
 fying adventure and a life to be lived 
 rather than an explanation of the Kosmos. 
 But that side of religion is not one that 
 can be permanently neglected. Modern- 
 ism failed, it is true, but it does not follow
 
 EPILOGUE 137 
 
 from that that the work which the early 
 Modernists set out to do did not need 
 doing. 
 
 If this work is ever to be done it is 
 France that will do it. There are 
 some who think that it may be the work 
 of the Church of England to show what a 
 liberal Catholicism can be. This, how- 
 ever creditable it may be to their Angli- 
 can loyalty, does little credit to their 
 appreciation of the real state of religion 
 in the world to-day, or to their apprecia- 
 tion of the unimportance of the Church 
 of England until she has purged herself. 
 It is a work that cannot be done with 
 dirty hands. But, from a combination 
 in France of those inspired by the enthusi- 
 asm and the mysticism of the new move- 
 ment and those who, while sympathizing 
 with the Modernist aims, yet escaped the 
 pit-falls into which many of the Modern- 
 ists fell, there is much to be hoped. 
 
 Printed jor EoBEBT Scott, Publislier, Faternostekj Kow, Lokdoh, B.C., ty 
 
 BUTLEE 4 TaHKEE, FbOME
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 The following list, of course, in no way claims to be 
 exhaustive. It merely suggests a few books for the use of 
 those who care to pursue the subject. 
 
 Chapter I. 
 
 E. Renan — Souvenirs d'enfance et dejeunesse. 
 Mme. Darmesteter — La vie de Renan. 
 Taine — Vie et correspondance. 4 vols. 
 
 Chapter II. 
 
 A. Loisy — L'evangile et I'iglise. 
 
 ,, — Autour d'un petit livre. 
 
 ,, — Quelques lettres. 
 
 ,, — Choses passies. 
 P. Desjardins — Catholicisme et critique. 
 A. Houtin — La question biblique au XlXme siicle. 
 
 — La question biblique an XXme siicle. 
 L. Laberthonni^re — Essais de philosophic religieuse. 
 E. Le Roy — Dogme et critique. 
 A. Fawkes — Studies in Modernism. 
 A. L. Lilley — Modernism. 
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 E. Dimnet — France Herself Again. 
 
 ,, — Paul B our get. 
 R. Gillouin — La philosophic de Bergson. 
 E. Le Roy — Une philosophic nouvelle. 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 Agathon — Les jeunes gens d'aujourd'hui. 
 E. Psichari — L'appel des armes. 
 
 ,, — Le voyage du centurion. 
 C. Peguy — Pages choisies. 
 
 R. Vallery-Radot — Anihologie de la poisie catholique. 
 A. Snares — Peguy. 
 
 V. Bourdon — Avec Piguy de la Lorraine d laMarne. 
 P. Claudel — Cinq grander odes. 
 
 ,, — Corona benignitatis anni Dei.
 
 From ROBERT SCOTT^S List 
 By the Right Rev. HERBERT EDWARD RYLE, P.P.. 
 
 DEAN OF WESTMINSTER and sometime BISHOP OF WINCHESTER. 
 
 LIFE AFTER DEATH. Addresses concerning our Belief in the 
 Life Everlasting. Edition de Luxe. 2s. net. 
 " The teacher who would meet the needs of to-day would do well to model his teaching upon these 
 really fine and helpful discourses. We thank Dr. Ryle for a timely and helpful book." 
 
 — Church Family Newspaper. 
 
 Books by the Rev. ALFREP PLUMMER, P.P. 
 
 CONSOLATION IN BEREAVEMENT: Through Prayers 
 for the Departed. A plea for the reasonableness of this method of 
 consolation. 2s. net. 
 
 AN EXEGETICAL COMMENTARY ON ST. MATTHEW. Fifth 
 
 Edition. 12s.net. 
 " The best commentary on S. Matthew in the English language." — Guardian. 
 
 THE CHURCHES IN BRITAIN. 2 Vols. each 5s. net. 
 
 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMATION. 3s. 6d. net. 
 
 " A valuable survey ; we commend it to the general reader as well worth his attention." — Guardian. 
 
 THE HULSEAN LECTURES 
 
 By the Rev. HERBERT WATSON, P.P. 
 
 THE MYSTICISM OF ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. Being 
 
 the Hulsean Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge, 
 
 191S-16. Revised and enlarged. 3s. 6ci. net. 
 
 "The book well deserves the serious attention of all christian students." 
 
 — Church Family Newspapif. 
 
 By the Rev. W. 0. E. OESTERLEY, P.P. 
 
 STUDIES IN ISAIAH XL— LXVI. with an introductory 
 Chapter on the Composite Characters of Isaiah i — xxxix. Full Index. 
 3s. 6d. net. 
 " An extremely able and original book." — Record. 
 
 THE BOOKS OF THE APOCRYPHA : Their Origin, 
 
 Teaching and Contents. 16s. net. 
 
 The Guardiatt says : — " A really important work for the intelligent theological student, massing 
 together as it does facts and theories not elsewhere accessible in so small a compass." 
 
 The Scotsman says : — " It would be hard to find more exact, informed and illuminative essays on 
 bese subjects in all their aspects and relations than are to be found in this masterly treatise." 
 
 LONDON : ROBERT SCOTT, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G.
 
 From ROniRr SCOIl'S List 
 By the Rev. Preh. H. P. DKXISQN. B.A., 
 
 Atitkor oj ■ Jk* Tr^t Rtt%fw*" S«. tut; " l'r»y«t 0a«| Idt^t," S*. Ml 
 
 THH MVSIHKV OF MAI<KIA(;H. is. oet. 
 
 THH I.OKI) IN HIS THMPLE. THe Me«.<e of lUbokkuk 
 to a World at War. Is. 6d. net 
 -•A moat valiubU littU book, which Boat b«ip twy rwdv.**— CAvcA Fmmh Ntmtfpm. 
 
 SCniF' SPIKITUAL I.HSSONS OF' THK WAR. 
 
 iH. 64I. tut 
 
 "A th Mi^iitlul anM tiiinuUung eoolnbattaa I0 lk« ^omuow •Ucb li la IM mimtt tl all 
 Cbrtsti^n lueu." — Tkt CAnrcAaMM. 
 
 VISIONS OF GOD. St net 
 
 " Admtrmblr c\mt aod vivid MpoaltiooB ol (fectrtaal Irafks."— CA^tA Ttmm. 
 
 THOUOHTS ON PFNANGE. t«. 6d. net 
 
 "A valuable tlti !v n( (he th««liVT anl (far lice ol paoane*. So pracUckl ami • 
 TotunM i» pnciaaljr what ta^uy paopla omiI k* LanL"— CWcA iMMa. 
 
 THF LIFF BF^'ONI). Tl...uj?ht«on the in- 'St*teand 
 
 the Soul in the Unseen World. Hy the Kev. K. E. i 2». net 
 
 RF I RI{ATS : Their Value, ()r|anUaiion, and firowth. 2s. 6d. net 
 
 I5y the Kevs a. W. Koiunson. D D . C C. Hell. MA., F. S. Guy 
 
 W'arman. DD. ; Peter Green. MA ; K. F. Hurst, MA.; E. H. 
 
 BucKLAND. S.J. ; and Sir He.sry H. Lunn, HA., H Ch . .M D. 
 
 rditcd by the Rev. R. Scokield, Secretary o( the Committrf (..r I^aymrn'i 
 
 Retreats. With an Introduction by the Right Rev. J. E. WAlta-DitCJiriSLO, 
 
 D.D.. Lx>rd Hishop of Chelnnsford. 
 
 Jtii: [RATIOS A L MISSION 
 
 The Ntzv Itiwion Hy^ nn Book ONE PESNY 
 
 THE CHURCH 
 MISSION HYMN BOOK 
 
 The Standaril Hymn Book for Mission Services 
 
 MUSIC AND WORDS WORDS ONLY 
 
 With 
 
 Lttargiaa Nat. 
 
 Paper Covers 1b. Od 
 
 Limp Cloth Is. 6 1 
 
 Cloth Boards 2s. OJ 
 
 Pres«atAtion Edn., Silk Sawn, Purple 
 
 Cloth. Gilt Edces, SUk Register ... 38, Od 
 
 With LltorKies NaL 
 
 Papar Covert 14. 
 
 StrooE Covers, Rouad Comers ... 2d« 
 
 Cloth, Round Comers Sd, 
 
 Sptci^l Tirms for Congrigaiionai Ult. 
 AU Bookt MM b* tupplitd with Ike nams 0/ th4 Ckurth or ci$kir sfuctai l4iUring om Ht4 eowtr (• ^4m^ 
 
 Full particulars and detailed price list on application, 
 (('lease WRITE for SPECIMEN COPY BOOK OF WORDS, pott free iH )
 
 From ROBERT SCOTTS List 
 
 THE HULSEAN LECTURES 
 
 By the Rev. HERBERT WATSON, P.P. 
 
 THE MYSTICISM OF ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. Being 
 
 the Hulsean Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge, 
 1915-16. Revised and enlarged. 3s. 6d. net. 
 "The book well deserves the serious attention of all Christian students." 
 
 — ■Church Family Newspaper, 
 
 By the Rev. W. 0. E. OESTERLEY, P.P. 
 
 STUDIES IN ISAIAH XL-LXVI. With an introductory 
 Chapter on the Comp)Osite Characters of Isaiah i — xxxix. Full Index. 
 3s. 6d. net. 
 "An extremely able and original book." — Record. 
 
 THE BOOKS OF THE APOCRYPHA : Their Origin. 
 
 Teaching and Contents. 16s. net. 
 
 The Guardian says : — " A really important work for the intelligent theological student, massing 
 together as it does facts and theories not elsewhere accessible in so small a compass." 
 
 The Scotsman says : — " It would be hard to find more exact, informed and illuminative essays oa 
 these subjects in all their aspects and relations than arc to be found in this masterly treatise. 
 
 By the Rev. F. W. BUSSELL. P.P. 
 RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND HERESY IN THE 
 
 MIDDLE AGES. 18s. net. 
 
 A distinguished scholar who has seen the MS. says: — "The work is crammed with erudition and 
 infonaatioQ ; it covers ground in regard to which information is not easily accessible, and should 
 meet a real want amongst students. ' 
 
 RELIGIOUS RECONSTRUCTION AFTER THE 
 
 WAR. By CAMBRIDGE RESIDENT GRADUATES. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 CONTENTS : — The Democratising of the English Church, by the Rev. 
 J. T. Plowden-Wardlaw, M.A. The Message of the War to the Clergy, 
 by the Rev. C. T. Wood, M.A. The Need for Re-asserting the English 
 Character of the Church of England, by the Rev. Prof. Emery Barnes. 
 I he Church and Social Reconstruction after the War, by the Rev. Prof. 
 Bethune-Baker. Religious Re-orientation, by the Rev. J. K. Mozlev, M.A. 
 The Necessity of Dogma, by the Rev. S. C. Carpenter, M.A. The Human 
 Christ, by the Rev. Dr. Foakes-Jackson, M.A. The Sign of Jonah : an 
 Interpretbtion and its Message, by the Rev. F. C. Clare, M.A. The Church 
 of England and the Evangelical Spirit, by the Rev. J. R. S. Taylor, M.A. 
 The Church of England and the Renewal of Spiritual Life, by the Rev. 
 A. H. F. Boughey, M.A. The Church and the Word : The Need of a New 
 Ideal of Preaching, by the Rev. A. J. Tait, D.D. The Opportunities of the 
 Church of England in the Colleges, by the Rev. The Master of Corpus. 
 The Changed Relations of Science and Religion, by the Rev. Prof T. G. 
 Bonney, Sc.D. The Church in its Corporate Capacity, by the Rev. 
 A. H. McNeile, D.D. 
 
 LONDON: ROBERT SCOTT, PATERNOSTER ROW E.G.
 
 From ROBERT SCOTT'S List 
 
 KNIGHTS IN ARMOUR. A new book of Talks to 
 Soldiers, for distribution among Officers and the Troops. By 
 the Rev. EDWARD S. WOODS. M.A. With Foreword by 
 General Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial 
 General Staff. Illustrated Is. net. 
 
 ONE-MINUTE READINGS FOR NURSES 
 AND PATIENTS. By F. K. KINDERSLEY. With 
 Foreword by the Lord Bishop of Worcester. 6d. net. 
 
 " These readings are splendidly selected and consist of passages of Scripture 
 and verses of hymns. The booklet is attractively got up." — Christian Advocate. 
 
 THE TRAFFIC OF JACOB'S LADDER. 
 
 Letters from Switzerland in War-time. By M. ROSAMOND 
 EARLE. With Commendation by the Rev. J. Stuart Holden, 
 D.D., and Foreword by the Rev. Edward S. Woods, M.A. 
 Illustrated. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON. Addresses on the Parable 
 
 of the Prodigal Son. By the Rev. T. W. GILBERT. B.D. 
 
 Is. net. 
 
 " Models of clear exposition, heart-searching appeal, and helpful instruc- 
 tion." — Church Family Newspaper. 
 
 THE TEST OF WAR. By the Rev. J. T. PLOWDEN- 
 WARDLAW, M.A. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 The Churchman says : — " Even those who are not wont to read sermons will 
 peruse these pages with real pleasure. There are twenty-four discourses and 
 they deal with the war from every possible standpoint." 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND WAR. By the Rev. H. G. 
 
 WOODS, D.D., late Master of the Temple. Sermons preached 
 in the Temple Church. With Portrait and Memoir by 
 Margaret L. Woods and an Appreciation by the Archbishop 
 OF Canterbury. 3s. net. 
 
 LONDON: ROBERT SCOTT. PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G.
 
 From ROBERT SCOTT'S List 
 FOR 'PREACHERS AND TEACHERS. 
 
 THE WONDERFUL SWORD : Addresses to Boys and Girls. 
 
 By the Rev. Will Reason, M.A. 2s. net. 
 
 KEEP TO THE RIGHT : Ten-minute Talks to Children. 
 
 By J. Ellis, zs. net. 
 
 WEAPONS FOR WORKERS : 322 Outline Addresses, 
 Illustrations and Points, dealing with all phases of Christian 
 life and work. By J. Ellis. 2s. net. 
 
 TALKS TO BOYS, OR MEN IN THE MAKING. 
 
 liy James Logan. 2s. net. 
 
 NUTS FROM AN OLD BAG : Bible Questions for Boys 
 and Girls. By the Rev. Rhys Davies. 25. net. 
 
 FLOWERS OF GOLD : Forty Bright Talks to Children. 
 
 By the Rev. C. E. Stone, is. net. 
 
 THE RAINBOW CROWN; Addresses to Children. 
 
 By the Rev. C. E. Stone. 2s. net. 
 
 STRAIGHT TO THE TARGET: Three Hundred and 
 Fifty Apt Illustrations for Pulpit and Class. By J. Ellis. 
 
 2s. net. 
 
 THE KNIGHT AND THE DRAGON : Talks to Boys and 
 
 Girls. By the Rev. Will Reason, M.A. 2s. net. 
 
 THINGS TO GRIP : Addresses in Outline. 
 
 By Charles Edwards, Author of " Tin Tacks for Tiny Folks." 25. net. 
 
 STEMS AND TWIGS : Ten-minute Talks to Children. 
 
 EIGHTY-SEVEN OUTLINE ADDRESSES. By J. Ellis. 2s. net. 
 
 WHAT JESUS SAID : Talks to Boys and Girls on the 
 
 Sayings of Jesus. By the Rev. Will Reason, M.A. 2s. net. 
 
 TEN-MINUTE TALKS TO BOYS AND GIRLS. 
 
 By the Rev. Will Reason, M.A. 2s. net. 
 
 THE FAITH OF A LITTLE CHILD : Talks to Little 
 
 Children on the Apostles' Creed. By the Rev. H. A. Wilson, 
 
 M.A. 2s. net. 
 
 THE CREED OF A YOUNG CHURCHMAN : Addresses 
 to Cc-'^irmation Candidates and other young Churchpeople 
 
 By the Rev. H. A. Wilson, M.A. Illustrated. 2s. net. 
 
 THE SUPREME SERVICE: Addresses to Men. 
 
 By the Rev. F. R. Wilson, is. 6d. net. 
 
 LAWS OF THE UPWARD LIFE : Addresses to Men. 
 
 By the Rev. James Burns, M.A. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 LAWS OF LIFE AND DESTINY: Addresses to Men. 
 
 By the Rev. James Burns, M.A. 25. 6d. net. 
 
 LONDON: ROBERT SCOTT, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G.
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 HISTORIC THEOLOGY 
 
 EDITXD BT 
 
 THE REV. WM. C. PIERGY. M.A. 
 
 Dean and Chaplain of Whitelands College. 
 Each Volume, Demy 8vo, Cloth, Red Burnished Top, 5s. net. 
 
 THE GREAT SCHISM BETWEEN THE EAST AND WEST. 
 
 By the Rev. F. J. F.)aki> Jackson, D.D. 
 
 THE CATHOLIC CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 Bv the Kev. W. J. Si'\rr>w Simi'Sms, D.D. 
 
 THE PRESENT RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 
 
 By the Krv. Prolessor T. G. Bosnky, D.Sc. 
 ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 By Professor Ed iuard Navii.li , D.C.L. 
 
 MYSTICISM IN CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 By the Rev. W. K. I'leminc. .\I.A.. B.D. 
 
 COMMON OBJECTIONS TO CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 By the Rev. C. L. DrvwbriD'.i, M..\. 
 RELIGION IN AN AGE OF DOUBT. 
 
 By the Kev. C. J. Siii hbkark, M..\. 
 
 THE RULE OF WORK AND WORSHIP. 
 
 By the Rev. R. L. Ottley, D.D. 
 THE RULE OF LIFE AND LOVE. 
 
 By the Rev. R. L. Ottley, D.D. 
 THE RULE OF FAITH AND HOPE. 
 
 By the Rev. R. L. Ottley, D.D. 
 MARRIAGE IN CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 By the Rev. T. A. Lacey, MA. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER FAITHS. 
 
 By the Rev. W. St. Clair Tisdall, D.D. 
 THE BUILDING UP OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 By the Rev. Canon R. B. Girdlestone, M.A. 
 THE CHURCHES IN BRITAIN. Vols. I and II . 
 
 By the Rev. Alfred Plummer, D.D. 
 CHARACTER AND RELIGION. 
 
 By the Rev. The Hon. Edward Lyttelton, M.A. 
 THE CREEDS : Their History, Nature and Use. 
 
 By the Rev. Harold Smith, M..-\. 
 THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. PAUL (Hulsean Prize Essay). 
 
 By the Rev. S. Nowell Rostron, M.A. 
 MISSIONARY METHODS, ST. PAUL'S OR OURS? 
 
 By the Rev. Roland Allen, M.A. 
 
 " The ' Library of Historic Theology ' is a project of great promise. 
 Several volumes by eminent writers have already appeared and the 
 issue of such a series amply demonstrates that there is no decline 
 in the interest felt all through the ages in theological literature." — 
 Homiletic Review. 
 
 Further important announcements will be made in due course ; full f-ariiculars may 
 he obtained from the Publisher, Robert Scott, Paternoster Row, London, E.C. 
 
 LONDON : ROBERT SCOTT, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This hook is DUE on the last date stamped helow. 
 
 ^tn^ 
 
 « 
 
 V 
 
 RHTDID-Uin 
 
 JAN 2 3 1986 
 
 24139
 
 ^ 
 
 AA 000 995 207 8 
 
 UNIVr" 
 
 ^FORNIA 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 ^