IX 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO i 
 

MODERNI SM 
 
 A RECORD AND REVIEW 
 
MODERNISM 
 
 A RECORD AND REVIEW 
 
 By 
 
 A. LESLIE LILLEY 
 
 Vicar of St. Mary's, Paddington 
 
 LONDON: SIR ISAAC PITMAN AND SONS, LTD 
 No. 1 AMEN CORNER, E.C. 1908 
 
PRINTED BY SIR ISAAC PITMAN 
 & SONS, LTD., LONDON, BATH 
 AND NEW YORK - - 1908 
 
TO 
 MY DEAR FRIEND AND FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN 
 
 GEORGE TYRRELL 
 
EPISTLE DEDICATORY 
 
 MY DEAR TYRRELL, 
 
 These pages seek the grace of an imputed merit in 
 offering themselves as an act of homage to the lustre of 
 your name. They are but an incomplete and haphazard 
 record of a movement whereof you have been a great part. 
 You and your friends have written an inspired and 
 inspiring page in the history of religious thought. I have 
 but scribbled some stray notes on its margin. It is in 
 the hope that these collected notes may avail to send 
 many to a study of the original documents that I now 
 venture to publish them. Their purpose will secure for 
 them your acceptance and approval, how far soever their 
 actual accomplishment may be from deserving either. 
 And here, fortunately, for once, value consists even more 
 in purpose than in accomplishment. 
 
 Nor will it be an occasion of reproach against me on your 
 part if I have addressed these papers primarily to what I 
 conceive to be the needs and the opportunities of my own 
 Communion. For that Communion was once yours also. 
 You went out from among us in the days of your boyhood, 
 days which you had already dedicated to that determined 
 and courageous quest of truth which you have never 
 abandoned. You went out from your own people, even 
 from your own country, from relatives and friends who 
 had so eagerly hoped to see your unquestioned ability 
 
 vii 
 
viii MODERNISM 
 
 developed in the service of the Church of your baptism, 
 from the University which so many men of your name 
 and family had illustrated, and which you in your turn 
 might eventually have no less adorned, from the religious 
 traditions, habits, prejudices of three centuries. You 
 went out to seek in the Church of Rome the friendship 
 of all the saints of God, to enrol yourself in that ancient 
 University which meets in every Roman school about the 
 feet of the Angelic Doctor, to live through a more vener- 
 able and inclusive tradition and to escape if it might be 
 the warping effects of a narrow and exclusive prejudice. 
 And you have found no cause to regret that spiritual 
 adventure of your boyhood. For through Rome you have 
 learned the lore of the saints and translated it for us into 
 the universal language of religion. Through Rome you 
 discovered your intellectual kinship with the mystics for 
 whom the undeniable religious miracle was given in their 
 own immediate experience, in their inner sense of God. 
 Through Rome, too, you learned that analogical value 
 of religious terms which you have so courageously and 
 skilfully applied to the defence and illustration of the 
 faith. And through Rome you still look on to that 
 Catholic Church which will have inherited the divine 
 beatitude by claiming as its own all who anywhere are 
 hungering and thirsting after righteousness. 
 
 Nor have you for a moment thought it necessary or 
 even possible to abandon the Church of your deliberate 
 adoption, even when quite recently you heard the voice 
 of authority raised against you in formal condemnation. 
 You know too well the nature of a Church and the nature 
 and limits of authority in a Church. For you a Church is 
 
EPISTLE DEDICATORY ix 
 
 a spiritual fatherland, your due allegiance to which no 
 authority can in the last resort either assess or guarantee. 
 Authority indeed is essential, but it discharges its special 
 function only when it waits upon life and ministers to it. 
 When it attempts to prescribe to life the limits within 
 which it must move and beyond which it must not 
 venture, it has ceased to be ministrant to life and is en- 
 gaged, whether it knows it or not, in preparing death. 
 Then it becomes a duty to resist it in its own interests, 
 to resist it in order that it may renew its character and 
 methods and become once again an authentic force of 
 direction and control. The limits of the coercive power 
 which it may legitimately exercise are prescribed for it 
 by the verdict of life as to what things have proved in 
 general and continuous experience to be morally hurtful. 
 Yet these are just the things on which authority (perhaps 
 wisely, for even here there may be some shrunken and 
 distorted growth of life) has always borne most lightly ; 
 while with the obstinate blindness which has characterised 
 it at many a moment of its history it crushes the forces 
 which would renew life and open out to it the way of 
 progress. Authority through those who have wielded it 
 has too often identified itself with its accidental and 
 temporary forms. At such times it is necessary for it to 
 learn that its forms are of the things that can be shaken 
 and must be shaken in order that the things which cannot 
 be shaken, life and the authority which proceeds from it, 
 may remain. The rulers of every spiritual society need 
 to learn from secular history the lesson that the best 
 citizens of the temporal fatherland have often been those 
 who resisted even to the death the unlimited claims of 
 
x MODERNISM 
 
 some temporary form of authority arrogating to itself 
 that divine right which was even then, through the 
 changing needs and conditions of life, passing to another 
 form. Both in the temporal and the spiritual spheres 
 authority proves its divine right by being limited and 
 ministerial. When it becomes absolute, it has already 
 denied that right. It is the function of authority to 
 keep life dependent upon God, and to that end to rever- 
 ence and cherish those forward and upward movements 
 of life in which the will of God is gradually declared. 
 It is the temptation of authority to despise life or to ignore 
 it, to identify its own momentary will with the ultimate 
 will of God, and so to become itself, and to force those whom 
 it mechanically controls to become, independent of that 
 will of God which ever inspires man's spiritual growth 
 and seeks expression through it. 
 
 You have been condemned as the enemy of religious 
 authority, indeed as the enemy of religion itself, because 
 you have sought to recall authority to the sources of its 
 strength and thus to restore to religious unity a world 
 which existing forms and methods of authority have been 
 for long, and are now ever more and more rapidly, 
 reducing to religious disintegration and decay. You will 
 not be arrested in the work of enduring pith and moment 
 to which you have been called, by this fiat of a day. 
 Through you the dawn has at last broken for thousands 
 of wearied souls who have battled all their lives, and 
 battled hopelessly, with the spectres of doubt and dark- 
 ness. You have spoken for them the word of hope, so 
 simple and obvious that, till you spoke it with the calm 
 confidence of assured conviction, they dared not believe 
 
EPISTLE DEDICATORY xi 
 
 it to be true : " The present is older and wiser and better 
 than the past which it incorporates and transcends." 
 They will be with you in the long and patient effort, which 
 you will not abandon or relax, to save the majestic and 
 glorious tradition of Roman Christianity from the narrow- 
 hearted and ineffectual isolation from the living world to 
 which it would condemn itself. 
 
 It is indeed a long and patient effort that the present 
 situation and the present needs of the religious world 
 demand from those who would keep alive the flame of 
 Christian faith. It is easy to rebel. It is not so easy to 
 hold one's ground and to maintain a living and effective 
 protest in the name of the future against the tyrannous 
 inertia of the past. Yet that is the task of the religious 
 reformer of to-day. The easy solution of a violent schism 
 is no longer possible. It seems indeed to the outside world, 
 which, if it cherishes the religious tradition in nothing else, 
 still clings at least to the scholastic distinction of an 
 absolutely true and an absolutely false, as if no course 
 were open to those who reject the prevailing intellectual 
 theories and concepts of their religious communion but 
 open rebellion and schism. That most costing and 
 courageous attitude of patient loyalty in and through 
 conflict still seems to the world quixotic and unintelligible 
 in religious matters, even while the same world under- 
 stands and admires in secular affairs the finely-tempered 
 patriotism which reveals itself in some momentary 
 opposition to national madness or even in lifelong oppo- 
 sition to a mistaken national policy. None the less it is 
 the only attitude which the modern view of religion 
 renders possible or even imaginable. Religion is the one 
 
xii MODERNISM 
 
 universal or rather universalising expression of the human 
 soul. In spite of its actual variety, it is coming con- 
 sciously to seek a tolerant and understanding unity as its 
 greatest need. Nay, we can now even see that through 
 its very variety it has in the past been unconsciously 
 straining towards a worthy and acceptable unity. It is 
 not at such a moment that schism can be accepted as 
 a solution of differences in the intellectual interpretation 
 of faith. For faith which constitutes religion is one, and 
 will be more and more felt to be one. Theology which 
 interprets religion may be one also. But it will be one 
 only in the provisional results which from time to time 
 it may reach, and to reach those results at all it will 
 demand as conditions the variety and freedom which are 
 given in life itself. No power can resist the unity to 
 which religious faith is tending or the variety and freedom 
 through which alone it will assert and secure its unity. 
 
 And with the disappearance of schism as a satisfying 
 expedient of religious reform, there disappears also that 
 which once justified schism and even made it necessary, 
 the absolute claim of any passing form or expression of 
 Catholic Truth to be the sole, necessary, and indisputable 
 form or expression a claim which is itself essentially un- 
 catholic, sectarian, and schismatic. You have taught us 
 both the necessity of an organised religious system and its 
 inevitable imperfection as something whose life and 
 growth forbid finality, petrifaction, and exclusiveness, 
 and demand elasticity and an unlimited power of assimila- 
 tion. You have shown us how the religious life, like 
 every other expression of life whatsoever, must seek the 
 universal through self-limitation within the particular. 
 
EPISTLE DEDICATORY xiii 
 
 You have reminded us that the religious life always 
 grows up into the religious system and receives from it in 
 turn the inspiration and the assurance of its own enlarging 
 reach. But you have shown us also how the society 
 may harden itself into knotty growths which reject and 
 rebuke the sap of life, how the particular which began 
 by expressing the universal may end by suppressing it. 
 We are at a crisis of growth where many antinomies of 
 the past are struggling to penetrate and transcend one 
 another in a new and original vital effort. In the sphere 
 of religion the mould of the new form, and much too that 
 is most generous in the forces which will fill it, have been 
 preserved for us by the Catholicity of Rome. But assu- 
 redly to that new synthesis Protestantism also will 
 contribute something which will prove that its courageous 
 witness of four centuries to the freedom of the spirit has 
 not been in vain. 
 
 It is because the Anglicanism in which I have found 
 my own spiritual home has tenaciously held to both of 
 these apparently contradictory principles, liberty and 
 authority, in virtue of an instinct deeper than its intellect- 
 ual grasp of the method of their reconciliation, that I have 
 dared to hope that the great constructive enterprise 
 which you have taken in hand might find the most 
 immediate and sympathetic recognition within our own 
 borders. We have idly dreamed of a Reunion which 
 would have sacrificed all the hard gains of life and even 
 life itself to the exigencies of an absolutism henceforward 
 unassailable because at last universal. You have opened 
 up for us the path to a Reunion which would preserve 
 everything that life has acquired, and strengthen it 
 
xiv MODERNISM 
 
 against sterility on the one hand and disintegration on the 
 other and against the decay which is the inevitable issue 
 of both. 
 
 For these reasons I offer you across the demolished 
 barrier of a merely defensive and controversial theology 
 this tribute of my admiration and regard. If the writer 
 and thinker who has illustrated our English tongue in 
 building up the splendid fabric of a new and universal 
 human hope should find the tribute unworthy, the warm- 
 hearted and tolerant friend will yet consent to receive it. 
 
 Your grateful and devoted friend, 
 
 A. L. LILLEY. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I AM indebted to the Editors of the Commonwealth and 
 the Guardian for their kindness in authorising my use of 
 the articles (forming part of this book) which appeared in 
 the pages of those reviews, and to the Editor of the 
 Nation for his kind permission to reprint the article on 
 " M. Desjardins and M. Loisy," which appeared hi the 
 Speaker. The article on " Mr. Inge and M. Loisy " was 
 written immediately after the publication of Dr. Inge's 
 " Faith and Knowledge," but has not hitherto been 
 published. The chapter on " The Church of England and 
 the Church of France " is taken from a lecture delivered 
 to the members of the Guild of St. Matthew. The rest 
 of the book is new. 
 
 Except for a very few verbal alterations, the chapters 
 which make up this volume preserve their original form 
 as magazine articles. Both the narrative of facts and 
 the judgments upon them followed in each case close 
 upon the facts themselves ; and the volume aims at 
 preserving this contemporary character, even at the risk 
 of exposing occasional mistakes of judgment both of men 
 and things. Forecasts of the future, whether about facts 
 or persons, are always dangerous ; but both facts and 
 persons have here for the most part manifested such 
 consistency as to reduce that danger to its lowest terms. 
 
 The dates in the margin fix the time of original 
 publication of the separate chapters. 
 
 A. L. L. 
 
 January, 1908. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I. LITERATURE OF MODERNISM 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY . . , . .3 
 
 I. M. DENIS ON CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE . 24 
 Guardian. October 29th, 1902. 
 
 II. THE PRECURSORS OF LIBERALISM . .35 
 
 Guardian, November 5th, 1902. 
 
 III. M. HOUTIN'S " QUESTION BIBLIQUE " . , 45 
 
 Guardian, February 18th, 1903. 
 
 IV. " L'ivANGILE ET L'^GLISE " v . .. . 55 
 
 Guardian, February 25th, 1903. 
 
 V. " AUTOUR D'UN PETIT LIVRE " . i . 65 
 
 Guardian, December 2nd, 1903. 
 
 VI. MR. INGE AND M. LOISY. . . .76 
 
 VII. M. DESJARDINS AND M. LOISY . . .88 
 
 Speaker, December 23rd, 1905. 
 
 vni. M. LABERTHONNIERE'S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY . 95 
 
 Guardian, September 16th, 1903. 
 
 IX. M. HOUTIN ON AMERICANISM . . . 104 
 
 Commonwealth, February, 1904. 
 
 X. THE " LETTRES ROMAINES," AND BARON VON 
 
 HDGEL'S " DU CHRIST TERNEL " . .112 
 
 xvii 
 a <*45) 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 XL " IL SANTO " . .;" '-. . . . 129 
 
 Commonwealth, April, 1906. 
 
 XII. " THE PAPAL COMMISSION AND THE PENTATEUCH " 139 
 Commonwealth, February, 1907. 
 
 XIII. M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE OF DOGMA . 149 
 
 PART IL FACTS AND FORCES 
 
 I. THE FRENCH ELECTIONS OF 1902 . . 165 
 
 Commonwealth, June, 1902. 
 
 II. THE NEW APOLOGETIC IN FRANCE . .174 
 
 Commonwealth, August, 1902. 
 
 III. FRANCE AND THE " AFFAIRE LOISY " . . 185 
 
 Commonwealth, March, 1903. 
 
 IV. THE INFLUENCE OF LEO XIII . . . 195 
 
 Commonwealth, August, 1903. 
 
 V. THE " UNKNOWN POPE " . . . 205 
 
 Commonwealth, September, 1903. 
 
 VI. THE FIRST ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS X . . 213 
 
 Commonwealth, December, 1903. 
 
 VII. THE SEPARATION LAW OF 1905 . . . 221 
 
 Commonwealth, August, 1905. 
 
 VIII. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND THE CHURCH OF 
 
 FRANCE ..... 232 
 
 IX. THE SYLLABUS OF THEOLOGICAL ERRORS . 247 
 
 Commonwealth, September, 1907. 
 
 X. THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI " . . 258 
 
 Commonwealth, December, 1907. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . 269 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES . . . 275 
 
PART I 
 
 Literature of Modernism 
 
MODERNISM 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 DURING the past ten years, and especially during the last 
 five, the movement which the recent Encyclical has 
 condemned under the name of Modernism has been 
 gradually gathering force and volume throughout those 
 sections of the Roman Communion which are most open 
 to the living influences of the time. 
 
 Most of the papers which are here collected have 
 appeared during the last five years in various magazines 
 and reviews as occasional notices of its progress. They 
 were written to call the attention of members of my own 
 Communion to a theological movement which seemed to 
 me, both by the freedom of its method and the boldness 
 of its conclusions, to have more promise of religious 
 fruitfulness than any which had found clear and articulate 
 expression within our own borders. I knew indeed how 
 many among ourselves, and especially among our younger 
 men, were feeling their way to an application of the same 
 apologetic method ; and I hoped that an example of 
 courage and faithfulness in the pursuit of truth which had 
 been an inspiration and encouragement to myself might 
 encourage and inspire them also. Relations of personal 
 friendship with some of the men to whose writings I thus 
 called attention, and an intimate knowledge of, and 
 
 3 
 
4 MODERNISM 
 
 sympathy with, the hopes and aims of all, warranted me 
 in trusting that I had generally interpreted their thought 
 as faithfully as it is given to one mind to interpret the 
 thought of another. It seemed, therefore, that these 
 collected papers might provide a record, however frag- 
 mentary and incomplete, of the movement, and that that 
 record might be useful at a critical moment in its fortunes. 
 One other merit I can claim for them as an exposition of 
 the attitude of the writers with whom they deal. They 
 do not contain, I trust, a single note of the astonishment 
 which is often expressed at the stubborn faithfulness to 
 Rome of men who are labouring to restrain the excesses 
 of Roman authority, and who have reaped for all result 
 condemnation at its hands. That faithfulness maintained 
 hitherto, and which will be maintained in spite of excom- 
 munication and anathema, is to me the most intelligible 
 and the most necessary expression of their religious 
 attitude. To the Church which would drive them out 
 with execrations as its most formidable enemies, they 
 turn with the words of unhesitating faith, " Ad quern 
 ibimus ? Verba vita ceterna habes." We, too, if the like 
 circumstances should arise for us, must be able to say 
 the same words to the Church of our baptism. For we 
 adhere each of us to his special communion, not because 
 of its temporary theological or ecclesiastical system, but 
 because it has the words of eternal life, and because it has 
 created in us a habit of the soul by which it can best 
 mediate them to us. 
 
 I ought to add that I have not thought it necessary to 
 include, except in one instance, such notices as I had 
 written of English Modernist writings. Those writings 
 
INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 are, indeed, among the most important contributions to 
 the literature of the movement, but they are happily too 
 familiar to the English reader to need introduction or 
 comment of mine. 
 
 What is, perhaps, further desirable is some connected 
 account of the inspiration and aims of the movement by 
 way of introduction to these straggling notices of it. And, 
 first of all, the inspiration of Modernism is primarily and 
 pre-eminently religious. Its leaders, born intellectually 
 into an age of positivism and metaphysical and religious 
 scepticism, were early oppressed with a sense of the 
 contemptuous aloofness of the contemporary world from 
 the Church. They beheld the educated world estranged 
 from the Church in a mood of defiant scepticism, or 
 returning to it occasionally in a mood of despairing 
 scepticism. They missed everywhere the spontaneous 
 and joyous energy of unhesitating faith. They noted 
 with mingled dismay and revulsion of feeling the respect- 
 able adhesion of worldly and faithless coteries to the 
 Church as to a powerful social institution or as to an ark 
 of social safety from the threatening and revolutionary 
 movements of the time. They felt that the Church was 
 unconsciously ceasing to be religious, and was coming to 
 be exploited as a refuge by all the honest or cowardly 
 reactions of the moment. Meanwhile they saw the great 
 mass of the common people become more and more 
 indifferent and even hostile to such religious witness as 
 the Church still upheld. 
 
 Yet they knew and felt, with an invincible personal 
 
6 MODERNISM 
 
 certainty, that the Church had the words of eternal life. 
 And they, members of the Roman Church, of that Church 
 which held unchallenged for herself and ministered to all 
 alien Communions the tradition of the saints and mystics 
 of Christendom, felt that Rome above all could claim the 
 priceless heritage of those words. But her possession of 
 them seemed for the moment futile. She formally recited 
 them in a language which no one could understand. She 
 had lost the gift of tongues, the power of effective inter- 
 pretation. And she had lost it because she refused to 
 learn the language of those to whom her message was 
 addressed. If the world had abandoned her, it was 
 because she had first abandoned the world and condemned 
 it. The world was alive in thought and action, and she 
 had chosen to dwell among the tombs of the past. She 
 who ought to have been the first-fruits of every resurrec- 
 tion of history, anathematised the world because it had 
 escaped from the tomb of a dead mode of thought and 
 action, and insisted that there alone was rest and safety. 
 But these, her faithful sons, believed that she too would 
 rise again, and in preparing that resurrection they were 
 confident that they were preparing a new hope for the 
 world. 
 
 But further, their Catholic heritage in Rome justified 
 of itself every instance of their faith in the religious value 
 of unfettered thought and new knowledge, and of itself 
 rebuked the official exclusiveness and sectarianism of a 
 moment, even if that moment had been four centuries 
 long. They claimed, and not without reason, that 
 Catholicism meant before everything else the recognition 
 and vital reconciliation of the absolute and contingent 
 
INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 elements in human experience. Their chief indictment 
 against Protestantism was that it had confused the 
 boundaries between these two elements. Catholicism, 
 with its implicit, if not always explicit, faith in a growing 
 Divine revelation, could afford to distinguish, even if at 
 times it had failed to do so, between the absolute spirit 
 of that revelation and the contingent forms in which it 
 had from time to time expressed itself. Protestantism, 
 in its anxiety to preserve some fixed and authoritative 
 nucleus of belief, had chosen arbitrarily among its con- 
 tingent forms and given to some of them an absolute 
 value. In the Protestant the scholar and the believer 
 were often at odds, with the result that the scholar was 
 sometimes forced to compromise his most certain 
 conclusions so as to harmonise them with the claims 
 of the believer. In the Catholic the scholar and the 
 believer could live together in peace, since the scholar 
 knew that he was merely establishing the phe- 
 nomenal events or contingent forms in which the 
 believer had found, or through which he had expressed, 
 the realities of faith. The Protestant was always timidly 
 attempting to guarantee the absolute of faith by some 
 historical or philosophical contingency. The Catholic 
 had been trained to find the absolute of faith in that to 
 which the universal conscience of humanity witnessed, 
 " quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus" And if 
 the growth and deepening of knowledge had impressed 
 upon him the certainty that that absolute had never been 
 and could never be perfectly and exhaustively mediated 
 through the contingent fact and thought of a world in 
 growth, he was not in the slightest degree disconcerted. 
 
8 MODERNISM 
 
 For in the Church, the organ and instrument of the Eternal 
 Christ, the absolute was for ever descending into and 
 incarnating itself in the relative ; the relative was con- 
 tinually ascending into and incorporating itself with the 
 absolute. In a word, the object of religious faith retains 
 its absolute character in the life of will and conscience, of 
 aspiration and prayer. The moment it comes out into 
 the open and begins to be mediated through thought, it 
 takes on perforce something of a relative character. 
 Catholicism, in its widest and fullest sense, is but the 
 growing realization and effectuation of the principle of 
 religious growth. Founded in the absolute of faith given 
 in varying degrees in human life as the necessary condition 
 of that life, its heart is open to recognize and welcome, 
 its mind to co-ordinate and utilize, all the spiritual treasure 
 of humanity. For it Christianity is the resuming and 
 controlling moment of a process of self-revelation of the 
 Divine which has been continuous with the spiritual 
 growth of humanity. It is at once an act of incorporation 
 of the revelation of the' past, and a point of departure for 
 the revelation of the future. 
 
 With this conception of what Catholicism is, and an 
 intense belief in the mission and the capacity of Rome 
 to give effect to it, the Modernist Catholics have not so 
 much framed a new kind of apologetic as conceived in a 
 new way the very nature of apologetic. The apologetic 
 of the past has too often repelled the outside world by an 
 appearance of insincerity and chicane. This appearance 
 was due to the fact that that apologetic had pledged 
 itself to an impossible task. Identifying the Christian 
 revelation with its expression through a temporary phase 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 of thought and a particular systematization of knowledge, 
 it attempted, in vain, to attach revelation so conceived 
 to a fresh body of knowledge which, under the impulse 
 of new ways of thinking, was systematizing itself on 
 different lines. The clumsiness of the sutures was too 
 obvious, and besides they gave way after a very little 
 wear. But the Modernist conception of revelation has 
 given a new character and method to apologetic. If 
 revelation is given in life and through life, if all life is in 
 various degrees and on various levels the obedient or 
 recalcitrant medium of revelation, if the natural is 
 dependent upon and penetrated by the supernatural, 
 then apologetic ceases to be mere intellectual fence and 
 defence, and becomes instead living interpretation. The 
 first duty of the apologist is to understand his own time, 
 its profoundest aspirations, its most enduring hopes, its 
 most generous and unselfish activities, its most dis- 
 interested quest of truth. It is through union with these 
 forms and qualities of life that even the classical revelation 
 of the past gains new fruitfuhiess and power. And so 
 apologetic, to be efficient, must be vital and not merely 
 formal. It must interpret the revelation in terms of the 
 concrete life of the present, and not be content to juggle 
 with contemporary knowledge till it yields a deceptive 
 show of agreement with some past form of revelation 
 which has been given an absolute value. 
 
 And here it may be well to take account of that indict- 
 ment which has been so abundantly laid against the 
 Modernist theology, that it has pronounced an unnatural 
 divorce between faith and knowledge. Modernism claims, 
 it is said, to preserve intact all the affirmations of faith, 
 
10 MODERNISM 
 
 while lightly admitting certain results of knowledge which 
 ought to be destructive of those affirmations. Now this, 
 it seems to me, is an almost wanton misrepresentation of 
 the distinction between faith and knowledge which the 
 Modernists have attempted to draw. For that distinction 
 is purely one of fact. It depends, no doubt, to some 
 degree, upon a particular philosophic conception of the 
 position and function of the understanding in the total 
 economy of the human spirit. That philosophic bias they 
 could not, as men of their time, altogether escape. But 
 independently of it the distinction asserts itself as one of 
 fact. The affirmations of faith are, as a matter of fact, 
 independent of, and vitally prior to, the rational process. 
 They are indeed not irrational : so far from that they 
 are, and just because they are affirmations of the total 
 human spirit, charged with an implicit reason. Those 
 affirmations find their occasion in certain facts and aspects 
 of the phenomenal world, and it is the business of the 
 rational intelligence to develop their rational content in 
 closest vital touch with the facts and aspects of fact 
 which provoked them. And as increasing knowledge 
 means a more accurate perception of fact and a juster 
 view of the general relations of fact, it is certain that it 
 must not only affect the form of faith, but even assist in 
 evoking its rational content. 
 
 It is exactly this close interdependence of faith and 
 knowledge that every Modernist writer most positively 
 asserts. It is the chief burden of his offence in the eyes 
 of scholastic orthodoxy. For it there can be no vital 
 interdependence between them, for the simple reason 
 that for it they are identical, faith being given as complete 
 
INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 and imperfectible knowledge. Yet the Modernist holds 
 that a distinction remains in the fact that faith has a 
 vital priority to all reasoned knowledge. In all its 
 affirmations there remains an element which is un- 
 analysable by reason, or at least which has not yet been 
 analysed by it. And if the reason could complete that 
 analysis, it would die of its own too much. We should 
 know as God knows, and there being no task left for the 
 reason to accomplish, it would perish of its very success. 
 But it is not merely from intellectual considerations 
 that the Modernist infers the distinction between faith 
 and knowledge. He finds it given in the evidence of 
 religion itself as to the nature of its own certainties. The 
 religious knowledge of God, for instance, is not the 
 comprehension or acceptance of some intellectual proof 
 of the necessity of His existence, but the immediate 
 personal sense of Him as Inspirer, Redeemer, Judge. 
 The really saving knowledge of God is possessed, and in 
 abundant measure, by many a soul which is incapable of 
 appraising the force of such intellectual proofs, even by 
 many a soul which has never heard of them. Or again, 
 those proofs may have a compelling validity for the mind 
 without conveying any knowledge of God which can stir 
 the soul into life. Or yet again, they may altogether 
 fail to satisfy the mind, while in spite of their failure, and 
 of the failure of all other formal proofs, the soul is pro- 
 foundly conscious of God as the very source and substance 
 of its life. Religion rightly takes no account of any faith 
 which has not this elemental certainty. It even asks for 
 no other save when it is mounted on the stilts of a dog- 
 matic orthodoxy. If the Modernist distinguishes between 
 
12 MODERNISM 
 
 faith and knowledge, he does so not to deny the legitimate 
 action of reason in the service of faith, but to protest 
 against their illegitimate confusion by the scholastic. 
 And again, wherein he distinguishes between them, he 
 points for his justification to the evidence of vital religion 
 itself. 
 
 But while the Modernist insists upon the priority of 
 religion as spiritual fact to all intellectual translations of 
 it, upon its development through spiritual action and not 
 through passive submission to an intellectual necessity, 
 upon its origin in spirit and its growth in spirit, he does 
 not deny either the necessity or the value of an external 
 religious authority in forming the life of the soul. But 
 here again he finds that authority in the vital influences 
 of spirit rather than in formal conceptions as to its 
 nature and method of action. For the Modernist the 
 Church is primarily a home of the spirit. It is the 
 spiritual atmosphere which as Christians we breathe ; 
 it is a highway across the desert of life built up out of all 
 the heroisms, sacrifices, martyrdoms of the Christian 
 centuries whereon all the pilgrims of faith may march 
 with confidence ; it is the spiritual soil in which we are 
 rooted, and in which, as we grow spiritually, our roots 
 strike more widely and deeply. Its organ of authority 
 exists, or ought to exist, in order to recover and con- 
 centrate at a fixed point of self-consciousness the spiritual 
 power diffused throughout the whole mass, and to 
 mediate it again by a thousand living processes to each 
 unit of the mass. That diffused power, which it is the 
 function of authority to mediate to each Christian soul, 
 is the generalized tradition of Christian life, the certainties 
 
INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 which have grown out of and been enriched by the 
 religious experience of the Christian Society tradition 
 and certainties which have their vital source and their 
 eternal norm in the Gospel, in the life and Person of Jesus 
 Christ. And here again the Modernist is at issue with 
 the Intellectualist. For the latter holds that the Gospel 
 was once reduced to an adequate intellectual form, and 
 that that form was entrusted to the safekeeping of certain 
 official guardians whose function it is to impose it upon 
 the faithful, who are faithful only when they accept it 
 without questioning. The Intellectualist, indeed, need 
 not always be so logical, but he has for once reached the 
 end of his logical tether in the conception and spirit of 
 actual Roman authority. The Modernist, on the other 
 hand, believes that because the Gospel was life, and more 
 abundant life, it was bound to commit itself freely to all 
 the risks of life. He conceives of the Church as the Gospel 
 taking those vital risks, as the Gospel actually lived by 
 saintly souls, and of its authority as the mediation of 
 that abundant life to its already living and therefore 
 receptive members. 
 
 II 
 
 It has been necessary, in order to do justice to the 
 Modernists, to insist at some length on their interior view 
 of religion which places them in the direct line of spiritual 
 succession from the Mystics. But they have one 
 characteristic which distinguishes them from the less 
 intelligible and more repellent aspects of Mysticism, and 
 which ought of itself to have protected them against 
 the charge of instituting a divorce between faith and 
 
14 MODERNISM 
 
 knowledge. They have an almost passionate faith in the 
 value to religion of actual contemporary knowledge, and of 
 the devotion to the living quest of truth by which it is 
 obtained. Not only is there nothing about them of that 
 contempt for modern knowledge and ways of thinking 
 so laboriously flaunted by the devout votaries of Roman 
 scholasticism, and even feebly imitated by scholastics 
 who are not Roman, but they are conspicuous among 
 theologians of all Christian communions for their eager 
 and enthusiastic confidence in the achievements of the 
 modern mind. They value, indeed, the thought of the 
 past, but they value it as the seed out of which the 
 thought of the present has grown, or as the food on which 
 the thinker of the present has been nourished so that his 
 thought in turn may be vigorous and individual. In 
 short they do not conceive of thought as stored-up 
 treasure, but as fructifying seed and fruitful harvest, as 
 nourishing food and the intellectual health and robustness 
 which it produces. No intellectual acquisition of the past 
 has any value save in so far as it points the way to 
 further acquisition. Nor can the excellence of the past 
 seed be allowed to weigh against the insignificance of the 
 present growth. In this matter a live dog is better than 
 a dead lion. After all, health depends even more upon 
 the reality of the living process than upon what comes 
 of it. 
 
 So, conceiving of thought and knowledge in this vital 
 way, the Modernists are frankly and without reserve the 
 intellectual children of their time. They have, as we have 
 seen, turned almost every suggestion of modern specula- 
 tion to account in their analysis of the content of faith, 
 
INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 and in their working theory of its relations to knowledge. 
 They have seen the necessity of accepting certain general 
 conclusions of criticism as to the origin and historical 
 character and value of the books of Holy Scripture. Some 
 of them, indeed, have been among the most fearless 
 pioneers in that field. They are satisfied that theology 
 must for the future make its account with the composite 
 view of the Hexateuch and of the prophetic writings 
 which criticism has established. They accept the view 
 of the theological purpose and symbolical method of the 
 author of the fourth Gospel, and see in his work rather a 
 construction of faith than a record of fact. They find 
 even in the Synoptics distinct traces of the theological 
 and ecclesiastical preoccupations of the second Christian 
 generation, and turn to St. Mark and to the passages 
 which St. Matthew and St. Luke have in common for the 
 original nucleus of the Gospel record. 
 
 Again, in the field of Church history they fearlessly 
 apply critical methods of historical investigation. As a 
 result they have undermined the merely statical view of 
 Church organization, and revealed the ecclesiastical 
 system as a natural growth determined by the super- 
 natural needs and occasions of the Church's life. They 
 have transformed hagiology, and removed by skilful 
 critical surgery that overgrowth of legend which had 
 defaced the body of Christian history and become one of 
 the greatest offences to the religious sense of our time. 
 And, most important gain of all, they have established 
 as an objective fact of history the growth of dogma, its 
 growth within the limits of the Biblical record, and its 
 growth in the historical life of the Church. It is a 
 
 3 ( 
 
16 MODERNISM 
 
 revolution which they have accomplished in the view of 
 the historical character and fortunes of the Church. Yet 
 it is a revolution which they believe to be entirely salutary 
 to religion. Their faith in the Divine action includes 
 and necessitates a desire to know as accurately as the 
 best available methods of enquiry will enable them to 
 know, the actual facts through which that action was 
 manifested. Their desire to reach objective certainty 
 is as conspicuously sincere as their use of the methods by 
 which our generation strives to attain it is conspicuously 
 honest. For both the sincerity of the one and the 
 honesty of the other are expressions of their religious 
 faith. They believe that God is the Truth of Spirit 
 which acts through facts and through our reasoned 
 attempts to establish the vital order of fact, and therefore 
 they believe in the spiritual service of both truth of fact 
 and truth of reason. Truth of fact must always be 
 accordant with truth of spirit ; and it is the honest 
 attempt to know the truth of fact, and to discover through 
 such knowledge the law or method of action of that 
 truth of spirit which was already immediately revealed 
 in fact, that constitutes the truth of reason. It is the 
 truth of spirit that is given immediately in faith. It is 
 the truth of fact that critical history attempts to establish. 
 The perfect truth of reason would be the absolute know- 
 ledge of how spirit works throughout the whole order of 
 fact, or of how every detail of fact strikes some necessary 
 note in the total harmony of spirit. And as we cannot 
 attain to such absolute knowledge, the truth of reason is 
 for us just such hints and instances of the law of spirit as 
 we can surprise. It is from this point of view that the 
 
INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 Modernists seek not only without fear, but with 
 unhesitating confidence, to utilize the best contemporary 
 knowledge in the service of religion. 
 
 But once more they have welcomed the results of the 
 modern comparative study of religions, not grudgingly 
 as of embarrassing knowledge, but gratefully as of know- 
 ledge which serves to illustrate and confirm the assertions 
 of faith. They see in those alien religions other revela- 
 tions of God, the Divine Spirit sustaining and nourishing 
 like dispositions and receptivities to our own into diverse 
 realizations of the same hidden ground of reality in life. 
 But they see in them also the same revelation, the same 
 power of God working through so many different types 
 of racial character, phases and degrees of knowledge, and 
 practical habit, the Eternal Word dispensing His Light 
 wherever light is found. They reflect how much religion 
 has already gained from such knowledge when they recall 
 the theory of diabolic imitation which seemed necessary 
 to the pious and charitable souls who first came into 
 contact with the religions of the East to account for 
 facts so unexpected and disconcerting. 
 
 The Modernist movement has introduced a new note 
 into the Roman Communion. Among vast numbers of 
 the clergy of France and Italy especially, the life of the 
 study has become the natural pendant to the life of 
 prayer. In no other communion of the Christian world 
 is there such a ferment of thought about the things of 
 religion, or such an earnest and serious pursuit of positive 
 knowledge. Even Protestant Germany, which has so 
 honestly laboured in the interests of theological progress 
 for a whole century, is turning with astonishment and 
 
18 MODERNISM 
 
 admiration to this veritable renaissance in Rome. It 
 remembers that it at least enjoyed the freedom of the 
 University chair in attempting the work of theological 
 renewal. But here are men who have to work under the 
 jealous and uninterrupted surveillance of reactionary 
 Orders, or in some petty seminary professorship, or amid 
 conditions of solitude and poverty which would rebuke 
 all but the bravest and most enthusiastic spirits. And 
 yet they have never compromised their vision of truth 
 nor minimised the conclusions which the ascertained facts 
 forced upon them. They are sustained by a simple and 
 passionate love of truth, and by the certainty which fills 
 them with a kind of despotic inspiration that all truth is 
 of God. For them the results of positive theology seem 
 to blend almost naturally and without effort with the 
 immediate certainties of mystical religion. They possess 
 that peculiar chemistry of the spirit which men seem to 
 acquire in crises of enthusiastic faith, and which har- 
 monises the most conflicting elements of their knowledge 
 in a generous and satisfying unity. It is on this account 
 that they not only have succeeded in discovering the 
 religious value of the new learning for themselves, but 
 are undoubtedly destined to be its spiritual sponsors 
 with every communion in Christendom. 
 
 Nor must it be forgotten that the Modernist Catholic 
 has a special encouragement and inspiration in his 
 devotion to knowledge. He can remind himself that he 
 has had innumerable precursors in every special phase of 
 his own thought and knowledge throughout the whole 
 past of Catholicism. In the sphere of apologetic, his 
 thought was suggested long ago by Duns Scotus and 
 
INTRODUCTORY 19 
 
 Pascal, and is even implicit in the whole mystic conception 
 of religion which has nowhere been so richly exemplified 
 as in Rome. He does not forget that the science of Biblical 
 criticism had its birth in his own Communion, through the 
 labours of Simon and Astmc. When he turns to the 
 history of dogma, he fortifies himself not only with the 
 recent memory of Newman, but with the suggestive fore- 
 gleams of Petavius and Thomassin. In his attempt to 
 write ecclesiastical history honestly, he works under the 
 high patronage of a long Benedictine and Bollandist tradi- 
 tion. And when he recognizes the revelational value of 
 non-Christian religions, he can go back to the very begin- 
 nings of Christianity for the most unhesitating sanction of 
 his intelligence and charity in Justin Martyr and Clement 
 of Alexandria. The assertions of faith are so broad and 
 deep that they thus sometimes seem unconsciously to 
 predict occasions and forms of knowledge which have 
 not yet appeared. And indeed, it is not mere seeming, 
 for does not faith always say something more and greater 
 than it knows ? 
 
 Ill 
 
 But there is one aspect of Modernism, perhaps the 
 most important, which seems to have escaped those 
 among ourselves who have professed an interest in its 
 fortunes. What, they ask, is the attitude of the Modernist 
 with regard to this doctrine or to that ? Does he really 
 believe in the Divinity of our Lord, or in miracles, or in 
 some other affirmation of dogma arbitrarily selected as a 
 test of orthodoxy ? The habit of mind out of which such 
 questions can arise is too obviously obtuse to the whole 
 
20 MODERNISM 
 
 Modernist position. It takes for granted that Christian 
 dogma is a mathematical sum of truths, some of which 
 are so unimportant that they may be discarded without 
 injury to the whole, while others have been finally given 
 in an essential and intangible form. Now Modernism is 
 above all things the denial that dogma is a sum of truths. 
 It insists that dogma is a body of truth, fashioned by the 
 soul of truth which inhabits it, and in turn providing that 
 soul with a means of expression. And so it is not con- 
 cerned to discard any dogma as valueless, or to select any 
 as specially indispensable. It is concerned only to con- 
 nect all alike with the life of faith, with that immediate 
 sense of the Divine action and revelation in life which is 
 the very heart of religion. 
 
 It is impossible for anyone who does not realize that 
 Modernism is the attempt to reach a new theological 
 synthesis to be at all just to its claims and achievements. 
 That attempt has been forced upon the Christian theo- 
 logian by the revolution in our world-view which has 
 been wrought in quite recent times by the accumulated 
 effect of a revolutionary physical science, a revolutionary 
 method of establishing historical truth, and a revolu- 
 tionary psychology. Two other great syntheses have 
 preceded it the synthesis in terms of a Platonic or neo- 
 Platonic world-view which was completed by the sixth 
 Christian century, and the synthesis in terms of a world- 
 view mediated through Aristotelian intellectualism 
 which was perfected by St. Thomas before the end of the 
 thirteenth century. The intervals between these critical 
 moments in theological development have been occupied 
 by local and particular skirmishes in various parts of 
 
INTRODUCTORY 21 
 
 the theological field. They have been the periods of 
 partial heresies. But the great crises themselves have 
 been moments of general reconstruction for which 
 the particular speculation had prepared. How difficult 
 it has been for official authority to recognize the near 
 approach of these critical moments and their construc- 
 tive significance may be gathered from a Letter* of 
 Gregory IX, which has been quoted in the recent 
 Encyclical of Pius X in support of the latter's con- 
 demnation of Modernism. Yet who would believe it ? 
 the Modernism which Gregory IX condemned in 1228 
 was that very Aristotelian apologetic which long before 
 the century's end was to receive its classical form through 
 the intellectual labours of St. Thomas, and whose 
 canonical value Pius X is now once again attempting 
 to impose upon Christendom. Within a few years 
 Gregory IX had to retract his condemnation of the 
 Aristotelian philosophy, and to approve its use in the 
 schools of the Church. The Modernism of to-day may 
 have to wait longer for its vindication, but that vindi- 
 cation will come. The mind of the thirteenth century, 
 dominated by the need of applying its logical categories 
 to the whole sum of its knowledge, could remain no 
 longer satisfied with a Christianity whose truths main- 
 tained an arbitrary aloofness from the rest of knowledge. 
 So the twentieth century will be unable to apprehend 
 Christian truth at all save through those categories of 
 growth and development which it is learning to apply to 
 all the objects of its knowledge. It is from the logical 
 
 * Epistola ad magistros theologia Parisienses. The document is given 
 in Denzinger's " Enchiridion," 5th edition, p. 139. Denzinger dates 
 the Epistle 1223 by mistake. 
 
22 MODERNISM , 
 
 and mathematical categories of Aristotelianism that we 
 inherit the notion of a sum of particular Christian truths 
 with various degrees of deductive validity. Modernism 
 can only conceive of particular truths as they are part of 
 the truth, and of their validity as the degree of their vital 
 participation in and illustration of the truth. And that 
 truth is the vision of the Divine action vouchsafed to a 
 religious sense inherent in man, which we call faith, and 
 mediated to us through a world of fact which exists as a 
 growing order, and through the Divine-human life in 
 which the spiritual secret of that order was supremely 
 revealed. There is no dogma, therefore, which can resist 
 the solvent of analysis necessitated by the application to 
 it of the category of growth. But neither is there any 
 which does not in some way witness to truth, and to some 
 degree inhere in truth, by reason of the fact that it has 
 had its origin in some profound experience of the general 
 soul of man which is the divinely-constituted source of 
 all revelation. So Modernism rejects no dogma and 
 transforms all. 
 
 As yet, however, this new synthesis makes no claim to 
 completeness. It is, indeed, not so much a synthesis at 
 all as the obedience to a despotic impulse towards one. 
 One thing only can be prophesied of it, but that may be 
 prophesied with certainty. The track which it is clearing 
 for theology is the only one which theology can safely 
 follow in the coming days. And in clearing that track, 
 it is preparing a mutual intelligence between the sundered 
 branches of Christendom which is possible on no other 
 terms. Protestant theology, which was scholastic to the 
 core, separated from the main body of the Christian 
 
INTRODUCTORY 23 
 
 tradition in refusing adhesion to certain dogmas as 
 intellectually false, as out of accord with the revelation 
 given in Scripture intellectually conceived and interpreted. 
 Protestantism, indeed, as a religious movement, had gone 
 deeper than its apologetics admitted. It had really 
 denied certain dogmas because religious experience 
 seemed to prove them valueless and even injurious to the 
 life of religion. But Modernism holds that life may be 
 trusted to slough its old skin, and that when it does so in 
 obedience to the needs of nature it may find that every 
 expression of the old life needs to repeat itself in some 
 worthier and more developed form in the new. With 
 the sense of the absoluteness of God's self-revelation in 
 life, of the supremacy of the life and Spirit of Jesus Christ 
 as the norm of that revelation, and of the relative value 
 of all its various forms as it expresses itself through the 
 religious life and thought of humanity, all motives to 
 schism will have vanished. In proportion as these 
 conceptions gain ground, and they cannot by their very 
 nature gain ground in one Christian communion without 
 affecting all, the reunion of Christendom will pass from 
 the stage of a vague sentimental desire to that of a 
 rational and highly practical aim. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 M. DENIS ON CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE 
 
 October 29. HISTORY, which is full of ironies, has seldom surely 
 1902 known a greater or a more tragic than the present position 
 of affairs in France. Of almost forty millions of French- 
 men not quite a million are Protestant, and, probably, 
 not more than three millions are definitely non-Catholic. 
 The monarchic absolutism of the seventeenth century 
 procured for France, by however questionable means, 
 a political and religious unity elsewhere unknown. The 
 political unity still survives in the centralized adminis- 
 tration which persists through every change in the form 
 of government. The political heredity of France declares 
 itself in an ingrained suspicion of variety, in a tempera- 
 ment which makes the liberty she cherishes as an ideal 
 impossible as a fact. And, equally, religious unity is a 
 first principle of her national consciousness. It shows 
 how deeply the inheritance of the Grand Silcle has passed 
 into her being, that she cannot even now regard the 
 religious descendants of Calvin whom M. Brunetire 
 himself has described as a typical exponent of the French 
 genius in matters of theology as other than foreigners 
 in the land of their birth and origin. Yet it is in this 
 supremely Catholic country that a savage anti-clericalism 
 rages ; that the gasconade of the atheist lecture-hall or 
 the Masonic lodge has become a settled principle of 
 government; that the Church is preparing to fight in 
 
 24 
 
M. DENIS ON CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE 25 
 
 her last ditch the battle of religious education ; that the 
 Government which had just passed a most stringent law 
 intended to clip the wings of the great religious orders, 
 if not altogether to crush out their life, was yet able to 
 secure a sweeping majority at the polls ; that a quondam 
 seminarist has been deliberately chosen to accomplish 
 the work of destruction which it seems doubtful whether 
 even his clumsy haste will be able to arrest or delay. 
 
 A situation so ironical compels reflection, and clamours 
 for explanation. It will not do to accept in explanation 
 the tradition of militant English Protestantism that the 
 French Church is corrupt. Besides that it is exceedingly 
 vague as, indeed, it is probably meant to be such a 
 charge is from every point of view so lacking in support 
 that it can only be described as ludicrously and scandal- 
 ously false. Perhaps in no part of Christendom is a 
 body of men to be found of simpler and more self-denying 
 lives, more wholly devoted to their duties, more conscious 
 of the spiritual character of their mission, and, at the 
 same time, more intelligent of the simple human aspect 
 of its claims and more capable in discharging them, than 
 the French clergy. One has only to consult the evidence 
 of capable, conscientious, and unprejudiced Englishmen 
 like Mr. Hamerton and Mr. Bodley, who know (or 
 have known) France intimately, or, better still, to recall 
 the bons pretres of French fiction from Balzac down to 
 M. Bourget, M. Ferdinand Fabre, M. Lafargue, and 
 M. Fonsegrive, to see how ignorant and absurd are these 
 charges of corruption. Nor will it be sufficient, though 
 it may be more true, to say that the French laity are 
 largely divorced from the Church. Such a charge is 
 
26 MODERNISM 
 
 probably no more true and no less true of France than 
 of any other country in Europe of Germany, say, or of 
 England. Membership in the Church has at all times, 
 and in all countries, had a twofold aspect. For an elect 
 few it has meant the development of the life of the 
 spirit. For the great majority it has meant the hope of 
 avoiding the dreaded consequences of the life of the 
 flesh. Probably France still produces as many saints 
 as ever she did. Equally probably, as few of her children 
 as ever are ready to face the terrors of the future without 
 recourse to the Church's supernatural assistance. 
 
 Yet this much-talked-of divorce of the laity from the 
 Church too true, alas ! even of England, America, and 
 Germany is in one important respect still more true 
 of France. And it is that aspect of the divorce which 
 is the real explanation of the present relations of French 
 civil government and French religion. While French- 
 men still, for the most part, seek to insure themselves 
 through the instrumentality of the Church against the 
 risks of the future, they just as generally regard all the 
 interests of the present life as being entirely outside the 
 Church's ken. They resent the influence of the clergy 
 in temporal affairs as an unwarranted incursion of 
 foreigners within their own frontiers. Rightly or wrongly, 
 they believe that the clergy do not understand, and 
 have no desire to understand, the lay point of view. 
 And so they have come instinctively to suspect every 
 attempted exercise of clerical influence as being neces- 
 sarily inspired either by ignorance or by craft. Now, 
 it might not be difficult to estimate the share of the laity 
 in the responsibility for this estrangement. But, 
 
M. DENIS ON CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE 27 
 
 assuredly, the responsibility is not entirely with them. 
 And in the remarkable pamphlet of the Abbe Denis, 
 published in the early months of this year, we have the 
 indictment of the Church for her contribution to so 
 disastrous a result, drawn up by one of her most faithful 
 and devoted sons. That it has been drawn up with such 
 insight, such sincerity, and such courage by one of the 
 most prominent of the younger clergy in France is, 
 perhaps, the best guarantee that the estrangement of the 
 clergy and the laity on all the great questions of living 
 moment, political, social, and intellectual, is by no means 
 inevitable, and even that it may be already beginning to 
 disappear. 
 
 M. Denis is the director of the Annales de Philosophic 
 Chretienne, a review which, under his direction, has 
 become almost the official organ of theological Liberal- 
 ism in the Church of France. To the English reader of 
 M. Bourget's novels, it may convey more to say that 
 M. Denis is the Abb< Chanut of " L'Etape," the latest 
 surprise which the author of " Le Disciple " has given 
 us. But M. Denis is very far indeed from being the mere 
 dupe of generous illusions, which M. Bourget, in the 
 mood of pessimism with which his so recent religious 
 orthodoxy seems to have inspired him, portrays in the 
 Abbe" Chanut. No one could be more free from the fatal 
 illusions in which M. Bourget seems anxious to encourage 
 the Church than is M. Denis. No one could have demon- 
 strated with more clearness and more courage than he how 
 fatal these illusions have been, how still more fatal they 
 may become if persisted in. It needs the courage of 
 absolute sincerity to speak home truths like these : 
 
28 MODERNISM 
 
 " Catholicism in Latin countries has reached a lament- 
 able pass. It must adapt itself to its environment, or it 
 will continue to decay. That is the least pessimistic 
 forecast. With us the Church is not suffering from 
 schism, but from inanition. What we want is not so 
 much unity as vitality. We are disobedient, not to our 
 masters in the supernatural order, but to liberty in the 
 natural order. We are languishing because we have 
 refused the discipline of action, and accepted a lifeless 
 immobility within the discipline of dogma. Dogma is a 
 light to lead us on. We have made it a barrier beyond 
 which we must not go. We have become helots in the 
 twentieth century because of our desire that the past 
 should live again. We have no relations with anything 
 that is vital, neither with science, nor with society, nor 
 with the State. We are crushed by our political tradi- 
 tionalism, which we make an article of faith. We are 
 compromised by our formalism, which is becoming more 
 and more unintelligible, because we substitute it too often 
 for the spirit which makes alive, even for the Gospel 
 itself. We love the Church and its infallible magisterium, 
 but on condition that the Church dispenses us from the 
 need of acting, of thinking, of knowing, of loving what is 
 undoubtedly good in our time. The evil is in us. Let 
 us not look for it elsewhere. Let us not be like those 
 invalids who rebel against the advice of the doctor, and 
 throw out of the window the remedies which would 
 restore them, but to which in their folly they attribute 
 their suffering. The evil is in ourselves, and has sunk 
 deep to the innermost recesses of our being." 
 
 There is the weakness of the Church. She has withdrawn 
 
M. DENIS ON CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE 29 
 
 from the common life. The indictment is summed up 
 in a phrase. The clergy are " homines de sacristie " 
 voild tout. They have failed to understand the needs 
 of the society to which they have had to minister. They 
 have thought that it was sufficient to impose the faith 
 upon an indifferent world. They have made no attempt 
 to appreciate the causes of its indifference, or to prepare 
 the way for its intelligent acceptance of the faith. For 
 a hundred years France has been living under a Parlia- 
 mentary Government. For a hundred years the Church 
 has sought to identify the Faith with suspicion and 
 defiance of Parliamentarism, and for thirty years with 
 hatred of Republicanism and hopeless championship of 
 some form of absolutism. Devoted sons of tradition 
 and of doctrinal authority, the clergy have not learned 
 to conform to the methods of Parliamentary compromise 
 which the modern State requires. They have not even 
 bowed to the supreme direction of the Holy See. When 
 two of their number, the Abbe Lemire and the Abb6 
 Gayraud, sought and obtained seats in the Chamber of 
 Deputies as Parliamentary rallies to the Republic, one 
 was deprived of his celebret, and the other became the 
 victim of a petty persecution, and found himself forced 
 at the last elections to meet the opposition of a clerical 
 candidate who was politically orthodox. The results of 
 this determination of the Church to sulk in her monarchi- 
 cal tent have been disastrous to her own interests. She 
 has seen interests the most sacred the family, education, 
 the right of association revolutionized without any 
 power of interference on her part. 
 Again, she has refused to understand the power and 
 
30 MODERNISM 
 
 the needs of the people. The advent of the great mass 
 of workers to political power, which has constituted 
 what is known as the social question, has been completely 
 disregarded by her. And yet it was supremely her 
 business to understand and to meet this momentous 
 issue. 
 
 " Religion," says the Abbe Six, " is summed up in 
 two words, justice and charity. Precisely the two 
 things demanded by the people are justice and charity. 
 . . . Charity has been given by the religious congrega- 
 tions, both men and women, and by all the clergy with 
 an incomparable zeal and devotion. But, besides the 
 people which suffers, which is ill, or has its orphans to 
 be ministered to, there is the people which has strong 
 arms, and works with them. It asks for justice. Now, 
 have we publicly, and as a body, fought and suffered 
 sufficiently to procure justice for the people as our 
 admirable Sisters have toiled and suffered to give it 
 charity ? Have we, as a body, the reputation of being 
 favourable to the just claims of the people ? In a word, 
 are we popular by our defence of justice as the Sisters 
 are by their exercise of charity ? There is the whole 
 question ; and who would dare to answer Yes ? " 
 
 And, again, the clergy have lost their influence by 
 their lack of interest in the intellectual problems which 
 disturb the age. Hear this frank confession of the Abbe 
 Denis, and recognize the community of experience of the 
 teaching Church in presence of the educated laity of all 
 the European nations : 
 
 " The majority of the secular and regular priests are 
 convinced that the problems of evil, of heredity, of 
 
M. DENIS ON CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE 31 
 
 Divine justice, of evolution, of the historical origin of 
 religions, of the sources of Scripture, are completely 
 unknown to their flocks, and that to speak of them is to 
 talk Greek. Fatal ignorance which fosters intellectual 
 apathy among the clergy ! " 
 
 But M. Denis at least has no illusions. He knows how 
 intellectually curious the younger generation is. He 
 recognizes the high level of popular education. He 
 knows how various and acute are the intellectual interests 
 of the educated section of modern society, the doctors, 
 officers, advocates, elementary teachers, pupils (male 
 and female) of the Iyc6es and the normal schools. And 
 it is with something like dismay that he contrasts with 
 this high level of knowledge and of intellectual interest 
 the ignorance and intellectual barrenness of the clergy. 
 The priest never thinks of grappling in the pulpit with 
 great intellectual issues. It is not wonderful, perhaps. 
 For there he has before him only pious listeners who 
 know nothing of intellectual struggles. But even if the 
 intelligent were there he would not know how to meet 
 their needs. His seminarist education has not fitted 
 him to get beyond the familiar truths of the catechism 
 and the liturgy. If, in his seminary days, he has ever 
 heard the actual questions of philosophy and science 
 touched upon at all, it was only that they might be 
 dismissed with a sniff of contempt, or crushed with a 
 summary condemnation. No wonder that he is disarmed 
 in presence of objections which he does not understand. 
 It is, perhaps, intelligible that, in presence of this fatal 
 incapacity of the Church to find an entrance for its 
 message into alert and eager minds, it should be with a 
 
 4 (2403) 
 
32 MODERNISM 
 
 feeling of something like despair that a faithful son of 
 the Church in France recalls the treatment of her most 
 gifted scholars in the present generation the Abbe 
 Duchesne suspended from his chair at the Catholic 
 Institute for his critical treatment of history, the Abb6 
 Loisy subjected to censure for his pioneer work in biblical 
 exegesis, and the Abbe" Turmel for his study of the 
 origins of dogma. And equally it is with a sense of 
 shame that such a one remembers that the great 
 masters of philosophical apologetics in France during 
 the last ten years have been laymen M. Fonsegrive, 
 M. Blondel, M. OlleXLaprune, M. Brunetiere, and 
 M. Goyau. 
 
 That is the indictment drawn up by M. Denis with a 
 courage in which there is no trace of presumption, with 
 a sincerity which could only be inspired by the most 
 absolute faith in the divine mission of the Church. That 
 there are eyes to see the truth and voices to speak it is 
 surely a most hopeful sign of the future of the Church 
 of France. Still more hopeful is it that the eyes and 
 the voices are so many. The " cole Large " how 
 these names repeat themselves in the history of Christian 
 thought is already a strong and active advance-guard 
 in the army of the Church of France. In the sphere of 
 Parliamentary action there are still but the Abbe Lemire, 
 the Deputy for Hazebrouck in the Nord, and the Abbe 
 Gayraud, the Deputy for Brest ; but they are a host in 
 themselves. The " Abb6s Democrates," who champion 
 the social movement in the Church with the exube- 
 rant vigour and enthusiasm of youth, are making their 
 influence felt on an ever-increasing scale. There is the 
 
M. DENIS ON CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE 33 
 
 Abb6 Naudet, with his " Justice Sociale," the Abb6s 
 Klein, Dabry, Six, Sifflet, Gamier, Ardant, and many 
 more. There is the enthusiastic movement of the 
 younger laity directed by M. Marc Sangnier and his 
 colleagues of the " Sillon." The influence of this growing 
 movement has been solemnly stamped with the seal of 
 authority by the great Congress, held last January at 
 Bourges under the presidency of its Archbishop, Mgr. 
 Servonnet. And, again, the whole question of seminarist 
 education is passing through a phase of practical reform. 
 Mgr. Le Camus, the Bishop of La Rochelle, has com- 
 pletely remodelled the teaching of his diocesan seminary. 
 Mgr. Fuzet, the Archbishop of Rouen, has insisted on 
 the same need. Above all, the Archbishop of Albi, 
 Mgr. Mignot, by his discourse on the " Method of 
 Theology " at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse, has 
 prepared the way for a really liberal treatment of apolo- 
 getics in the chairs of Catholic Institutes and Seminaries. 
 To Albi, it may be said in passing, we owe the philosophic 
 mind of M. Birot, and to Toulouse the sane and critical 
 scholarship of M. Batiffol. But, perhaps, there is no 
 greater or more trustworthy evidence of the strength and 
 extensive influence of the new movement than the 
 dismay it has occasioned among the ranks of the old 
 guard. Mgr. Turinaz, a prelate of strong convictions 
 and vigorous temper, who has for almost thirty years 
 ruled the diocese of Nancy, has made himself the official 
 mouthpiece of the hostility with which the new move- 
 ment is being met. That hostility had, indeed, already 
 been uttered with sufficient virulence by Pere Fontaine 
 in his " Infiltrations Protestantes et le Clerg6 Francois." 
 
34 MODERNISM 
 
 But those who wish to obtain a rapid and comprehensive 
 view of the nature and variety of this most hopeful 
 movement in the Church of France will find in the vigorous 
 indictment and condemnation of it by Mgr. Turinaz a 
 means ready to their hand. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PRECURSORS OF LIBERALISM 
 
 ON the last day of September, in the year 1901, there November 5, 
 died in Paris a man who for more than thirty years was, 1902 
 perhaps, the greatest single influence in moulding the 
 elite of the French clergy. He was an Irishman, born at 
 Bodyke so far back as 1829. In 1844 he became a 
 seminarist at Bordeaux, and five years later went to 
 Paris to complete his studies at Saint-Sulpice. There he 
 had hardly been ordained priest when he was appointed 
 to the chair of theology in 1852. For thirty-two years 
 he continued to occupy it, giving himself with an 
 unexampled zeal and a unique power of direction to the 
 great work of that home of theological learning and 
 clerical training. In 1884 he was sent to Boston, in 
 Massachusetts, to found a seminary of the Sulpicians. 
 Five years later he was called to Washington to organize 
 the seminary teaching in connection with the new Roman 
 Catholic University, and once more was he recalled to 
 Boston, in 1894, as Superior of its diocesan seminary. 
 
 What were the character and the force of Father 
 Hogan's influence at Saint-Sulpice may be gathered from 
 an excellent appreciation in the Revue du Clerge Fratifais 
 for the first quinzaine of August, by one of his most 
 distinguished pupils, Mgr. Batiffol, the present rector of 
 the Catholic Institute of Toulouse. Much that is most 
 intimate and characteristic in the influence of a great 
 
36 MODERNISM 
 
 teacher can never, alas ! reach beyond the narrow circle 
 of those who have felt it. But, fortunately, Father 
 Hogan has left us a precious legacy in his volume, entitled 
 " Clerical Studies," the matured and mellow fruitage of a 
 long life of strenuous intellectual energy in uninterrupted 
 contact with a single practical mission. For here there 
 is something more than the formal results of a life of 
 scholarship. There is something of the most intimate 
 quality of a soul, its freshness, its simplicity, its absolute 
 sincerity, its obvious sympathy with every natural and 
 healthy manifestation of life. 
 
 But the present interest of this book lies in the evidence 
 it affords, alike in its own teachings and in the circum- 
 stances of its author's position and influence, of the nature 
 and extent of the recent revival of Catholic theology 
 in France. That revival, which seems to the foreign 
 observer to have come with such astonishing suddenness, 
 was after all being prepared in the silent but far-reaching 
 influence of teachers like Father Hogan. Only the love 
 of truth, the keen intellectual sympathy with all the 
 best knowledge of our time, the sincere and strenuous 
 endeavour to adapt the content of the Christian revelation 
 to that knowledge, to which this book bears witness, 
 could have produced the change of theological method 
 which has found most adequate expression in the now 
 famous address of Mgr. Mignot before the Catholic 
 Institute of Toulouse. What that revival means, how 
 revolutionary its character, may, perhaps, best be 
 appreciated by a brief review of the Archbishop of Albi's 
 thesis. The Archbishop prefaces his quest of an efficient 
 theological method, of a method which will bring theology 
 
THE PRECURSORS OF LIBERALISM 37 
 
 into living correspondence with actual knowledge, by 
 contrasting the present position of theology with regard 
 to other sciences with that which obtained in the middle 
 ages. During the long development of Christian civiliza- 
 tion the Western mind has passed through two distinct 
 phases or stages of evolution, the one deductive and 
 synthetic, the other experimental and analytic. The 
 thirteenth century saw the consummation of the first 
 stage. Our own age has witnessed the virtual triumph 
 of the other. 
 
 " Human knowledge was at first a formless and chaotic 
 mass in which every element was confusedly mingled. 
 Aristotle's first attempts at organization themselves far 
 from complete had been lost in the vast revolution 
 which renewed the world after the fall of Rome. Cut off 
 from its origins, deprived of every means of information 
 unskilled as yet in direct observation, and yet unable to 
 remain inactive, reason had to content itself with hasty 
 generalizations, embracing as best it might the meagre 
 baggage of facts and memories which it possessed. To 
 this thought, so unsteady, without knowledge of what it 
 might rest upon for support, Christianity offered the 
 objective element it needed. On the one hand the Bible, 
 on the other dogma tinged with Hellenism through the 
 medium of the Fathers, provided a chronology and meta- 
 physic which were accepted with confidence, and served 
 as a framework for further developments. From this 
 source it was necessary by force of mere logic to extract 
 a solution for every problem. Science was therefore 
 deductive, and it might be said of it, as of a famous 
 prisoner, that it was nourished with the blood from its 
 
38 MODERNISM 
 
 own veins. Meanwhile, as fresh data arose from the 
 hidden depths of history or of nature, they were made to 
 fit in with the original system. Thus the philosophy of 
 Averroes was assimilated as well as the discoveries of 
 Albertus Magnus. In spite of a method so imperfect, 
 this science of the Trivium and Quadrivium was not 
 wanting in a certain grandeur, especially when the great 
 geniuses of the thirteenth century had given it the 
 finishing touches. There has been no period when, with 
 such poor resources, reason has proved herself so great 
 so much so that, at the close of this great work of synthesis 
 and integration there stood forth an imposing and unified 
 system claiming universal knowledge, and, as a matter 
 of fact, embracing almost every truth to which unaided 
 dialectic could attain." 
 
 With the age of St. Thomas the deductive theology 
 had attained its apogee. And there we had thought in 
 our ignorance that Roman theology was satisfied to 
 remain. How often we had writhed under the reproach, 
 or smiled at it, as our mood might be, that the boasted 
 learning of our Universities was the senseless confusion 
 into which the retrograde modern mind was doomed to 
 fall ! Besides, if we could have remained in doubt about 
 the official attitude of the Roman Church upon this 
 matter, we had only to recall the encyclical Mterni Patris 
 and the pious efforts of Louvain and of Rome to revive 
 the influence of the Thomist philosophy under the imme- 
 diate patronage of Leo XIII. But the Archbishop of 
 Albi, at least, does not regard Thomism as the be-all 
 and end-all of theological science. " At the very moment 
 of its completion," he says, " the work lay open to 
 
THE PRECURSORS OF LIBERALISM 39 
 
 suspicion On se prit a doiUer cTelle" Discoveries were 
 added to discoveries. Nature revealed herself to the 
 Roger Bacons, the Galileos, the Gassendis. Ancient 
 thought awoke as the monks deciphered palimpsests 
 and the Turks rolled back the East upon the West. The 
 framework of the school proved too narrow for all these 
 new additions. It revealed the artificial element la 
 part d'artifice which lay concealed within its structure. 
 Then began a kind of inventory, an immense work of 
 analytical revision analogous to that essayed by Greece 
 after the great theological syntheses of Hesiod and 
 Epimenides. The object of knowledge split into its 
 fractional elements. From the womb of universal science 
 one by one the sciences were born, as experience and 
 analysis, henceforward masters of every avenue of the 
 mind, distinguished their elements. Analysis had not 
 merely established itself as a scientific method. It had 
 produced what Mgr. Mignot calls a " formal segmenta- 
 tion " of knowledge. Each separate science was con- 
 stituted by the determination of its object and the 
 definite realization of its method. Thus, as Comte 
 indicated, the sciences came to range themselves in a 
 natural hierarchy. Those whose subject-matter was 
 more obstinate and complex became dependent for their 
 development upon the progress of those which were 
 simpler, " comme dans un arbre immense les rameaux 
 touffus et les fleurs delicates dependent des racines vigoureuses 
 et du tronc noueux" 
 
 Now theology, if it is to be related at all to the growth 
 of human knowledge, and without such relation it can 
 make no appeal to thoughtful men, must take account 
 
40 MODERNISM 
 
 of more, must submit itself to the conditions of that 
 growth as they are established in our time. And 
 so 
 
 " La theologie qui etait au point de depart de la science 
 deductive, ne peut etre qu'au point d'arrivee de la science 
 analytique" 
 
 The facts with which religion deals, the facts of revela- 
 tion, are exactly the most complex and elusive with 
 which human knowledge has to grapple. In one sense, 
 indeed, they are beyond the pursuit of mere rational 
 methods. They are assertions of the heart and the will 
 under the impulses of Divine grace. Yet they, too, 
 must be translated into human language, they must be 
 localized in time and space, they must be determined 
 in their relations with the other objects of human know- 
 ledge. And this can be done only by the aid of the 
 critical sciences of history, philology, exegesis. The 
 task which the modern theologian must set himself is, 
 therefore, twofold that of critical information and that of 
 dogmatic interpretation. He must disentangle the facts 
 of the Gospel with their preparation and development. 
 He must fix the letter and the exact meaning of the texts, 
 whether Biblical, Patristic, or Conciliar, in which the 
 kernel of religious truth is contained. This is the task 
 of positive theology, that branch of sacred science which 
 has had in our day such a remarkable development 
 corresponding to the preponderance in secular learning 
 of critical over speculative studies. It is only when the 
 task of positive theology is completed, or at least only 
 when such results as it can hope to attain at any single 
 period have actually been reached, that the field is open 
 
THE PRECURSORS OF LIBERALISM 41 
 
 for speculative theology, for the co-ordination of results, 
 the welding of them into an intelligible whole. 
 
 With this vigorous contention of Mgr. Mignot, that 
 theology, exactly because it is a living science and in so 
 far as it is really alive in any particular age, must be 
 progressive, Mr. Hogan is most heartily in accord. He, 
 too, claims that history and psychology are the essential 
 instruments of the modern interpreter of the faith, and 
 even the most useful weapons which its sincere defender 
 can handle. On the one hand, they justify and strengthen 
 some of the most essential articles of the faith. On 
 the other, they expose the weakness of beliefs which were 
 once considered as inevitable deductions of the faith, but 
 have now proved to be its greatest stumbling-blocks. 
 On the one hand, De Rossi has, in the fine phrase of 
 Mr. Hogan, " exhumed almost every article of the 
 Catholic creed " from the Roman Catacombs. On the 
 other, the deductive aberglaube of the schools has been 
 forced to disappear by the mere realization that the 
 deductive method, if its use in this region could be justified 
 at all, had been forced to the point of wanton abuse. 
 Mr. Hogan recalls, and does a service in recalling, what 
 the middle-age theologians had established as almost of 
 the essence of revelation. In all that refers to the angels 
 it seems as if nothing was unknown to them. There are 
 great folios in which may be learned everything that 
 relates to the celestial beings their organisation, action, 
 powers, functions, relations with one another, with the 
 human race, and with the entire creation. The history 
 of creation is narrated with a wealth of detail which 
 no one would dare to permit himself nowadays. Our 
 
42 MODERNISM 
 
 theologians described the state of innocence as if they 
 had been there themselves, explaining what Adam knew 
 and did not know, how long he lived in the terrestrial 
 Paradise, what his life would have been if he had never 
 fallen, etc. And as with the origins, so with the ultimate 
 destiny of the human race. Their gaze penetrated even 
 into heaven, so that they could describe the life of the 
 saints in glory. They recounted with frightful details the 
 sufferings of the reprobate, assigned the place occupied 
 by hell, and calculated mathematically its form and 
 dimensions. In a word, of all the innumerable questions 
 which the mind of man has put to itself throughout the 
 ages with reference to God, to the world, or to man him- 
 self, there is none that the theologians have not discussed 
 and attempted to resolve with an assurance beside which 
 that of the modern savant is modesty itself. 
 
 Of course, it goes without saying that Mgr. Mignot and 
 Mr. Hogan attach the greatest importance to the 
 traditional element in theology. Is not, indeed, the 
 Christian tradition, of which the Bible is but one, if the 
 most important, element, itself the revelation ? But 
 revelation is a Divine deposit given in terms of human 
 language and knowledge. And, as we have seen, 
 the function of theology is, on the one hand, to 
 modify and adapt to changing conditions of knowledge 
 and habits of thought the human envelope of the faith, 
 and, on the other, to penetrate more profoundly the 
 significance of the faith itself. As the science, therefore, 
 whose function it is progressively to interpret the revealed 
 facts of religion, theology owes no more and no less 
 homage to tradition than does any other science. It is 
 
THE PRECURSORS OF LIBERALISM 43 
 
 the duty of every science to preserve all the truth that 
 has been already acquired in the area of its inquiry, though 
 it may be that the most effective way to preserve that 
 truth will consist in disentangling it from imperfect 
 statements in the past and in providing it with a more 
 adequate statement in the present. So theology, by the 
 very fact of its loyalty to tradition, is the more surely 
 pledged to progress. Its seeming contradictions may be 
 but the highest evidence of its loyalty to and its faith in 
 the truth. Mgr. Mignot gives a striking instance of such 
 apparent contradiction. In the earliest volume of the 
 " Cursus Scripturae Sacrae," a kind of French Encyclo- 
 paedia Biblica, Pere Comely devoted 150 pages to proving 
 the authenticity, integrity, and Mosaic authorship of the 
 Pentateuch. In the later volumes of the very same 
 work, Pere de Hummelauer devotes just as many to the 
 proof that the Pentateuch was the work neither of one 
 man nor of one period, but of several centuries. Behind 
 both views lies the same faith in the Divine truth which 
 lies embedded in the Sacred Tradition. It is a parable 
 of the permanent and the non-permanent in religious 
 truth. 
 
 The sum of the matter lies in some words of Mr. Hogan's, 
 which it is worth while to quote textually : 
 
 " Divine truth as we find it in the teaching of the 
 Church and the schools, wears a robe of human origin 
 which serves at once to reveal and to conceal the reality. 
 It presents itself to us in the Bible enveloped frequently 
 in the most diverse Oriental metaphors. We encounter 
 it in the Fathers, draped in the mantle of Greek 
 philosophy. It appears anew in the schools of the 
 
44 MODERNISM 
 
 Middle Age, beneath the armour of Aristotelian dialectic. 
 But none of these vestments is essentially necessary to 
 it. They are only the variable accidents which reveal 
 the hidden substance. To reach to the substance itself ; 
 to contemplate the reality as closely as possible, shorn of 
 every metaphor, freed from everything which is system 
 only ; to remove the anthropomorphic images in which 
 men have accustomed themselves to clothe God and all 
 that is divine ; to contemplate the mysteries of the Faith 
 apart from the terminology of the schools, as often 
 embarrassing as useful such is the first result of an 
 earnest and serious study of Christian doctrine." 
 
 This is the leaven which is working in the Catholic 
 theology of France working through reviews, through 
 the new Catholic Universities, through the activity and 
 the faith of all the most thoughtful among the younger 
 clergy. It promises surely a reconciliation near at hand 
 between the too long alienated mind of France and its 
 religious faith. It is in itself the beginning of that 
 reconciliation. For the leaders of this movement at 
 least are good Catholics who hold themselves indebted at 
 every point to the intellectual gains of modern thought 
 with its distinctive methods. In a Church and among 
 a people like our own which, with whatever hesitations 
 and compromises, have consistently believed in the 
 compatibility of religious faith and progressive knowledge, 
 this movement will surely be hailed with unaffected 
 delight and followed with sympathetic confidence. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 M. HOUTIN'S " QUESTION BIBLIQUE " 
 
 THE theological crisis in the Church of France is becoming February 18, 
 more acute every day. It is almost ten years since the 1903 
 Abbe" Loisy was virtually forced to resign his chair of 
 Sacred Scripture at the Catholic Institute of Paris, and 
 hastened to make his submission to the directions given 
 by the Holy Father in the Encyclical Providentissimus 
 Deus. During those ten years he has pursued his studies 
 in lonely retirement at Bellevue, publishing their results 
 in the " Revue d'Histoire et de Litte"rature Religieuses," 
 writing under various pseudonyms in the more widely- 
 read clerical reviews, and in these later years lecturing at 
 the 6cole des Hautes Etudes to audiences almost as large 
 and as representative as those which throng the lecture- 
 hall of Harnack at Berlin. Now once more the liberal 
 movement has been struck at in the person of the frail 
 hermit of Bellevue. Cardinal Richard, who continues the 
 reactionary policy of his predecessor, Cardinal Guibert, 
 has condemned Loisy's latest book and forbidden the 
 reading of it to the faithful of his diocese on the ground 
 that it is likely " seriously to disturb their faith in the 
 fundamental dogmas of Catholic teaching." Loisy has 
 himself been summoned to Rome, and it is hoped that 
 the raw haste with which he has been condemned at 
 Paris may prove his best safeguard from formal con- 
 demnation at the hands of the central authority. 
 
 45 
 
46 MODERNISM 
 
 But before speaking of Loisy's book, it may be well to 
 refer to the work of the Abb6 Houtin, which is said to 
 have provoked the present storm, and which has now 
 fallen under the ban of Cardinal Richard and the Bishop 
 of Angers. 
 
 It is probably not merely the success of this extra- 
 ordinarily outspoken and incisive account of Biblical 
 controversy in France during the last century that has 
 so irritated the clerical Right. It is perhaps still more 
 the contemptuous indifference with which its author has 
 treated their stale criticisms and vapid denunciations. 
 In the new edition of his book he has for all reply printed 
 as an appendix a representative selection of these 
 elegances of polemic. It was a crushing form of reply to 
 select, but one not likely to soothe the irritation which 
 the original publication of the book a little less than a 
 year ago had caused. It is reported that the book was 
 only saved from official condemnation last April by 
 certain vigorous representations made to Cardinal 
 Rampolla that such a step would certainly annoy, and 
 might perhaps alienate, the Liberal Catholics of England, 
 America, and Germany. Now, however, it is not likely 
 to be saved by even such considerations. The decision 
 of the Congregation of the Index with regard to it will be 
 awaited with interest, not only through sympathy with 
 its courageous author, but also in view of the forthcoming 
 report of the Biblical Commission. 
 
 Meanwhile the grounds for a condemnation of the Abb6 
 Houtin afforded by his book might well seem sufficiently 
 difficult of discovery to tax even the ingenuity of a Roman 
 Congregation. He has written what is in form a bald, 
 
M. HOUTIN'S "QUESTION BIBLIQUE " 47 
 
 passionless, at first sight almost disinterested, account 
 of the struggles of a century in the field of Biblical contro- 
 versy. From beginning to end there is not a single 
 instance of special pleading, hardly a momentary lapse 
 of formal self-betrayal. But the book is so artfully 
 constructed as to reveal the real mind and intention of 
 the author on every page. Under all its resolute show 
 of historical frigidity it becomes a passionate protest of 
 despair against theological chicane, an overwhelming 
 condemnation of the ineptitude of the old guard of French 
 theology. The conviction which has sustained M. Houtin 
 throughout in his tone of calm and dispassionate historical 
 analysis is that the intellectual interpretation of the 
 Christian faith can recognize the autonomy of Biblical 
 science, not only without fear, but with a positive con- 
 fidence. Dogmatic theology can no longer develop 
 fruitfully until, or at least except in so far as, positive or 
 historical theology is given free scope. To dictate to 
 history beforehand what it is to discover, what results it 
 is to reach, is to nullify it. To be willing to learn from 
 it and to modify traditional conceptions in the light of 
 its conclusions, is the act of faith and courage which is 
 required of the modern theologian. That is the position 
 for which the Liberals among the French clergy are so 
 obstinately contending. On the last page of his book, 
 M. Houtin for once makes a confession of his faith, though 
 even then under the guise of a summary of the century's 
 struggle : 
 
 " For all those who were not content to linger in 
 mere fictions one fact was clear. The criticism of 
 Scripture in France, as elsewhere, had been secularised, 
 
 5 (2405) 
 
48 MODERNISM 
 
 had become positive. In Germany it had for long been 
 fettered to Hegelianism. In other countries it had 
 been dominated by confessional beliefs or by rationalism. 
 By degrees it had everywhere become more and more 
 free of every system, autonomous, scientific." 
 
 And he ends by quoting some wise words of the Arch- 
 bishop of Albi in his famous Toulouse discourse on the 
 Method of Theology. Mgr. Mignot is claiming " for 
 Catholic scholars the right of freely pursuing their studies 
 under the safeguard of the Church " : 
 
 " Let us also grant them," he continues, " the very 
 human right of sometimes making a mistake. Error is 
 one of the inevitable vicissitudes of the development of 
 the human mind. For the scholar who is sincere it is 
 often a roundabout way of getting at the truth. And 
 for the Catholic scholar it has less inconvenience than 
 for any other, for with him it can only be temporary, and 
 commits neither theology nor the Church which at the 
 right moment will know how to set it right. Let us, 
 therefore, give free discussion time to do its own work. 
 In conducting it let us employ scientific methods only, 
 and not those invectives or that violence which witness 
 to a zeal for orthodoxy more worthy of knights errant 
 than of conscientious scholars. Let no one be disturbed 
 by seeing some of our scientific conclusions agree with 
 opinions uttered by heterodox or non-Christian scholars. 
 That has been called ' protestantising,' ' rationalising ' 
 the Church. But these barbarisms will not prevent 
 science from being one and single, certainty from 
 imposing itself upon the human mind, and serious theology 
 from welcoming every truth whencesoever it may come." 
 
M. HOUTIN'S "QUESTION BIBLIQUE " 49 
 
 M. Houtin's narrative divides itself naturally into two 
 periods, very unequal indeed in duration, but each 
 characterised by a special interest of its own. There was 
 first the long, gradual gestation of the problem, the period 
 of more or less open and unfettered competition between 
 the different schools the ultra- traditionalist, the Con- 
 servative, and the Progressive. This period was brought 
 to a sudden and dramatic end in October, 1893, by the 
 famous Encyclical Providentissimus Deus. Since then 
 the Progressive party has been engaged in an obstinate 
 struggle for mere existence, relying, for the most part, 
 upon forced and unnatural interpretations of that fatal 
 document. Neither the decision of the Congregation of 
 the Inquisition in favour of the authenticity of the 
 text of the three Heavenly Witnesses, nor Leo Kill's 
 condemnation of Americanism by his letter, Testem 
 Benevolently, addressed to Cardinal Gibbons, nor his 
 encyclical to the Archbishops, Bishops, and clergy of 
 France of September, 1899, has availed to check the 
 boldness or lessen the influence of the critical school. On 
 the contrary, they have served only to sharpen its 
 ingenuity and extend its power. The moral right of the 
 critics to carry on their campaign in favour of critical 
 freedom depends entirely upon the view that may be 
 taken of the meaning and scope of the infallible magis- 
 terium of the Roman See. On that issue the battle of 
 the next fifty years will no doubt be waged, and on its 
 result will depend the vitality and spiritual force of the 
 Roman Church. Meanwhile, the practical difficulty of 
 turning any position which Rome may have taken up 
 
50 MODERNISM 
 
 does not seem great. Here is M. Houtin's incidental 
 account of the process : 
 
 " Never has the adage, Rome a fiarle, la cause est finie, 
 been more in use than during the nineteenth century. 
 Yet it has always been a far cry from the formula to its 
 application. Rome's pronouncement does not often 
 assume the brief and definite form which necessitates 
 either submission or withdrawal from the Church. The 
 pontifical directions are as a rule set forth and glossed 
 (exposees et commentees) in lengthy documents. As 
 theological discussions present for the most part a very 
 wide range of opinion, and as the defenders of each position 
 include in their ranks dialecticians who are both subtle 
 and convinced, they have no difficulty in presenting 
 under different points of view a teaching which every 
 unprejudiced mind would assert was exceedingly definite 
 and exceedingly strong. Lastly, the directions of the 
 Pope may strike counter to a current so powerful, may 
 chance upon a set of circumstances so extraordinary, that 
 it becomes necessary to repeat them in order that they 
 may acquire their due effect." 
 
 Biblical criticism in France may have had a more tardy 
 development than elsewhere ; but at least it seems to 
 have run very much the same course and to have presented 
 the same general character. There was the same fatuous 
 persistency in the attempt to reconcile every fresh 
 position of geological and palaeontological science with 
 the Biblical accounts of the Creation and the Flood which 
 made the apologetics of the mid-century in England a 
 nightmare of pointless theology and impossible science. 
 M. Houtin, whose humour consists in telling the truth 
 
M. HOUTIN'S "QUESTION BIBLIQUE " 51 
 
 pointedly, details some of the absurdities of the French 
 Concordistes as, for instance, when Marcel de Series, 
 the defender of the " jours-epoques " interpretation of the 
 first chapter of Genesis, gravely discusses whether there 
 is any evidence in the Bible that the introduction of 
 railways in the nineteenth century had been foreseen, or 
 when Roselly de Lorgues finds the life of Columbus and 
 the destiny of the American Indians clearly foretold in 
 the eleventh chapter of Isaiah. After all, these are only 
 exaggerations of the Concordist theory, the theory that 
 expected to find in the Bible not only scientific teaching, 
 but scientific prophecy. Yet in spite of these absurdities 
 the critical spirit was growing. That growth could not, 
 perhaps, be better exemplified than by a comparison of 
 two addresses from the chair of Holy Scripture in the 
 chief seat of Catholic learning, one in the year 1867, and 
 the other in 1892 a comparison which M. Houtin himself 
 makes. In 1867 the Abbe Vollot had just been appointed 
 Professor of Holy Scripture at the Sorbonne for the 
 Faculty of Catholic Theology was then still connected 
 with the University and the subject of his discourse at 
 the opening of the session was, " The Rights and Duties 
 of Criticism with regard to the Bible." In the course of 
 that address which had for preface the usual disparage- 
 ment of the great pioneer of French Biblical criticism 
 condemned by Bossuet at the end of the seventeenth 
 century, Richard Simon Vollot said : " Everything has 
 been said, wrote La Bruyre two hundred years ago 
 well, on the Bible everything has been said now." Exactly 
 twenty-five years after, M. Loisy, in delivering his sessional 
 discourse at the Catholic Institute of Paris, as its Professor 
 
52 MODERNISM 
 
 of Holy Scripture, spoke with respect of Richard Simon, 
 and declared that " the field of exegesis is immense, varied, 
 and even in one sense and on many points almost 
 unexplored." That is in brief the progress of a quarter 
 of a century. Yet this progress must be discounted by 
 the very different treatment accorded to these two young 
 scholars by the diocesan administration of Paris, which 
 is in great measure the official mouthpiece of the French 
 Church. Vollot was until his early death petted and 
 approved. Loisy was deprived of his chair, and has been 
 ever since the victim of a studied neglect. 
 
 The total impression left by M. Houtin's book resolves 
 itself into the establishment of a principle and the con- 
 vincing evidence of a fact. The principle is the necessity 
 of freedom of speculation and research for the sane 
 development of theological science. Freedom no doubt 
 involves the certainty of extravagance and the possibility 
 of error. But then error, as Bossuet said long ago, is 
 only an imperfect apprehension of the truth ; or, as 
 Mgr. Mignot says to-day, " wn chemin deiourne qui conduit 
 souvent d la verite" And if the atmosphere of intellectual 
 freedom seems at first sight to foster extravagance, it 
 also most surely kills it. The fact to which M. Houtin's 
 narrative witnesses is that it is hard for a Roman theo- 
 logian to assert and secure that freedom. It is not, of 
 course, that there is any reality in the Protestant bugbear 
 of an essentially persecuting spirit in the Roman Church, 
 of a kind of love of persecution for its own sake. It is 
 that Roman theology is dominated by a mentality of the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which is simply 
 unable to meet or even to understand the living challenge 
 
M. HOUTIN'S "QUESTION BIBLIQUE " 53 
 
 of modern theological problems. Over and over again 
 M. Houtin makes us feel the fatal effect of the Scriptural 
 decrees of the Tridentine and Vatican Councils and of the 
 Papal letters and Encyclicals of the last ten years in 
 lowering the standard and checking even the desire of 
 learning among the clergy, in reproving critical sincerity 
 and courage wherever they existed, and in deferring 
 the possibility of a sane apologetic until perhaps the 
 modern mind shall have been completely alienated from 
 Christianity. He makes us feel how many golden oppor- 
 tunities of laying the foundations of an understanding 
 between theology and modern ways of thinking the 
 Church has thrown away by her obstinate adhesion to 
 mediaeval positions, by her refusal to admit even the 
 existence of difficulties. He reminds us how Quinet was 
 accused of atheism because, in all good faith, he appealed 
 to the leaders of the Church of France to treat seriously 
 and to answer the difficulties raised by the book of 
 D. F. Strauss. He reminds us of the mere unintelligent 
 abuse which was almost the only answer accorded to 
 Renan during the whole course of his career. The 
 disastrous effect of this policy upon clerical learning 
 disastrous it must be called in presence of an almost 
 universal lay scepticism is thus humorously described 
 by M. Houtin. He says that at the end of the nineteenth 
 century 
 
 " The clergy were so much the less drawn to occupy 
 themselves with the question of Biblical criticism that 
 they knew how intolerant was the veche of any rashness 
 upon this ground. Perhaps, on an average, only two 
 priests in twenty could be found who interested themselves 
 
54 MODERNISM 
 
 in Biblical questions. Of these one declared himself 
 an uncompromising defender of tradition, the other 
 as open to the new ideas. Between these two battle 
 would often be joined at clerical meetings or conferences. 
 Discussion would promptly degenerate into bitterness 
 and sharp words. The traditionalist would treat his 
 adversary as a heretic, and the other, though his antagonist 
 might be old, perhaps very old, would end by answering 
 him in terms but little flattering to his intelligence or his 
 information. The others would remain dumb, embar- 
 rassed, anxious not to compromise themselves, judging 
 the young man indeed exceedingly rash, but wishing 
 all the same that he might be right, because they would 
 no longer have to argue with M. Homais about Adam 
 and the apple or Jonah and the whale." 
 
 It is not merely because M. Houtin's book has been 
 denounced to the Index, nor, again, because it is a very 
 careful and interesting history of a special phase of 
 theological change, that it is well worth reading. It 
 is still more because it succeeds in being besides a tran- 
 script from life. As such it may often make the English 
 reader feel, for himself and his Church, " De nobis fabula." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 " L'EVANGILE ET I/EGLISE " 
 
 ON January I7th, 1903, the Cardinal Archbishop of February 25, 
 Paris condemned M. Loisy's latest book, " L'Evangile 
 et I'^glise," a reply to Harnack's " Das Wesen des 
 Christenthums," on the follo\ving grounds : 
 
 "It is calculated seriously to disturb the belief of the 
 faithful in the fundamental dogmas of Catholic teaching, 
 notably the authority of the Scriptures and of Tradition, 
 the Divinity of Jesus Christ, His infallible knowledge, 
 the redemption wrought by His death, His resurrection, 
 the Eucharist, the Divine institution of the Episcopate 
 and of the Sovereign Pontificate." 
 
 On February 7th the Semaine Religieuse of the diocese 
 of Paris published the following official notice : 
 
 " M. Loisy has addressed a letter to his Eminence in 
 which he states that he has stopped the publication of 
 the second edition of his book which was just about to 
 appear, that he yields before the judgment which has 
 been given, and that he condemns all the errors which 
 may have been drawn from his work. His Eminence, 
 delighted at this step taken by the Abb6 Loisy, has 
 expressed to him his entire satisfaction with it." 
 
 Thus Loisy has made formal submission to his Diocesan, 
 and final judgment on his book must rest with the new 
 Biblical Commission, which, it is said, will become a 
 permanent body, and replace the Congregation of the 
 
 55 
 
56 MODERNISM 
 
 Inquisition in deciding upon the orthodoxy of all works 
 on Biblical questions. 
 
 M. Loisy has hitherto been known mainly as a scholar, 
 so revolutionary as often to outstrip his German masters. 
 In his latest book he appears as an apologist more 
 revolutionary still. Yet there are two things which must 
 impress themselves upon every one who knows his work 
 the sincerity of his devotion to truth, and the sincerity 
 of his devotion to the Roman Church. He is a man 
 endowed with most of the gifts of the really great scholar 
 patience, teachableness, and a rare intellectual sincerity. 
 He is unwearied in his attempt to disentangle the facts 
 from the documents which he handles, he keeps his mind 
 open to receive their full and just impression, and he 
 passes fearlessly to the conclusions which they seem to 
 him to impose. He is not a revolutionary for the sake 
 of being such, but because the facts as he finds them 
 leave him no other alternative. But this is after all only 
 the superficial activity of the man. Behind it lies a deep 
 humble religious nature, and one which you feel has 
 received its most intimate quality from the Roman 
 Church, and can never be at home elsewhere. 
 
 Apart from this view of the man, it is impossible to 
 understand his work or to state its results with any 
 justice to himself. It is a commonplace to say that the 
 present position of religious thought and theological 
 speculation is transitional. But, perhaps, it is not so 
 generally recognized what the nature of that transition is. 
 It may, perhaps, be roughly described as a tendency to 
 close the long period of divorce between the natural and 
 the supernatural, to find the supernatural within the 
 
"L'6VANGILE ET L'^GLISE " 57 
 
 natural. For many theologians this tendency is an 
 influence which either unconsciously colours their thought 
 or goads them into conscious opposition. For more it 
 leads to all kinds of compromises with traditional teaching. 
 Loisy, perhaps more than any theologian of England or 
 Germany, has yielded to its uncompromising logic. For 
 him religion is in its substance and spirit divine. In its 
 form it is always and everywhere human. It must be 
 so, for it is not a system imposed upon an abstract 
 humanity which does not exist, but a life infused into 
 actual men, and in them obeying the laws of their natural 
 growth and development. Every outward manifestation 
 of religion worship, dogma, government, embodiment in 
 a redemptive society has indeed a Divine substance, but 
 is relative to and conditioned by temporary needs and 
 circumstances. Therefore each of these manifestations 
 has its own history, is always changing, and must always 
 be changing because it is an expression of life. Worship 
 is the expression of the religious aspirations of actual 
 men, and changes as their religious needs change. Dogma 
 is the interpretation of religious facts by actual men, and 
 must change with the changing intellectual conditions 
 which determine their apprehension of those facts. The 
 significance of dogma is not absolute but relative : 
 
 " The Church does not require faith in its formulas as 
 the adequate expression of absolute truth, but presents 
 them as the least imperfect expression which is morally 
 possible. It asks that they should be respected according 
 to their quality, that the faith should be sought in them, 
 that they should be used for the transmission of that 
 faith. The formularies of the Church are the auxiliary 
 
58 MODERNISM 
 
 of faith, the guiding line of religious thought. They 
 cannot be the integral object of this thought, since that 
 object is God Himself, the Christ and His work. Each 
 man appropriates the object as best he can, with the help 
 of the formulary. As all souls and intelligences differ 
 from one another, the shades of belief are also of an 
 infinite variety under the one direction (la direction 
 unique) of the Church and in the unity of its symbol. 
 The continuous evolution of doctrine is the result of the 
 effort of individuals in proportion as their activity reacts 
 upon the general activity, and it is individuals that, 
 thinking with the Church, think also for it." 
 
 Similarly the government of the Church has endured 
 continual change under the immediate pressure of out- 
 ward circumstances, but really in obedience to the higher 
 necessity of preserving the Gospel, which could not have 
 been preserved without such change. In a few masterly 
 paragraphs Loisy has written the history of that develop- 
 ment as he sees it. The Christian society of the first 
 century consisted of a number of autonomous Churches, 
 each governed by a committee of its elder members, by 
 the Presbyterium rather than by individual presbyters. 
 The condition of the life of the societies was the develop- 
 ment of an organ of authority, however rudimentary. 
 This College of Presbyters would naturally speak and act 
 through some one of its individual members, who would 
 thus gain a special prominence and even official eminence 
 among his fellows. Under the stress of resistance to the 
 Gnostic heresies, the value of an authority concentrated in 
 one individual was demonstrated, and so that authority 
 emerged from the struggle endowed with a definite 
 
"L'EVANGILE ET L'EGLISE " 59 
 
 prestige. The monarchical episcopate had been formed. 
 But from the first there had been working in the Christian 
 communities an instinctive feeling towards unity as the 
 guarantee of a fuller and more durable life. Alike from 
 its political importance as the centre of the Empire, 
 and from the fact, due to that importance, that the 
 greatest of the Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, had been 
 led to make it the centre of Evangelical activity, Rome 
 was marked out as the natural organ by which this 
 feeling towards unity might express itself in fact, the 
 natural point of concentration of the Christian com- 
 munities into the Church. True, the Church of Rome 
 was one of those in which the effective power of the 
 Presbyteral College continued longest, in which the 
 evolution of the monarchical episcopate was most tardy 
 and gradual. True, also, that it was far from the thought 
 of the great Apostles " that they were bequeathing at 
 their death a master to Caesar, or even giving to the Church 
 a supreme head." But that is only one proof the more 
 how little all this development grew out of any deliberate 
 intention and purpose in a human mind, how entirely out 
 of the stress of that living force in the Church whose one 
 purpose was to preserve the Gospel under different 
 circumstances and in face of ever-varying necessities. 
 The unity which Rome thus established was, again, not 
 a constant, but a growing thing, and, again, grew out of 
 actual vital necessities. At first, she preserved unity 
 by serving as a type to other Churches of teaching, 
 organization, and discipline. But gradually she was 
 forced into legislating, or rather into forming a con- 
 stitution for the whole Church as one. It is necessary 
 
60 MODERNISM 
 
 again to quote M. Loisy in order to render his thought 
 adequately : 
 
 " It was necessary that the Church should become a 
 government or cease to exist. But government in a 
 Church which is one and universal is inconceivable 
 without a central authority. An ideal centre without 
 real power, such as St. Cyprian conceived, would have 
 been useless. Differences on important questions had 
 to be settled somewhere. Partial councils (les conciles 
 particuliers) could not acquire a sufficient prestige. 
 General councils could never have been more than an 
 extraordinary tribunal, and experience proved that these 
 assemblies were not without very great inconvenience. 
 The superior and permanent tribunal to which all major 
 causes might naturally be referred, and whose mission 
 it was to provide a definite settlement of all conflicts, 
 could only be found in the Church which was Apostolic 
 above all others, which had the traditions of Peter and 
 Paul, and whose chiefs no longer hesitated to style 
 themselves successors of the Prince of the Apostles." 
 
 A further stage in the development of government in 
 the Roman Church was reached when, after centuries of 
 illusion, it was at last realised that the ancient order of 
 the Roman Imperium had vanished, that Europe was a 
 chaos. Then the Roman Church found herself intrusted 
 with the charge of educating the West, of kneading it 
 into a manageable unity through the Spirit of the 
 Gospel. She founded the middle-age Christian Republic 
 of the West, she became the head of the Christian 
 Confederation : 
 
 " In that confusion, which she had to dominate in 
 
"L'EVANGILE ET L'^GLISE " 61 
 
 order not herself to disappear, the Church kept on growing 
 and transforming herself. She grew in order to endure, 
 because the changes which were being wrought in her 
 were the very condition of her existence. The great 
 temporal position of the Popes during the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries was only the guarantee of their 
 independence in the spiritual order. And in that order 
 the Popes had to be what they were, what they had 
 become, in order that the Church might still be the 
 Church, might not cease to be Christianity and the religion 
 of Jesus." 
 
 And M. Loisy concludes his history of Church 
 government with just a hint of his view of its future : 
 
 " The Pope remains the father of the faithful and the 
 head of the Churches." (The expression is significant.) 
 "We may foresee that his action will never again take 
 the form it took in the middle ages. But this power 
 will always be needed for the preservation of the Church 
 and for the preservation of the Gospel in the Church." 
 
 There is only one feature of religion which for M. Loisy 
 is constant, the necessity of its embodiment in a visible 
 society, and that is constant only because such embodi- 
 ment is a constant condition of life. It is only in an 
 organized society that religion can enter into the lives of 
 actual men and through them grow into all its wealth of 
 dogma and worship. It is only in an organized society 
 that the life, the spirit, of the Gospel could have grown 
 as it had to do if it was to remain life. But what in 
 Loisy's view is this Gospel ? Has it any absolute form ? 
 Has it ever expressed itself in a form which is valid for 
 all times and places, for all souls and circumstances ? 
 
62 MODERNISM 
 
 Loisy's answer is No. The only element of the Gospel 
 which is absolute is its life, its soul, and that life of the 
 Gospel was communicated to men through the Risen 
 Christ. But his great controversy with Harnack arises 
 out of what he describes as the arbitrary attempt of the 
 latter to single out some portion of our Lord's teaching 
 as of absolute value. It will be remembered that Harnack 
 tried to distinguish between the traditional and the 
 personal elements in the teaching of Jesus, and that he 
 assigned to what he held to be the latter an absolute and 
 eternal religious value, described it as the essence of 
 Christianity. Loisy will have none of this. The teaching 
 of Jesus is all traditional. Where is the element in that 
 teaching which cannot be traced to tradition ? Not the 
 belief in God as the Father, which Harnack selects, for 
 that was held and taught by the Hebrew prophets. Not 
 the belief in the coming Kingdom, for that, too, was the 
 main religious heritage of Judaism. Not the certainty 
 of eternal life, which Harnack traces solely to faith in the 
 Risen Christ, for Plato, the religion of the Persians, and 
 post-exilian Judaism had surely all contributed to the 
 formation of that certainty. Not even the belief in the 
 Divine Sonship, which Harnack (relying upon a passage 
 common to the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke 
 " No man knoweth the Son, but the Father ; neither 
 knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to 
 whomsoever the Son will reveal Him ") claims as the 
 peculiar consciousness of Jesus, though felt and known 
 by Him as a moral relation rather than as a metaphysical 
 identity. But Loisy, while insisting that the relation 
 between the Father and the Son here asserted is 
 
"L'fcVANGILE ET L'GLISE " 63 
 
 metaphysical, refuses to accept the text as a genuine saying 
 of Jesus, and insists that it is an interpretation, akin to 
 the theology of the Johannine Gospel, which is due to the 
 generation in which the Evangelical tradition was reduced 
 to its present form. As to the undoubted claim of Jesus 
 to Divine Sonship, he sees no reason as an historian to 
 believe that it was other than His belief that He was 
 Messiah : 
 
 " Jesus se dit fils unique de Dieu dans la mesure ou il 
 s'avoue Messie. Uhistorien en conclura, hypothetiquement, 
 qu'il se croyait fils de Dieu depuis qu'il se croyait Messie" 
 
 And, equally, the teaching of Jesus is all relative. No 
 part of it in the form in which it was given holds good for 
 all time, because it was not meant for all time. It was 
 meant for actual men. If it had not been so meant and 
 so adapted, it would never have had any effect, it would 
 have perished still-born. Religion is life, and, no matter 
 by whom communicated as mere teaching, must conform 
 to the conditions of life. Nor, again, will Loisy have 
 anything to do with those who hold the accommodation 
 theory the theory that Jesus consciously accommodated 
 His teaching to the intelligence and the existing religious 
 belief of His time. " Jesus spoke in order to say what 
 He thought true without the least regard to our categories 
 of absolute and relative." The truth is that the teaching 
 of Jesus all centred about the proclamation of the great 
 hope " la grande esperance" That is the real " essence 
 of Christianity," and that had been drawn from the heart 
 of Judaism to be transfigured in the life of the Risen 
 Christ into a fuller religious force propagating itself in its 
 own way by its own inherent energy. The actual form 
 
 6 (2405) 
 
64 MODERNISM 
 
 of that hope as Jesus taught it and conceived it had 
 already changed within the lifetime of some of His 
 apostles. But such change was again the very condition 
 of its life : 
 
 " It was neither possible nor would it have served any 
 useful purpose that the future of the Church should be 
 revealed by Jesus to His disciples. The thought that 
 Jesus bequeathed to them was the necessity of continuing 
 to desire, to prepare, to expect, to realise the kingdom of 
 God. The perspective of the kingdom has been widened 
 and modified, that of its definite arrival has receded, 
 but the aim of the Gospel has remained the aim of the 
 Church." 
 
 The Cardinal who is reported to have said that if 
 Loisy's ideas prevailed the Church would be revolutionised 
 was not far wrong. Nor would the revolution be confined 
 to the Church of Rome. This book is a reply to Harnack, 
 but it answers him by convicting him of an impossible 
 compromise with orthodoxy. It is certainly by strangely 
 different ways that the reunion of Christendom is being 
 sought after on the Continent of Europe and at home. 
 If it is true that Loisy is not to be condemned by Rome 
 (and it is well known that he has powerful friends and 
 protectors), then the words of the Abbe Marcel H6bert 
 may have a more immediate meaning than one thinks. 
 " A day will come when Catholicism also will make its 
 act of Protestantism, and then there will be an end of the 
 latter " and, perhaps we may add, a beginning of the 
 former. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 " ADTOUR D'UN PETIT LIVRE " 
 " L'EVANGILE ET L'EGLISE " WOS a noteworthy book. December 2, 
 
 The amplification of it which M. Loisy has just given us 
 in his " Autour d'un Petit Livre " is still more noteworthy. 
 In it he has defined his method, one would say beyond 
 the possibility of misunderstanding, and applied it in 
 new and important directions. The new work consists of 
 a series of seven letters addressed to eminent French 
 Churchmen. The names of the destinataires are not 
 given, but by anyone who knows even a little of the 
 contemporary Church of France most of them will be 
 easily recognized. The Cardinal, for instance, to whom 
 the letter on the Biblical question is addressed, is obviously 
 Cardinal Perraud, Bishop of Autun. The letter on the 
 Criticism of the Gospels, addressed to a Bishop, is as 
 evidently a reply to the attack upon M. Loisy 's former 
 book from the pen of Mgr. Le Camus, Bishop of La 
 Rochelle. And equally there need be no hesitation about 
 the recognition of Mgr. Mignot, Archbishop of Albi, 
 M. Loisy 's closest theological ally, in the friendly prelate 
 to whom the essay on the Divinity of Jesus Christ is 
 communicated. Internal evidence points to the Abbe" 
 F61ix Klein as the recipient of the fifth letter, that which 
 deals with the foundation and authority of the Church, 
 and to M. Francois Thureau-Dangin, the learned son of 
 the Academician and historian of English Tractarianism, 
 
 65 
 
66 MODERNISM 
 
 as the youthful scholar to whom the letter on the origin 
 and authority of dogma is addressed. The first letter 
 and the last, the one a further elucidation of the purpose 
 of " L'Evangileet 1'Eglise," the other a critical examina- 
 tion of the institution of the Sacraments, are addressed 
 respectively to a " Cure Doyen," and a " Superieur de 
 S6minaire," whom the present writer cannot venture to 
 identify. 
 
 The identification of these names is no mere imper- 
 tinence of an irrelevant curiosity. It is, on the contrary, 
 a most interesting guide to the variety of tone which 
 marks the different letters. With his friends Mgr. Mignot, 
 M. Klein, and M. Thureau-Dangin, M. Loisy expands in 
 an easy and luminous exposition of his theme, confident 
 of understanding and sympathy. But in the letters to 
 the Bishops of Autun and La Rochelle there is something 
 of the note of conflict which gives them a special piquancy 
 and force. It is unnecessary to say that M. Loisy's 
 frankness is always good-tempered and urbane. But it is 
 also fearless. It is the unhesitating frankness of the 
 scholar who is sure of his scholarship and of the believer 
 who is sure of his faith. 
 
 M. Loisy has been accused by the perverse or otiose 
 unintelligence of his critics of denying almost every 
 article of the Christian faith. This book is a demonstra- 
 tion for the reader of good faith that M. Loisy affirms 
 every Christian belief with a personal certainty which has 
 been reached through a fresh intellectual appreciation of 
 its contents, an appreciation determined by the knowledge 
 and the mental habit of our time. It is indeed just his 
 sympathy with the difficulties in the way of faith created 
 
"AUTOUR D'UN PETIT LIVRE " 67 
 
 by the rift between modern ways of thinking and the 
 traditional presentation of Christian beliefs that will not 
 allow him to play the part of the theological ostrich or to 
 discuss theological questions in camera : 
 
 " It is not assuredly in France," as he well says, " since 
 the time of Renan that a non-ecclesiastical reader is 
 likely to be perturbed by the discussion of the thorniest 
 questions. Have not all those educated laymen who, 
 baptised and brought up in the Catholic Church, leave 
 it as soon as they have reached the age of manhood, 
 decided for themselves and alas ! all too hastily the 
 problems of the Christ and of God, because our religious 
 teaching appears to them conceived in a spirit of hostility 
 to science and history ? Is it not already to have done 
 much for them, just to have shown that we are not 
 unaware of the nature of their difficulties, that we 
 appreciate their intellectual sensitiveness, that we are 
 thinking of them and desire to clear the way for their 
 return to the fold ? " 
 
 And elsewhere, in discussing the Christological problem, 
 he says, with a true intelligence of actual needs : 
 
 " If we keep silence upon this serious question, if we 
 confine ourselves to a recitation of the traditional formula, 
 we are abandoning to doubt and unbelief numbers of 
 souls who do not even know that they have a right, in 
 company with the Church and with us, to seek for a better 
 understanding of the Gospel." 
 
 It may be well to select M. Loisy's treatment of this 
 very problem for a somewhat detailed examination both 
 on account of its own intrinsic importance and as an 
 instance of his general conception of dogma and his 
 
68 MODERNISM 
 
 method of handling it. Many friendly critics of M. Loisy 
 outside the Roman Church, and many hostile critics 
 within it, have professed themselves unable to understand 
 his position as at once an obedient son of the Church and 
 a scholar holding the most advanced critical positions on 
 Biblical and dogmatic questions. For M. Loisy himself 
 the incompatibility does not exist. On the contrary, it 
 is of the very essence of Catholicism to believe in what 
 I may call the progressive permanence, the permanence 
 through an unending development, of the faith of 
 Christendom. The object of the Christian faith is one 
 and permanent. That object is realised progressively, 
 though always inadequately, in the religious experience 
 of Christendom. It is formulated progressively, but 
 with even less adequacy, in the intellectual definitions 
 of the Christian faith. A dogma is the definition 
 of a particular phase of the religious experience of 
 Christendom which is authorised by the Church at a 
 particular moment of its history. All these definitions 
 or formulas have only a provisional and relative value. 
 They are vehicles of the truth. They exist to stimulate 
 the faith in individual souls, to help it to grow to an ever 
 fuller consciousness of itself. If it were otherwise, there 
 would be no need of the living direction of the Church. 
 The Pope and the Councils would have become a mere 
 cumbering superfluity. It would be necessary only, in 
 order to ascertain the adequate statement of the faith, 
 to provide one's self with a complete record of past 
 decisions of Councils or of Popes. It would be to apply 
 to the completed conciliar and patristic tradition the 
 old Protestant view of the Bible as an absolute rule of 
 
"AUTOUR D'UN PETIT LIVRE " 69 
 
 faith. But nothing, M. Loisy holds, is more opposed to 
 the real spirit of Catholicism, as nothing is more harmful 
 to the human mind, than the worship of formulas. The 
 real rule of faith ought to be as living as faith itself. And 
 such a rule can be found only in revelation, as from age 
 to age it is actually interpreted by the living Church and 
 put to the proof in the living souls that make the Church. 
 For the interpretation which is a rule of faith at any 
 moment is just as much the result of the religious 
 experience of the Church's children as it is her own 
 authoritative form of explanation. Indeed, the latter 
 depends upon the former. It is the ecclesia discens that 
 provides for the constitution of the ecclesia docens. And 
 there is no finality for the rule of faith. So long as the 
 human mind grows, the intellectual expression of that 
 which has been spiritually discerned will widen. 
 
 Now all this (M. Loisy holds) applies to the growth of 
 Christological as of all other dogmas. The starting-point 
 of Christian faith is that Christ is God. A Christian is 
 just one whose religious experience is mediated to him 
 through that initial belief. But that faith, to which the 
 whole history of Christianity has been a growing witness, 
 has been intellectually appreciated by men of different 
 generations in very different ways. At the present 
 moment the great claim upon the Church is that she 
 should once more make real to the modern world what 
 she means by the very terms Christ and God. She is at 
 present using definitions which were framed in another 
 intellectual language, another intellectual atmosphere, 
 than ours. For us they are meaningless when they are 
 not misleading. Those who keep the faith of Christendom, 
 
70 MODERNISM 
 
 the faith that Christ is God, keep it in spite of the formulas. 
 Many of those who lose it, lose it because of the unin- 
 telligibility of the formulas, and because they believe 
 that the formulas as they stand are regarded by the 
 Church as an absolute statement of truth. The vital 
 necessity of the moment is a translation of the formulas 
 into terms of actual thought. To that end two things 
 will be helpful first, a history of the growth of interpre- 
 tation in the past, and secondly, an analysis, in the light 
 of modern knowledge, of the religious ideas involved. 
 The former task M. Loisy has undertaken and carried 
 through with considerable minuteness. He has indicated 
 the main lines on which the latter must proceed. The 
 former is historical, the latter mainly philosophical. 
 
 The duty of the historian is to ascertain facts and so 
 to establish the living reality to which the record that he 
 may be examining bears witness. The counsel of perfec- 
 tion for the historian is to avoid at all costs the importing 
 of the ideas of a later time into the record of an earlier. 
 Like all counsels of perfection, it is naturally difficult of 
 complete fulfilment. But at least the effort to give effect 
 to it must be made if we would arrive at the truth or 
 anything near the truth. Now M. Loisy accuses the 
 traditional Christian theologian of having conspicuously 
 neglected this counsel in his examination of the Gospel 
 records. He has deliberately read into them something 
 which the historian cannot possibly find there. M. Loisy 
 refuses to follow his example. For instance, the orthodox 
 theology has insisted on ascribing to the Jesus of history 
 a full consciousness of His Divine nature as it was affirmed 
 in the developed speculation of fourth or fifth century 
 
" AUTOUR D'UN PETIT LIVRE " 71 
 
 Councils that is to say, of His consubstantiality with 
 the Father. For M. Loisy that speculation was 
 thoroughly justified. It preserved, as no other statement 
 at that time could have done, the essential faith of 
 Christendom, the faith in Christ as God. But it was 
 speculation. It in no way corresponded with the psycho- 
 logical reality of the consciousness of Jesus. It is 
 impossible for the historian to say what the full reality 
 of that consciousness was. But, at least, it is impossible 
 to ask the historian to assert that it coincided exactly 
 with a phase of human speculation determined by fourth- 
 century Hellenistic philosophy, even though we believe 
 that the results of that speculation were the most 
 adequate interpretation of the Christian faith that was 
 then possible, and believe further that it was guided to 
 those results, in common with all other sincere human 
 thought, by the Divine Spirit working through the human 
 intellect. All that the historian can assert of the self- 
 consciousness of Jesus is what he finds by the witness of 
 the synoptic record that Jesus asserts about Himself. 
 And that is that He was the Messiah announced by Jewish 
 prophecy. It is true, indeed, that the conception of the 
 Messiah, which the synoptic tradition ascribes to Jesus, 
 was in one important point a development of the con- 
 temporary Jewish conception. The unique relation of 
 the Messiah to Israel persists in the synoptic account of 
 the witness of Jesus to Himself, but the strictly national 
 element in that relation is absorbed into and lost sight of 
 in a moral relation. Here is the germ of that universal 
 redemptive relation of Jesus to humanity, on which the 
 faith of Christendom seized, under the guidance of the 
 
72 MODERNISM 
 
 Spirit, and out of which all later Christology naturally 
 grew. In other words, what M. Loisy would insist upon 
 is that the perception that Christ was God was a percep- 
 tion of faith. That perception was, of course, the 
 perception of a real fact, of the supreme religious fact. 
 But its actual realization in the Christian consciousness 
 was the gradual result of difficulties which it had to meet 
 and overcome, and the business of the historian is to 
 disengage the stages and the process of its growth. The 
 first test which this faith had to encounter was the death 
 of Jesus. It met it victoriously by the belief in the 
 Resurrection, a belief which, as M. Loisy holds, the 
 Synoptists show to have been a belief in the immortal 
 life of the Crucified " still more than in the initial fact 
 which is suggested to our minds by the word resurrection. 
 The apostolic preaching did not insist upon the circum- 
 stances of this resurrection, but upon the existence of the 
 Risen One." 
 
 In support of his view that the belief in the Resurrec- 
 tion was a great act of faith rather than the result of 
 mere sensible evidence, M. Loisy reminds us that the 
 Gospel tradition preserves the memory of doubts which 
 had arisen at the very time of the recorded appearances 
 of the Risen Lord, and also witnesses to the conscious 
 effort of the faith to justify itself by an appeal to the 
 prophetic promises of the Old Testament. At any rate 
 the faith of Christendom had taken the first step in its 
 upward progress. Out of the simple Messianic idea had 
 grown the faith in the immortal life of the Risen Lord. 
 Faith in Jesus as the Christ had victoriously met its first 
 test. The growth of Christology had begun. As a 
 
73 
 
 historian M. Loisy details the history of this growth, the 
 deepening consciousness of Christendom of the content 
 and implications of its faith, the historical circumstances 
 which necessitated each stage in the advance. First 
 within the pages of the New Testament he exposes the 
 occasion and the character of the Christology of St. Paul, 
 of that of the Epistle to the Hebrews, of that of the 
 Fourth Gospel. Beyond the limits of the New Testament 
 he continues the history until the completed Christology 
 of the fifth century is reached. 
 
 But the objection will at once be raised that between 
 the highly developed Christology of Chalcedon and the 
 synoptic witness to the self -consciousness of Jesus there 
 is a great gulf fixed, that they do not testify to the same 
 fact. That is just what M. Loisy will not admit. For, 
 first of all, let it be remembered what this Christology 
 was. It was an attempt to define not what Jesus taught 
 about Himself, but what Jesus was for the Christian 
 consciousness. The definitions were the most adequate 
 representation that was possible of what Jesus was, in 
 the circumstances and under the conditions of their 
 origin. But between them and the actual consciousness 
 of Jesus there was all the difference that always separates 
 the abstract from the real. What was the actual 
 consciousness of Himself which Jesus possessed the 
 historian, of course, cannot completely determine. " The 
 feeling which Jesus had of His union with God is above 
 all definition." But, at least, the tradition bears witness 
 to His consciousness of such a union, in testifying to His 
 belief in Himself as the Messiah. The substance of His 
 self-consciousness is, therefore, one with the consciousness 
 
74 MODERNISM 
 
 of Christendom about Him which found expression in 
 the fully developed speculative Christology of the fifth 
 century. 
 
 But that Christology M. Loisy proclaims to be no longer 
 adequate. It was conceived in terms of a philosophy 
 which no longer holds. It depended upon a view of God 
 which conceived of Him as apart from the world, on a 
 view of the world which conceived of it as apart from 
 God. The traditional theory of the Incarnation was 
 framed to fit in with this conception of a transcendent 
 God desiring to establish relations with a world which 
 was separated from Him. The Word was the inter- 
 mediary of creation, an emanation from God towards the 
 world. Such theories have no longer any meaning for 
 us. The " spatial transcendence " theory, as Pere 
 Laberthonniere has aptly called it, must be abandoned 
 because it no longer helps us to conceive of God. Every 
 acquisition of knowledge in our time forces us, if we 
 would retain a vital doctrine of God, to conceive of Him 
 as immanent in the world and in man, needing no inter- 
 mediary in order to act upon and in both. Physical 
 science is forcing us to a fresh analysis of the religious 
 idea of creation which will provide for God's immediate 
 activity in the world of nature. History is forcing us to 
 a fresh analysis of the idea of revelation which will 
 provide for God's immediate activity in the total spiritual 
 development of human society. Psychology is forcing 
 us to a fresh analysis of the idea of redemption which will 
 provide for God's moral action in the development of the 
 individual soul. Out of this threefold analysis will issue 
 a new and fruitful realization of God as operant in the 
 
"AUTOUR D'UN PETIT LIVRE " 75 
 
 world and in man. For the religious mind the rational- 
 ism which conceives of a purely transcendent God and 
 of a purely human Christ will become unmeaning and 
 impossible. The Christian faith that Christ is God will be 
 established through conceptions which the modern mind 
 can appreciate. 
 
 This is a most imperfect summary of a stimulating 
 fragment of a stimulating book. Some, who will think it 
 dangerous and revolutionary, may perhaps be impressed 
 by the fact that M. Loisy does not stand alone that he 
 has at least two great French prelates, one of them a 
 considerable theologian, behind him ; that he is followed 
 by a growing band of devout thinkers among the Catholic 
 clergy and educated laity of France, Italy, Germany, 
 America, and England. Let them remember, too, that 
 if M. Loisy is known as a daring and original thinker, he 
 is known equally as a devout and humble soul. His work 
 is important. It must be reckoned with. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MR. INGE AND M. LOISY 
 
 IT was with a feeling of very genuine surprise that some 
 months ago I read Mr. Inge's sermon on Liberal 
 Catholicism in the Guardian. For if I had been asked to 
 name an English theologian who would unreservedly 
 appreciate what I had taken to be the position of M. Loisy, 
 I should at once have named Mr. Inge. That surprise 
 has been intensified by a reading of Mr. Inge's recently 
 published volume of sermons.* For, all that I most 
 admire in M. Loisy 's attitude, all that seems to me most 
 characteristic of his view of religion, is here put again 
 and again with a force and incisiveness which are rare 
 in theological writing. Here, for instance, is a passage 
 which might be taken as an illuminating introduction to 
 all that M. Loisy has written. " Our religious faith is 
 deeper and fuller than the expressions which it finds for 
 itself. Being in its essence Divine, faith can never fully 
 embody itself in any human forms. It is not exactly 
 above Reason, for the reason of man, as a Greek theolo- 
 gian said, is the throne of the Godhead, but it is above 
 Rationalism, the logic of the understanding. Ration- 
 alism can neither give us religion nor deprive us of it. 
 The relation of religious truth to other kinds of truth a 
 problem of immeasurable complexity is made hardly 
 at all clearer by either orthodox or anti-orthodox 
 rationalism." I can hardly imagine a statement with 
 
 * " Faith and Knowledge." T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1904. 
 
 76 
 
MR. INGE AND M. LOISY 77 
 
 which, as I think, M. Loisy would more heartily and in 
 every detail agree. 
 
 But Mr. Inge is evidently sincerely convinced that 
 M. Loisy has pronounced a permanent divorce between 
 Faith and Reason, that he has attempted " to render faith 
 invulnerable by separating it entirely from science." 
 Now I think that this is a complete misunderstanding of 
 M. Loisy's position, and I cannot help feeling that 
 Mr. Inge has here inadvertently made M. Loisy the victim 
 of his own persistent suspicion of the Pragmatist philoso- 
 phy. The truth is that nowhere does M. Loisy distinguish 
 between faith and science otherwise than as they are 
 distinguished in fact. And that distinction could not 
 be better expressed than in Mr. Inge's own words. 
 " When religious faith is challenged to justify itself, it is 
 almost obliged to argue and give reasons. But in reality 
 it knows that it cannot be acquitted or condemned by 
 the categories of the understanding : its inspiration and 
 its energy are drawn from a deeper and a more mysterious 
 source. It wells up from the depths of the basal person- 
 ality ; its fresh springs are fed by the river of God, the 
 eternal fountain of all life." That is to say, faith is 
 native to the religious sense. It is the original vital 
 perception of eternal realities, or rather, the original 
 point of contact of the living spirit of man with their 
 infinite and all-informing life. And that is the one 
 supernatural moment of religion. Hardly has that super- 
 natural conception of the religious instinct been accom- 
 plished before the birth-pangs of its release through 
 reason into the natural world of knowledge begin to 
 declare themselves. Faith is not fully faith till it has 
 
78 MODERNISM 
 
 formed some kind of expression, however rudimentary. 
 The supernatural is not real for us till it has mingled and 
 become one with the natural. And yet if we would make 
 clear to ourselves each moment of the process of faith, 
 we must distinguish between the original undiluted 
 certainty for the active spirit, and that certainty as it 
 becomes mediated with increasing clearness by and for 
 the mind. That is the real distinction between faith 
 and the science which faith may use. And it is the only 
 distinction between faith and science to which, so far as 
 I can see, M. Loisy ever commits himself. Dogma is 
 always for him that Divine-human fact, that vital inter- 
 blending of the immutable Divine certainty which is 
 immediately given to what Mr. Inge calls the religious 
 instinct and the temporary and changing forms of know- 
 ledge which may be required to explicate it. In every 
 dogma there is the core of Divine truth which the religious 
 instinct originally affirmed, and on which it continually 
 seizes in order to sustain its life. But in it there is also 
 the form which was originally given by the mental habit 
 of a particular moment, and which, even when it does not 
 change in outward appearance, is ever freshly apprehended 
 by each slightest increase of knowledge, and even by 
 each faintest variety of intellectual activity which is at 
 all sincere. In short, dogma as a mere statement of 
 Divine truth belongs at least in part to the natural order. 
 Its birth, growth, decay, renewal are determined by the 
 restless activity of the human mind. But in so far as it 
 serves to elicit that immediate certainty of God and the 
 heavenly order which presided at its conception, which lay 
 behind its birth into the world of time, it is supernatural 
 
MR. INGE AND M. LOISY 79 
 
 and eternal. Its conception is purely spiritual; its 
 birth and life are partly intellectual, and must share 
 in the variety and relativity of mental apprehension. And 
 yet we can never separate Divine and human, natural 
 and supernatural, as we have to do with them, except as 
 elements in a process. Something like this seems to me 
 to be the distinction which M. Loisy makes between 
 faith and knowledge. And surely the religious life itself 
 clamours for this distinction. Surely, too, which is more 
 to the present purpose, Mr. Inge himself, in the passage 
 which I have quoted, insists upon it. 
 
 But Mr. Inge did not make his charge against M. Loisy 
 of separating faith " entirely from science " without 
 producing his piece justificative. He quotes the following 
 passage with a confidence which is far from being justified 
 by any support which, so far as I can see, it is likely to offer 
 to his contention. " The principle of criticism does not 
 permit us to formulate any conclusions of faith ; and no 
 theological principle authorizes us to formulate conclusions 
 of history. Historical researches only tend to prove and 
 represent facts, which cannot be in contradiction with 
 any dogma, precisely because they are facts." Far from 
 proclaiming an absolute divorce between faith and 
 science, this passage seeks to define the nature and limits 
 of their necessary connection a definition which is the 
 special apologetic need of the moment. Let us see what 
 M. Loisy says. " The principle of criticism does not 
 permit us to formulate any conclusions of faith." The 
 purpose of criticism is to elucidate fact. When it has 
 contributed all it can to that end, its work is accomplished. 
 Only if the facts as phenomenal happenings, as happenings 
 
 T ("405) 
 
80 MODERNISM 
 
 whose full scope and import were appreciable by 
 sense-experience, constituted a Divine Revelation, would 
 criticism have any direct dealings with their faith-value. 
 But the inspiration in virtue of which the religious 
 instinct finds a Divine Revelation in certain facts is 
 drawn, in Mr. Inge's words, "from a deeper and a more 
 mysterious source " than sense-experience. It is true 
 that the view of the facts might be so modified by 
 criticism as to leave in them no object for faith, nothing 
 which the religious instinct could recognize as Divine. But 
 it is just M. Loisy's contention that criticism has not so 
 affected the evangelical documents. He holds that the 
 distinctively Christian affirmation of the religious sense, 
 the belief in Christ as God, is still possible through that 
 presentation of the life and teaching of Jesus which the 
 most rigorous criticism has left us. But he also indicates 
 his belief that the assertions of the Christian faith are 
 still assured less in spite of critical negations than by 
 virtue of positive developments of faith itself. It is the 
 deepening of the content of faith, a deepening which is 
 moral rather than intellectual, which has enabled us to 
 find God in events which fit into the orderly natural 
 movement of history. The religious sense is growing 
 more inclined to find God in the perfection of man's moral 
 nature than in what seem to us arbitrary manifestations 
 of power in the order of physical nature. Criticism is so 
 far from having the power of formulating conclusions of 
 faith that, if it were to establish to-morrow the certainty 
 of all those events of the Gospel record which are usually 
 described as miraculous, it would not have added in the 
 
MR. INGE AND M. LOISY 81 
 
 slightest degree to the faith of a generation which seeks 
 elsewhere the vision of God. 
 
 And again, M. Loisy holds that " no theological 
 principle authorizes us to formulate conclusions of 
 history." I cannot think that Mr. Inge would dispute 
 the obvious justice of such a proposition. The facts of 
 past history are beyond our manipulation. They 
 happened in such and such a definite fashion. Not even 
 faith, much less a particular theological principle, can be 
 allowed to come in beforehand to confuse our perception 
 of what the facts really were. It will be difficult enough 
 for criticism to disentangle those facts. Its success will 
 never be more than approximate. But at least historical 
 criticism is the one instrument which we have at our 
 disposal for the attainment of that end, and it must be 
 left as free as possible to pursue it. 
 
 But it is perhaps in M. Loisy 's assertion that facts 
 " cannot be in contradiction with any dogma, precisely 
 because they are facts," that his chief offending lies. 
 Now here again, and indeed here especially, I would say 
 that M. Loisy, so far from proclaiming a complete separa- 
 tion between faith and science, is insisting upon their 
 consentient witness. They are indeed for him different 
 modes of apprehension, each valid in its own sphere. 
 But for one who believes in a Divine activity in the facts 
 of history, and in a supreme expression of that activity 
 in the life of Jesus of Nazareth culminating in the mani- 
 festation of His risen life as Lord and Christ, their witness 
 must agree. It is not of course enough to assert that 
 agreement. It cannot exist in contradiction of the 
 reason ; it can only exist for the reason. And if M. Loisy, 
 
82 MODERNISM 
 
 while admitting the results of criticism in modifying 
 our view of the evangelical fact, simply reasserted the 
 absolute validity of dogma in its actual form, he might 
 justly be accused of irrationalism. But he does nothing 
 of the kind. The only value which he attaches to dogma 
 is the value which it has in preserving certain affirmations 
 of the religious sense which, though they are inherent in 
 that human reason which is in us " the throne of the God- 
 head," yet are logically and even vitally anterior to any 
 rational process. It is in virtue of its essential spiritual 
 witness that it cannot, for the religious mind, contradict 
 facts, and exactly because they are facts through which 
 the religious sense attains to its vision of God. But if the 
 spirit of dogma is its power to preserve and evoke cer- 
 tain affirmations of the religious instinct, its form was 
 determined by the exigencies of a definite intellectual 
 struggle to preserve and elucidate those affirmations. 
 Viewed from this side, dogma is little more than an 
 interesting record of the historical fortunes of what is 
 original and essential in Christian faith. And M. Loisy 
 at least thinks that in this aspect dogma needs just now 
 to be analysed anew, exactly because of our fresh gains 
 of knowledge in the fields of physical science, history, 
 and psychology. The whole aim of his apologetic has 
 been to make dogma in the largest sense reasonable for 
 the modern habit of mind. He has been condemned by 
 Roman orthodoxy because he insisted on the necessity 
 of distinguishing between the religious and the intellectual 
 contents of dogma, because he held that the one was the 
 spiritual perception of Divine realities, varying only in 
 the measure of its vital intensity and fulness, the other, 
 
MR. INGE AND M. LOISY 83 
 
 the intellectual apprehension of those realities, varying 
 always according to the changing human modes of 
 apprehending and expressing truth. And if he dis- 
 tinguishes between these, it is not because he thinks 
 that faith as spiritual perception can dispense with some 
 mode of intellectual apprehension and expression, but 
 because he wishes to give that faith an intellectual 
 translation which will be valid for current modes of 
 thought, so that it may become a living force in this 
 generation. 
 
 But it is in Mr. Inge's account of M. Loisy's view of the 
 relation between the Christ and the Church that he does 
 him most injustice. M. Loisy's view of these relations 
 is very simple and, as it seems to me, entirely reasonable. 
 He starts from the common Christian faith in the Catholic 
 Church as an integral part of the faith in the Holy Spirit. 
 But how is that faith to be justified historically ? Does 
 the evangelical history warrant us in asserting that Jesus, 
 during His life on earth, foresaw or fore willed the actual 
 development of the Church in history ? Did He forewill, 
 for instance, the primacy of Peter, or was the early 
 preponderance of Rome in the Christian world determined, 
 at least so far as the examination of the historian can 
 penetrate into the sphere of causes, by purely historical 
 circumstances ? The answer of the historian is unhesi- 
 tating. He can see the dawn of the very conception of 
 the Catholic Church in the circumstances which the first 
 Apostles, and especially St. Paul, had to face. Equally 
 all the later developments of the Church have their place 
 in the orderly movement of history. But the very idea 
 of a movement of history is an assertion of faith. It 
 
84 MODERNISM 
 
 is the vision of a continuous purpose giving meaning 
 and vital connection to isolated events, of a supreme 
 determination of the struggles from which these events 
 issue. And the peculiarly Christian faith is the vision of 
 a Divine purpose which had at once its inauguration and 
 its implicit accomplishment in the life of Jesus Christ, but 
 which is being explicitly wrought out in the life of the 
 Church, and will not be historically completed until that 
 life has reached its earthly term. It is certainly the 
 belief of M. Loisy that the Church has grown out of Jesus 
 Christ, out of what He taught and consciously sought, 
 but it is equally his belief that it must grow into Him, 
 into what He essentially was. Only if Mr. Inge insists 
 on identifying the reality of what Jesus was with 
 His self-consciousness as man will his charge against 
 M. Loisy have any force. The life of the Church is in 
 some real sense an unfolding in time of the Spirit of 
 the Risen Christ, of the fulness of the life of Jesus as it 
 entered into its eternal victory through the grave and 
 gate of death. 
 
 But does M. Loisy leave the impression upon his readers 
 that this life of the Church has been expressed absolutely 
 in any single phase of its historical development or in the 
 whole course of that development hitherto ? Does he lay 
 himself open to the charge of divinising the Papacy, of 
 giving it the absolute warrant of a Divine authorship to 
 impose its arbitrary and unchallenged rule upon the 
 Church of God ? I cannot think how anyone who has 
 read pages 175-186 of the "Autour d'un Petit Livre" 
 can accuse him of so infantile a conception. Nor can I 
 imagine how anyone, even the most convinced Protestant, 
 
MR. INGE AND MR. LOISY 85 
 
 can have read those pages without learning to respect 
 and even to sympathise with the attitude of a Liberal 
 Romanist towards the development of the idea of 
 authority in his Church. That attitude is that authority 
 as defined by the decrees of 1870 was the result of the 
 instinct to preserve the ideal of Christian unity. No 
 doubt it is open to us to maintain that that ideal was 
 trampled upon by Rome herself in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, that the fact of disruption is chargeable largely to 
 her account. Yet unity is a Christian ideal ; it is an 
 expression of the spirit of Christ, and it required perhaps 
 the disaster of Christian disruption and anarchy to bring 
 that home conclusively to the Christian conscience. If 
 that is so, then unmistakably Rome stood thenceforward 
 as the hope and the visible centre of the desired unity. 
 And if unity is in fact to be restored, it will be as M. Loisy 
 claims, in virtue of an entire change of front on the part 
 of Rome. Authority has asserted the full measure of its 
 claims. It can only continue to exist in discharging the 
 full measure of its responsibilities. In establishing its 
 claims it has forgotten its responsibilities. It has aimed 
 at an intellectual and spiritual despotism. It has to learn 
 that its only justification lies in its becoming the servant 
 of all, the mediator of that true Christian unity which is 
 essentially spiritual, and whose very existence depends 
 upon variety of worship and intellectual interpretation, 
 not only permitted, but cherished. Here, as elsewhere, 
 M. Loisy is a true evangelical. He brings every develop- 
 ment of the Church back to the judgment-seat of Christ, 
 to the spirit of the Gospel. He demands of his Church 
 that it shall procure " the conciliation of the rights of the 
 
86 MODERNISM 
 
 sovereign individual with those of the servant authority." 
 No Protestant could make a more stringent claim. The 
 hope of the Church's future lies for him in a return to 
 what he calls the " perpetual charter of the Gospel." 
 " The Kings of the Gentiles have lordship over them ; 
 and they that have authority over them are called 
 Benefactors. But ye shall not be so ; but he that is the 
 greater among you, let him become as the younger, and 
 he that is chief as he that doth serve. For whether is 
 greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth ? Is 
 not he that sitteth at meat ? But I am in the midst of 
 you as he that serveth." And he adds, " The law of the 
 Messianic vocation is also the law of the apostolic vocation. 
 Jesus served the apostles; the apostles and their suc- 
 cessors were to be the servants of the faithful. Thanks 
 to the Gospel, the peoples of the modern world are coming 
 to understand that the only raison d'etre of authority in 
 a human society is the welfare of the collectivity, i.e., of 
 all those who form part of that society. The elite which 
 guides is at the service of the mass which is guided. A 
 nation does not exist for the good of its government, but 
 the government exists for the good of the nation. It 
 would be strange if the Church, which has made this truth 
 prevail in the world, should in her own case deny it, or 
 recognise in the hierarchy a right which was not a duty 
 or a service towards the community." 
 
 In short, M. Loisy does not exalt the Church above 
 the Christ of the Gospels. The Church in which he 
 believes is not the Church of a particular moment, but 
 the Church of the Eternities, the " fulness of Him that 
 filleth all in all," accomplishing that fulness in time, and 
 
MR. INGE AND M. LOISY 87 
 
 accomplishing it in the midst of temporary struggle and 
 loss, and perhaps defeat ; the Church which is growing 
 up into the fulness of Christ exactly because and exactly 
 in the measure that it grows out of Him, which is growing 
 out of Him just in so far and no farther than as it is 
 growing into Him. M. Loisy does not save the Creeds 
 at the expense of the Gospels. He finds in both the 
 relative expressions, each accordant to the needs and 
 capacities of a particular time, of that " strength of the 
 might of God which He wrought in Christ, when He 
 raised Him from the dead and made Him to sit at His 
 right hand in the heavenly places, and put all things in 
 subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over 
 all things to the Church, which is His body, the fulness 
 of Him that filleth all in all." Above all, he finds in the 
 Gospels the spirit which alone gives life to the Creeds and 
 the Church, the spirit by which they live ideally and by 
 which their actual life must continually be reproved, 
 inspired, developed. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 M. DESJARDINS AND M. LOISY 
 
 Dec ember 23, A CONSIDERABLE literature has already grown up around 
 190s th e Affaire Loisy. It is, by the way, a piquant and 
 instructive comment upon our ordinary literary valua- 
 tions that a word, which by its origin so distinctly 
 challenges quality, should have come to represent only 
 the gross measure of quantity. M. Desjardins' dis- 
 cussion of the Affaire, at least, is considerable in the older 
 and worthier sense. It is distinguished by an accurate 
 and exhaustive knowledge of the facts, a sympathetic 
 and at the same time critical intelligence of M. Loisy 's 
 position, and a studious justice in assessing the various 
 kinds and degrees of motive which contributed to the 
 hostile verdict of Catholic authority. M. Desjardins is 
 careful to label himself on his title-page un profane, and 
 of course with technical correctness. But the author of 
 Le Devoir Present has once again demonstrated that he is 
 a soul naturally religious and naturally Christian. He 
 is one of the few men in France who have at once sufficient 
 sympathy with the world of faith and sufficient authority 
 in the 'world of thought to treat so delicate a theme with 
 much hope of success. And that he has been successful, 
 successful in understanding his author and in challenging 
 for him the interest of a world which is usually indifferent 
 to theology, no one who reads this little book* is likely to 
 deny. 
 
 * " Catholicisme et Critique." Paris, 1905. 
 
 88 
 
M. DESJARDINS AND M. LOISY 89 
 
 But it will be necessary to confine ourselves here to a 
 single point. M. Desjardins, picturing the isolation to 
 which M. Loisy's originality condemns him, imagines the 
 astonishment of M. Lavisse or M. Seignobos at meeting 
 this proposition in some university thesis : " The Church 
 may claim that, in order to be at every epoch what Jesus 
 willed that the Society of His Friends should be, it has 
 had to be what it has been. For in preserving itself it 
 has been what it also needed to be in order to preserve 
 the Gospel." Now it so happens that this passage, 
 whatever emotion it might arouse in a French university 
 professor, has in fact stirred, and perhaps not unnaturally, 
 the indignant protest of many Protestant and Anglican 
 theologians. Indeed, M. Desjardins has himself stated 
 M. Loisy's belief upon this point in a form so absolute as 
 might at first sight entirely justify such protests. M. 
 Loisy believes, he says, " that this movement of the 
 Christian Church is different in kind from all the other 
 movements, fortuitous, or at least wavering and confused, 
 which are registered by history. He recognizes it as a 
 development which is constant, rectilinear, preserved 
 from all forwandering by a hidden force which is the 
 Spirit of God." And he adds that this thesis places 
 M. Loisy as an interpreter of history " on a different 
 plane from rationalist and critical historians in such a 
 way that he appears to them as a frank apologist of 
 Catholicism." Now, it is quite intelligible that not only 
 to the rationalist historian but to the religious historian 
 as well who is also an evolutionist, the establishment of 
 such a line of demarcation as is here suggested may 
 appear artificial and quite untenable. And it is equally 
 
90 MODERNISM 
 
 intelligible that to the religious historian who, believing 
 that the history of Christianity has been in some sense 
 providentially safeguarded from historical risks and 
 accidents, happens at the same time to be a non-Catholic, 
 it may seem apposite to inquire why the Roman Church 
 alone should be the object of such miraculous guidance, or 
 how it can be established that such is indeed the case. 
 
 But the truth is that both these kinds of protest are 
 premature and unnecessary. If there be a historian so 
 rationalistic and so irrational as to regard history as mere 
 phenomenalism, then he is certainly moving in a different 
 plane of thought from M. Loisy, and indeed from all men 
 who would exact some kind of order from human affairs. 
 But M. Desjardins, by his most intelligent exposition of 
 M. Loisy's opinions throughout this little book, is suffi- 
 cient witness that the phrase which I have just quoted 
 from him was somewhat unguarded, or at least was 
 used only with a view to the possible exponents of 
 historical phenomenalism. Indeed, he himself has 
 qualified, or rather annulled, his unguarded phrase by 
 an eloquent passage a few pages further on. If we could 
 place ourselves at M. Loisy's point of view, he says, 
 " sacred history would return into the main current of 
 general history, or rather the latter would become sacred 
 in its entirety ; the elimination of the heterogeneous in 
 the cosmos, in history, in the conscience, would be 
 accomplished gently and without break ; the idea of the 
 divinity of a particular person or a particular institution 
 would disengage itself gradually from the contradictions 
 which it entails." That, it seems to me, is nearer M. 
 Loisy's thought. The " hidden force which is the Spirit 
 
M. DESJARDINS AND M. LOISY 91 
 
 of God " is operating throughout the whole scheme of 
 things. It is operating with such different degrees of 
 effectiveness that there are whole regions of its activity 
 in which we cannot define its method or assess its triumph 
 or even definitely trace its course. It is only when we 
 come to the human personality, to something within 
 which we habitually dwell and of which we are, that we 
 can begin not only to know its operation within that 
 personality, but to carry of necessity the assertion of its 
 activity beyond those confines. Now the character of its 
 operation to which this practically universal experience 
 testifies is twofold its universality and its variety. It 
 is acting throughout the whole movement of life, and yet 
 acting uniquely in each contributory individual centre of 
 the movement. Thus the idea of the divinity of a par- 
 ticular person or a particular institution, if it involves 
 an exclusive claim to the manifestation of the Divine 
 action in them, becomes unthinkable and, as M. Desjardins 
 says, " enveloped in contradictions." But the same 
 idea becomes not only thinkable but a necessity of 
 thought when it is used to express what, from the one 
 side, we may regard as the highest manifestation among 
 many of this Divine force, from the other the fullest and 
 most conscious adhesion of the human will, individual 
 or collective, to the Divine. And this is just what 
 M. Loisy holds about a particular institution, the Catholic 
 Church. In a world which is still a relative and growing 
 expression of the absolute, the Society of the Friends of 
 Christ, the society which underneath and through all its 
 changes and mistakes has consciously and consistently 
 aimed at being such, is so far the most perfect collective 
 
92 MODERNISM 
 
 human expression of that hidden force of all history 
 which is the Spirit of God, is so far the divine institution 
 par excellence. Will, at least, any Christian deny this, 
 or will he refuse the hope and belief that whatever more 
 perfect expression of that Spirit the future may hold in 
 its womb will be in largest measure the natural and 
 legitimate development of that institution ? Or, will 
 any Christian deny, even if he be not himself a member 
 of the Roman Church, that for Christendom at large the 
 Roman Church has been the providential (in the sense of 
 supremely adapted and therefore on the religious assump- 
 tion supremely guided) depositary of those ideas by 
 which the Spirit of Christ has lived and wrought among 
 men, by which the Society of the Friends of Christ has 
 endured in ideal and in fact ? It is, of course, true that 
 for nearly four hundred years the Anglican Church has, 
 with varying fortunes and 'in varying degrees, kept 
 alive that witness for a great majority of the English- 
 speaking peoples. It is true that for fully four hundred 
 years Protestantism has intensified and deepened a 
 certain portion of that witness and has thus prepared a 
 most valuable contribution towards the Church of the 
 future. And it is towards the Church of the future that 
 M. Loisy's gaze is set. Do we, who are not of the Roman 
 Communion, look elsewhere ? The enlightened Pro- 
 testant will hardly deny that, owing mainly to the 
 circumstances of its origin, the religious witness of 
 Protestantism has been partial ; that it has unduly 
 depressed the social element in religion which may be 
 fairly claimed as the original and characteristic element 
 of the religion of the kingdom ; that its effect, even its 
 
M. DESJARDINS AND M. LOISY 93 
 
 conscious purpose, has been to create a religious ilite. 
 And the enlightened Anglican will admit that, while 
 Anglicanism has been privileged by its historical fortunse 
 to share to some extent in the fulness of the Catholic 
 and in the intensity of the Protestant witness, it yet 
 appeals only to a portion of a single race. Even we, 
 who are Anglicans or Protestants, may recognize the 
 prerogative opportunity of the Church of Rome to be 
 the centre of a reformed and, if not reunited, at least 
 federated and mutually intelligent, Christendom. 
 
 Are we satisfied with a Christian witness which in its 
 best moods is fragmentary and partial, in its worst is 
 discordant and mutually unintelligent ? M. Loisy is no 
 more satisfied than we with that spirit of absolutism, 
 which throughout Christendom, and not in the Roman 
 Church alone, has been, and is, the spirit of discord. 
 But he at least is working for the better day. He has 
 constituted himself, by the work to which he has devoted 
 his life, at once the intellectual and the spiritual protago- 
 nist of a new reform. He is the clear-sighted, patient 
 antagonist of that absolutism, intellectual or ecclesiastical, 
 which, at least in our day, whatever services it may have 
 rendered in the past, threatens the very foundations of 
 the Society of the Friends of Christ. But he has the 
 historical sense. He sees how the Divine purposes 
 accomplish themselves in the most unexpected ways. 
 He sees the absolutism against which he fights already 
 self-strangled by the contradictions inherent in the 
 logical completion of its idea as affirmed by militant 
 Ultramontanism. Why should he despair of the Church, 
 which has hitherto, and often as it would seem by the 
 
94 MODERNISM 
 
 most contradictory processes, preserved the witness of 
 Christianity for the greater part of the West ? Or, 
 again, why should he be thought to despise the value 
 of the religious witness of Protestantism because he sees 
 how partial that witness is ? Probably no one under- 
 stands more fully than he the import of those words of 
 M. Marcel H6bert, uttered while he was still a member 
 of the Roman Church. " Catholicism must endure its 
 Protestantism, and in the day that it does so there will 
 be an end of the latter." That is the only possible 
 method of what is called the Reunion of Christendom. 
 If the Church of the Christendom of the future is to be, 
 if there is to be again one Society of the Friends of Christ, 
 on such terms alone will it be formed. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 M. LABERTHONNIERE'S RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY* 
 
 IT is now ten years since M. Blondel in his famous Sor- September 16, 
 bonne thesis launched that view of religious certainty 1903 
 which has since been known as the New Apologetic, or 
 the Apologetic of Immanence. During those ten years 
 it has been the mark for innumerable criticisms from the 
 outraged devotees of the traditional scholastic dog- 
 matism, criticisms which must have inspired those who 
 had at heart the extension of the area of faith with a 
 profound satisfaction that the traditionalists were no 
 longer left in exclusive possession of the field of religious 
 defence. Meanwhile " L' Action " has long been out of 
 print, and M. Blondel's scrupulous conscientiousness and, 
 one is sorry to have to add, his delicate health have too 
 long delayed that revised edition which for some years 
 his admirers have been eagerly awaiting. It is therefore 
 with all the greater pleasure that we hail the appearance 
 of these admirable essays in religious philosophy written 
 by the most original of M. Blondel's disciples, Pere 
 Laberthonni&re of the Oratory. They are marked 
 throughout by a closeness of reasoning, a controversial 
 forbearance and urbanity (where controversy could not 
 be avoided), a depth of religious feeling, and a rich human 
 warmth which witness at once to a profound intellect and 
 a saintly soul. 
 
 * " Essais de Philosophic Religieuse." Par le Pdre L. Laberthon- 
 nidre. Paris : Lethielleux, 1903. 
 
 95 
 
96 MODERNISM 
 
 The New Apologetic, as it has been called, is, like many 
 things which are hailed as new by injudicious friends or 
 contemptuously labelled new by interested enemies, not 
 new at all, but exactly as old as human faith. That is 
 its own first claim. It is merely the conscious analysis of 
 the process by which the religious life has always attained, 
 and must always attain, to the certainty of vital truth 
 a process which we may call unconscious, in so far as it 
 has not adequately realised itself in terms of thought. 
 It is only the experience of the mystics and of all great 
 religious souls caught in the living act and made intelli- 
 gible. Its value as apologetic lies in the fact that it finds 
 in life itself, in the total activity of living wills, the only 
 trustworthy means of affirming reality. The traditional 
 apologetic has failed because it is lifeless, because it has 
 attempted to substitute an abstraction of thought for a 
 living belief. It has thought to present the eternal 
 mysteries of God, of the universe, of the soul as rigidly 
 ascertained facts of completed knowledge, not as the 
 increasingly ascertainable certainties of a knowledge 
 which grows in exact proportion as life grows. And so 
 life and above all life in its highest expression, the 
 religious life which must grow, has either languished 
 in the prison of this intellectual dogmatism or has burst 
 its barriers, often in the fatal belief that it had at the 
 same time escaped the need of faith or unmasked its 
 illusions. P6re Laberthonni6re is not indeed concerned 
 to provide a new temporary expedient of religious defence 
 in the place of one which has grown antiquated and 
 futile. He is engaged in a much more serious task, a task 
 of pure philosophy that, namely, of discovering how in 
 any truth we reach a knowledge of ultimate certainties. 
 
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY 97 
 
 But incidentally he has done something, and not merely 
 for his own time, not only to make religious faith possible, 
 but to demonstrate it as a necessity of life. 
 
 The method of certainty which Pre Laberthonni6re 
 exposes in these essays he calls in contrast with the 
 empirical dogmatism of the Sensationalists and the 
 intellectual dogmatism of the Idealists moral dog- 
 matism. Though during the greater part of the nine- 
 teenth century metaphysics was under a cloud, the 
 ultimate problem of philosophy still remains the meta- 
 physical one of the nature of reality. And with that 
 question must always be allied the further question of 
 how we can attain to the knowledge of reality. These 
 two questions can be separated only if, and in so far as, 
 reality is considered as something outside, and apart 
 from, ourselves. They become vitally one when we 
 conceive of reality as something which is affirmed by the 
 total activity of the soul. It is the merit of these studies 
 that they face the problem of reality in this way. To 
 measure the value of this method it will be necessary to 
 consider for a moment the nature of rival solutions. 
 On the one hand, there is the metaphysical scepticism of 
 those who deny that any certainty of reality can be 
 attained. For them the world is a world of appearances. 
 It is impossible to say of anything that it is, only that it 
 appears such to such and such a one. This variety of 
 appearance is irreducible, and the only refuge from it is 
 to refuse to believe in or affirm any reality. Akin to 
 this is the agnostic attitude the admission that reality 
 exists, but that it is altogether beyond our knowledge. 
 On the other hand, there are the intellectual dogmatists 
 
98 MODERNISM 
 
 who think to find the real in the phenomenal, the absolute 
 in the relative, either by an immediate act of perception 
 or through the intermediary of ideas to which they give 
 an ontological value. It was the merit of the critical 
 philosophy that it exposed the contradictions and the 
 absurdity of this virtual identification of the phenomenal 
 with the real. 
 
 In this view reality is what Kant called an object 
 an object either of sensation or of thought. But an 
 object of sensation as such is only that which we feel, 
 in other words a state of our own feeling. An object of 
 thought as such is only that which we have thought, an 
 abstraction of our minds from certain states of feeling. 
 So far the critical philosophy is completely justified. 
 But it is just here that Pere Laberthonniere parts com- 
 pany with the critics and imports a new constructive 
 element into the problem of reality. The real is not an 
 object at all, but a subject. It is as subject and subject 
 only that we can attain to a knowledge of the real in 
 itself. Obviously this is a knowledge which cannot be 
 achieved by a single effort of the mind, or indeed by 
 intellectual effort at all, in so far as that effort is possible 
 apart from the complete activity of the will. It is a 
 knowledge which involves moral activity, and sensation 
 and thought only in so far as they are part of that activity 
 or minister to it. For, because sensation and thought 
 cannot of themselves bring us into contact with the real, 
 it does not follow that they can only land us in delusion. 
 On the contrary, in so far as they contribute to moral 
 effort they are themselves helping to constitute the real 
 which everywhere underlies the phenomenal. Their 
 
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY 99 
 
 report, indeed, of objects felt and thought is not the 
 truth of that reality which is one and permanent ; but, 
 as we have seen, a record of states of our own feeling or 
 of abstractions from them. They do not bring reality to 
 us. It is just we who can import reality into them. Our 
 sensations and our ideas contain just as much reality as 
 there is already in ourselves, in our active, conscious 
 energy. Life does not passively receive truth ; it 
 actively constitutes it. 
 
 Let us examine a little more closely how this method 
 of attaining certainty of the real works. How, for 
 instance, do we attain to a sense of the real, of being, 
 which is one and permanent, in ourselves, or in the world 
 outside ourselves ? We may for the present overlook 
 the answer of the sceptics, for that answer is a mere 
 denial of the possibility of any such attainment. For 
 them, neither in themselves nor in the world, is there 
 any permanent reality which may be known. But the 
 intellectual dogmatists assert that such reality is know- 
 able. It is only necessary to open the eyes of the mind 
 in order to receive it. But, as we have already seen, the 
 critical philosophy has sufficiently demonstrated that 
 the world thus conceived is not the world of permanent 
 reality, but of a particular manner of seeing. That is 
 sufficiently evident from the fact that the world has been 
 conceived in so many different manners. Or to take 
 another example from Pere Laberthonniere himself : 
 " Under the word God have been ranged and continue 
 to be ranged conceptions often very different the one 
 from the other. The God of the Gospel is not the God 
 of Plato or of Aristotle. The God of Descartes is not 
 
100 MODERNISM 
 
 the God of Leibnitz. And the God whom certain 
 Neapolitan brigands call to their aid in the commission 
 of a crime has no resemblance to the God of St. Vincent 
 de Paul or of the rest of the saints." In short, we all 
 desire that what we think should be the truth, and 
 the truth reduced to this kind of static abstraction is 
 a mere record of some phase of human desire. We 
 have, as it were, intellectually photographed a purely 
 temporary and relative aspect of ourselves, and tried 
 thenceforward to impose it upon the world as unalterable 
 truth. We thought we had discovered the authentic 
 figure of reality, and we find that, after all, it is only 
 our own intellectual shadow, or, rather, the permanent 
 spectre of some momentary dead-and-gone phase of 
 ourselves. 
 
 But just here is the clue to the attainment of the only 
 knowledge of reality which is possible for us. If we 
 could attain to something like unity and permanence in 
 ourselves, then we should inevitably import that measure 
 of reality into even our ideas, we should so far help to 
 constitute truth. Now, of course, it is clear that man, 
 just because he is man, can never attain to absolute 
 unity and permanence in himself, and can never, therefore, 
 give birth to ideas which will even represent the absolute 
 truth. But none the less man does attain to a kind of 
 provisional sense of unity and permanence in every act 
 of the moral will ; for the moral will is the act by which 
 man affirms himself amid the shows of things that change 
 and pass alike within and without, by which he con- 
 stitutes himself through whatever is real and permanent 
 in the phenomenal and impermanent. It is the act by 
 
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY 101 
 
 which man loves God and seeks to lift himself into union 
 with the Divine will. It is the act of love and not of 
 mere desire, the act by which man would transform 
 himself into the nature of God, according to the will of 
 God, not the act by which he would seek to accommodate 
 God's will to his own. It is, therefore, the act to which 
 life can put no term, the act which must continue and 
 deepen so long as man continues and grows. It is only 
 through this act, the uninterrupted and growing act of 
 life, that man can attain to the sense of permanence in 
 himself. 
 
 And through it also he attains to the certainty of God, 
 he affirms God. Yet he does not reach this certainty, 
 he does not make this affirmation, apart from God. On 
 the contrary, it is just because God is the principle of his 
 life that either is possible. If God were apart from man, 
 he might strain for ever in vain to reach reality, or, 
 rather, he would never have made the attempt. It is 
 just because God is in him that he has never ceased to 
 make the attempt. Yet this fact of the Divine imma- 
 nence is no part of a mere Pantheistic conception. Nor, 
 on the other hand, does it need to be corrected by some 
 crude notion of spatial transcendence. Its real corrective 
 is suggested in the reality of man's will. God is not only 
 the principle of man's life by which every faculty and 
 capacity of action which he possesses exist. He is also 
 the End after which man must continually strive in 
 constituting himself as a reality. So it is God Who 
 strives with him as the principle by which he is able to 
 strive at all. Yet it is he who chooses to bring the 
 principle into action, who makes it his own in action, 
 
102 MODERNISM 
 
 who calls God into that activity by which he works 
 towards God as his end. This is the Divine co-operation 
 through which in the life of the moral will man attains to 
 the certainty of being, one and permanent. It is a 
 doctrine of will and liberty in which, nevertheless, man 
 is utterly dependent upon God, and in which indeed, in 
 a sense, God condescends to be dependent upon man. 
 Pere Laberthonniere puts it with a fervour of almost 
 lyrical audacity : 
 
 " It seems as though God Who wills us and loves, us 
 were as it were enlarged by us in His own being. In 
 loving Him we help Him to rediscover Himself in us as 
 we rediscover ourselves in Him. He comports Himself 
 with us as if He had need of us in order to be. Just as 
 we affirm ourselves freely by Him, so He by us freely 
 affirms Himself ; yet with this difference that we, if we 
 willed to affirm ourselves without Him, would lose 
 ourselves, while He could affirm Himself without us and 
 yet lose nothing of the fulness of His being." 
 
 It is almost unnecessary to add that it is through the 
 same activity of the moral will that Pere Laberthonnidre 
 conceives the possibility of our affirming reality of beings 
 other than ourselves. Here again it is this same activity, 
 it is the life of love, which helps to constitute that reality. 
 The same co-operation exists between man and man as 
 between man and God, and exists on the same terms. 
 All affirmations of reality are moral affirmations, and are 
 worth just what those who make them are worth. And 
 in proportion as the interpenetration of human life by 
 mutual intelligence and love proceeds, men will awaken 
 to the value not merely of one another, but of the 
 
RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY 103 
 
 differences through which they express their certainty of 
 the real. Truth, in so far as it can be committed to pro- 
 positions, will be the result of the natural interaction and 
 fusion of the highest, that is, the most vital, individual 
 certainties. Above all, truth so reached will never be 
 static, a hard, fixed, self-sufficient statement, independent 
 of life. It will be, rather, dynamic, a rational point of 
 departure for life setting forth upon its new moral ventures. 
 It will be truth committing itself in absolute faith to the 
 hazards of such ventures. The only object of each fresh 
 harvest of truth is to become seed for a new sowing in 
 the human will, and assuredly no one can say of what 
 form or quality the new harvest will be. That will 
 depend upon the healthiness and productiveness of the 
 soil. It is always an affair of life, and our anxiety ought 
 to be rather about the character of the life than about 
 the aspect of formal truth which the life may assimilate. 
 This is the merest suggestion of the matter of these 
 interesting essays. But by those who would learn what 
 a new and living force Pere Laberthonniere has brought 
 into the usually arid region of religious apologetics, he 
 must be read and not merely read about. There is a 
 fascination of literary style in these essays, blended with 
 a kind of spiritual fragrance, which it is impossible to 
 convey to others. They burn occasionally with the 
 passion of some mystical poem. And yet through all 
 the glow and the glamour the close, sustained, un- 
 halting argument pursues its easy way. This is indeed 
 to write on the philosophy of religion so that men may 
 read. si sic omnes ! 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 M. HOUTIN ON AMERICANISM 
 
 February, SAINTE-BEUVE once said admirably that in matters of 
 1904 art and literature the judgment of the foreign public was 
 as it were the judgment of a contemporary posterity. 
 The aphorism of the great critic implies for the competent 
 historian of contemporary events the supreme virtue of 
 detachment from contemporary prejudice a virtue, like 
 most, hard to acquire. But at least the measure of the 
 historian's success will be best tested by the impression 
 his work produces on those who are outside the area of 
 conflict and immediate interest. It is the distinction of 
 the younger school of French historians and sociologists 
 that they leave on the outsider the impression of a 
 scrupulous honesty and a genuine detachment in the use 
 of their materials. M. Houtin, by his works on the 
 Biblical question among French Catholics during the 
 nineteenth century, and on the Apostolicity of the 
 Churches of France, revealed himself as a distinguished 
 and worthy representative of this school. He has 
 sustained, indeed enhanced, his reputation by the book 
 which he has just published on " Americanism." 
 
 This book is, as the French say, " Hen documented 
 M. Houtin lets events narrate themselves out of the 
 mouths of those who took part in them. And the result 
 is an impression of those events which is living and actual 
 
 104 
 
M. HOUTIN ON AMERICANISM 105 
 
 in a very satisfying degree. It might, indeed, at first 
 sight seem impossible to give the effect of historical 
 symmetry and completeness to a movement which is 
 yet proceeding. But somehow M. Houtin achieves the 
 impossible. And if I may venture an explanation of his 
 success, I would say that it is because he has imaginatively 
 projected himself beyond the furthest limits of the move- 
 ment with which he is dealing. He feels that he has 
 merely written the historical prologue to a great drama 
 which is already beginning to unfold itself upon the 
 stage of religious history. That will be the interest 
 of Americanism in the near future. That is the interest 
 which M. Houtin has subtly caught and deftly managed 
 to convey to the sympathetic reader. And it is just 
 that interest that redeems Americanism from a certain 
 flaccid indecision which is a feature of all movements 
 that are contemporary, that gives it due perspective 
 and precision. If the critical and philosophic movements 
 connected with the names of M. Loisy, M. Maurice Blondel, 
 and Pere Laberthonniere, had not come to foreshadow a 
 theological revolution, Americanism would be unable as 
 yet to justify its claim to the serious attention of the 
 historian. 
 
 But M. Loisy and the others are with us, and 
 Americanism is, therefore, important and immensely 
 significant. And its significance is all the greater that 
 it knew not what it was preparing. It is the magnificent 
 irony of the spirit of life that it forces every genuine 
 living movement to become something greater than it 
 knows, something other and larger than it ever intended 
 to be. The tide of life is ever setting towards an unknown 
 
106 MODERNISM 
 
 shore with a force which mocks at prevision and over- 
 whelms authority. Neither the " thus far will I go and 
 no further," nor the " thus far shalt thou go," is of any 
 avail against the mastery of its advance. It has been so 
 with Americanism. The apparent accident of a religious 
 movement growing naturally out of a new soil, alive 
 with the instinctive appreciation of a new atmosphere, 
 is producing results in far distant sections of the Roman 
 Church which will either give that Church the practical 
 hegemony of the Christianity of the future, or leave her 
 an abandoned hulk in the wake of human progress. 
 
 Let us see, then, what Americanism is. In its actual 
 form it has been, like so many other great movements, 
 the product of various causes, differing in their character 
 and apparent importance. This variety of origin is perhaps 
 most clearly demonstrated in the theological attitude of 
 the men who have been associated with its fortunes. It 
 has found devoted adherents in traditionalists like the 
 present Rector of the Catholic University of Washington, 
 or again in men like the Bishop of Peoria, who are as far 
 removed as possible alike from the spirit and the letter of 
 scholastic tradition. But the spirit of the movement is 
 one, and that spirit has been created and determined by 
 the peculiar national character of America. The ideal 
 of the old national groups in which Catholicism took its 
 definite European form was uniformity. Catholicism 
 was itself the chief factor in procuring and maintaining 
 that uniformity. But as we can now see in the case of 
 France, the instinct for uniformity has survived the 
 break-up of Catholicism. The France of the Republican 
 Block is just as anxious to crush out Catholicism as an 
 
M. HOUTIN ON AMERICANISM 107 
 
 unassimilable element in a Republican State as Louis XIV 
 was to extinguish Protestantism in the interest of a 
 uniform Catholic State. America does not even regret 
 the impossibility for her of attaining such a uniformity. 
 Her very ideal is variety. It is the aspect of her national 
 life of which she is most proud, in which she consciously 
 realizes her peculiar strength. Hear, for instance, the 
 note of something like exultation in the words of Bishop 
 Spalding, of Peoria. " It is not to wealth or to numbers 
 that we owe our importance among the nations, but to 
 our having demonstrated that the respect for law is 
 compatible with civil and religious liberty ; that a free 
 people can grow and prosper and maintain order without 
 a Sovereign or a standing army ; that State and Church 
 can move in separate orbits and yet act for the common 
 good ; that men of different races and different beliefs 
 can live together in peace ; that in spite of the surprisingly 
 rapid development of wealth and population, in spite of 
 the numerous ills which have resulted from it, the tendency 
 to healthiness of thought and feeling has prevailed, thus 
 clearly revealing the vigor of our life and institutions ; 
 that government by the majority, when men have faith 
 in God and in the advance of knowledge, is after all the 
 wisest and justest form of government." These are words 
 which, perhaps, only an American could have spoken, 
 which at least only an American has any right to speak. 
 Americanism has its origin in the recognition by 
 American Catholicism of the psychological climate (if I 
 may steal or borrow Mr. Balfour's phrase) to which it 
 had to accommodate itself, and in the instinctive effort 
 to accommodate itself to it. How much of change this 
 
108 MODERNISM 
 
 effort was to entail was not of course at once perceived. 
 Its extent is not perhaps yet quite realized by the 
 American Church itself. It is this perfectly natural fact, 
 rather than any conscious insincerity, which accounts for 
 the momentary confusion into which the famous letter 
 of Leo XIII to Cardinal Gibbons seemed to throw some 
 of the leading representatives of Americanism. They 
 simply did not know how far they had gone. None the 
 less the results are there, unmistakable for the careful 
 and detached observer. All that Catholicism is in its 
 age-long growth out of a European soil I do not of course 
 include England it is ceasing to be in America, and is 
 becoming something other than and strongly contrasted 
 with it. While in Europe Catholicism distrusts and even 
 hates democracy, and still applauds, both in theory and 
 practice, the doctrines of the Syllabus, in America it 
 shares to the full the grateful and exuberant confidence 
 in the democratic system and temper of government 
 which is the most distinctive element of the national 
 policy. Naturally such a difference as this affects the 
 whole attitude of the Church towards national and civic 
 affairs. In so far as all its outward activity is concerned, 
 it is no longer, as in Europe, the implacably hostile rival 
 of the State, but one corporate force among many co- 
 operating heartily and on equal terms in the common 
 action of the State. Even on the thorny question of 
 education the Church has not failed in her devotion to 
 the ideal of the Republic, and compromises like that 
 known as the Poughkeepsie experiment* testify to a 
 
 * At Poughkeepsie, in the State of New York, the School Board for 
 some years rented the Catholic schools, which thus became State 
 
M. HOUTIN ON AMERICANISM 109 
 
 praiseworthy largeness of view alike on her part and on 
 the part of local Education Authorities. 
 
 But it is not merely in the outward activity of the 
 Church as a corporate body that a change has declared 
 itself. It is just as much in her more intimate work as 
 a director of souls. The uniform ideal of character, or 
 rather of temperament, which obtains throughout the 
 old Catholic world, and has actually produced a common 
 type of character, at least a type marked by an apparent 
 uniformity, has yielded in America to the urgency of the 
 national ideal of individuality. Where enterprise and 
 initiative count for so much in all fields of action, it is 
 not likely that they could for long be excluded from the 
 field of religious feeling and its expression. And the 
 change which was being unconsciously wrought by the 
 necessary action of changed conditions found conscious 
 expression in the thought and aim of one man Isaac 
 Thomas Hecker. Hecker, who wa born in New York, 
 in 1819, of German parents, was one of those spirits, of 
 whom the Nineteenth Century knew so many, who 
 suffered from the intellectual anarchy and confusion of 
 an over-confident and aggressive individualism. He 
 found, again like so many others of his time, in the 
 authoritative claim of the Roman Church exactly the 
 rest, or rather the support, he needed. But he took with 
 him into the Roman fold his Protestant feeling for 
 individual initiative and variety of expression in matters 
 
 schools during school hours, but reverted to the absolute use of the 
 Catholic body outside those hours. The Catholic teachers were 
 recognised by the Board, and religious instruction could be given by 
 them at any time outside the ordinary school hours of nine to three. 
 The same experiment was tried on a larger scale in the State of Georgia. 
 
110 MODERNISM 
 
 religious. The watchword of his school was the necessity 
 to a complete Christian life of the active virtues as 
 contrasted with the passive virtues of absolute submission 
 and obedience to authority which the old Catholicism 
 had so sedulously cultivated. He depreciated the con- 
 templative life as unsuited to the religious needs of 
 the modern world, and especially of American life. He 
 extolled and aimed at developing the social activity of 
 the Church. He claimed free play for, and full recognition 
 of, the action of the Divine Spirit in the individual life. 
 Authority was but the background against which the 
 multiform energies of the Spirit in individuals were thrown 
 into relief, perhaps better the bond by which in their free 
 movement they were held together. It was from Hecker 
 that men like Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop Ireland, and 
 Bishop Spalding drew their inspiration. Impartial and 
 capable observers have again and again described the 
 results. One of the latest of them, M. Bargy, has sum- 
 marised his observations in the statement that there 
 is a new fact in the religious world, that there is a type 
 of religion which is peculiarly American. To this type, 
 he says, all the American Churches are conforming more 
 and more, to such an extent that they resemble one 
 another more than any one of them its Mother Church in 
 the Old World. The note of this American type of 
 religion is the light stress laid upon all forms of dogmatic 
 statement and teaching, and an immense and ever- 
 growing social activity. "It is a religion of humanity 
 grafted on Christianity," says M. Bargy. And again, 
 " The American religion has always as its aim the well- 
 being of the race. It is the poetry of citizenship." And 
 
M. HOUTIN ON AMERICANISM 111 
 
 M. Houtin, echoing M. Bargy, sums up the whole matter 
 thus : " If we wish to characterize the very essence of 
 the religious evolution in the United States, we must say 
 that it is drawing all the sects alike in the direction 
 of what we call in Europe Liberal Protestantism." It 
 is not perhaps exactly how even the most advanced 
 Americanist would wish it to be expressed. But if a 
 movement is to be judged by the tendencies of its greatest 
 minds, then those who are acquainted with the writings 
 of Bishop Spalding will recognize, if not the perfect 
 adequacy, at least the general truth, of M. Houtin's 
 estimate of the share of Americanism in the common 
 trend of American religion. It may be that M. Houtin 
 is nearer the truth as to the general temper of the Roman 
 Church in America when he likens its spirit, as he has 
 done in another place, to that of the Anglican Church. 
 It is a resemblance of whose suggestion no member of 
 that Church need be ashamed. But perhaps the closest 
 resemblance to Americanism, as I have realized it in 
 M. Houtin's interesting pages, is to be found in the ideal 
 of Catholicism which haunts the mind of my friend, Mr. 
 Headlam, and is witnessed to by his Guild of St. Matthew. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE " LETTRES ROMAINES," AND BARON VON H0GEL'S 
 " DU CHRIST ETERNEL " 
 
 THE year 1904 has given us at least two contributions of 
 1904 the first importance to the elucidation of the Liberal 
 theological movement in the Roman Church. During 
 the first three months of the year a defence and reinforce- 
 ment of M. Loisy's position, in the form of letters 
 addressed by a priest to his friend, appeared in the 
 Annales de Philosophie Chretienne. The authorship of 
 these anonymous letters has been generally attributed 
 to a well-known Italian theologian. The second document 
 of importance was Baron von Hiigel's reply in the 
 Quinzaine for June ist to certain articles of M. Maurice 
 Blondel in the same review, in which that philosopher 
 denied the right of historical criticism to complete 
 autonomy in the field of Gospel history. 
 
 I 
 
 M. Blondel attempted to defeat the critics by an 
 ingenious turning movement. He did not venture to 
 defend the position occupied by so many conservative, 
 and especially English conservative scholars, that the 
 application of critical methods of enquiry to the Gospel 
 history has left the traditional view of that history 
 practically intact. He admitted that theological 
 criticism, released from the control of theological pre- 
 conceptions, was justified of the destructive conclusions 
 
 112 
 
THE "LETTRES ROMAINES " 113 
 
 which it had reached. But just because those conclusions 
 seemed to him to be destructive of the integrity of 
 Christian doctrine, he denied altogether the right of 
 criticism to autonomy in the religious domain. It was 
 impossible to admit the legitimacy of a method which 
 thus rendered insecure the very foundations of 
 Christianity, the supreme expression of the religious faith 
 and hope of mankind. M. BlondePs way of meeting 
 the difficulty was characteristic. It was from his own 
 philosophy of " action," from his conception of the 
 totality of life as the medium through which all religious 
 revelation is given, and more especially the medium 
 through which alone it can be apprehended, that he 
 drew the materials for his defence of the traditional 
 position. Naturally, for a scholastic his argument would 
 have no force whatever. The scholastic, to whom the 
 defence of the Christian faith is an exercise in pure 
 dialectic, is forced to assert the integrity of the Christian 
 revelation in its original form, or rather to maintain the 
 formal identity of the present sum of Christian dogma 
 with the revealed doctrine of the Gospels. To that end 
 he has simply neutralised the whole territory of formal 
 Revelation. He has shut it off from the operation of the 
 methods of critical experiment and conflict by which 
 truth is ordinarily established. Revelation is intangible 
 and subject to no possibility or degree of doubt. If, as 
 a concession to the prevailing insanity of the time, he 
 admits the application of critical method at all, he admits 
 it only on the condition that it establishes his case. He is 
 as little likely to sympathise with M. Blondel's subtle 
 method of evading the force of critical conclusions as he 
 
114 MODERNISM 
 
 is to admit either the legitimacy of those conclusions or the 
 right of the critics to reach them. 
 
 M. Blondel, then, admits that modern critical history 
 is a science which, like every other science, has its own 
 characteristic method. He admits that this science must, 
 both by its own nature and in virtue of the historical 
 character of the Gospel, deal with the historical facts 
 which the Gospels record. But he denies its sufficiency to 
 establish even the historical truth of the record ; and he 
 denies it, as I have said, in virtue of that philosophy of 
 " action " which is his own profound contribution to the 
 religious apologetic of our time. For M. Blondel, reality, 
 the ultimately real in every life, is immediately revealed 
 in the confused activity of spirit, an activity which 
 necessarily eludes exact apprehension or definition. The 
 real, therefore, is not and never can be completely given 
 in intellectual concepts which are of their very nature 
 secondary and derived. It is given in that from which 
 these inadequate and often mutilating concepts are 
 derived. It is by a kind of sublime spiritual intuition, 
 determined by our common share in ultimate reality, that 
 each life enters into a knowledge of every other. That 
 power of entry into the secret reality of other life depends 
 upon the degree in which the soul that would know has 
 developed in itself a complete and harmonious quality 
 of spiritual activity. Now it is evident that in the life 
 of our Lord that reality was given in the most exhaustive 
 and perfect form which it can attain under the conditions 
 of humanity. And it is equally evident that the know- 
 ledge of that life depends upon the increasing power 
 which humanity is gaining through its developed spiritual 
 
THE "LETTRES ROMAINES " 115 
 
 activity of apprehending the inexhaustible mystery of 
 reality revealed in it. M. Blondel therefore argues that 
 even the history of the human life of Jesus must be read 
 in the light of the knowledge which Christian humanity 
 has gained through its vital experience of all that was 
 contained and involved in the personality of Jesus. In 
 His personality, as it was manifested in Galilee 2000 
 years ago, all that progressive and ever-enlarging Christian 
 experience has since discovered in it was already revealed. 
 But historical criticism cannot and does not even pretend 
 to do more than establish the impression which the 
 personality of our Lord left upon the minds of His con- 
 temporaries. It is evident, therefore, that it is unequal 
 to the task of giving a true record even of our Lord's 
 human life. That life contained mysteries which its 
 contemporary observers did not so much as suspect ; 
 and those mysteries may well have expressed themselves 
 in outward events and happenings, the true nature and 
 purport of which escaped those who actually saw them, 
 but were gradually revealed to those who may not have 
 seen them with the eyes of the flesh, but meditated upon 
 them through the vision of the spirit. Thus the Synoptics 
 may have preserved for us a more faithful record of what 
 contemporaries saw in the life of Jesus, while the Fourth 
 Gospel may still give us the truer account not only of the 
 inner life of Jesus, but even of its phenomenal happenings. 
 This is by no means the whole of M. Blondel's argument. 
 But it seems to be the most important point which he 
 makes as against the claim of criticism to disengage the 
 measure of exact historical truth contained in the Gospel 
 records. And it is to this point chiefly that Baron von 
 
116 MODERNISM 
 
 Hiigel addresses his reply. That reply delivers us at 
 once from the tangle in which the subtlety of M. Blondel's 
 argument had involved us. It seems almost the object, 
 it certainly would be the effect, of arguments like those 
 of M. Blondel, to lead us back, by way of a life-philosophy, 
 into all the dangerous delusions with which the monopoly 
 claimed by a mere intellectual dialectic in the exposition 
 of Christian truth had for so long beset the path of the 
 Christian apologist. However little M. Blondel may 
 himself intend it, the effect of his position would be to 
 consecrate afresh, and in a far more subtle and dangerous 
 manner, the formal adequacy of dogma. That this is 
 far from M. Blondel's own intention, all those who know 
 his writings will at once conclude. He has indeed done 
 as much as any man of his time to demonstrate the 
 merely representative character of dogma, to establish 
 alike the distinction and the connection between the 
 reality lived and felt and the reality thought. Yet 
 there is here an evident tendency to obliterate the dis- 
 tinction and to resolve the connection into an actual 
 identity. For the establishment of the distinction 
 depends upon a work of analysis which can only be 
 accomplished in the workshop of history. If history may 
 not give its evidence as to the growth of dogma freely, if 
 its witness on that head is denied or tampered with, then 
 the block of formal dogma remains. M. Blondel may 
 still distinguish for himself between the witness of dogma 
 to the reality revealed immediately in life, and its witness 
 to the same reality mediated through changing habits of 
 thought. But there is no longer any objective measure 
 or criterion of such distinction. The formal block of 
 
THE "LETTRES ROMAINES " 117 
 
 dogma is reinstated by M. Blondel's efforts. And the 
 scholastics will turn the result to their own account 
 without even thanking him for his part in procuring it. 
 
 What Baron von Hugel so admirably enforces in his 
 reply to M. Blondel is the necessity of seizing the objective 
 element in dogmatic statements as a guide and standard 
 in their analysis. Now that element is primarily the 
 actual phenomenal facts and happenings which first 
 stimulated the life of faith to see in them the further 
 objective reality of spirit, the affirmation of which is the 
 very essence of dogmatic truth. This truth may of 
 course be mediated to us through much historical illusion, 
 and has as matter of fact been often so mediated. But 
 we feel that such mediation of the truth is necessarily 
 imperfect or provisional. We ought at least to know 
 the spiritual truth the more adequately, the more perfectly 
 we can establish the phenomenal events through which 
 it was given. This is the value of criticism, that it alone 
 can disengage the actual historical facts which were both 
 the occasion of faith and the medium which conveyed and 
 suggested the special content of its intuitions. It may 
 therefore legitimately claim for its conclusions in its own 
 kind and on its own level of enquiry freedom from revision 
 or amplification on the part of any external interest or 
 authority. In other words, criticism in its own field 
 must be autonomous. The facts were what they were, 
 and cannot be altered by doctrinal considerations of a 
 later date. In reaching a conclusion as to what the facts 
 actually were, no dogmatic afterthought or after-vision 
 of faith has the right to intervene. 
 
 It may be that scholarship has not yet reached an 
 
118 MODERNISM 
 
 agreement on the exact measure of the facts which 
 underlie the Gospel record, though Baron von Hugel 
 seems to agree with M. Loisy that the extent and degree 
 of the doubt which still subsists among competent scholars 
 is so small as not materially to affect the essential features 
 of the Gospel history as passed through the critical sieve. 
 But in any case critical scholarship must continue its 
 task until agreement is secured. That is beginning to 
 be the insistent claim of religion itself. It does not want 
 fancy facts, facts fashioned or coloured by some religious 
 preconception of a moment as to what the facts ought 
 to be. Starting from its initial faith in God, it is confident 
 that the actual facts of God's world are sufficient for the 
 revelation of God, that in them as they have actually 
 happened God has always declared Himself. And 
 especially it is beginning to feel that there is nothing but 
 gain for its cause and for its influence over men in the 
 new verdict of criticism about the facts of our Lord's 
 life, which is bringing those facts into closer accord with 
 the deepest elements in men's ordinary experience. 
 
 Such relative autonomy, therefore, as history legiti- 
 mately claims in any portion of its own domain it can 
 and must claim in the peculiarly religious portion also. 
 There, too, it is required to do its own special work by 
 its own special methods. It must make by the use of 
 those methods as accurate report as it can of the facts 
 through which the Christian revelation was given to men. 
 It cannot, indeed, in any wise impose either positively or 
 negatively a religious meaning upon those facts. The 
 religious significance of the facts for those who saw them 
 face to face was the work of faith. Their religious 
 
THE "LETTRES ROMAINES " 119 
 
 significance for those who have heard of them ever since 
 has also been the work of faith. The facts in their 
 phenomenal or formal aspect, the only aspect perceptible 
 to the senses of the contemporaries of Jesus, had no 
 power of imposing a religious revelation upon those His 
 contemporaries. Nor have the facts as mere happenings, 
 when transmitted to us, any such power. It is that 
 intuitive vision of reality which springs out of the deepest 
 and most harmonious activity of all our faculties realised 
 in the moral will and conscience, that vision which we 
 call faith, that alone reveals to us the religious value and 
 witness of the facts. Yet it is not possible to maintain, 
 as M. Blondel does, that the religious significance of the 
 facts once perceived may legitimately react upon them 
 so as to change even their phenomenal character, or 
 rather (it may be more just to M. Blondel's thought to 
 say) so as to reveal in them a character which they 
 actually had as events in space and time, and yet which 
 no one who had experience of them as events in space and 
 time seems to have recognised or reported. What the 
 facts phenomenally were, what, that is to say, they were 
 for the eyes and ears of those who observed and reported 
 them, that they remain for the historian. What they 
 were in themselves, what they witnessed to of the 
 character and action of eternal reality, that the historian 
 as historian has no competence to declare. It is true 
 that since the historian and the man of faith are often, 
 and ought normally to be, merely different functions or 
 aspects of the same individual, some confusion of the 
 two characters is inevitable in every judgment. Yet 
 that does not justify such confusion. The concrete living 
 
120 MODERNISM 
 
 reality can only be made an object of knowledge by our 
 recognizing the distinction between its phenomenal and 
 spiritual aspects, and respecting as fully as possible 
 the conditions under which each is apprehended. Baron 
 von Hugel has happily disengaged what is vitally true in 
 M. Blondel's contention from what is misleading and 
 dangerous in the following sentences : 
 
 "It is undoubtedly true that every saintly soul which 
 has been inspired by the Christian life and by the love 
 of our Lord has helped in its measure to penetrate, to 
 explicitate, to translate, and to make fruitful the glorious 
 reality of the truth and grace of Jesus Christ. And so 
 in a very real sense, we can speak of the earthly life of 
 the heavenly Christ Himself, that is to say, of the effects 
 wrought by the Eternal Christ upon this earth. These 
 spiritual facts, too, have a historical side and are presented 
 under phenomenal forms which the Church observes, 
 collects, and registers, and in which she sees, again under 
 the influence of the heavenly life of the Christ, the growing 
 apprehension and indefinite application of the events of 
 His past life on earth. Yet this series of phenomena 
 does not complete our critical knowledge of the earthly 
 life of Jesus. Of this terrestrial and phenomenal life we 
 shall gain no new knowledge, so long, at least, as no new 
 document is discovered, or no more scholarly analysis of 
 the documents which we know already is offered us." 
 
 II 
 
 But it is sufficiently obvious that M. Blondel's retreat 
 to positions which only Scholasticism can effectively 
 occupy is due to d priori considerations. It is his fear 
 
121 
 
 of an inductive Christology that has compelled him to 
 wrest his own theory of the method and character of our 
 knowledge of reality to the defence of conclusions which 
 it does not naturally support, which indeed it expressly 
 controverts. It is natural that the scholastic theology, 
 with its strong deductive bias, should virtually annul 
 the humanity of our Lord in its theory of the union of the 
 human nature of Jesus with God. Starting from its 
 abstract theory of the nature of Divinity and of the 
 necessary conditions of its self-manifestation, it imposes 
 these conditions upon the facts. The omniscience and 
 omnipotence of God, for instance, must be present in 
 their full expression in every manifestation of Himself. 
 These purely abstract conceptions, which rebuke all our 
 concrete experience and escape all our concrete knowledge, 
 are used to determine, before all examination of the facts, 
 the nature of our Lord's complex personality and even 
 the events of His earthly life. Miracles in the crudest 
 evidential sense, as the witnesses of unlimited and even 
 unintelligible power, were not only the natural accompani- 
 ment, but the very essence, of our Lord's activity. It 
 was necessary, in virtue of His nature, that God should 
 so act ; and therefore God in union with the human life 
 of Jesus did so act. Again, because of the omniscience 
 of God, Jesus through His union with God must have 
 had God's complete and inclusive knowledge of all 
 events, past, present, and to come, and must have had 
 it, without limit or possibility of growth, from the cradle 
 of Bethlehem to the Cross of Calvary. 
 
 Now for M. Blondel, who holds that the supernatural 
 action of God in man consists in a stimulation of his 
 
122 MODERNISM 
 
 natural active powers to an ever-growing apprehension of 
 the Divine, it might have seemed that such a conception 
 would prove unsatisfying. Yet he falls back upon some- 
 thing very much akin to it, in fear apparently of losing 
 all real hold upon our Lord's Divinity. Here his timidity 
 is rebuked, not only by Baron von Hiigel, but by the 
 author of the " Lettres Romaines." Both these writers 
 remind us of the very obvious fact that all apprehension 
 proceeds from the known to the unknown, or rather, 
 from the better-known to the less-known. Our know- 
 ledge of God is indeed the effect of a Divine grace ; but 
 that grace acts through our natural powers and through 
 our use of them in penetrating to the secret of certain 
 actual concrete facts. It is through these familiar facts 
 that God reveals Himself to us. Without our more 
 immediate knowledge of man we could never have 
 reached to the more distant knowledge of God. All our 
 conceptions of God are necessarily anthropomorphic. 
 The more we come to know of the nature and conditions 
 of human personality, the more likely are we to frame 
 analogies of the Divine nature which will be at least less 
 discordant with its reality. The essential difference 
 between scholastic and modern theology is not so much 
 a difference between the use of the deductive and inductive 
 methods, but proceeds rather from their different con- 
 ceptions of human personality. Scholasticism is no more 
 free than any other system from the necessity of finding 
 its theological starting-point in the known. It, too, is 
 to some degree inductive in its method. But it gives an 
 absolute value to a conception of God which was founded 
 in a less perfect notion of what is greatest and most 
 
THE "LETTRES ROMAINES " 123 
 
 worthy in human character, and deduces from that 
 imperfect conception even the character of the facts of 
 God's self-revelation. With a less imperfect, but still 
 perfectible and altogether relative view of what constitutes 
 worth in personality, and of the conditions under which 
 that worth is achieved, we not only do not need to impose 
 upon history a particular view of the facts which will 
 accord with the supposed necessities of a Divine revela- 
 tion, but are compelled to ascertain as accurately as we 
 can the facts through which the Divine revelation was 
 conveyed, in order to a better apprehension of it through 
 the supernatural grace of faith. 
 
 These are the positions enforced with a convincing 
 power by both Baron von Hiigel and the author of the 
 " Lettres Romaines." If, says the former, we knew 
 beforehand the full nature of the mystery of Divinity in 
 Jesus, if our conceptions of Divinity were adequate, then 
 we could understand the application of d priori methods, 
 even to the establishment of the facts of His life. If, 
 on the other hand, as the Christian faith asserts, the 
 reality of the Divine union with the humanity of Jesus 
 is unique, and for our intelligence of an inexhaustible 
 import, then it becomes us to learn in all humility by the 
 patient processes of critical science what the facts of His 
 human life really were. To force the facts to our con- 
 ception of what they ought to be is an instance of spiritual 
 pride and unteachableness, not the less reprehensible 
 because it may be the result of ignorance or of intellectual 
 sloth. " This method," says the author of the " Lettres 
 Romaines," " is in itself illogical. It is not by d priori 
 methods that we can determine the character of what 
 
124 MODERNISM 
 
 comes from God or is united to God, but only by d 
 posteriori methods. What would be thought of a 
 philosopher who should reason thus : * The world was 
 created by God, therefore there can be no evil in it.' We 
 should reply, ' Examine the physical reality of things, 
 before dictating to God the law of His creation. 
 Formerly theologians asserted that Holy Scripture was 
 inspired by God, which was true. But they concluded 
 from that premiss that it must therefore contain truth 
 as to the order of nature, which is a false consequence 
 deduced d priori. And is not this reasoning on a level 
 with that of the theologians who say, ' Jesus was God- 
 man or Man-God : therefore His humanity united to 
 His divinity cannot have been subject either to ignorance 
 or to development ? ' ' Can ' or ' cannot ' all that is mere 
 creation on our part. It is not our business to create 
 things, but to ascertain them. X priori a God-man of 
 imperfect knowledge (in his capacity as man, that is to 
 say) is no greater challenge to our ways of thought and 
 feeling than a God-man simply, or than a suffering God- 
 man. I am much mistaken or we have conceived God 
 uniting Himself to man as something which has changed 
 man, or again of man united to God as something which 
 is no longer man. The Christ of the theologians floats 
 indefinitely between real humanity and divinity. But 
 no, we must remind ourselves that Jesus was a real 
 man, like to His brethren in everything save sin only. 
 We must seek in accordance with the documents the 
 measure of the veritable results which were effected in 
 His humanity by its union with the Divinity. If the 
 documents tell us that Jesus developed in His human 
 
THE "LETTRES ROMAINES " 125 
 
 nature, that His knowledge was imperfect, that He was 
 tempted, that He suffered, we must believe them. And 
 if anyone is offended, we can only repeat the words of 
 Christ Himself : ' Beatus qui non fuerit scandalizatus in 
 me? We can only remind him that the Jews also were 
 offended by the idea of a crucified Man-God, and that 
 yet St. Paul neither denied nor minimised that ignominy, 
 the opprobrium crucis. In the same way we to-day must 
 not minimise the real and complete humanity of Jesus, 
 body, soul, intelligence, and will. We must boldly assert 
 it. According both to history and to dogma, the Christ 
 was a real, complete, and perfect man perfect, we mean, 
 in His human quality." 
 
 Nor do the writers from whom I have quoted at all 
 shirk the consequences of our Lord's imperfect human 
 knowledge, of His ignorance of the future course of 
 events in detail, including the outward character and 
 destiny of His own Church. Far from shirking them, 
 they find in that ignorance the strongest proof of our 
 Lord's human greatness, and that in accordance with 
 the surest conclusions of modern psychology as to the 
 nature and true greatness of human personality. " It 
 seems," says Baron von Hiigel, " that for M. Blondel the 
 Divine-human action of Christ, in order that it might 
 be really worthy of a God made man, really capable of 
 saving us, required that the human consciousness and 
 reflection of Jesus should embrace that action and be 
 entirely equal to it at the very moment when it was 
 determined and effected. That surely is contradicted 
 by all analogies drawn from the lives of the saints, and 
 especially of those who most nearly approached the 
 
126 MODERNISM 
 
 character of Jesus. Who indeed demands, whether 
 that he may admire the greatness of these saints or that 
 he may profit by their help, that there should be even a 
 distant approximation between their actions and a clear 
 consciousness of all that was implied in them ? Is it not 
 exactly the contrary which always happens ? We may 
 admit that St. Paul and the Poverello enjoyed an infinitely 
 deeper spiritual insight than our own, and that they 
 heroically followed that inner light. Yet do we not 
 regard them as all the greater and more helpful by their 
 example exactly because in every one of their acts they 
 passed beyond what their consciousness explicitly 
 realized at the moment they wrought them ? That is 
 assuredly the most profound and touching characteristic 
 of all specifically human life ; and how could our Lord, 
 Who came precisely that He might draw men, have failed 
 of this same characteristic, or not have been at this 
 point also truly man ? " 
 
 The author of the " Lettres Romaines " discusses the 
 same question of the limitations of our Lord's human 
 knowledge, of His defective and even erroneous prevision 
 of the future, in special connection with the foundation 
 and growth of the Christian Church. And he, too, 
 enforces the same conclusion as to the true human 
 greatness which this outstripping of conscious knowledge 
 by inspired action witnesses to and reveals. " Psychology," 
 he says, " in union with history, teaches us that the men 
 who have been truly great have never foreseen the 
 historical details of their enterprise, that the latter has 
 always surpassed their designs, their conscious purpose, 
 even their personal prevision. St. Francis of Assisi had 
 
THE "LETTRES ROMAINES " 127 
 
 no thought of a new religious order. Yet that is what 
 issued from the movement which he impressed upon the 
 souls of his friends and contemporaries. Now if that in 
 no wise lessens the greatness of St. Francis, is the great- 
 ness of Jesus any the more lessened by the admission 
 that He did not foresee the long course of His Church's 
 progress ? It was from Him and from Him alone that 
 it received the impulse by which it still lives after twenty 
 centuries of labour, of struggle, of suffering, and of joyous 
 fruitful life. That we may lay hold of this principle, let 
 us remember what recent psychology has placed in the 
 clearest light. The character of true greatness lies not 
 in consciousness, but in unconsciousness, or something 
 like it. When I write miserable little verses, I do so 
 with far more consciousness of what I want to say than 
 Pindar, Virgil, Shelley, or Victor Hugo felt when they 
 sang the most profound and inspired of their songs. It 
 seems almost as if the truth of this position had been 
 reached expressly to remove the scandal caused to some 
 minds by the idea of a Christ who was, not altogether 
 unconscious indeed, but much less conscious than was 
 formerly supposed, in His work of founding the Church." 
 And the same author sums up his argument in these 
 words : " Once more, the Christ of criticism, that is to 
 say the real Christ, is not inferior to the Christ of learned 
 or pious fancies. He is greater. He has the specific 
 character of true greatness. For that greatness does 
 not consist in the conscious prevision of the work which 
 one accomplishes. Rather it is measured by the 
 superiority of the work over the fully conscious intention. 
 It is to be found in a certain unconsciousness. Psychology 
 
 10 (1405) 
 
128 MODERNISM 
 
 discovers this unconsciousness in all those who have had 
 the right to say : ' Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus 
 itto' And who has ever had that right in equal measure 
 with the Lord Jesus ? " 
 
 These two documents, so contrasted in their style and 
 in the individual character which shines through them, 
 concur in their critical view of the facts of the Christian 
 revelation, and in their exposition of the certainties which 
 faith discovers in those facts. They will do much to 
 clear up some of the issues which have been raised by 
 the Loisy writings. The truth of history consists in the 
 establishment of what has actually happened and 
 appeared in space and time. It is necessary in order 
 to reach such truth to weigh all the available evidence, 
 interpreted through the medium of a matured psychology, 
 in scales as nicely adjusted as detachment from all 
 extraneous and disturbing preoccupations can make 
 them. The Christian revelation was in its phenomenal 
 vehicles and occasions a part of history, and its historical 
 reality cannot escape the ordinary tests. But again, the 
 Christian revelation was a Divine secret apprehended by 
 human souls through those facts. Here, too, truth has 
 its criteria, though they are no longer the criteria of 
 historical truth. The criterion of spiritual truth for the 
 Scholastic has been, as the author of the " Lettres 
 Romaines " reminds us, a barren fixity. Its real 
 criterion is, on the contrary, its power to produce life 
 and to incorporate the gains of life, its intrinsic growth 
 and its extrinsic fruitfulness. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 " IL SANTO " 
 
 WE are at a moment of critical change in the history of April, 
 religion. It may be at once admitted that it is too 1906 
 early to estimate the full measure of the change. But 
 certain aspects of it at least, and these the controlling 
 ones, are already clear enough. The study of religion is 
 passing from the region of the abstract into the region of 
 the concrete, from the religious formula to the religious 
 life. We are no longer satisfied with making an inventory 
 and an assay of the contents of the theological granary. 
 We want to see the seed growing, and to learn all we 
 can of the abiding conditions of its growth. We are 
 back again at the Parable of the Sower with its stress on 
 the comparative and contrasted values of soil, and its 
 implication that the seed sown in them all is the same 
 seed the universal Word of God. For us the life of 
 the saint has supplanted in importance the doctrine of 
 the theologian. The theological controversies of the 
 past are almost meaningless. The theological contro- 
 versies of the future are not yet denned. They must 
 wait upon the slow results of a comprehensive and patient 
 analysis of religious experience. The signs of this change 
 are on all hands. A whole literature is growing up to 
 bear witness to it and elicit or illustrate its meaning. 
 Religious psychology vies with the history of dogma 
 for the favour of the younger theologians, and helps 
 
 129 
 
130 MODERNISM 
 
 to interpret and supplement its results. The theology 
 which would make religion intelligible instead of burying 
 it under a mere heap of gratuitous unintelligibility has 
 had no more valuable contributions in our day than such 
 studies in concrete religious psychology, studies such, 
 for instance, as those of the Abbe Bremond on More and 
 Newman. And now, as was inevitable in the existing 
 conditions of successful literary appeal, the novel claims 
 its share in the work of religious renewal. Within the 
 past year, at least four religious novels marked by an 
 almost poignant sincerity have appeared. M. Rod's 
 " L'Indocile " is a concrete study in the conflict of actual 
 religious ideals. The great Styrian novelist, Rosegger, 
 has portrayed in a novel which has just been translated 
 into English, the effect of the Gospel story upon a soul 
 awaiting death in the silence of the condemned cell. 
 Madame Handel-Mazzetti's " Jesse und Maria " is a 
 study of the reaction upon each other of the Catholic and 
 Protestant types of devotion and heroism, a study which 
 in its justice and its sympathetic intelligence is now for 
 the first time possible since the sixteenth century dis- 
 ruption of Christendom. And the honour of this superb 
 act of truth, which is also a supreme act of faith, falls, 
 we ought to add, to a Roman Catholic writer. And, 
 lastly, there is Antonio Fogazzaro's " II Santo." 
 
 It is of this last that I wish to speak here. The question 
 which besets the thought and possesses the heart of the 
 Italian novelist is the means of the Church's salvation 
 from the four evil spirits which assail her life the spirit 
 of falsehood, the spirit of sacerdotalism (dominazione 
 del clero), the spirit of avarice, and the spirit of immobility. 
 
"IL SANTO" 131 
 
 For Fogazzaro, no answer to this question can be satis- 
 factory which would involve the destruction of the 
 Church's existing constitution and order. Throughout 
 the book there breathes a note of reverent submission to 
 her authority, of pious devotion to even her formal 
 tradition. But there breathes, too, the note of insistent 
 and pitiless sincerity which will recall authority to a sense 
 of its real spiritual mission, which will remind the formal 
 tradition of dogma that it is only the imperfect depositary 
 of the living tradition of holiness which is the Church's 
 past, only the provisional, if necessary, instrument of its 
 transmission to the future. The actual Church is not the 
 Kingdom of Heaven, but only its herald and servant. 
 But the Church that ought to be must grow out of the 
 Church that is, and therefore it must be free to grow out 
 of it. That is the responsibility which is laid upon the 
 momentary wielders of the Church's authority. They 
 are not responsible so much to the past that is half-dead, 
 as to the future which labours to be wholly alive. In 
 the loins of the present, the past and the future meet. 
 All of the past that can endure is that which endures 
 there in the act of spiritual procreation on which 
 the future depends. It is courageous insight into the 
 spiritual needs and realities of the present that justifies 
 authority, and not the timorous obstinacy which barri- 
 cades itself behind the letter of what was once a living 
 experience in the past. But I shall perhaps best do 
 justice to Fogazzaro's conception of the Church by 
 quoting some words which he has put into the mouth of 
 his saint : " The Church is the whole man, not a mere 
 group of outstanding and dominant ideas ; the Church 
 
132 MODERNISM 
 
 is the hierarchy with its traditional concepts, and it is 
 the lay world with its continuous hold upon reality, with 
 its continuous reaction upon tradition ; the Church is 
 official theology and the inexhaustible treasure of Divine 
 truth which reacts upon official theology ; the Church 
 does not die, the Church does not grow old, the Church 
 has in its heart more than on its lips the Living Christ, 
 the Church is a laboratory of truth in continuous action, 
 and God calls you to remain in the Church, to work in 
 the Church, to be in the Church fountains of living 
 waters." The words are addressed to those who in their 
 devotion to Christ had fled from the Church to the Saint 
 for guidance, who complained that " the Catholic Church, 
 which proclaims herself a minister of life, fetters and 
 suffocates to-day everything within her that lives with a 
 young and vigorous life, props up all that is falling to ruin 
 and decay." They no doubt express the faith in the 
 Church which the novelist would desire to claim as his 
 own. " You have turned to me," says the Saint, " with- 
 out knowing what you did, to learn that the Church is 
 not the hierarchy only, but is the universal assembly of 
 the faithful, a gens sancta ; that from the depth of every 
 Christian heart may burst forth the living water of the 
 same fountain head, of the same Truth." 
 
 And with this conception of the Church, Fogazzaro is 
 able to give his answer. What is needed for the reform 
 of the Church is a great Saint, one of those master souls 
 of the great lay world, who have so often, in times past, 
 arisen to testify of God and His immediate present 
 claims. And Fogazzaro has not feared to snatch his 
 Saint from the gutter of modern decadence. He is no 
 
"IL SANTO" 133 
 
 other than that Piero Maironi, whose neurotic liaison 
 with Jeanne Dessalle was chronicled in his last novel, the 
 " Piccolo Mondo Moderno." Yet, daring as the venture 
 was, no one, I think, who reads this novel will say that it 
 has not succeeded. Maironi concentrates about himself 
 all those men of goodwill, whether formally in commu- 
 nion with the Church or not, whether or not they will 
 ever formally enter within her pale, who are naturally 
 Christian, who are of the soul of the Church. And we 
 feel that, in spite of all the occasional extravagance 
 of his portraiture, he had the right to draw them, and 
 that in him the Church was coming to her true self and 
 recognizing and fostering her own children. 
 
 Here is his story, very baldly told. Brought to peni- 
 tence through the death of his wife and the ministrations 
 of a holy priest, Don Giuseppe Flores, Maironi had fled 
 from his sin and from all knowledge of his old world. At 
 the beginning of this book he is found a poor labouring 
 gardener -in the house of Santa Scolastica, at Subiaco. 
 He has left all his wealth behind him ; he lives in perpetual 
 fasts, submitting himself to a kind of mediaeval penance ; 
 he spends whole nights on the mountain side in prayer ; 
 he has refused himself in the austerity of his penance 
 even the hope of assuming the dress of a lay brother of 
 the order. Yet he is beloved by all, and especially by 
 his confessor, Don Clemente, a Benedictine of saintly life, 
 who sees in him the Saint that is destined, perhaps, to 
 the mission of recalling the Church to the true following 
 of Christ. Don Clemente is a disciple of Giovanni Selva, 
 a lay philosopher whose liberal theological teaching has 
 already made him suspect with the authorities at Rome. 
 
134 MODERNISM 
 
 Following upon a conclave of Liberals at Selva's house, 
 Don Clemente is denied by the new Abbot all further 
 communication with Selva, and Maironi is banished to 
 the Benedictine house at Jenne. Here he gains the 
 reputation of a miracle-worker among the common people 
 whom he tends in their sickness, till he is once more 
 driven forth, degraded this time by deprivation of the 
 lay brother's habit which he had been temporarily 
 permitted to wear. Fever-stricken by fasting and 
 exposure, he is conveyed by the Selvas to their home, and 
 there nursed back by them to health. With returning 
 health there comes to him the direction of the inner voice, 
 which, like the mystic that he is, he always trusts 
 unhesitatingly as the immediate word of God to repair 
 to Rome. There he soon becomes the centre of a little 
 band of disciples, most of them loosely connected with 
 the Church, but many of them also just those men of 
 goodwill for whom the Church has had no certain word 
 of truth. To these disciples he preaches the doctrine 
 that religion is life ; that it can only be lived aright in 
 submission to and co-operation with the Lord of Life, 
 who is the Spirit of Truth and of charity ; that every truth, 
 however acquired, must be reverently greeted as His gift, 
 and must be turned to account in action in His Spirit. 
 Long ago in the days of his early penitence he had seen a 
 vision in which he spoke out face to face with the Pope 
 the truth that God had committed to him. There is no 
 surprise for him, therefore, in the summons when at last 
 it comes. The Pope himself is represented as a kind of 
 Saint, but a Saint suffering from the impotence to which 
 his official position and his official surroundings have 
 
"IL SANTO" 135 
 
 condemned him. Maironi calls upon him to deliver the 
 Church from the four evil spirits which are corrupting 
 her life. In acquiescent silence, the Pope hears the 
 terrible indictment and the confident appeal, unhesitating 
 as a command of God. Maironi receives the benediction of 
 the Holy Father and departs into the night. But the hour 
 of his final martyrdom has struck. An attempt which the 
 Pope makes, in obedience to a prayer of Maironi's, to save 
 Selva's book from the censure of the Index is the signal 
 for the serpent-spring of the Vatican coterie. The Italian 
 Ministry of the Interior, manageable in such emergencies 
 in spite of the public outlawry which it has tamely to 
 endure at the hands of the Vatican, is compelled to forge 
 some means of banishing the Saint of Jenne from Rome and 
 Italy, so much the better if it be under some pretext that 
 will cast the lasting shadow of suspicion upon his name 
 and character. But neither the blustering violence nor 
 the wily blandishments of the modern Pilate avail to 
 shake the firm-set will of Maironi. He is saved from 
 forced and secret deportation by the fatal fever which 
 finds an easy prey in his wrecked constitution and wasted 
 body. One of his disciples, Mayda, the man of science, 
 professor in the University, at once intellectually agnostic 
 and profoundly religious, receives him into his house on 
 the Aventine. Through the long hours of weary nights 
 he tenderly nurses the Saint, while by day he teaches in 
 his lecture room to the youth of Rome the hard stern 
 truth of this universe of ordered process. Who will 
 apportion the rival merits of this service or of that in the 
 eyes of God ? But they are not rival merits, they are 
 indissolubly wed. Only, what God has joined together 
 
136 MODERNISM 
 
 we have too often put asunder. To me Mayda is one of 
 the most attractive figures in this sincere and fearless 
 drama of human reality. But to return to Maironi as 
 he feels the end draw near, he begs to be taken to the 
 gardener's hut, there to die among the flowers which he 
 has loved. And there he takes the last farewell of all 
 his friends ; of the common people of the Quarter who 
 file silently through the dying chamber to catch as a 
 last benediction the wonder on the face of the Saint they 
 have venerated, and alas ! after their fickle manner, 
 rejected, too, in the hour of his disgrace ; of his little 
 band of disciples ; of Selva, who had been for him a 
 master of living truth ; of Don Clemente, who had been 
 the brother of his love ; and last of all of the partner of 
 his ancient sin, who from the crucifix which he yields to 
 her from his dying hands receives at last the faith which 
 her intellect had always resisted even in the days of her 
 profound and humble penitence. So the latest of the 
 Saints enters into the white light of the Eternal Truth, 
 into the consuming fire of the Eternal Love, where lie 
 the secrets of the Eternal Judgment. 
 
 Of Maironi's last words to his disciples, I would cull 
 some fragments as only comment upon the story which 
 I have so imperfectly told. 
 
 " Purify the faith for the full-grown for whom the 
 food of babes is unmeet. This portion of your work is 
 for those who are outside the Church, whether they 
 belong to it in name or not, for those with whom your 
 intercourse will be continual. Labour to glorify the idea 
 of God by reverencing the truth above all things, and 
 teaching that there is no truth which is contrary to God 
 
"IL SANTO" 137 
 
 and His laws. Give equal care that babes be not offered 
 the food which suits grown men. Let not a corrupt or 
 imperfect faith offend you where the life is pure and the 
 conscience just ; for to the infinite depths of God there 
 is little difference between the faith of the little child and 
 your own, and if the conscience of the little child be 
 just, if its life be pure, ye will not enter before it into the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. Labour for the leavening of life 
 by the purified faith. This work is on behalf of those 
 who are in the Church and will remain in it ; for those 
 who sincerely believe in dogmas and would willingly 
 believe still more of them, who sincerely believe in 
 miracles and would willingly believe in many more, but 
 who do not sincerely believe in the Beatitudes, who say 
 to Christ, ' Lord, Lord,' but think it too hard a matter 
 to do all His will, nor are zealous to search it out in the 
 Holy Book, and know not that religion is before all else 
 action and life. Those who pray much, often in an 
 idolatrous spirit, teach to use, over and above set prayers, 
 that mystical prayer also, in which is the purest faith, 
 the most perfect hope, the most perfect charity, which of 
 itself purifies the soul and the life. Do I bid you assume 
 publicly the work of pastors ? No ; let each one labour 
 in his own family, among his own friends. He who can, 
 let him labour with his pen. So also will ye prepare the 
 soil whence pastors spring. My sons, I do not promise 
 that you will renew the world. Ye will toil in the night 
 like Peter and his companions on the sea of Galilee, 
 without visible reward ; but in the end Christ will come, 
 and then will your gain be great. Be ye poor, live as 
 poor men, take not pleasure in titles nor in robes of 
 
138 MODERNISM 
 
 honour, neither in personal authority, neither in collective 
 authority. Love those who hate you, hold yourselves 
 aloof from parties. Make peace in the name of God ; 
 accept not civil offices ; lord it not over souls nor seek to 
 direct them over much ; do not force your priests like 
 exotics in a hothouse ; pray God that ye be many, but 
 do not fear to be few ; do not suppose that you need 
 much human knowledge, you need only much respect 
 for reason and much faith in truth, which is universal 
 and indivisible." 
 
 Such is the brotherhood to which the author of this 
 remarkable novel would entrust the slow and patient 
 preparation of his Christian Utopia. It is a sincere return 
 to the spirit of the Gospel, a faithful attempt by one of 
 the faithful to rouse the Church out of her self-satisfaction 
 and recall her to the permanent conditions of the making 
 of the Kingdom. It is a sign of the times to which even 
 officialism dare not be blind ; for in these days the novel 
 is more powerful than even the most revolutionary 
 theological treatise. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE PAPAL COMMISSION AND THE PENTATEUCH 
 
 THE Catholic Scientific Congress which met at Fribourg February 
 in Switzerland in 1897, was an important event in the 1907 
 history of modern Catholicism. A note of vigorous life 
 and confident sincerity pervaded its deliberations, 
 especially with regard to Biblical questions ; and nowhere 
 was that note more conspicuous than in the paper on the 
 Hexateuch read by the Baron Friedrich von Hiigel. 
 But the Fribourg meeting had still more important 
 consequences. When the Congress met again in 1900, 
 the section dealing with Biblical questions had been 
 suppressed by order of Leo XIII ; and two years later, on 
 October 30th, 1902, a Special Commission was appointed 
 by His Holiness to deal with the development of Bibli- 
 cal studies. The choice of Father David Fleming as 
 Secretary of the Commission inspired Catholic scholars 
 with confidence, and gave them a real hope that the 
 questions raised by independent criticism would be 
 honestly met. But all such hopes were rudely dispelled 
 when, shortly after the accession of Pius X to the Papal 
 Chair, Father Fleming was relieved of his duties on the 
 Commission, and it seemed doubtful for a time whether 
 the Commission itself would not be dissolved. However, 
 another fate awaited it. What the scholars had hoped 
 might prove a sympathetic or at least forbearing assessor 
 of their labours was quickly turned, under reactionary 
 
 139 
 
140 MODERNISM 
 
 direction, into a scourge to reprove them withal. It is 
 true that the Commission did not seem anxious to press 
 matters immediately to a definite issue. As the Tablet 
 of the 28th July last, when announcing the first really 
 important decision of the Commission, somewhat naively 
 but veiy accurately put it : " The Biblical Commission 
 moves slowly so slowly that its published decisions 
 average rather less than one a year : the Biblical Com- 
 mission is cautious so cautious that hitherto its 
 decisions have been little more than a succinct nega- 
 tive to certain theories advanced to solve some grave 
 Biblical difficulties." 
 
 However, the oracle had at last spoken to some effect. 
 It is an ancient merit in oracles that their answers be 
 found flexible. Here, however, the answers were perfectly 
 definite and unescapable. If the judgments of the 
 Commission should at any future date require modifica- 
 tion, occasion for it must be found in the carefully pro- 
 posed questions to which its definite answers were given. 
 It is already urged by some of those Catholic apologists 
 who would like to stand equally well with the world of 
 scholarship and the world of authority, that such oppor- 
 tunities of escape are in fact to be found in the form of 
 the questions proposed. It is difficult, however, for the 
 ordinary mind to discover the grounds of such a hope. 
 That readers may form their own judgment, it may be 
 well to quote the text of the questions as translated in 
 the Tablet of July 28th, 1906 : 
 
 "i. Whether the arguments amassed by critics to 
 impugn the Mosaic authenticity of the Sacred Books 
 known as the Pentateuch are of sufficient weight, 
 
THE PAPAL COMMISSION 141 
 
 notwithstanding the very many evidences to the contrary 
 contained in both Testaments taken collectively, the 
 perpetual agreement of the Hebrew people, and the 
 constant tradition of the Church as well as the proofs 
 furnished by internal criticism of the text, to justify 
 the statement that these books have not Moses for their 
 author, but have been compiled from sources for the 
 most part posterior to the time of Moses ? 
 
 " Answer : No. 
 
 44 2. Whether the Mosaic authenticity of the Penta- 
 teuch necessarily postulates a redaction of the whole 
 work in the sense that it must be absolutely held that 
 Moses wrote with his own hand or dictated to amanuenses 
 all and everything contained in it ; or whether it is 
 possible to admit the hypothesis of those who think that 
 Moses conceived the work under the influence of divine 
 inspiration, and then entrusted the writing of it to some 
 other person or persons, but in such manner that they 
 faithfully rendered his meaning, wrote nothing contrary 
 to his will, and omitted nothing ; and that the work thus 
 formed, approved by Moses as the principal and inspired 
 author, was made public under his name ? 
 
 "Answer : No, to the first ; Yes, to the second. 
 
 "3. Whether it can be conceded, without prejudice 
 to the Mosaic authenticity of the Pentateuch, that Moses 
 in his work used sources, i.e., written documents or oral 
 traditions, from which, to suit his special purpose and 
 under the influence of Divine inspiration, he selected 
 some things and inserted them in his own work, either 
 verbally or in substance, summarised or amplified ? 
 
 " Answer : Yes. 
 
142 MODERNISM 
 
 "4. Whether, granted the substantial Mosaic authen- 
 ticity and the integrity of the Pentateuch, it may be 
 admitted that in the long course of ages some modifi- 
 cations have been introduced into it, such as additions 
 after the death of Moses, either inserted by an inspired 
 author or attached to the text as glosses or interpreta- 
 tions ; words and forms translated from the ancient 
 language to more recent languages ; and finally, faulty 
 readings to be ascribed to the error of amanuenses, 
 concerning which it is lawful to investigate and judge 
 according to the laws of criticism ? 
 
 " Answer : Yes ; due regard being paid to the 
 judgment of the Church." 
 
 This decision, signed by the secretaries of the Com- 
 mission, the Abbe Vigouroux and Dom Janssen, was 
 reported to Pius X, who approved, and ordered its 
 publication. Its present interest for us is that it has 
 been the occasion of two excellent letters just published 
 in a small volume by Longmans & Co., under the title, 
 " The Papal Commission and the Pentateuch." The 
 writers of these letters, it will be recognized by all, have a 
 right to speak on the questions raised by the decision. 
 In the first place, they are both Hebraists of undoubted 
 competence. Dr. Briggs has attained a conspicuous 
 place in the field of Biblical scholarship by his volume on 
 the Hexateuch, and by his collaboration with Dr. Brown 
 and Dr. Driver in the production of the new Hebrew 
 Lexicon, in which " the uses of all Hebrew words in the 
 Old Testament have been carefully examined and classified 
 according to their historical development in the litera- 
 ture." More than that, he has suffered in the cause to 
 
THE PAPAL COMMISSION 143 
 
 which he has devoted a large share of the interest and 
 activity of his life. It was ostensibly on account of his 
 critical conclusions on Old Testament matters that he 
 was expelled from the American Presbyterian Church, 
 of which he was a member, by its General Assembly. 
 The writer of the second letter in this little volume is 
 Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, to whose paper read before 
 the Catholic Congress at Fribourg I have already 
 referred. In the inner circle of international scholar- 
 ship he is known as one of the soundest Hebraists and 
 most fearless and competent critics now living. 
 
 But this is not the only, or even the chief, justification 
 for their interference in the questions raised by the 
 decisions of the Commission. It is undoubtedly open to 
 any competent scholar to criticise these decisions on their 
 merits. But to most scholars, if they are outside the 
 Church of Rome or lacking in sympathy with it, the task 
 of criticism other than the most perfunctory will no doubt 
 have seemed superfluous, in any case futile, and perhaps 
 even a little impertinent. It is not so with the writers of 
 these letters. Dr. Briggs is known almost as much for 
 his friendly attitude towards the Roman Church and for 
 his ardent hopes and labours on behalf of the reunion of 
 Christendom, as he is for his work as a Biblical scholar. 
 And Baron von Hiigel is a faithful son and devoted 
 servant of the Roman Church. An interchange of views 
 between two such men is of the first importance, and 
 must, we should hope, command the respectful attention 
 of the Roman authorities. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to enter here into the arguments 
 which both these writers adduce against the indefensible 
 ji (1405) 
 
144 MODERNISM 
 
 position at least from the point of view of criticism, 
 the only one which has any claim to be considered in the 
 question under discussion assumed by the Commission. 
 As Dr. Briggs succinctly puts it : "So far as the question 
 of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is concerned, 
 that has been settled in the arena of Biblical scholarship 
 in the negative." And his arguments, arrayed notwith- 
 standing their closeness with admirable clearness in a 
 dozen pages, are reinforced by Baron von Hugel out of 
 the abundance of his knowledge and his easy and 
 thorough command of it. I would only say that, if 
 anyone wishes to know what the expert has to say upon 
 this matter, he cannot do better than read Dr. Briggs' 
 letter in full, and the second part of the letter of Baron 
 von Hugel. But it may, I think, be of even greater and 
 more immediate interest to the ordinary reader to have 
 his attention turned to the third part of the Baron's 
 letter, in which he discusses the reasons for his hope 
 that even " the immensely conservative Roman Catholic 
 Church " may in time be led to accept and even to 
 welcome the assured results of independent criticism. 
 
 " Four necessities," he says, " are working within 
 Catholicism as such towards a final acceptance, however 
 slow and cautious, of a consistent and sincere historico- 
 critical method for the Bible." First of all, Catholicism, 
 by its very character as a historical and institutional 
 religion, " is wedded to history, and hence to historic 
 proofs and methods." " It is, at bottom, a sheer logical 
 impossibility, and a psychical condition of the most 
 unstable equilibrium or sceptical effect, both to appeal to 
 the facts, persons, and documents [associated with the 
 
THE PAPAL COMMISSION 145 
 
 Christian tradition] as downrightly historical, and to 
 refuse to submit them to thorough historical investigation." 
 Secondly, Catholicism is a missionary religion, a religion 
 that by its very nature must teach, and therefore must 
 learn in order to teach. " For you cannot teach whom 
 you do not understand, and you cannot win the man 
 with whom you cannot share certain fundamental pre- 
 suppositions." But in order to teach the educated 
 West-European world of to-day, Catholicism must 
 assimilate the intellectual temper of the cultivated non- 
 Roman world which is, " in part unconsciously, often 
 slowly yet everywhere surely, getting permeated and 
 won by critical standards and methods. A system 
 cannot both claim to teach all the world and erect an 
 impenetrable partition-wall between itself and the edu- 
 cated portion of that world." Thirdly, Catholicism is 
 essentially a " Church and Bible," not a " Bible only " 
 religion. The old Protestant Bibliolatry is not Catholic, 
 and Catholicism cannot afford to add to its intellectual 
 difficulties and increase its intellectual burdens by an 
 " un-Catholic super-exaltation of the Bible." And, 
 finally, Catholicism is a growth, not a mere logical and 
 analytical development of a fixed Revelation, but the 
 dynamic development of a real spiritual life. " However 
 rightly we may find a certain true uniqueness and the 
 final norm for spiritual truth and practice in our Lord's 
 Person, Life, and Teaching, and however legitimately 
 we may talk of a period of Revelation followed by one 
 of simple Assistance : there will, between Christ and His 
 Spirit and the nowhere utterly God-forsaken world into 
 which they have come, ever be a sufficient affinity for the 
 
146 MODERNISM 
 
 former to be able to penetrate, appropriate, satisfy, and 
 measure all the goodness, truth, and spiritual hunger 
 variously yet ever present in the world. From Moses 
 back to prehistoric times, forward to Christ, and on from 
 Christ to the end of time, we thus get one great chain 
 of slow, varying, intermittent, yet true development 
 occasioned by God in man, and moving from man 
 towards God. And if so, then the chief difficulty raised 
 by the critical view of the various documents disappears : 
 for such a truly dynamic conception would englobe and 
 spiritualise it all." 
 
 And finally, the writer of this passionately felt and 
 maturely conceived Christian Apologetic, for it is nothing 
 less, turns to two considerations which may abate the 
 ardour of the hope he has thus formed. Are there not 
 signs that the line of cleavage in Christendom is coming 
 to be lateral rather than horizontal, a cleavage occasioned 
 and determined by different contemporary mentalities 
 rather than by traditional confessional hostilities ? Are 
 there not signs that the " traditionalists '* of all con- 
 fessions are drawing closely together to meet the attack 
 of the " rationalists " of all confessions ? May not the 
 Pope become the leader, actual if not recognized, of a 
 crusade to rescue the Bible from the malevolence of the 
 critics ? Against the possibility of such an alliance and 
 to many minds, and not the least far-seeing, it is a very 
 real one Baron von Hiigel urges that " the immanental 
 peculiarities of the Catholic position would soon break it 
 up from the Roman side ; whilst on the Protestant side, 
 even such strongly individualistic Bible-Protestants as 
 the Congregationalists, the descendants of Cromwell and 
 
THE PAPAL COMMISSION 147 
 
 Milton, are steadily maturing a critically-trained body of 
 Ministers." 
 
 The second consideration is of more weight. It lies 
 in the rigid attitude of Rome in the past on all matters 
 which have become the object of a formal decision by 
 her. " When and where has Rome quite finally 
 abandoned any position, however informal and late its 
 occupation, and however demonstrated its untenable- 
 ness ? " And here the writer admits that he cannot 
 fully arrest the blow. " Rome alone can do so, and not 
 by words, but by deeds." However, he thinks he can 
 break its force, and he proceeds to make the attempt by 
 citing a number of instances, most of them from recent 
 history, where, though Rome has not formally receded 
 from untenable positions, has indeed in some cases quite 
 recently occupied them, Roman scholars have with 
 impunity not only abandoned them, but demonstrated 
 their general untenableness. So then, he concludes, 
 Rome may be, after all, more Catholic than she appears 
 to be. 
 
 I have allowed Baron von Hugel to speak in the main 
 for himself, first because I would not misrepresent him, 
 and secondly, because he is one of those writers whose 
 every word tells in that it has been wrung out of the total 
 spiritual energy of the man. The letter which he has 
 here written is not only a noble and quite unanswerable 
 retort to an obscurantist decision, (obscurantist, I mean, 
 as coming from a body of men professing to be scholars 
 and to focus their scholarship upon a single question 
 which has been minutely and with growing dispassionate- 
 ness examined by the most capable expert students of 
 
148 MODERNISM 
 
 the West during a hundred years) ; it is also, and 
 especially that part of it with which I have mainly dealt, 
 a magnificent contribution to that vital apologetic which 
 Christianity demands at the present hour. Before 
 leaving a plea for religious intelligence so entirely un- 
 tainted by one trace of the cramping polemic which so 
 often mars the words of even those writers on religious 
 themes who would claim to be tolerant and impartial, 
 yet so rooted in devotion to the Roman Church, I would 
 quote still another passage which it will be well for us all 
 to ponder. Personal as it is, perhaps because personal, 
 it ought to be a word of general and magnificent inspira- 
 tion. " Born in Florence, my imagination was early 
 impressed with the great figures of Dante and of 
 Savonarola, and, later on, by those of Marsilio Ficino 
 and his fellow Platonizers. The spacious outlook and 
 virile depth and tenacity of that early Catholic Renais- 
 sance still fire my blood ; neither Protestantism as such 
 (so pathetically understandable, yet so largely unjust 
 because ungenerous), nor a bitter, puny anti-Protestant- 
 ism, a Catholicism contracted to a mere negation of 
 negations, or to a system of the greatest possible ex- 
 clusion of trouble, trial, and danger can (so all my being 
 tells me) be the final, God-willed solution for all the 
 battles, heroisms, faults, sins, and glories of so many 
 centuries of Western Christendom." 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE OF DOGMA 
 
 THE appearance of M. Le Roy in the field of theological 190? 
 controversy was a notable event in the history of the 
 Liberal Catholic movement. M. Le Roy, as all readers 
 of the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale will know, is 
 a philosopher of assured competence, a distinguished 
 representative of the later French school whose chief 
 masters are M. Henri Bergson and M. Emile Boutroux. 
 He is also a devout and " practising " Catholic layman. 
 Two years ago in April, 1905, to be exact he published 
 in the Quinzaine an article in which he put and attempted 
 a reply to the question " What is a dogma ? " The 
 article provoked a ferment of discussion which has not 
 even yet subsided. M. Le Roy has at length collected a 
 number of the replies to the criticism which was directed 
 against him from the orthodox camp, and has published 
 them along with his original article in a volume of nearly 
 400 pages, entitled " Dogme et Critique." The book 
 forms perhaps the most important contribution of our 
 time to the discussion of the nature of dogma. Yet, 
 intensely modern as is its point of view, it but carries on 
 the almost uniform tradition of mystical theology, and 
 more especially the tradition of the Seraphic Doctor 
 and his later disciples. It is interesting to find a seven- 
 teenth century disciple of Duns Scotus, Frassen, using 
 such words as these : " Our theology is not scientific 
 
 149 
 
150 MODERNISM 
 
 knowledge. It is by no means speculative, but directly 
 practical. The object of theological knowledge does not 
 exist to be thought discursively, but to be wrought 
 actively."* Here is the whole philosophy of the 
 " primacy of action " already applied to the conception 
 of dogma. 
 
 I 
 
 It may be well to confine our exposition of M. Le Roy's 
 argument within the framework provided by his examina- 
 tion of the question in the original Quinzaine article. 
 Here he divides his subject into two parts. In the first 
 he demonstrates the impossibility of commending the 
 ordinary intellectualist conception of dogma to modern 
 ways of thinking. The second he devotes to a positive 
 exposition of the nature of dogma, such as will both 
 preserve its real religious value and gain acceptance for 
 it with the thinker of to-day. 
 
 We have passed, says M. Le Roy, beyond the stage of 
 partial and particular heresies. That stage was possible 
 only so long as there was agreement between the defenders 
 of orthodoxy and their heretical opponents on the first 
 principles of all discussion. Such agreement no longer 
 exists. The modern thinker does not reject this dogma 
 or that, founding his rejection on arguments drawn 
 from first principles held in common by himself and his 
 orthodox antagonist. He rejects the very idea of dogma, 
 and that for four reasons. In the first place, a dogma 
 claims to be a truth given on mere external authority. 
 
 * Theologia nostra non est scientia . . . Nostra theologia nullatenus 
 speculativa est, sed simpliciter practica . . . Theologiae objectum non 
 est speculabile, sed operabile. 
 
M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE OF DOGMA 151 
 
 Those who assert its truth not only deny the necessity, 
 but even affirm the impossibility, of demonstrating that 
 truth intrinsically. Now it is the first necessity of 
 modern thought to find even for its most fundamental 
 axioms some basis of certainty, if only by demonstrating 
 that those axioms are necessary conditions of knowledge, 
 certainties implied in every activity of the reason. It 
 owes all its success to its keeping in closest touch with 
 fact and requiring clear and unmistakable proof for 
 every detailed conclusion. The very idea, therefore, of the 
 strictly dogmatic proposition is wholly repugnant to it. 
 And in the most important matters of knowledge it 
 rightly requires the clearest and most unambiguous 
 proof, while it is just in these matters that it is asked to 
 believe on the naked assurance of authority. 
 
 But here the traditional apologist may reply that a 
 dogma is by no means given without proof. He admits 
 that he is unable to establish the how and the why of any 
 dogmatic truth whatsoever. Yet he claims to establish 
 its truth none the less, and points to the analogy of the 
 physicist who has often to accept facts which he cannot 
 theoretically explain, or to that of the historian who has 
 to accept all his knowledge on external evidence. But it 
 is evident that the analogy will not hold good. For the 
 physicist is compelled to accept facts which elude his 
 theory, just because they are facts of his immediate 
 knowledge, facts disclosed by minute observation and 
 exact experiment. But the facts which dogma asserts 
 can make no claim to be facts of this kind. Again, it is 
 true that the historian gains all his knowledge on the 
 evidence of others. But he admits the facts of such 
 
1$2 MODERNISM 
 
 knowledge exactly because they are facts of which in 
 like circumstances he has himself had direct experience. 
 In proportion as the reported facts are remote from the 
 facts of his own experience, either by distance in time 
 or by dissimilarity in their character and connection, it is 
 more difficult for him to give them credence or to accept 
 them as genuine. And here, again, the analogy tells 
 against and not for the truth of dogma in the mind of the 
 thinker who has had a modern training. For the facts 
 to which dogma witnesses are exactly of that disconcerting 
 and mysterious kind which would require overwhelming 
 evidence for their acceptance. 
 
 It is clear, then, that these pretended proofs of 
 dogmatic propositions have no demonstrative validity. 
 They rest inevitably upon the appeal to mere authority. 
 And here is another reason for the rejection of the very 
 idea of dogma by the modern mind. It cannot endure 
 the imposition of truth upon the mind from without. It 
 cannot even conceive the possibility of truth so enforced. 
 For it truth is the process of development of something 
 already given in the mind, of some inherent principle of 
 order or need of growth adapting itself to, and so 
 assimilating to itself, the facts of experience. " No 
 truth," as M. Le Roy puts it, " can enter into us except 
 it is postulated by something which precedes it as its 
 more or less necessary complement, just as food in order 
 to become effective nourishment supposes in him who 
 receives it certain preliminary dispositions and prepara- 
 tions, viz., the call of hunger and the power of digestion. 
 Even the establishment of a scientific fact presents this 
 characteristic, since no fact has any meaning and therefore 
 
M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE Otf DOGMA 153 
 
 any existence for us except in virtue of some theory out 
 of which it issues as a fact of our knowledge, and into 
 which as a fact of our knowledge it fits." So then 
 the attempt to establish truth by considerations and 
 arguments extrinsic to the truth itself is radically opposed 
 to the spirit, the attitude, and the method of modern 
 thought. 
 
 But in spite of all this, let us concede to authority the 
 right to teach truths by a simple affirmation which no one 
 has a corresponding right to criticise. In that case it 
 might legitimately be claimed that the truths taught 
 should have a clear and unmistakable meaning. But so 
 far is this from being the case with regard to religious 
 dogmas that their formulas are often couched in the 
 language of a philosophic system which it is no longer 
 easy even for the trained philosopher to understand, and 
 which is not free from the danger of suggesting equivocal 
 and even contradictory meanings. " The doctrine of the 
 Word, for instance, has close bonds of attachment with 
 Alexandrian Neo-Platonism, while the theory of matter 
 and form in the Sacraments, or that of the relations 
 between substance and accidents in the dogma of the 
 Real Presence are closely allied to Aristotelian and 
 scholastic conceptions. Now, these different philosophies 
 are sometimes doubtful as to their basis and obscure in 
 expression. In any case they have long since become 
 obsolete, and are no longer in use among philosophers and 
 scholars. To be a Christian, then, must one begin by 
 getting converted to these philosophies ? An enterprise 
 so exacting that many a believer would find himself 
 singularly embarrassed in presence of it ! And besides, 
 
154 MODERNISM 
 
 even that would not be sufficient, for the medley of 
 several languages, having their origin in conflicting 
 philosophies, constitutes still another difficulty even 
 more troublesome than the former." But M. Le Roy 
 points out that the confusion as to the meaning of dog- 
 matic statements does not end here. For many of the 
 terms which they employ are not even borrowed from 
 philosophies of the past, but are simple metaphors 
 borrowed from common sense such as the Divine 
 Fatherhood or the Divine Sonship. Now it is clearly 
 impossible to give a precise intellectual meaning to 
 these metaphors and so to fix their theoretical value. 
 As M. Le Roy says : " They are images inconvertible 
 into concepts." And so the confusion is increased by 
 the mixture of these imaginative symbols with the 
 abstract philosophic formulas of which we have already 
 spoken. A third cause, therefore, of the rejection of 
 dogmas by the contemporary mind is that they offer 
 it no meaning which can be thought out. M. Le Roy 
 quotes a saying of M. Belot : " The most embarras- 
 sing requirement which could be made of the generality 
 of believers would be that, before they were asked at 
 all for a proof of what they believe, they should define 
 exactly what it is that they affirm and deny." 
 
 But again, the contemporary mind rejects the idea of 
 dogma as a system of intellectual truth, because it is 
 useless and unfruitful. It does not fit in with the know- 
 ledge which the modern mind is most confident of posses- 
 sing, so as to form with it a coherent body of truth. 
 Because it is unchangeable, it remains alien to that 
 progress which is the very essence of truth. Because it 
 
M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE OF DOGMA 155 
 
 is transcendent, it has no relations with the effective life 
 of the intellect. This, says M. Le Roy, is the gravest 
 reproach which can be levelled against it at a moment 
 " when it is more and more clearly perceived that the 
 value of a truth is measured before everything else by 
 the services which it renders, by the new results which 
 it suggests, by the consequences with which it is 
 pregnant ; in short, by the vivifying influence which it 
 exercises over the whole body of knowledge." 
 
 II 
 
 It will be seen that what M. Le Roy shows to be anti- 
 pathetic to modern thought is not dogma itself, but the 
 particular conception of dogma which is current in the 
 orthodox apologetic. He holds, therefore, that this 
 intellectualist conception is not, and cannot be, the true 
 Catholic conception. But before going on to consider 
 what conception of dogma is possible which will commend 
 to the modern mind the reality to which dogma witnesses, 
 let us examine by particular instances whether the 
 intellectualist conception does in fact justify the claim 
 which it makes. That conception is that dogma is the 
 enunciation of a truth of the speculative or theoretical 
 order, without any demonstration and on the mere word 
 of authority. Every dogma ought, therefore, to be a 
 distinct and appreciable addition to the sum of our 
 knowledge. Let us examine, then, from this point of 
 view the dogma of the Personality of God. What 
 distinct idea, having its place and effect in the order of 
 our theoretical knowledge, is conveyed to us by the state- 
 ment that God is personal ? If the word is used to suggest 
 
156 MODERNISM 
 
 to us that the Divine nature is but a kind of idealization 
 of the human nature which we know, that it is but that 
 nature exalted to its perfect expression, then we are 
 landed in an anthropomorphism which Catholic theo- 
 logians would be the first to reject. If, on the other hand, 
 personality is used of the Divine nature to indicate its 
 incomparable and transcendent excellence, its use can 
 only create illusion. While suggesting something which 
 we know, it is employed to indicate something which, it 
 is implied, we cannot know. Here no truth of the 
 speculative or theoretical order, and destined to be 
 fruitful in that order, has been conveyed to us. As 
 M. Le Roy admirably puts it : " Either we define per- 
 sonality and fall inevitably into anthropomorphism ; or 
 we do not define it, and fall no less inevitably into 
 agnosticism." 
 
 Or again, let us take the dogma of the Resurrection of 
 Jesus. If the purpose of this dogma is to add to our 
 knowledge by guaranteeing to us the exact manner in 
 which a certain fact was accomplished, if it is a state- 
 ment having its place in the intellectual order, then we 
 must first ask ourselves what is implied by the word 
 " resurrection." Does that word imply that after three 
 days Jesus reappeared in the same life-conditions as those 
 which had governed His earthly life ? The Gospels 
 themselves expressly state the contrary. " The idea 
 represented by the word ' life * has not, then, the same 
 content when we apply it to the period which preceded 
 the Crucifixion and to that which followed it. What, 
 then, does it represent when applied to this second period ? 
 Nothing which can be expressed in an intellectual 
 
M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE OF DOGMA 157 
 
 concept." Here, as in the case of personality, another 
 word ought to be adopted whose application might be 
 reserved to the unique case to which alone it corresponds. 
 
 Or again, let us take the dogma of the Real Presence. 
 A being is ordinarily said to be present only when it can 
 be perceived or manifests itself through perceptible effects. 
 Now the dogma itself denies both these characters to the 
 Presence which it affirms. That Presence is mysterious 
 and unique, and its manner is not in the slightest degree 
 conveyed, at least as an addition to our theoretical 
 knowledge, by the use of that word. So the conception 
 of dogmas as statements communicating to us theoretical 
 knowledge breaks down at every point. 
 
 But these very instances which we have chosen may 
 suggest to us a truer conception of the nature of dogma. 
 The dogma of the Personality of God may not add to our 
 speculative knowledge of the nature of God ; but it serves 
 to direct that practical knowledge of Him which is the 
 only knowledge that religion is concerned with. It says 
 in effect to us : " Conduct yourselves in your relations 
 with God as you would in your relations with a human 
 person. " In the same way, the dogma of the Resurrection 
 of Jesus does not add to our knowledge of the new life 
 which Jesus lived after death or to the manner of the 
 transformation of the old life into the new. But it says 
 to us : " Let your relations to Him now be what they 
 would have been before His death, or what they are to 
 your own contemporaries," And again, the dogma of the 
 Real Presence conveys to us no knowledge of the modality 
 of that presence. But it enjoins upon us the necessity of 
 preserving in the presence of the consecrated Host such 
 
158 MODERNISM 
 
 an attitude of spirit as we should feel in the presence of 
 Jesus Himself if He were visible to us. 
 
 Dogmas, then, are primarily rules of practical conduct, 
 practical guides to the spirit and conduct of the religious 
 life. Their value is religious and not speculative. And 
 that this must be the prerogative character of dogma 
 will be evident when we reflect that Christianity is not a 
 speculative philosophy, but " a source and a rule of 
 life, a discipline of moral and religious action." The 
 intellectualist, indeed, does not deny this practical 
 character of dogma, but he insists that it is secondary 
 and derived. For him dogma is primarily a revelation 
 adding to our speculative knowledge, and just because 
 it is so can make and enforce its practical claims upon 
 life. He places theology before religion, and makes the 
 latter depend upon the former. But in so doing he 
 reverses the actual order of life. For the propositions of 
 dogma are not within the comprehension of most of those 
 who have led, or are leading, the Christian life with a 
 steadfast faithfulness and loyalty. And that is to grant 
 what we have seen cannot be granted, that they are 
 comprehensible propositions at all in the sense of additions 
 to or developments of our theoretical knowledge. The 
 intellectualist, therefore, would make the religious life 
 depend upon the prior enunciation and acceptance of 
 unintelligible propositions. But let us accept dogma as 
 fitted to man's practical needs, and its propositions are 
 by no means unintelligible. For then all its metaphors 
 drawn from the language of common sense, its anthropo- 
 morphic symbols and analogies, are full of force and 
 meaning. The dogmatic proposition exists for man and 
 
M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE OF DOGMA 159 
 
 his religious life, and therefore naturally and rightly 
 clothes itself in language drawn from the most intimate 
 and vital human relations and experiences. 
 
 But it may be urged that such a conception of dogma 
 altogether separates our knowledge of God from that 
 supreme expression of human life the life of thought. 
 No consequence of such a conception -could be more 
 unwarranted. And indeed, the need of some reconciliation 
 between the life of thought and the nature of dogma 
 so conceived arises immediately out of the conception 
 itself. For, it may be urged, if the voice of authority 
 is not justified in uttering dogmas which have a theo- 
 retical import, how is it any the more justified in teaching 
 dogmas of practical import only ? The necessity of 
 an appeal to the reason at once declares itself. And 
 the answer which reason itself gives is that there is 
 no authority which can impose speculative truth, but 
 that there is an authority whose very function it is to 
 direct conduct and the life of the spirit which expresses 
 itself in conduct. And the Church is just such an 
 authority. For the Church is above everything else the 
 generalised tradition of the highest religious experience. 
 From that character of hers proceeds all her authority. 
 By the degree in which she preserves that character and 
 makes it effectual, the total economy of her authority 
 and all her authoritative action must be judged. The 
 modern mind may still criticise this use of the Church's 
 authority, but it will not challenge as irrational her right 
 to its use. 
 
 But again, there is a necessary relation between dogmas 
 and thought. For thought is involved in all action. It 
 n (24*3) 
 
160 MODERNISM 
 
 is impossible to act save under the guidance of some kind 
 of vague diffused light. We choose our path because of 
 some sufficient light which determines the choice. The 
 light that guides us is not of course the light of discursive 
 reason. That is a light which would not so much guide as 
 compel. But there is what we call the experience of life, 
 which is but the operation of thought in all our actions. 
 And so we do not accept dogmas blindly. We accept 
 them because of their rational conformity with experience. 
 Whereas, if they were indeed what the intellectualist 
 represents them to be, revelations of speculative truth, 
 they would compel our acceptance, they would render 
 impossible that act of faith which is rooted in the freedom 
 of the will and which theology itself asserts to be the only 
 method of their acceptance. 
 
 And again, it is because dogmas have a practical aim 
 that they can claim in a very real sense, in the only 
 admissible sense, to be unchangeable. For the practical 
 life is uniform in its motives and texture, and therefore 
 appeals to it can preserve the same meaning for all. If 
 dogmas had primarily an intellectual character, and so 
 far as they had that character, they would necessarily 
 convey a different meaning in different ages and to men 
 of different intellectual culture. But it is the very claim 
 of religion that they should always and everywhere make 
 the same effectual appeal, and that is only possible when 
 they are conceived of as primarily rules of life. 
 
 But dogmas have a still closer connection with thought. 
 For, however practical their immediate import, they 
 witness to a world of unseen reality with which they 
 desire to bring our action into relation. And we cannot 
 
M. LE ROY ON THE NATURE OF DOGMA 161 
 
 help thinking of that world of reality as best we can, and 
 bringing it into ordered intellectual relation with the 
 rest of our knowledge. We are forced to form images 
 of that world whereby it may correspond with and fit into 
 the framework of our other knowledge. These systems 
 of images and analogies constitute those theological 
 constructions which have succeeded each other throughout 
 the Christian ages. So it is that theology grows out of 
 religion, that the speculative element of dogma is 
 secondary and not primary, that the activity of the dis- 
 cursive reason in framing dogmatic statements is subse- 
 quent to those affirmations of faith in which nevertheless 
 the reason inherent in every act of life is implied. 
 
 But finally, M. Le Roy holds that there is an immediate 
 speculative import in dogma. Yet even that import is 
 determined by its practical character. He insists that 
 every dogma has at least a negative value in the order 
 of speculative thought. If it does not positively deter- 
 mine truth, at least it excludes and condemns certain 
 positions as erroneous. For instance, if it asserts that 
 God is personal, it teaches nothing explicit about this 
 personality, it does not reveal its nature or provide any 
 precise idea of it. But it denies " that God is a mere law, 
 a formal category, an ideal principle, an abstract entity, 
 a universal substance, or some cosmic force diffused 
 throughout the universe." In the same way the dogma 
 of the Resurrection of Jesus does not reveal the means 
 by which that unique fact was accomplished or the nature 
 of Christ's second life. But it denies that His death set 
 a term to His action upon the world. And it denies, too, 
 that His present action upon the world is similar to that 
 
162 MODERNISM 
 
 of some dead-and-gone thinker whose influence remains 
 living and fruitful, and whose work is followed by 
 long-continued effects. Again, the dogma of the Real 
 Presence enunciates no theory of that Presence, nor even 
 teaches us in what it consists. But it warns us that the 
 Presence is not to be understood in certain ways, that, 
 for example, the consecrated Host must not be held to be 
 merely a figure or symbol of Jesus. It is evident how this 
 negative significance of dogma is determined by and 
 complementary to its positive practical character. It is 
 just the danger to its practical and directive import that 
 has in fact always motived, and can alone justify, its 
 negative witness in the sphere of speculative thought. 
 M. Le Roy sums up his argument in two propositions : 
 
 1. The intellectualist conception which is current to-day 
 renders insoluble most of the objections provoked by the 
 idea of dogma. 
 
 2. The doctrine of the primacy of action, on the con- 
 trary, provides for a solution of the problem without 
 sacrificing either the rights of thought or the requirements 
 of dogma. 
 
PART II 
 
 Facts and Forces 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE FRENCH ELECTIONS OF IQO2 
 
 M. WALDECK-ROUSSEAU may return to his practice at June. 
 the Bar and escape definitely from the dust of the poli- 1902 
 tical arena. But, none the less, he will remain one of 
 the three great statesmen of the Third Republic. With 
 Gambetta and Ferry he will rank as its saviour in a time 
 of crisis. Since the crisis, forced by the letter of 
 MacMahon which dissolved the ministry of Jules Simon 
 on the famous Seize Mai in the year 1877, the Republic 
 has known no such peril, not even in the mad days of 
 Boulangism, as that which it had to face in the darkness 
 and confusion of the terrible Dreyfus struggle of 1899. 
 When on the 22nd of June in that year the new President 
 of the Council attempted, amid a scene of indescribable 
 tumult which can be but dimly realized by those who 
 read the report in the Journal Officiel, to explain his 
 programme to the Chamber of Deputies, it seemed 
 impossible to hope that his Ministry would last longer 
 or be more successful than that of his immediate 
 predecessors. Yet he carried Revision, brought back the 
 poor prisoner of the Devil's Isle and set him before his 
 new judges at Rennes, granted him a free pardon when 
 he had been once more condemned, and stanched the 
 wounds of a lacerated France by the act of general 
 amnesty. The work of Republican defence seemed to 
 be complete, and all the voices of reaction called for the 
 
 165 
 
166 MODERNISM 
 
 resignation of the Minister whose mandate was, according 
 to them, exhausted. But he himself interpreted his duty 
 otherwise. The work of Republican defence involved, in 
 his opinion, a development of Republican activity. He 
 threw down the gauntlet to the Clerical party in the 
 Associations Law of last July. It was a bold, some 
 thought a rash and even suicidal, move. There was a 
 wild scramble of all the forces of reaction to pick it up. 
 Under the standard of the " Ligue de la patrie fran9aise," 
 which M. Anatole France has called with mordant wit 
 the " Ligue de la patrie romaine," the reaction marshalled 
 its forces confident of victory. Had not the Angel 
 Gabriel appeared in a village of Touraine to the prophetic 
 child, Mdlle. Couesdon, and announced the victory of the 
 Nationalists in heavenly verses ? Had not pious ladies 
 stinted themselves of legitimate social pleasures, 
 abandoned their dances and receptions throughout the 
 winter, that they might fill the electoral war-chest ? And 
 the result has been that on the clearest issue on which an 
 election has been fought in the history of the Third 
 Republic, the reaction has been hopelessly beaten. M. 
 Waldeck-Rousseau's Government has a clear majority of 
 close upon a hundred over the combined forces of 
 Royalists, Rallies, Nationalists, and anti-Ministerial 
 Republicans. The Republican Concentration, for which 
 the Temps timorously clamoured in the weeks before the 
 election, has become so unnecessary that even that 
 careful journal no longer refers to it. The new President 
 of the Council, whoever he may be, whether M. Waldeck- 
 Rousseau or M. Barthou or M. Doumer or another, can 
 count on a clear majority of the Left without turning a 
 
THE FRENCH ELECTIONS OF 1902 167 
 
 wistful eye to the benches occupied by MM. M61ine, 
 Ribot, Poincar6, and Aynard. 
 
 Now much as English Liberals, and indeed Englishmen 
 generally, may rejoice over this victory of the Left, there 
 is something about it which must sadden and disturb us. 
 For it is essentially a victory of Anti-Clericalism. At 
 first sight, indeed, that need not disturb us at all. It 
 ought to be but one reason the more for profound satis- 
 faction with the result. The use of the organized forces 
 of the Church for mere political wreckage, any attempt 
 on the part of the Church to determine the form of State 
 organization, is a prostitution of its sacred functions, for 
 which it deserves whatever punishment it may incur. 
 And that is, unfortunately, the part which the Church 
 has consistently played since the proclamation of the 
 Third Republic. She has shrunk from no alliance, how- 
 ever incongruous, she has recoiled from no stratagem, 
 however mean and unworthy, if haply she might maim 
 the existing Constitution. It was her action in the crisis 
 of the Seize Mai that drove Gambetta into the declaration 
 that clericalism was the enemy a declaration which has 
 ever since been the touchstone of Republican policy. 
 But Anti-Clericalism had become distinctly less virulent, 
 it had spent its force and relapsed into the impotence of 
 a traditional shibboleth, during the Nineties. A wise 
 Church could have exorcised that evil spirit. Never had 
 there been such an opportunity of doing so. The Pope 
 had wisely called upon French Catholics to rally to the 
 Republic only, we are told, to rouse the pious ladies of 
 Royalist households to pray for his conversion. The 
 intellect of France had been turning with sympathy, and 
 
168 MODERNISM 
 
 its heart with yearning, to the old truths and hopes of the 
 Christian religion. The foremost names in literary France, 
 men like M. Coppe'e and M. Brunetiere and M. Bourget, 
 were rallying to the Church. But to the Old Guard they 
 remained suspect, barely tolerated. The secret distrust 
 with which they were regarded, in spite of the political 
 apostasy to which many of them were ready to commit 
 themselves in the supposed interests of their recovered 
 faith, found open expression some months ago in the 
 manifesto of the honest and straightforward, if distinctly 
 reactionary, Mgr. Turinaz, Bishop of Nancy " Les 
 Perils de la foi et de la discipline dans 1'eglise francaise." 
 Every advantage which the Church had in the changed 
 spirit of the time she seemed anxious to reject or annul. 
 And then came her crowning opportunity and her great 
 refusal the " affaire Dreyfus." It seemed almost 
 designed to be the touchstone of the zeal for righteousness, 
 or call it mere fair play, of every corporate unity in the 
 life of France. And the only thing it proved with regard 
 to the Church was her blindness of heart or her readiness 
 to turn the sacred cause of justice into a weapon of 
 political attack, her moral indifference or her immoral 
 chicane. It would be difficult to decide which is the more 
 charitable account of her action were it not only too 
 clear that all charity is forbidden, and that her attitude 
 revealed both the one and the other. She stirred into a 
 loathly and poisonous life in the national breast what 
 M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, himself a faithful son of the 
 Church and one of those moderate Liberals who do honour 
 to France, has well called "les doctrines de haine." 
 Through the veins of France there ran once more the fiery 
 
THE FRENCH ELECTIONS OF 1902 169 
 
 poison of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Protestantism. And the 
 Church cannot be relieved of the odium of having 
 deliberately inoculated the nation, and of all the bitter 
 consequences which even yet that action may entail. 
 Two, at least, of her most powerful Congregations, to 
 which were committed the greatest influence for good or 
 for evil which any body can enjoy, the influence of the 
 School and the influence of the Press, stand condemned 
 in the judgment of the plain practical man the Jesuits 
 and the Assumptionists. One might have hoped that the 
 Christian School would have justified itself by the presence 
 of some instinct for justice in its former pupils. One 
 might have hoped that a Christian Press would have 
 evinced a more worthy temper than the violence and 
 insanity of the Croix. The tragedy of the present 
 situation in France is that the Church seems anxious to 
 prove even to the most patient of the bien pensants that 
 which a hostile world had already proclaimed to be beyond 
 all need of proof her constitutional incapacity to under- 
 stand the modern spirit, to discipline and control it in 
 those permanent interests of humanity which are always 
 spiritual. During a whole decade she had an unexampled 
 opportunity, alike in the growing goodwill of the best 
 representatives of the modern spirit and in the insensible 
 alleviation of the hatred with which she had been 
 undoubtedly menaced, of learning and answering to the 
 claims which the time made upon her. But she has 
 absolutely refused to learn. Her only answer to the 
 spirit of the new age has been an uncompromising 
 anathema. It seems as though she had deliberately 
 sought to justify and accentuate the suspicion with which 
 
170 MODERNISM 
 
 the Revolution spirit regarded her by launching against 
 it a declaration of irreconcilable enmity. She might 
 have revealed to its confident and heady materialism its 
 fatal insufficiency, she might have tempered it with a 
 sense of spiritual possibility and moral purpose, if she 
 had only come out into the open and met it on equal 
 terms. But she chose instead to ban it from the spiritual 
 twilight of the sacristy. She might have humanised and 
 touched to issues of spiritual fruitfulness its somewhat 
 abstract and barren idealism. But she chose instead to 
 curse it altogether as a fatal and Satanic delusion. On 
 the side of positive action the France of the Revolution, 
 and especially of the Third Republic, has unfortunately 
 only known the Church as a wily and implacable enemy 
 incessantly working for its destruction by underhand 
 diplomacy and crooked intrigue. Her very virtues have 
 made her suspect with the Republic, since they have 
 been consistently directed to its ruin. The self-sacrifice, 
 the devotion, the unexampled charity of Catholic France 
 are but one menace the more for Republican France. 
 The zeal of the teaching orders, of the Christian Brothers 
 and the Jesuit Fathers, is quite legitimately dreaded by 
 the authority which guides the State. It is always 
 unconsciously, even when it is not deliberately, directed 
 to undermining the principles on which the State rests. 
 This is an impossible attitude save on one assumption 
 viz., that the modern spirit is really an inspiration of Satan. 
 In that case the Church of France is magnificently and 
 heroically in the right, except indeed in so far as she 
 condescends to fight the spiritual enemy with weapons 
 of his own forging. And that unfortunately must be, in 
 
THE FRENCH ELECTIONS OF 1902 171 
 
 any case, a very considerable modification of the respect 
 which her uncompromising opposition to the false gods of 
 the State might otherwise inspire. But if she is right, 
 then the Christianity of England, of America, and of 
 Germany are hopelessly wrong. Their patient and 
 tempered optimism, their readiness to make the best of 
 the world as it is and to refuse to take up their abode in 
 the charnel-house of the past, are but the evidences of a 
 cowardly and compromising spirit or of an incurable 
 spiritual blindness. And if she is right and they are 
 wrong, then religion is doomed. Religion itself is the 
 enemy in the victorious path of the materialistic spirit 
 incarnate in the modern State. That is, unfortunately, 
 the conclusion at which the anti-clerical temper in France 
 has arrived. Anti-clericalism has become, and the 
 attitude of the Church has forced it to become, anti- 
 Christianity, even anti-Theism. It is against the religious 
 spirit itself that an increasing number of French electors 
 vote, because for them the religious spirit is the monopoly 
 of that Church which is the irreconcilable enemy of 
 every ideal they cherish. There are few things more 
 significant than the rout of the Abbes in the late elections. 
 Wherever they stood, in the Creuse, in the Isere, in the 
 Lot, in the Meurthe et Moselle, in the Maine et Loire, 
 they have been defeated, and, as a rule, defeated by 
 enormous majorities. Only at Hazebrouck, in the Nord, 
 was the Abb6 Lemire, the " heretic of the Soutane " and 
 Christian Democrat, unassailable even by the Church 
 which suspects him. The Abb6 Gayraud, who alone is 
 like-minded with him, had actually to face a clerical 
 enemy, the Abb6 St6phan, in the Catholic constituency 
 
172 MODERNISM 
 
 of Brest only, however, to prove the weakness of the 
 official opposition of the Church to her own large-hearted 
 and clear-sighted children. 
 
 The tragedy of the situation is that liberty itself is in 
 danger, that liberty indeed cannot exist in the midst of 
 the civil war to which France is a prey the war between 
 two ideals which refuse to meet, and yet in whose 
 reconciliation is the only hope for her future. It is quite 
 possible that the triumphant Left may think the time 
 opportune for annulling the last guarantees of the Loi 
 Falloux for liberty of teaching, may restore the monopoly 
 of the University, may make it illegal for the Congre- 
 gations to teach. No greater disaster could overtake 
 France, for then religion would disappear as an element 
 in moulding her future. But if by any evil fortune the 
 liberalism of the Charter of 1830 should at last founder, 
 the Church must herself bear a very large share of the 
 responsibility for a veritable spiritual catastrophe. Even 
 yet she has the chance of abandoning her intransigent 
 attitude of learning nothing and unlearning nothing. 
 There are not wanting perhaps signs that she is still 
 capable of the supreme virtue of teachableness. The 
 Dominicans produced the greatest Catholic Liberal of 
 the last half of the nineteenth century, the late Pre 
 Didon, and though they did not treat him too well, they 
 seem at least to have acquired something of his liberal 
 temper. They are now among the authorised Congrega- 
 tions under the new law. There is surely, too, reason, 
 and very great reason, for hopefulness in the changed 
 theological temper of the School of the New Apologetic, 
 the school against which the fury of the traditional 
 
THE FRENCH ELECTIONS OF 1902 173 
 
 scholasticism has flung with perfect justice what it con- 
 siders as the damning epithet of Kantism. Yet it can 
 afford to be complacent under the bitterest attacks, for 
 has it not as its chief patrons the enlightened Archbishop 
 of Albi, Mgr. Mignot, and the Bishop of La Rochelle, 
 Mgr. Le Camus, who has revised on modern lines the 
 theological teaching of his diocesan seminary ? With 
 such forces at work, it is not too much to hope that the 
 Church of France may yet at the eleventh hour be able 
 and willing to undertake that task of reconciliation which 
 is, in virtue of her Divine mission, peculiarly her own. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE NEW APOLOGETIC IN FRANCE 
 
 August. IN the French Church Liberalism has been sporadic 
 1902 throughout the whole course of the century which has 
 just ended. But its fortunes have been varied rather 
 than happy. It is a little disquieting to those of us who 
 are following with a sympathetic interest the latest of 
 these movements to recall the fate of its predecessors. 
 We remember the fate of that little band of distinguished 
 Liberal Catholics who wrought something greater than 
 they knew, who dealt a fatal blow to the last remains of 
 the old Gallican liberties, and established in the Church 
 of France the Ultramontanism which crushed its authors. 
 We remember the greatness of soul, the austere saintliness, 
 of the excommunicated Lamennais. We remember 
 Gratry, Perreyve, Montalembert. We remember with 
 mixed feelings of admiration and pity Lacordaire, who 
 was not strong enough to stand by the friend who had 
 inspired all that was best in him when that friend was 
 placed under the Church's ban, but who closed a career 
 of pathetic disillusion with the words on his lips : 
 " I die a penitent Catholic, but an impenitent Liberal." 
 The Liberal movement had perished by the instrument 
 which it had so elaborately forged. Independence of 
 thought and of action seemed to have vanished from 
 the Church which had been its chosen home. Yet it 
 had not utterly disappeared. Again we remember 
 
 174 
 
THE NEW APOLOGETIC IN FRANCE 175 
 
 Mgr. d'Hulst, Lenormant, the Abb6 de Broglie. Above 
 all we remember the sublime figure of the second great 
 Dominican of the century, Pere Didon. We have been 
 reminded by those exquisite letters which have just 
 appeared,* of the exile of Corbara, of the great spirit who 
 could appreciate so fully from the heart of an alien 
 communion the religious sincerity and greatness of 
 Germany, who detected unerringly the sources of reli- 
 gious weakness in his own land, and devoted the closing 
 years of his life in a spirit of patient courage and faith 
 to a humble attempt at their removal. 
 
 And now once more the Liberal movement has declared 
 itself this time decisively in the sphere of dogma. 
 During the past decade the breath of a new life has been 
 stirring among the dry bones of the old theology, till at 
 last they have begun to move as living forms, invoking 
 the attention of all those who are interested in such 
 resurrection. Religious thought in France is fast coming 
 into line with those developments which have been long 
 familiar to us in the theology of Germany, Scotland, 
 America, and England. And what is most interesting 
 and hopeful in this change is that it is by no means 
 confined to academic circles. It has its representatives 
 among bishops ruling great dioceses and humble parish 
 priests or country curates absorbed in the constant round 
 of pastoral work, as well as among seminary professors 
 and the occupants of chairs in Catholic Faculties. The 
 protagonist of this movement, which calls itself the " New 
 Apologetic," but which we may more intelligibly, if less 
 accurately, name the " New Theology," is an Archbishop 
 
 * In the Revue des Deux Mandes, Jan. and Feb., 1902. 
 13 (2405) 
 
176 MODERNISM 
 
 Mgr. Mignot, the Archbishop of Albi, a diocese made 
 famous (or infamous) in the history of the thirteenth 
 century by the relentless crusade of Simon de Montfort 
 and his Dominican allies against its heretical inhabitants, 
 and possessing a certain interest, even in the twentieth 
 century, through having for its representative in the 
 Chamber of Deputies the great Socialist tribune and 
 orator, M. Jaures. And Mgr. Mignot is by no means the 
 only Bishop whose name is prominently associated with 
 the " New Theology." Mgr. Le Camus, the newly- 
 appointed Bishop of La Rochelle (another historic strong- 
 hold of heresy this time that of the sixteenth century) 
 has had the courage to remodel the teaching of his 
 diocesan seminary and to abandon the sacred tradition of 
 scholasticism in the training of the future priests of his 
 diocese. Many other Bishops are credited with an 
 affection for the new learning, among them Mgr. Servonnet, 
 the Archbishop of Bourges, Mgr. Lacroix, Bishop of 
 Tarentaise, and Mgr. Fuzet, Archbishop of Rouen. But 
 at least they have not declared themselves so definitely 
 as Mgr. Mignot by his discourse on the Method of 
 Theology or Mgr. Le Camus by his revolutionary change 
 in the instrument of seminarist study. 
 
 To those who think of Roman theological science as 
 being mainly a study of the catalogues of fossilized dogmas 
 carefully arranged by the great systematisers of the past, 
 the originality, the freshness, the variety of contemporary 
 French theology will probably be a surprise. Of course 
 it is proverbially difficult for the outsider to estimate 
 aright the real force of movements which to him present 
 a show of strength. Boldness or even violence in 
 
THE NEW APOLOGETIC IN FRANCE 177 
 
 innovation may often go with, may often be accounted 
 for by, a contemptuous indifference or a serene and 
 unregarding assurance on the part of established beliefs. 
 But there are many signs that the New Theology in 
 France is not only very much in earnest itself, but is also 
 being taken seriously by those who dislike and fear it. 
 The alarm has been sounded throughout France in notes 
 of passionate violence and obstinate conviction from the 
 mouth of Mgr. Turinaz, the vigorous Bishop of Nancy. 
 The local organs of religious opinion, the " Semaines 
 Religieuses " of the different dioceses, ring with the 
 clamour of battle and strain at the grim work of attack 
 and defence. The epithets of " Protestant " and 
 " Kantian " are flung about in the most promiscuous 
 fashion. Theological journals like the Annales de 
 Philosophic Chretienne, or the Revue du Clerge 
 Franfais, which are widely read among the scholarly 
 members of the French clergy and the interest in 
 scholarship is much more widely diffused throughout 
 that body than we imagine open their columns freely 
 to able champions of the new movement. Indeed, the 
 editors of these journals, the Abbe Denis and the Abb6 
 Bricout, are themselves among its ablest representatives. 
 Then again it is a fact of no small moment in estimating 
 the force of this movement that members of the great 
 religious orders like the Dominicans and the Jesuits, who 
 would be the first to feel the constraints of religious 
 expediency, are among the leading advocates and 
 practicians of the new theological method. This very 
 trustworthy religious barometer seems to be at " set fair," 
 though one must admit that its changes are often 
 
178 MODERNISM 
 
 unexpected and even unaccountable. Lastly, the readi- 
 ness of the new theology to come out into the open and 
 lean for philosophic support upon the writings, not only 
 of Catholic laymen like M. Fonsegrive and M. Brunetiere, 
 but also of non-Catholics like M. Bergson and M. Boutroux, 
 has already attracted to it the sympathetic attention 
 of many thoughtful Frenchmen who have not hitherto 
 evinced much interest in religious questions. 
 
 It would be obviously impossible to achieve and 
 presumptuous to attempt even in outline an account of 
 such a movement in the space of one short article nor 
 indeed am I anxious to make the attempt. I should be 
 satisfied if I could persuade my fellow-countrymen and 
 fellow-churchmen that on the other side of the Channel 
 as here, in the heart of Roman orthodoxy as with us, the 
 real difficulties which sincere religious thinkers have to 
 face are difficulties in the interpretation of that deposit of 
 traditional Christian teaching which we call dogma, and 
 that the method of meeting those difficulties with some 
 hope of success is gradually becoming one and the same 
 throughout the whole area of Western Christendom. 
 Perhaps I can best do this by selecting at random a few 
 examples of the way in which the theological problems 
 that clamour for solution are being met by con- 
 temporary French theologians. Let us take, to begin 
 with, the origin and the nature of the difficulty. For to 
 understand the origin of a difficulty is to be well on the 
 way towards a recognition of its nature. I have seldom 
 read a more frank and lucid exposition of the origin of 
 the modern theological problem than that given by a 
 writer in the current number of the Revue du Clerge 
 
THE NEW APOLOGETIC IN FRANCE 179 
 
 Franfais. He reminds us that up to the close of the 
 Middle Age, and even later, all human knowledge, 
 whether religious or secular, started from exactly the 
 same premisses. If the science of those days reached 
 slightly different conclusions on particular points from 
 received theological teaching, such difference occasioned 
 no alarm, as the ultimate data of both science and 
 religion remained the same. The idea of a science 
 independent of Scripture was entertained no more 
 at Wittemberg than at Rome till near the close of 
 the seventeenth century. To-day the aspect of their 
 relations is entirely changed. A scientist may be Christian 
 or unbeliever, but his science is equally independent of 
 all theological assumptions. To realize the nature and 
 extent of this change it is necessary to remember two 
 things the new method of scientific knowledge, and the 
 actual conclusions to which it has led. Science was 
 once a rigorous deduction from certain preliminary truths 
 as to the origin and nature of the world which were taken 
 as revealed. It is now the gradual elaboration of general 
 views of the process by which the world's lif e is developing, 
 founded upon the patient and unprejudiced observation 
 of facts. Formerly the man of science started from the 
 revealed certainty of how things began, and accommodated 
 as skilfully as he could the facts of his own experience and 
 observation to that indisputable certainty. Now he 
 begins just with the facts that he can observe, and seeks 
 back to some working theory which will account for 
 them. And as to the conclusions of the new scientific 
 method, how far they have removed our knowledge of 
 nature from the old theological hypotheses ! Then " the 
 
180 MODERNISM 
 
 universe was of recent origin, small in extent, and destined 
 to be short-lived. The earth was its centre, not only 
 because the sun and a number of tiny stars moved round 
 it, but because it alone was inhabited, because the eye of 
 God was fixed upon it only, and because by the Incarna- 
 tion He had raised human nature to a level with His own. 
 There was no science save that of God and of man in 
 relation to God, and this science was contained in its 
 entirety in infallible books preserved by an infallible 
 Church." Now " the limits of space and time have been 
 thrown back immeasurably. The universe is not a sphere 
 whose form and movement the eye can easily take in. 
 The earth is not its centre. All that is mere appearance. 
 The earth is a humble satellite of a star which is itself but 
 a grain of dust in immensity. It did not issue from 
 nothingness six thousand years ago. Ascend some high 
 mountain peak, take a block of the marble you may find 
 there, grind it into dust, and examine that dust through 
 the microscope. It is formed of the decomposed remains 
 of marine animals. So that rock was once at the bottom 
 of the sea. What appalling lapse of centuries has not 
 been necessary to raise so high that which was once 
 buried in the depths of ocean ! Push back indeed, as 
 far as you will, the limits of the world in space and time, 
 yet you do not eliminate God. The creative act still 
 claims recognition. Yet at the first glance it is evident 
 that God appears less than formerly as the immediate 
 Cause of all that goes on in the universe. The old form 
 of anthropomorphism is replaced by a new. We no 
 longer imagine the Creator under the image of a workman, 
 the sovereign master of that which He has fashioned. 
 
THE NEW APOLOGETIC IN FRANCE 181 
 
 The imagination tends rather to conceive of Him as of 
 the great magnetic currents which bathe, penetrate, and 
 stir all that exists. His action is no longer that of an all- 
 powerful hand felt though invisible at each moment. It 
 mingles with the play of inexorable laws. The great 
 principle of modern physics, that the sum of energy 
 and the quantity of matter are constant, admits of no 
 derogation. Astronomy establishes it almost experi- 
 mentally when it shows us that worlds make, unmake, 
 and remake themselves without a single new force or 
 molecule coming into play. Everything is formed slowly, 
 insensibly, with no apparent intervention from without. 
 The very forms of life appear successively throughout 
 periods of infinite length, and the theory which seems to 
 impose itself upon our acceptance is that these forms 
 issue one from the other. It is the same with the history 
 of humanity. There nothing takes place suddenly. 
 Everything is linked together in a chain of growth as in 
 the history of nature. Civilizations are superimposed 
 upon each other like the layers of the palaeontological 
 series, and their points of contact are not more clearly 
 marked. Thus determinism is everywhere in evidence, 
 and every day science reduces the number of excep- 
 tions. In other words, the modern man eliminates the 
 supernatural from a host of explanations in which the 
 man of the Middle Age thought it was impossible to do 
 without it." 
 
 Here is a statement of the origin of the modern theo- 
 logical problem as forcible and clear as R. H. Hutton 
 would have made it. And this author does not for a 
 moment shirk the task of facing it. He sees that the 
 
182 MODERNISM 
 
 question of the moment is this : " How far has this 
 change influenced the religious conceptions of the 
 European nations ? How far is it necessary to show 
 favour to this influence in the bosom of Catholicism ? " 
 I cannot do better than again quote his words, more 
 especially as they are evidence from within of the attitude 
 of Liberal Catholics upon the great question of the 
 inspiration and authority of the Bible. " It is by no 
 means doubtful that a profound change is being wrought 
 in Catholic theology. It is only necessary to open a 
 review to convince one's self of the fact. Though this 
 change may have more or less distant origins, though it 
 may be traced back to Dom Calmet or even to Cajetan, 
 it is none the less true that priests hardly yet forty years 
 old, trained in the seminaries by masters who are still 
 living, and with the aid of books which are reprinted 
 every year, reveal the liveliest surprise when they hear 
 of a new treatment of Apologetics and of Holy Scripture, 
 of the superior importance given to the moral proof in 
 comparison with miracles and prophecy, of profound 
 modifications in the Introductions to the books of the 
 Old and the New Testaments, of the discussion of their 
 historic parts in the same way as the similar writings of 
 profane authors, of changes in their dates and suspicions 
 thrown upon their authorship, of ancient difficulties in 
 their most discussed passages resolved by methods which 
 are quite new, or rather admitted as if they explained 
 themselves and exegesis had no need to trouble about 
 them, of the ' theology ' of the different books studied 
 separately with a marked freedom, of the study and 
 examination of the development of these ' theologies,' of 
 
THE NEW APOLOGETIC IN FRANCE 183 
 
 histories of the doctrine of an only God, of that of the 
 angels, of demons, of hell, of the immortality of the soul, 
 of the Holy Spirit, revealing in each case the beginnings, 
 the gropings, the transformations through which they 
 assumed their ultimate form. In what, say these priests, 
 does this method differ from that of sheer rationalism, 
 and above all, how is it to be harmonized with the 
 tradition and teaching of the Councils ? Yet we see that 
 the principles of this school are daily gaining ground, 
 and that with reserves they are securing the support of 
 men of gravity and learning, of trusted members of 
 religious Orders, of publications known for their prudence 
 and orthodoxy." And the conclusion of this author I 
 must again give in his own words. " The Church is 
 allowing herself to be penetrated by the scientific spirit 
 which has been developing by her side during the past 
 three centuries, and evidently believes that in admitting 
 this influence she is caring for her own interests." 
 
 But one question inevitably arises. In what way do 
 these Liberals conceive of authority ? What room can 
 they find in their system for an infallible Pope ? Let me 
 quote once again and finally from the author I have 
 followed so long. He is replying to the taunts of those 
 who assert that the Church never makes a step forward 
 until she has been compelled to do so. He claims that 
 such objections arise from a misunderstanding of what 
 the Church is. The Church, for instance, contains a 
 great number of simple, straightforward spirits who have 
 no animosity against science or progress. These people 
 have the very best right to represent the spirit of the 
 Church to which they belong. But perhaps the objectors 
 
184 MODERNISM 
 
 have in their mind the central power, the Popes and the 
 Roman Congregations. Well, authority is before every- 
 thing else a counterpoise. " Since when has it become 
 its duty to take the initiative in changes which every 
 tradition has in the long run to endure ? Where is there 
 an instance of such a thing ? Authority does not keep 
 a bureau of science, and, even if it did, it would always 
 be reproached with being behindhand if it did not anti- 
 cipate the initiative of genius. Rome is slow, granted. 
 But it is a less defect than to be fickle and hasty, and for 
 a responsible authority it is a necessity. It is enough if 
 she does not fetter the prudent search for truth." 
 
 To me the interest of these opinions is the evidence 
 they yield that the thoughtful men of all the Christian 
 Communions of Europe are practically at the same point 
 of view. Whether on the nature of Church authority, 
 of the inspiration of Scripture, or of the general religious 
 problem, I can see no appreciable difference between the 
 positions of M. Dimnet, Professor at the Ecole Jeanne 
 d'Arc at Lille, and those of the German and Scotch 
 theologians to whom these French Liberals continually 
 acknowledge their indebtedness. Only it is a little 
 amusing to compare the naturalist interpretation of an 
 infallible authority which holds among Liberal Catholics 
 of the Roman Communion with the comforting dream 
 of intellectual passivity and submission in a spiritual 
 lotus-land which haunts the imagination of those whom 
 M. Dimnet calls, with I think unnecessary contempt, 
 " quelques anglicans tres pieux et assez ignorants." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 FRANCE AND THE " AFFAIRE LOISY " 
 
 M. LOISY has suddenly and how much against his will March. 
 
 1903 
 
 all who know anything of his character and career will 
 readily conceive been accorded a niche in the temple of 
 newspaper fame that paradise of the vain and foolish, 
 inferno of wise and humble souls. He has, indeed, had 
 this unhappy greatness thrust upon him, and the hand 
 of destiny is that of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. 
 Such English readers as concern themselves with theo- 
 logical wrangles have already had many opportunities of 
 learning something of his case. But it may be worth 
 while to re-state it here, and to attempt to estimate its 
 importance. 
 
 First of all let us see what has actually happened. 
 Towards the close of last year M. Loisy published a 
 reply to Harnack's " Das Wesen des Christenthums," 
 entitled " L'Evangile et 1'Eglise." On January I7th of 
 this year, Cardinal Richard, having received the report 
 of a commission which he had appointed to examine 
 Loisy's book, condemned it, and forbade the clergy and 
 faithful of his diocese to read it on the following grounds : 
 " It is calculated seriously to disturb the belief of the 
 faithful in the fundamental dogmas of Catholic teaching, 
 notably the authority of the Scriptures and Tradition, the 
 Divinity of Jesus Christ, His infallible knowledge, the 
 redemption wrought by His death, the Resurrection, 
 
 185 
 
186 MODERNISM 
 
 the Eucharist, the Divine institution of the Episcopate 
 and of the Sovereign Pontificate." This trenchant 
 condemnation was no doubt not entirely due to the 
 alleged danger of M. Loisy's teaching. A host of other 
 causes concurred to inspire terror in the appointed 
 guardians of scholastic orthodoxy. Early last year the 
 Abb6 Houtin, a disciple of Loisy's, had published an 
 account of Biblical criticism among the Catholics of France 
 during the nineteenth century, in which the stupidity 
 of the extreme orthodox champions and the intellectual 
 insincerity of the more moderate were exposed with a 
 corrosive irony. Naturally enough this book became 
 the target for innumerable attacks in which orthodoxy 
 atoned for feebleness of argument by virulence of abuse. 
 For all reply M. Houtin, when a new edition was called 
 for towards the end of the year, published as a supple- 
 ment to his volume a representative selection of these 
 elegances of controversy. This contemptuous attitude 
 was more than human nature could be expected to bear, 
 and M. Houtin was duly denounced to the Congregation 
 of the Index. Meanwhile the young bloods of the critical 
 movement were laying rude hands on the Sacred Ark. 
 The Abb6 Grosjean, a priest of the Diocese of Autun, 
 published in the Abbe Dabry's Observateur Franfais (a 
 Christian Socialist journal, whose title suggests a daring 
 comparison I know not whether intended with the 
 official organ of the Vatican) a witty and somewhat 
 irreverent review of Houtin's book. And it was not 
 only in the field of Biblical criticism that scholastic 
 orthodoxy was being assailed. The Abb6 Marcel Hebert 
 contributed to the July number of the Revue de 
 
FRANCE AND THE "AFFAIRE LOISY " 187 
 
 Metaphysique et de Morale a study on Divine Personality 
 which he entitled : "La Derniere I dole." The aim of 
 this study, which consisted of a radical and destructive 
 criticism of St. Thomas's proofs of the existence of God, 
 was to prove that " the ancient belief in the transcendent 
 God must yield to the affirmation of the immanent 
 Divine." Strangely enough this audacious defiance of 
 scholasticism is said to have been saved from condem- 
 nation by the Spanish Capuchin, Cardinal Vives y Tuto. 
 Still other works are spoken of as likely to be denounced 
 to the Index, among them a study of the theology of 
 Jesus by the Dominican Pere Rose, a professor at the 
 Catholic University at Fribourg, in Switzerland. Under 
 this repeated provocation, it is not, perhaps, wonderful 
 if orthodoxy became restive, and determined, when the 
 opportunity was given it, to strike at Loisy regarded as 
 the head and front of this various offending. 
 
 The next question which it concerns us to answer, if 
 we would understand the present situation in the Church 
 of France is who is Loisy ? What kind of man hides 
 behind this name suddenly grown so familiar ? The 
 first impression which anyone who knows his writings 
 will take away is that of a soul tempered to a profound 
 and serene religious faith ; the second, that he has gained 
 that faith and will keep it in obedience to the Roman 
 Church. Perhaps never has the soul of Catholic worship, 
 its universal fitness to human need, been more adequately 
 suggested and suggestion is here so much more what is 
 needed than dogmatic exposition than in the last 
 chapter of " L'Evangile et PEglise." But a man is 
 understood as much by what he does as by what he is 
 
188 MODERNISM 
 
 behind all action. And certainly Loisy cannot be under- 
 stood apart from the life-work which has at once absorbed 
 and made him. The key to Loisy is that he is a scholar 
 and that he knows what is due to scholarship. There is 
 not to be found in his pages a single note of insincerity. 
 He is indefatigable in his pursuit of facts, and absolutely 
 conscientious in their interpretation. He seems never 
 to succumb to that unconscious prejudice which is the 
 peculiar temptation of the scholar who has a cause to 
 defend. Or rather he seems to be the one scholar in a 
 thousand who has mastered it so completely that it has 
 vanished without leaving a trace behind, or who has had 
 the good luck to be free from it from the beginning. 
 As a very young man, in the early Eighties, Loisy was 
 appointed Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Catholic 
 Institute of Paris. It was the time when some of the 
 younger and abler seminarists were beginning to feel 
 out towards a more vital apologetic than that which 
 they had learned from their traditional handbooks. In 
 Paris such men were drawn to the lectures of the Ecole 
 des Hautes Etudes, where, under the influence especially 
 of Auguste Sabatier, they learned to respect and cultivate 
 a curiosity for the Biblical scholarship of Germany. Of 
 these men Loisy was by far the most brilliant, and as 
 Mgr. d'Hulst, the then leader of the Liberals, reigned 
 over the Catholic Institute, he was free from vexatious 
 interference. But about the beginning of 1893 the 
 storm which was to hurl Loisy from his chair began to 
 brew. Renan had died in the October of 1892. In the 
 following January an appreciative article on the great 
 scholar, written by Mgr. d'Hulst, brought odium not 
 
FRANCE AND THE "AFFAIRE LOISY " 189 
 
 only upon the Rector of the Catholic Institute, but also 
 upon all who were known to be tarred with the Liberal 
 brush. Besides, in November, Loisy had chosen for 
 the subject of his opening Sessional address at the 
 Institute " The Biblical question and the inspiration 
 of Scripture." The principle for which he contended 
 in that lecture, which resumed his conclusions from ten 
 years' Biblical study, may be given in a sentence : " All 
 the historical books of Scripture, even those of the New 
 Testament, were formed (rediges) by freer processes than 
 those admitted in the writing of history nowadays, and 
 a certain liberty of interpretation is the legitimate conse- 
 quence of the liberty which reigns in their composition." 
 This lecture was published in the Spring of 1893, and 
 immediately a fierce agitation against its doctrines began 
 to rage. Loisy was practically forced into the resigna- 
 tion of his chair, and in the Autumn the rout of the 
 Liberals was completed by the publication of the Papal 
 Encyclical Providentissimus Deus. Loisy and Mgr. 
 d'Hulst hastened to make dutiful submission to the 
 directions of the Holy Father. The former continued for 
 a time to teach Hebrew and Syriac at the Catholic 
 Institute, but he lived henceforward under the frown of 
 the Diocesan administration. At Bellevue, between 
 SeVres and Meudon, and within easy reach of Paris, he 
 quietly pursued his studies undeterred by poverty and 
 inveterate ill-health. Some years ago the Government 
 nominated him to a lectureship at the Ecole des Hautes 
 Etudes, where he has drawn large audiences of a class 
 not usually represented in the lecture-room of a religious 
 apologist many of them students of the Ecole Normale, 
 
190 MODERNISM 
 
 in whose hands lie the intellectual destinies of the next 
 generation of Frenchmen. There he delivered his famous 
 lectures on the Babylonian myths and the first chapter of 
 Genesis. Last year he published a remarkable series of 
 studies on the Gospels one on the synoptic Parables, 
 inspired by the recent work of Jiilicher of Marburg, the 
 others on the Gospel of St. John. Then came his reply 
 to Harnack, and its condemnation by Cardinal Richard, 
 to which, with ready obedience, he has made the usual 
 formal submission. The Semaine Religieuse of the 
 diocese of Paris published, in its number of February 7th, 
 Loisy's letter, in which he stated that he had stopped the 
 publication of the second edition of his book which was 
 just on the point of appearing, that he yielded before the 
 judgment which had been passed, and reproved all the 
 errors which might have been deduced from his book. 
 Meanwhile his case goes to Rome, where it is said it 
 will be tried not before the Congregation of the Index, 
 but by the newly appointed Biblical Commission. 
 
 Two questions remain. What is the nature of Loisy's 
 teaching ? And what effect is it likely to have on the 
 Catholicism of France ? The first of these questions it 
 is not easy to answer adequately in a single paragraph. 
 But it may be sufficient to say that Loisy's view of dogma 
 is profoundly different from that of the ordinary Scholastic 
 apologist. For the latter dogma is practically the object of 
 faith, the revelation of absolute truth. For Loisy it is 
 merely the guiding line of religious thought, an aid to 
 faith. The historical analysis of doctrine reveals the 
 process of its growth and the factors which have deter- 
 mined its growth. As that historical analysis proceeds, 
 
FRANCE AND THE "AFFAIRE LOISY " 191 
 
 or rather recedes, we get nearer and nearer to the facts out 
 of which the Christian life and the Christian doctrine alike 
 have grown. But we never reach the naked facts them- 
 selves. The earliest tradition we possess in which they 
 are enshrined, the four Gospels, is already a living synthe- 
 sis of interpretation and fact, a refraction of fact through 
 the lens of a special interpretation. This is especially the 
 case for the Gospel of St. John. But even in the Synoptics 
 this process of interpretation by the early Christian con- 
 sciousness is apparent. The work of historical criticism is 
 to reach the actual facts through the first growth of inter- 
 pretation so far as that is possible. As a critic, Loisy is led 
 to the most radical results. He will have none of Harnack's 
 arbitrary separation of our Lord's teaching into the abso- 
 lute and the relative, that which was eternally true and 
 that which was conditioned by the knowledge of the time. 
 For him it was all true, but it was all true because it was 
 all relative, because it was conditioned throughout by the 
 knowledge of a given place and time. Nothing is true but 
 what is true for actual men, and actual men can apprehend 
 no truth otherwise than through an intellectual medium 
 determined by their actual experience. Nothing can be 
 more illusory than the separation of the absolute and the 
 relative in a living faith. In thought they are separable, 
 and it is the function of thought to separate them. In 
 life they are inseparable, and religion is a life. Nor 
 again will he have any truck with the doctrine that our 
 Lord consciously accommodated His teaching to the 
 intellectual disabilities of men. " Jesus spoke," says 
 Loisy, " in order to say what He thought true, without 
 the least regard to our categories of relative and absolute." 
 
 M (3403) 
 
192 MODERNISM 
 
 But it is not necessary that Jesus should have spoken 
 some eternal truth, some truth which in the form he 
 delivered it would have an eternal value. " For the 
 full life of the Gospel does not reside in a single element 
 of the teaching of Jesus, but in the totality of His mani- 
 festation which has its point of departure in the personal 
 ministry of the Christ and its development in the history 
 of Christianity. What is truly evangelical in the 
 Christianity of to-day, is not what has never changed, 
 for in one sense everything has changed and has never 
 ceased changing, but that which, notwithstanding all 
 external changes, proceeds from the impulse given by 
 the Christ, is inspired by His spirit, serves the same ideal 
 and the same hope." This is a mere suggestion, but I 
 think not an unfaithful one, of Loisy's position. 
 
 As to the influence he is likely to exercise upon the 
 fortunes of French Catholicism, and indeed, of Catholicism 
 generally, it is difficult to strike its balance. There is 
 no doubt, however, that Loisy is followed with an 
 enthusiasm which must often be embarrassing because 
 so heady and undisciplined, by the more intellectual of 
 the younger clergy. The men of the Justice Sociale and 
 the men of the Sillon are young, and they are, perhaps, 
 not always wise. But at least they have a faith and the 
 consciousness of a mission two things which carry men 
 a long way. Then, too, there are saner and stronger 
 minds among the younger clergy equally ready to range 
 themselves with the revered master to whose teaching 
 at the Catholic Institute in the early Nineties they look 
 back with gratitude for a faith which can look the best 
 contemporary thought in the face without shame. And 
 
FRANCE AND THE "AFFAIRE LOISY " 193 
 
 even among the more conservative scholars, with a 
 certain reputation for orthodoxy to maintain, Loisy has 
 many open followers, and still more who shrink from 
 declaring themselves, or who, though they are hurrying 
 along the same critical and historical lines, honestly 
 hesitate to touch the goal which he has reached. One 
 can understand the hesitation of an honest scholar like 
 Mgr. Batiffol to accept such extreme conclusions as 
 Loisy 's, and his honest regret in having to separate 
 himself from his friend in the moment of trial. On the 
 other hand, that fine scholar and liberal Jesuit, Pre de 
 Grandmaison, has written in the Jesuit tudes an ex- 
 ceedingly appreciative study of Loisy 's book. He does 
 not, indeed, accept Loisy's position in full, but at least 
 he shows that he understands it. " It is the book," 
 he says, " of a man who knows the New Testament 
 thoroughly, and the immense literature, especially 
 Protestant, inspired by the Gospels." But it is not by 
 the amount of adhesion to his own special conclusions 
 that Loisy's influence is to be judged. It is by the very 
 general change in the attitude of scholarship towards 
 Biblical and doctrinal questions. Dogmatic theology, 
 the theology of mere definition, has still, indeed, many 
 champions ; among them the well-known Abbe" Gay- 
 raud, as militant in the pages of the Revue du Clerge 
 Franfais as in the Chamber of Deputies. But historical 
 or positive theology is gaining ground daily among the 
 really scholarly men. Such studies as Mgr. Batiffol's 
 on the origin of the episcopate or of the doctrine of 
 penitence, or M. Tunnel's on the early Christian doctrine 
 of the future life, are models of temperate reasoning 
 
194 MODERNISM 
 
 and honest research. Then, too, there are the Jesuit 
 Biblical scholars, Pre Durand and Pere de Hummelauer, 
 who are moderate enough, but whose moderation no 
 doubt seems the wildest excess to Pere Fontaine, of the 
 same Order, whose scent for Protestant heresy is so 
 keen. Altogether it seems impossible to believe that 
 any power can really crush a movement so virile, so 
 honest, so convinced, and above all so loyal, as the present 
 Liberal movement in the Church of France. It has many 
 powerful and bitter enemies. It has a few ardent friends 
 even in the Curia. But its best friend is its own strength 
 and patience, its inherent conviction and earnestness. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF LEO XIII 
 
 THE long life has come to an end. The greatest figure 
 of the time has vanished from the world of appearances. 
 We who cannot see beyond our noses begin, as is our 
 custom, to assess its worth, to appraise its meaning. But 
 our work, necessary or supererogatory, will be hampered 
 not alone by our incompetence, but also by the strange 
 glamour of the mighty soul. Just judgment of the mere 
 outward effect of the marvellous life must be confused 
 by the miracle of its inner worth refracted, as all miracu- 
 lous things always are, through the lens of popular feeling. 
 Already the mythoplastic tendency, as they pompously 
 term it, is at work. M. Galtier, the Rome correspondent 
 of the Temps newspaper, tells us how he learned from 
 one of the Pope's nephews that all the dying utterances 
 attributed to the Pope were entirely mythical, that he 
 had kept a great silence, and almost from the beginning 
 of his illness had refused to see anyone except his doctors 
 and the faithful Pio Centra, that even the famous poem 
 textually quoted (with apologies for the imperfect Latinity 
 of the telegraph) by all the newspapers was but a product 
 of the excited imagination of Roman journalism. One 
 wonders if some acute access of telepathy during this 
 seething fortnight in Rome can have quite guilelessly 
 produced such a wonderful result. At least it is clear 
 that the newspaper and the electric wire have not lessened 
 
 195 
 
196 MODERNISM 
 
 the need of surcharged human feeling to express itself 
 worthily in myth. 
 
 It is rash, it may be presumptuous, to attempt an 
 estimate of the influence of Leo XIII upon the intellectual 
 life of the great Latin communion. If I do so, it is only 
 from the knowledge that an interested and observant 
 outsider may have. Beyond this I can only plead in 
 explanation or extenuation of my attempt a supreme 
 reverence for the great historical Communion of Wes- 
 tern Christendom, a hope that it may prove itself capable 
 of a practical hegemony of the Christianity of the 
 future, and a certainty that it can do so only through 
 its power to absorb and make part of its universal spirit 
 certain elements which are now struggling for effective 
 existence within its pale. From this point of view the 
 interest of Leo XIII is his influence upon the movement 
 towards a more liberal theology which has marked 
 especially the last ten years of his pontificate. 
 
 There are here two things to be considered. What is 
 this movement ? And what is the scope of any action 
 which authority may have taken with regard to it ? 
 After dealing with these points it will be easier to discuss 
 the effects of the last pontificate upon Catholic thought. 
 The quarter of a century during which Leo XIII ruled 
 at the Vatican saw the end of one era and the beginning of 
 another. The critical movement of the middle of the 
 last century, which had originated for the most part 
 either outside historic Christianity or on its extreme 
 fringes, and had developed principally within the narrow 
 paddock of academic Protestantism, was beginning to 
 produce its effect even within the borders of the Roman 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF LEO XIII 197 
 
 Church. It is perhaps natural that the first effect of this 
 movement upon those minds which gradually became 
 aware of its magnitude and import was a tendency to 
 intellectual despair. The close rationalism of the schools 
 a rationalism, be it understood, traditionally enlisted in 
 the service of faith served to increase and intensify this 
 despair. Some perhaps submitted to it, trying to get 
 on as best they could with a kind of loose Renanism. 
 But most hardened themselves against it in a more rigid 
 scholastic dogmatism. There are many theologians 
 to-day in the Roman Communion, as in every Christian 
 Communion, who spend their energies in taking away 
 with one hand what they concede with the other men, 
 for instance, who accept many of the most assured truths 
 of Biblical criticism only to wriggle out of the conclusions 
 to which they point by a tortuous logical process. But, 
 meanwhile, an entirely new school was forming. The 
 object of this school was to get back to a vital certainty 
 of the faith, its inspiration the conviction that that was 
 possible. It has worked along two lines which yet 
 merge into one, a broadened mysticism and a new philo- 
 sophic defence. The new apologetic, as it is called, is 
 indeed but a reasoned statement of the experiences to 
 which mysticism witnesses. It establishes a reconcilia- 
 tion between philosophy and religion by claiming that 
 the only satisfying answer to the supreme problem of 
 philosophy is given in religious experience. The quest 
 of philosophy is after reality, the thing in itself. Now 
 the thing in itself, pure being, cannot be reached either 
 by the senses or by thought. All that is given in the 
 senses is states of feeling. All that is given in thought 
 
198 MODERNISM 
 
 is abstractions from these states of feeling. We are 
 always brought up against objects of sensation, objects 
 of thought. But what we seek to know is subjects 
 which feel and know. We want to reach to the absolute 
 of being in ourselves, in other creatures, in God. How, 
 then, is this to be achieved ? If, because our sensations 
 or our thoughts do not enable us to reach reality, we were 
 therefore to reject them as illusions, the problem would 
 be insoluble. Scepticism would be the only intelligible 
 outcome of such a view. But thought and feeling are 
 of value, not because they can ever overstep the limits 
 of the phenomenal without us, but because they are 
 expressions, however imperfect and fragmentary, of the 
 real within us. Their value is proportional to our own 
 moral value. They are worth just what we are worth. 
 And our worth is the worth of the total moral will which 
 finds expression in us and through us. It is this total 
 activity of the will which constitutes reality in ourselves, 
 which feels towards and helps reality to constitute itself 
 in others, and which finally reaches beyond the whole 
 sphere of the phenomenal to the absolute being who is 
 God. This is the doctrine of Kant, in so far as that 
 philosopher insists that pure being can only be reached 
 by an affirmation of the moral will. Where it separates 
 from him is in the necessary opposition which he estab- 
 lishes between phenomena and pure being. The real is 
 not apart from and opposed to the appearance. It is 
 in it. It constitutes it. The act of the righteous will 
 which we call faith, and by which we lay hold upon God, 
 is not an act apart from God, but most really in God. 
 That act is possible only because God is in us as the 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF LEO XIII 199 
 
 principle of life. Yet it is our act, inasmuch as in it we 
 are consciously making God the end of our activity, and 
 by doing so are, as it were, helping God to constitute 
 Himself in ourselves. It is this double relation of God 
 to us as the original principle by which we live and 
 strive at all, and as the final end towards which all true 
 life in us is striving which will resolve most of the 
 contradictions of Christian thought. It is the living 
 reconciliation of immanent and transcendent conceptions 
 of God, of Pelagian free-will and a determinist view of 
 Divine grace. 
 
 One other point remains to be noted, another antinomy 
 to be faced, and, if possible, resolved. If certainty of 
 reality, if the knowledge of God, is attained from within, 
 by the harmonious activity of the inner life, in what 
 relation does this certainty of each stand to that 
 attained by others and to absolute truth ? For, even if 
 it be a certainty of the absolute, it is not in itself an 
 absolute certainty. On the contrary, it is imperfect 
 with the varying degrees of moral imperfection of the 
 subject which knows. And it will find still more im- 
 perfect expression in intellectual forms. The truth, 
 then, does not necessarily correspond to the intellectual 
 assertion of the certainty of even the holiest life. Truth 
 as much of it as we can have is rather attained in the 
 vital reconciliation of all such certainties, in the fusion 
 which grows out of their living conflict. Its authority 
 lies in its necessity as a point of departure for new 
 experience, as a seed which is sown to fructify in each new 
 life. But the mind that receives it is not constrained 
 by it, is rather liberated by it into the responsibility of 
 
200 MODERNISM 
 
 sounding more adequately the hidden depths of life. 
 Truth is a growing thing, because life is a growing thing 
 " no end to growth." It lies in the values which 
 the life of love, the life of that self which has attained 
 oneness with the not-self, affirms as its most positive 
 certainties. 
 
 This is something like the philosophic attitude of the 
 New Apologetic. In this form it has found expression 
 through a few profound and original minds some of 
 them laymen. But the spirit which animates it, the 
 positive spirit, the spirit which trusts life as a revelation 
 of God, is at work in many other directions. It is trans- 
 forming the old asceticism, giving it a more positive 
 content, making it selective and intensive, rather than 
 merely negative, in its dealings with life. Through the 
 life of Father Hecker it is reaching out with promise of 
 profound modification for the Catholicism of America. 
 The leaven of the Paulist Fathers in New York, for 
 instance, is working vigorously in the lump. But what 
 is the attitude of authority towards this movement, and 
 what can authority effect ? Let me take the last ques- 
 tion first. Authority can effect nothing against it, for 
 two reasons. First, it is profoundly Catholic. It has 
 the living tradition of Catholicism in its favour. It is 
 opposed only by and to the dead hand of recent scholastic 
 orthodoxy. At the Reformation the Catholicism of the 
 Roman Communion was cooped in behind fenced walls. 
 There it has ever since remained, strictly on the defensive, 
 using every weapon of the scholastic armoury to repel 
 attack. Now the field is once more clear for the recovery 
 and the development of a vital theology. The attack 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF LEO XIII 201 
 
 of Protestantism has died away into an impotent mimicry 
 of warfare among its less instructed zealots. The old 
 guard of Catholicism does not yet realize this. But the 
 new men will some day persuade, by the mere tenacity 
 and force of their conviction, even them. Then the day 
 for restoring and broadening the living tradition of 
 Catholic theology in terms of current thinking will have 
 arrived. And, secondly, the function of authority is 
 itself being gradually modified, both in practice and in 
 theory. The responsibility of infallibility, in a world 
 where the most sacred utterances are so easily convicted 
 of some degree of fallibility, is simply too great a risk. 
 And so the meaning of the word is being gradually 
 whittled away. A recent Roman writer has told us that 
 the conditions of infallibility as laid down in the Vatican 
 decree have obtained only in two decisions during the 
 whole course of the Church's history, possibly only in 
 one. And it is not impossible that an ingenious dialectic 
 might discover even that one to be uncertain. But 
 what is still more probable is that the conditions of the 
 Vatican decree will never be met in any future pro- 
 nouncement of authority. Meanwhile a new positive 
 view of authority is shaping itself as an integral part of 
 that philosophy of will and liberty which I have outlined 
 above. In that authority the Ecclesia discens the 
 garnered experience of all holy souls, the free and un- 
 fettered analysis of what that experience imports, the 
 work of the Church's thinkers in kneading the results of 
 that analysis into the forms of contemporary thought 
 will have its part, and that the most important, the 
 formative, part. The Magisterium infattibile will but 
 
202 MODERNISM 
 
 reprove the rawness of haste, check the excesses of 
 individualism, and register the final collective result. 
 After all, that is the true function of authority, and it 
 will prevail. 
 
 And now, what has been the attitude of Leo XIII, or, 
 rather, of the Roman authority during his pontificate, 
 towards this movement ? For an answer to that ques- 
 tion is in the main an account of his influence upon the 
 intellectual life of the Roman Church. No one, I think, 
 can help feeling a profound reverence for the vivid 
 intelligence which in an extreme old age was eager to 
 face new problems unfamiliar to the intellectual atmo- 
 sphere in which it had itself been formed. That is the 
 first feeling one has about this great ecclesiastical ruler 
 in his dealings with things of the intellect. But having 
 expressed it, one is the more free to assert that he had 
 not, and, in the nature of things, could not have had, 
 any real living sympathy with the men of the last two 
 decades of the nineteenth century. His instinct was 
 that of repression, though it was tempered by the wisdom 
 and patience of a really great ruler. There was indeed 
 something of irony in the fact that his own personal 
 enthusiasm for St. Thomas Aquinas led him to make an 
 effort to revive Scholasticism at the very moment when 
 it was being threatened by the inroads of a more modern 
 philosophy. The Encyclical JEterni Patris did something, 
 no doubt, to impart a certain vigour and virility to 
 Catholic dialectic. It did nothing to stimulate Catholic 
 thought. The most it did was to give a fillip to the 
 fading energies of the universities of Louvain and Rome, 
 and to prepare a generation of hard controversialists for 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF LEO XIII 203 
 
 the coming duel with the new apologists. The next 
 Encyclical on matters theological was the famous 
 Providentissimus Deus, issued on November i8th, 1893. 
 This was directly called forth by the acute phase of the 
 Biblical controversy which had then been reached, 
 especially in France. The total effect of that Encyclical 
 was, as it was meant to be, to make it next to impossible 
 for the critics to continue their work. For instance, the 
 internal criticism by which the origin, the authority, and 
 the integrity of every book of Scripture were to be assured, 
 and which a distinguished French bishop had in that very 
 year declared to have obtained " le droit de cit6 " among 
 all parties, was ruthlessly rejected, except in so far as it 
 might serve to bolster up the historical tradition on those 
 points. But the boldest declaration of this Encyclical, 
 and that which it has been hardest for the critical school 
 ever since to evade, was that on inspiration. " All those 
 books, and those books in their entirety, which the Church 
 regards as sacred and canonical were written with all 
 their parts under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. 
 Now, far from admitting the co-existence of error, Divine 
 inspiration by itself excludes all error, and that also of 
 necessity, since God, the Supreme Truth, must be in- 
 capable of teaching error." It is evident that this view 
 of inspiration tended to make the natural development of 
 Biblical study in the Roman Church extremely difficult. 
 Yet, in spite of the Encyclical, criticism flourishes and 
 numbers among its adepts many who are in all matters of 
 philosophic apology the most unbending of old scholastics. 
 Finally, there was the letter to Cardinal Gibbons, Testem 
 Benevolcntia, in which the obscuration and attenuation 
 
204 MODERNISM 
 
 of doctrine imputed to Americanism were condemned. 
 In all these ways the authority of the late Pontificate 
 tended to depress and hamper the men who were labour- 
 ing in the sweat of their souls for the intellectual restora- 
 tion of the Christian faith, and to encourage and sustain 
 those whose only conception of defence was to insulate 
 the edifice of truth from all touch with the living world. 
 That is a task sufficiently hard of accomplishment. In 
 the words of a great Catholic scholar, " Catholic exegetes 
 cannot make the theology of the past the science of 
 to-day." But it is a misfortune that in their attempt 
 to do so they should have been reinforced by the support 
 of a venerable authority. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE " UNKNOWN POPE " 
 
 Two years ago in Vienna I spent a delightful afternoon September, 
 of late April in the Prater discussing the coming Conclave 
 with an Austrian publicist who had for long lived in 
 Rome as representative of the Neue Freie Presse, and 
 had there acquired a detailed and accurate knowledge of 
 ecclesiastical affairs. There were few Cardinals, Papabili 
 or otherwise, who were not passed in review during those 
 two hours' conversation. But there was one whose name 
 provoked only the most passing and distant allusion 
 the then Cardinal Patriarch of Venice. The Conclave, 
 which was then but a certainty of some uncertain future, 
 is now a thing of the past. Cardinal Sarto has become 
 Pius X, the little-known Venetian Patriarch the " Un- 
 known Pope," as the French, with their flair for the right 
 phrase, have already styled him. So is history made in 
 great moments of birth, of death, of unalterable choice. 
 
 The election of Pius X may be a revolution. Who 
 knows ? The great spirit of history may have spoken a 
 word big with fate in the Conclave of July, 1903. At 
 least in its accidental features this election is the begin- 
 ning of a new era or the reversion to an old. The Pope is 
 still indeed Italian, but no longer an Italian of the old 
 school, a noble trained in the traditional diplomacy of 
 the Papal Court, graduating in distant nunciatures or 
 legations. Pius X has never been, like his predecessor, 
 
 205 
 
206 MODERNISM 
 
 Pontifical Legate at Beneventum, or Nuncio at Brussels. 
 The son of the peasant of Riesi has from the beginning 
 shared the life of the secular priesthood. As parish 
 priest of Salzano, as Bishop of Mantua, as Patriarch of 
 Venice, he has all his life been absorbed in the details of 
 parochial or diocesan administration. In the words of 
 the Paris Temps, " Son election est comme 1'apotheose 
 du cure" de campagne." But more than that, the new 
 Pope has remained what he was born, a son of the people, 
 simple with their simplicity, alive to their needs, aware 
 of their difficulties, eager for their permanent reconcilia- 
 tion with the Church, above all convinced that the 
 Church must be the Church of the poor if it is to endure. 
 The old democratic days seem to have come again. We 
 recall the far-distant time when the waif of the Cypriote 
 shore, fathered by a kindly fisherman, came to sit for a 
 few perilous months on the Throne of the Fisherman as 
 Alexander V. 
 
 But after all these are or may be but mere accidents 
 of the new situation. We have no right to count on 
 them as factors of permanent importance. The policy 
 of the Vatican is run in a groove of too ancient routine 
 to be lightly displaced by a personality, and especially 
 by a personality on which we can so little calculate. 
 The forces of the Roman Curia are forces to which Pius 
 X. may be ready to yield or forced to succumb. And 
 what interests the outside world is whether the election 
 of the new Pope will mean a conflict of opinion at all ; 
 and if it does, whether the new forces or the old will win. 
 Alike in affairs of international politics and in matters of 
 belief, a new spirit is making itself felt in the Roman 
 
THE "UNKNOWN POPE" 207 
 
 Church, a new attitude is being urgently called for. Will 
 the new pontificate take account of one or the other ; and 
 if it does, will it do justice to them ? 
 
 I have already in these chapters dealt with the critical 
 leaven which is working in the Roman Church, as else- 
 where throughout Christendom, with the attempt to 
 correct the rigidly dogmatic by the historical point of 
 view. It is difficult to forecast the effect of the New 
 Pontificate upon this movement. But whatever change 
 in the attitude of the Roman Curia towards dogmatic 
 questions may be effected in our time will, we may 
 be sure, be largely if not entirely influenced by political 
 or semi-political considerations. The Curia will not 
 move till America and Germany force it to move, till 
 the spirit of Hecker and of Kraus has become so 
 powerful and insistent as to make further resistance 
 dangerous. It is impossible to avoid the fear that in the 
 near future, as in the past, the Papacy will elect to 
 challenge the judgment of history on its political action. 
 Now there is one country in which the future policy of 
 the Vatican will be awaited with interest, not only within 
 the borders of that country, but by all who, of whatever 
 country, are preoccupied with the future of the Roman 
 Church. I need hardly say that that country is France. 
 Leo XIII was a Pope of considerable political imagina- 
 tion and of vast political schemes. His policy suc- 
 ceeded in many countries, notably in Germany, where it 
 formed in the great Catholic party of the Centre a most 
 formidable political power. But in France it failed 
 utterly. When the late Pope called upon the Catholics 
 of France to rally to the Republic, his object was 
 15 (2405) 
 
208 MODERNISM 
 
 transparent. He hoped to form a powerful Catholic party 
 which, as in Germany, might hold the balance between 
 the strictly national groups of Liberals and Conservatives, 
 or, as in Belgium, might even itself seize the reins of 
 government. He failed because the French Catholics 
 pointedly refused to obey him. The clergy indeed 
 obeyed under a hardly veiled protest. The laity were 
 more obstinate. Instead of obeying they prayed for 
 his conversion, and appealed in the clerical press from 
 the Pope ill-informed to the Pope better-informed. Not 
 only did the obstinacy of the pious laity wreck the policy, 
 at once generous and shrewd, of Leo XIII, but it also 
 wantonly aggravated its own hostility towards the 
 Republic until it had provoked that violent outburst of 
 anti-clericalism from which France is at the present 
 moment suffering. There is an intimate, if also a some- 
 what intricate relation of cause and effect between the 
 Papal policy of " ralliement " and the intolerant adminis- 
 tration of M. Combes. And it is surely a sign of the 
 times worth noting, that the most violent and uncom- 
 promising statement of State policy towards the Church 
 which has ever fallen from the lips of a French Premier, 
 the now famous "Marseillaise"* of M. Combes, should 
 have followed by only a few days' interval the election 
 of the new Pope. It means something that after 
 eighteen months of continuous protest from all the 
 Liberals of France, whether official or non-official, against 
 his treatment of the Congregations, M. Combes can still 
 venture to proclaim a continuance and even an aggrava- 
 tion of his policy. And it seems to me to mean just this, 
 
 * A newspaper title for the Minister's speech, which was delivered at 
 Marseilles. 
 
THE "UNKNOWN POPE" 209 
 
 that the French Catholics are so reactionary as to provoke 
 the most violent policy of persecution among the extreme 
 anti-clerical section of Republicans, and at the same time 
 so powerful as to concentrate at critical moments the 
 Republican Block in support of that policy, detested as 
 it is by many members and even whole groups of the 
 Republican party. M. Combes' ministry may indeed 
 fall in the autumn, and every Liberal would rejoice in its 
 fall but for the possible danger to the Republic. But 
 one thing must not be forgotten, that what makes the 
 intransigeance of the present Government possible is the 
 determined and hopeless hostility of French Catholics 
 to the Republic, and their incessant intrigues against it. 
 The political judgments of the foreigner are often in- 
 fluenced by considerations of the attitude of particular 
 individuals which to the native mind seem negligible, 
 or at least unimportant. One such consideration has 
 weighed with me in my observation of French politics 
 during the last few years. It is not many years ago 
 that M. Francis de Pressense, the brilliant scion of an 
 ancient Huguenot stock, wrote his famous life of Cardinal 
 Manning, and his still more famous Introduction. Many 
 people, and among them M. de Pressense's own friends, 
 feared that that Introduction was only a preliminary to 
 his joining the Roman Church. Well, to-day M. de 
 Pressense is one of the foremost of the Socialist deputies 
 in the Chamber, and the author of a drastic " projet de 
 loi " for the separation of Church and State in France. 
 It was the venomous hatred of the Republic displayed 
 by French Catholics during the course of the Dreyfus 
 struggle that wrought that change. 
 
210 MODERNISM 
 
 What, then, might a well-wisher at once of Liberalism 
 and of the French Church hope that the attitude of the 
 new Pope should be ? There is no doubt about the 
 answer. The only attitude which can preserve both 
 Liberalism and the Church is a frank abandonment of 
 political action. The Church cares little possibly for 
 the fate of Liberalism, though when the last vestige 
 of its moderating influence disappears from Catholic 
 countries, when it has everywhere yielded to a rabid 
 Jacobinism, she may learn the folly of even that in- 
 difference. But at least she ought to care for the interests 
 of religion. And the fortunes of organized Christianity 
 will be wrecked throughout Catholic Europe unless the 
 Church abandons her traditional ideal of asserting herself 
 as a great political force. A solid political Catholicism 
 is the nightmare which is driving so many European 
 States into precipitate and ill-considered action. Even 
 in Protestant States like Germany it is producing evil, 
 or at least unnatural, results. Social Democracy is a 
 growing power in the Fatherland far more from fear of 
 the Centre than from love of Socialism. And in France 
 the only hope of Catholicism is in political inactivity 
 on the part of the Vatican. " In returning and rest 
 shall ye be saved : in quietness and in confidence snail 
 be your strength." Leo XIII found even French 
 Catholicism recalcitrant to his political schemes. It was 
 natural. The traditions of generations are not to be 
 reversed in a night. It is not possible for any outside 
 force, even the strongest, suddenly to regiment whole 
 masses of men, hereditarily committed to a given policy 
 with all its far-reaching consequences, in a new direction. 
 
THE "UNKNOWN POPE" 211 
 
 And for French Catholics the political dreams of Leo 
 XIII constituted an outside force. The political change 
 of attitude which must in time declare itself among 
 French Catholics will be of slow and gradual growth. 
 It will be accomplished in individuals, and according to 
 the psychology of the individual, in order that it may be 
 accomplished in the mass. The most politically intelli- 
 gent will first and almost unconsciously accommodate 
 themselves to the changed conditions, as indeed they 
 have already done and are doing. The politically stupid 
 and unteachable must remain where they are and perhaps 
 for generations. But the dream of forcing united action 
 is both delusive and fatal. It cannot succeed, and its 
 very failure, as the experience of the last ten years has 
 amply shown, only increases the mischief which its 
 success would not have averted. The bugbear of the 
 modern politician, especially in Catholic countries, is 
 the obvious desire of the Church to force herself as a 
 wedge between the parties which represent the natural 
 political development of nations, the parties of inactivity 
 and of progress. The Church as a political force can only 
 be a disturbing element in national development, and the 
 politician is wise in the instinct which regards her as 
 the enemy in so far as she insists on being such. Her 
 mission is of another order and in another sphere. Even 
 in France, if only the evil traditions of a century could 
 be obliterated, the Jacobinism which supports M. 
 Combes or goads him into extreme action would crumble 
 to pieces. He is now supported by thousands who long 
 for the day when Liberalism may regain its humanising 
 sway, and alas ! long in vain. And their longing will 
 
212 MODERNISM 
 
 continue to be vain while the fear of a united Catholic 
 party, either rigidly fixed in its own bitter mood of reac- 
 tion or rallied by the Pope to the cause of the Republic, 
 troubles the dreams of politicians. 
 
 It is not wonderful if the Liberalism of France remem- 
 bers with relief that the new Pope is not a diplomatist, 
 but a mere ecclesiastic, and hopes against hope that he 
 may continue to be an ecclesiastic and refuse the tempta- 
 tion to become a politician. It is a little inconsequent 
 of them but human nature, and especially political 
 human nature, being what it is, perhaps also natural 
 to be jubilant over the rumour that he belongs to the 
 French or Rampollist party at the Vatican rather than 
 to the Vannutellist or Austrian. At any rate the religious 
 future of Catholicism, in other words of organized 
 Christianity, depends upon the political neutralization 
 of the Vatican. The " Unknown Pope " may be able 
 and willing to reverse tradition. It is a feeble hope, 
 but it is a hope worth cherishing. Meanwhile on 
 espere et on verm ! 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FIRST ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS X 
 
 IN the September number of the Commonwealth, when December, 
 
 1 Q0*^ 
 
 the new Pope was still an unknown force, I expressed the 
 hope that the election of Pius X might be the beginning 
 of a new era at the Vatican ; that the entail of Curial 
 diplomacy might at last be broken ; that the Church, 
 through its responsible head, might for the future devote 
 itself only to the spiritual guidance of Christendom, and 
 abandon the fantastic heritage of merely Italian politics 
 bequeathed to it by the dead hand of past history. The 
 hope. I admitted, was a feeble one. It is all the more 
 necessary to recognize the signs of a more ample and 
 immediate fulfilment of it than could have been expected. 
 The relations which Pius X has already established with 
 the clergy and people of Rome are those of a true spiritual 
 pastor. It is delightful to read of those Sunday after- 
 noon gatherings in the Vatican gardens, when the people 
 of the different Roman " regions " assemble to hear 
 from the lips of their Chief Pastor the simple words of 
 the Eternal Gospel. It is equally delightful to hear that 
 the Bishop of Rome, like any simple diocesan bishop, 
 calls his clergy together to receive his guidance and 
 encouragement in the discharge of their spiritual duties. 
 It is facts like these that justify the prediction of a recent 
 writer in the Quinzaine, one who knew Pius X intimately 
 before his elevation to the Pontificate : "He will talk 
 less than Leo XIII, but perhaps he will do more." 
 
 213 
 
214 MODERNISM 
 
 There is hope, too, that what seems to an outsider the 
 grotesque anachronism of the Captivity may soon come 
 to an end, and that the Roman crowd may yet acclaim 
 the passing of the Pope, no longer King, in the Corso or 
 the Via Nazionale. 
 
 But to me the most significant change in the aim and 
 direction of Papal policy is indicated in the tone of the 
 encyclical letter of October 4th. There are, as we shall 
 see, disquieting aspects about that letter. Yet it must 
 be admitted that the aspects to which I refer would prove 
 disquieting to but a very small proportion of the members 
 of the Roman Communion, and to a still small, if some- 
 what larger, proportion of Christians outside the Roman 
 pale. To the great majority they would count, no 
 doubt, as most reassuring. In any case I have no desire 
 to touch upon them just now. My immediate purpose 
 is to call attention to the spiritual earnestness and 
 purpose which pervade this letter, and to the almost 
 entire absence from it of political implications. Even 
 the temporal power is only distantly hinted at in a single 
 passing phrase, and that, perhaps, the most conventional 
 and least convincing in the whole letter. On the other 
 hand, though every sentence taken by itself may be 
 commonplace in conception and conventional in ex- 
 pression, there glows throughout the whole a spiritual 
 ardour which reveals the directness and simplicity of a 
 personal, as distinguished from a merely official, ideal of 
 duty. 
 
 Already the spirit of Pius X is being reflected in 
 France. The most significant episcopal pronouncement 
 of recent times is the pastoral letter which Mgr. Fuzet, 
 
THE FIRST ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS X 215 
 
 Archbishop of Rouen, has just issued to his clergy. 
 Taken with an article written earlier in the year by 
 M. Birot, the Vicar General of Mgr. Mignot's diocese of 
 Albi, and almost certainly representing the views of the 
 Archbishop of Albi himself, it points to a change of 
 policy on the part of French Catholics which, if not too 
 late, may be full of fruitful and happy consequence for 
 the future of the Church in France. It is a matter of 
 common knowledge that the same policy is strenuously 
 advocated by Mgr. Lacroix, Bishop of Tarentaise. Mgr. 
 Fuzet could not be more explicit. He calls upon his 
 clergy to hold themselves aloof from the tumultuous 
 arena agitated by political passions ; to avoid the " com- 
 motions of a bitter, irascible, unforgiving zeal," to 
 refrain from taking part in " political conferences, 
 banquets, or processions organized by our associations." 
 " If we wish," he continues, " to hold France for the 
 Church, it is high time to return to that patient charity 
 which is not easily provoked, which beareth all things, 
 and which knows how to raise itself above secondary 
 questions in which first principles are not involved. To 
 secure religious peace, let us refuse no accommodation 
 which leaves the faith untouched." These words, 
 uttered at a time when the Concordat is endangered, 
 when the repeal of the Loi Falloux, in so far as it guar- 
 anteed to the authorized Orders and the secular clergy 
 the right of teaching, is on the eve of being accomplished, 
 when the Orders themselves have to face wholesale 
 suppression, and often in circumstances (generally, it 
 must be admitted, of their own creation) of legal in- 
 dignity, may seem a cowardly shirking of a great issue. 
 
216 MODERNISM 
 
 To me they seem, on the contrary, the words of wisdom 
 and moderation, inspired by a just view of the political 
 situation. It is unnecessary to say that they have been 
 met by a storm of abuse, alike from the extreme Clericals 
 who hate the Republic, and from the extreme Radicals 
 who hate the Church. Mgr. Fuzet is for the moment 
 the common target for the grossest missiles of scorn 
 which the ingenuity of extreme sectaries can devise. 
 The Radicals, of course, accuse him of having his eye on 
 the vacancy in the Archbishopric of Paris, which the 
 death of the aged and infirm Cardinal Richard may 
 any day create. To the extreme Clericals he is simply a 
 traitor. The reactionary Bishops, with the fiery Mgr. 
 Turinaz at their head, have promptly fulminated in a 
 contrary sense. None the less, Mgr. Fuzet and those 
 who act with him are the one hope of the Church at a 
 moment of supreme crisis. The Republican Block, 
 dominated by M. Jaures, and by even fiercer spirits than 
 he, holds the occasionally hesitant M. Combes in the hollow 
 of its hand. The Jacobin spirit is triumphant. Passive 
 obedience to the dictates of the Block has become the 
 one political virtue. The ideal of Ignatius Loyola, to 
 become like a corpse in the hands of authority, is the 
 ideal which Jacobin fanaticism is prepared to impose 
 upon every minister, as well as upon every member of the 
 majority in the Chamber. M. Lintilhac parades his 
 autocratic tags from Aristotle in the Senate with an 
 effrontery which would not have been unworthy of 
 Napoleon himself. It seems as if the liberties of the 
 Catholic minority were to be completely suppressed. 
 And yet all this is possible only because of the political 
 
THE FIRST ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS X 217 
 
 intransigeance of the Clericals an intransigeance at 
 once stupid and unteachable. And it will continue to 
 be possible so long as that spirit continues. That is just 
 what the few intelligent Churchmen in France so clearly 
 see. M. Fonsegrive (known perhaps best to English 
 readers under his pseudonym of Yves le Querdec), has 
 recently stated in the Quinzaine that he and other Catholic 
 Liberals have probably conceded too much in the past 
 to the prejudices of the extreme wing, that they ought 
 all along to have fought more boldly and openly for the 
 idea of Liberalism in Catholic politics. M. Fonsegrive 
 is quite right. It is the hour for compromise, for a 
 frank acceptance of the Republic by Catholics, for 
 political action on the part of Catholic laymen in concert 
 with the Progressist Liberal party. That party is 
 reconstituting itself. The cause of Liberalism for which 
 it stands is daily championed in the Press by the fore- 
 most minds of France, often by men who could not 
 identify themselves politically with M. Meline. M. 
 Clemenceau has just urged in the Senate one of the most 
 powerful pleas for liberty which have been heard there 
 for years. Perhaps a still more significant fact is the 
 speech of M. Charles Dupuy, formerly President of the 
 Council, delivered in the Senate on November 5th. For 
 in that speech he buttressed his appeal for liberty of 
 teaching by a reference to the changed tone of Catholic 
 theology, to its openness to the influence of modern 
 knowledge and modern habits of thought, as indicated 
 by M. Loisy's " L'Evangile et L'Eglise " a name which, 
 as M. Dupuy added, was on all men's lips. It is certainly 
 not usual for an ex-Radical Minister to defend his 
 
218 MODERNISM 
 
 political action by a reference to the writings of a Catholic 
 divine, just as it is unusual to find such writings available 
 for such a purpose. The forces of Liberalism would not 
 only be enormously strengthened, they would be speedily 
 triumphant, if only the policy advocated by Mgr. Fuzet 
 could be frankly accepted by even a respectable minority 
 of the Catholics of France. It would mean, of course, 
 the abandonment for the moment of the cause of the 
 Congregations, but it would mean also the preservation 
 of the Concordat, which without such a change of policy 
 seems inevitably doomed. It is of course but a feeble 
 hope that such prudent counsels will prevail. But at 
 least the temper of the new Encyclical is a direct en- 
 couragement to those who may be courageous enough 
 to adopt and follow them. 
 
 The influence of the Church in the future must depend 
 upon her spiritual methods and aims, no longer upon 
 mere political chicanery. Every attempt to extend her 
 mere political influence is a direct loss of effective power. 
 It is on this account that we may hope that the dream 
 of installing a Papal Nuncio at the court of St. James's, 
 which it is said is again haunting the brains of certain 
 ecclesiastics both in England and in Rome, will come to 
 nothing. There is, indeed, in any case little chance of 
 its success. The temper of England is touchy and 
 irritable at the mere suggestion of such schemes. The 
 instinct which will resist them may be largely the product 
 of ignorance and prejudice, but in the main it is a right 
 instinct. No religion will make its way in the future but 
 in virtue of its own inherent worthiness, of its corre- 
 spondence to the actual needs of humanity. If the 
 
THE FIRST ENCYCLICAL OF PIUS X 219 
 
 Catholicism of the Roman Church is to make its way, 
 it must not attempt to exempt itself from the conditions 
 of success which are being everywhere set by the trend 
 of the modern spirit. Among these none is more certain 
 than a view of religion which, however much it may allow 
 for the claims of organization and the need of authority, 
 yet claims for the individual the right to apply it as he 
 will in all the multiform concerns of the secular life. 
 The religion which seeks to regiment its adherents 
 politically is to that extent doomed as a living spiritual 
 force. It must inevitably sink to the level of a semi- 
 political semi-religious sect, about the most grotesque 
 and antiquated absurdity which can still cumber God's 
 earth. 
 
 It is on this account that I recognize with satisfaction 
 the new note of the Encyclical E Supremi Apostolatus. 
 I wish I could look forward with equal hope to the 
 influence of Pius X upon the future of the heroic attempts 
 which are being made by the young scholars of France 
 and Italy to present the faith in an intellectual form 
 likely to commend itself to modern habits of thought. 
 For any such hope I can only say with regret that I see 
 no support. Pius X is not a theologian. He is almost 
 a saint, with all the narrowness and intensity of a man 
 of meagre intellect and strong conviction. He is all 
 the more dangerous on that account. The new Papal 
 Secretary may have a wider range of intellectual interests, 
 but he is said by those who know him to be a man of the 
 same stamp, sincere, courageous, straightforward, con- 
 vinced that the faith is coterminous with its traditional 
 interpretation. Those of us who believe that the future 
 
220 MODERNISM 
 
 of the faith depends in a supreme degree upon the wise 
 application of the results and habits of contemporary 
 thinking to the fresh interpretation of its contents may 
 yet long for one of the days of Rampolla, may live to 
 regret the veto which the Archbishop of Cracow carried 
 in his pocket into the Conclave and which indirectly lifted 
 Cardinal Sarto into the Apostolic Chair. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE SEPARATION LAW OF IQO5 
 
 THE Napoleonic agreement with the Supreme Pontiff 
 has outstayed its welcome while. It has succeeded in 
 completing its century, insisting besides upon its three 
 years of grace. With the last day of 1905 it will no 
 doubt finally cease to be ; for the Luxembourg is not 
 likely even to modify the decisions of the Palais Bourbon. 
 For long this strange treaty has clung a dead leaf to the 
 tree of history. Only a belated blast of a great storm of 
 popular indignation has at last swept it away. Or can 
 we say even that ? For rather it seems to have fallen 
 by chance after the passing of the storm, under the 
 benediction of the recovered sunshine and amidst the 
 quiet laughter of peaceful airs. jEolus, in the person of 
 M. Combes, had retired to his cave, and the calm head 
 of Neptune Rouvier appeared above the waves. It is a 
 change of metaphor, but the situation permits and even 
 demands a good many. 
 
 Nothing certainly is more astonishing than the 
 universal satisfaction amid which this project of separation 
 has been completed, except perhaps the passion and the 
 terror with which it was inaugurated. Were they both 
 a little feigned ? Did the fiercest anti-clerical sincerely 
 believe that separation would clip the Church's talons, 
 or the most obstinate Ultramontane fear that it would 
 clip her wings ? We are at least permitted to doubt it, 
 
 221 
 
222 MODERNISM 
 
 now that the result leaves all but the most irreconcilable 
 extremists on either side satisfied. The power of the 
 Church to hurt and destroy in the mountain of Republican 
 politics and to soar in the free air of its native spirit 
 remains exactly what it was before. Perhaps it is a 
 perception of this fact, added to the studied moderation 
 of the Legislature in its references during the discussion 
 of the Bill to members of the dissolved Congregations, 
 that accounts for the favour with which most of these 
 have received a measure whose absolute condemnation 
 at their hands might well have been expected. At any 
 rate the fact remains, that they have for the most part 
 accepted it with something like satisfaction, and it is 
 even said that their influence has been steadily directed 
 to procuring its favourable reception by the Roman 
 Curia. 
 
 But if the Bill will leave the legitimate power of the 
 Church intact, and may fail to reduce appreciably its 
 interference in secular politics, nay, may even intensify 
 the danger for the present democratic Republic of that 
 interference, it is none the less a gain that it should be 
 passed. For it creates an honest situation all round. 
 There is always something confusing for the moral sense 
 and disconcerting for the moral judgment in a compact 
 between things so unequal and dissimilar as a spiritual 
 and a temporal power. The least exercise of power on 
 the part of the temporal partner in the compact can be 
 construed into an appearance of tyranny. The most 
 unwarrantable use of spiritual power can save itself from 
 condemnation, and even procure for itself a certain 
 measure of respect, at least with those who do not 
 
THE SEPARATION LAW OF 1905 223 
 
 immediately suffer from it, and they are always the 
 greater number. It has been so conspicuously in the 
 relations between the French State and the Vatican under 
 the Concordat. The situation which that compact 
 created was confused from the beginning, and it remains 
 confused till the end. The Organic Articles, for instance, 
 have never been recognized by the Roman Court. The 
 Concordat was a treaty between the French State and 
 the Curia. The Organic Articles were certain regulations 
 determining the relations of the French Church, regarded 
 as national, and the civil administration. In these no 
 foreign power had the right of interference. Yet it is 
 clear that the Pope was not likely to admit and with the 
 growth of Ultramontanism was less and less likely to 
 admit the validity of such internal arrangements between 
 Church and State. But the very act by which the 
 Concordat gained effect on French territory, the law of 
 the i8th Germinal in the year X of the Republic, 
 incorporated the Organic Articles with the treaty. So 
 that from the beginning and in the very constitution 
 of the compact the elements of friction existed. It is not 
 wonderful that a treaty between powers so unequally 
 matched, and vitiated by the inherence of such radical 
 defects, has tried all the skill of diplomatists to work it 
 at all. It is still less wonderful that it has frequently 
 broken down altogether, and that in late years it has 
 resulted in a deadlock which threatened in time to 
 paralyse the Church's action. No one can mistake the 
 significance of twenty vacant bishoprics which disputed 
 interpretations of the Concordat are leaving as a legacy 
 to the new regime. 
 
224 MODERNISM 
 
 Granted the necessity of this measure of political 
 honesty and sincerity, it has been carried through with a 
 scrupulous regard for justice and even for traditional 
 religious sentiment which does honour to Republican 
 France. And it is interesting to notice that the man 
 who, as Reporter of this Bill, has displayed the most 
 liberal, intelligent and sympathetic statesmanship, is a 
 socialist M. Aristide Briand, the still youthful deputy 
 of the Loire. The general form of the Bill is determined 
 by the fact that at present all expenses incident upon 
 the exercise of public worship Catholic, Protestant and 
 Jewish are a charge upon the State Budget and upon 
 certain Departmental and Communal Budgets. All 
 such charges are suppressed from the ist of January of 
 next year. The present ecclesiastical establishments 
 will, however, continue to use and administer all the 
 ecclesiastical property at present under their direction 
 until they have transferred it to the new associations for 
 worship (associations cultuelles), which they must do 
 within a year from the date on which the law comes into 
 operation. All Cathedrals, Churches, Chapels, Temples, 
 and Synagogues, which are at present, in accordance 
 with the law of the i8th Germinal in the year X, 
 appropriated by the State to the exercise of public 
 worship, or which have been provided by the State for 
 the same purpose since that date, will continue to be 
 State property, and by it will continue to be appropriated 
 to the ecclesiastical establishments which at present use 
 them, and to their successors the Associations. Arch- 
 bishops' and Bishops' houses will be in the same way 
 freely placed by the State at the disposition of the present 
 
THE SEPARATION LAW OF 1905 225 
 
 ecclesiastical establishments and the Associations to 
 which they may transfer them, during a period of two 
 years. Presbyteries, the " Grands S6minaires," and the 
 Protestant Theological Faculties will be freely continued 
 in the possession of their present directors and the 
 Associations which will legally succeed them, for a period 
 of five years. At the end of these periods, the further 
 disposition of all these buildings will be resumed by the 
 State, the Departments, or the Communes to which they 
 belong. Where there is no Presbytery and the Commune 
 has provided the rent of the Minister's house, it is still 
 called upon to do so during a period of five years. All 
 buildings are granted on condition that they are kept in 
 sufficient repair by the Association. Certain buildings 
 having an artistic or historical value will be placed in a 
 class by themselves, and no " restoration " may be 
 attempted upon them without the authority of the 
 Minister of Fine Arts, or may be executed without the 
 superintendence of his department. So that Church 
 Vandalism will not in France be a private amusement, 
 but, when it occurs in the future, a national sin. 
 
 All ministers of religion who are over 60 and who have 
 been for 30 years performing ecclesiastical duties paid 
 for by the State, will receive an annual pension for life 
 equal to three-fourths of their present salary. Those 
 who are over 45, and have been paid by the State for at 
 least 20 years, will receive a life pension equal to half of 
 their present salary. All others will receive a grant of 
 the whole of their present yearly salary for the first year 
 after the Separation, two-thirds for the second, a half for 
 the third, and a third for the fourth year ; except that 
 
226 MODERNISM 
 
 in the case of Communes of less than 1,000 inhabitants, 
 and for their present ministers of religion who will 
 continue to serve in them, the duration of each of the 
 above periods will be doubled. 
 
 The religious unit recognized by the State will be for 
 the future the " Association for worship " formed in each 
 Commune. In Communes of less than 1,000 inhabitants, 
 seven persons may form such an Association. In Com- 
 munes of from 1,000 to 20,000 inhabitants, an Association 
 must consist of at least 15 persons, and in Communes of 
 over 20,000 inhabitants, of 25. These Associations must 
 hold a general meeting once a year, to consider and 
 approve the yearly statement of finance. They must 
 receive and control all collections and offerings for the 
 expenses of worship, all payments for religious services 
 and ceremonies, pew-rents (it is the nearest English I can 
 find for " la location des banes el sieges "), etc. They can 
 freely transfer to other Associations formed for a like 
 purpose any surplus of their receipts over expenditure. 
 They must in no form receive subventions from the 
 State, Departments or Communes, except grants made 
 for repairs to buildings under their control which may 
 be classed as public monuments. The Associations can 
 form themselves into Unions with a central administra- 
 tion. Associations and Unions must submit their 
 financial position to the control of the Inspector-General 
 of Finances. For the purpose of assuring the expenses 
 and maintenance of worship, both Associations and 
 Unions can form a reserve fund not exceeding three times 
 their average annual income, if that income is more than 
 5,000 francs, not exceeding six times their income if it is 
 
THE SEPARATION LAW OF 1905 227 
 
 less than 5,000 francs. In addition they can establish a 
 special reserve for building purposes, or for the decoration 
 and repair of the fabric and furniture of the Churches or 
 other buildings entrusted to them. Finally, all Churches 
 are exempt from the land tax and from the door and 
 window tax, while Presbyteries, Seminaries and the 
 Protestant Faculties of Theology are subject to the same 
 taxes as the property of private persons. 
 
 The provisions of the 5th " Title " of the law, which 
 deals with " police des cultes" have little interest. They 
 are largely a repetition of certain provisions of the 
 Organic Articles. One of the most interesting (to an 
 Irishman) is the attachment of certain penalties to the 
 boycotting of any citizen for attending or refusing to 
 attend public worship. But readers of the Common- 
 wealth may be more interested to know that religious 
 instruction may not be given, under a penalty, to chil- 
 dren of school age and on the rolls of public schools, save 
 outside school hours. 
 
 Now, as a Churchman, I claim that this Bill is a just 
 and statesmanlike attempt to disentangle an exceedingly 
 confused situation, that it fully guarantees individual 
 liberty of conscience, that it gives the Church perfect 
 freedom of action within her legitimate sphere, which by 
 elimination it defines. It is a clear, practical analysis of 
 the idea of a Church, or rather of the concrete fact of a 
 Church as it presents itself to the disinterested State. 
 The Church's conception of what would be just treatment 
 for herself at the hands of the State is an utterly fantastic 
 one, because it proceeds from an unwarranted assumption, 
 the assumption, viz., that the State takes the same view 
 
228 MODERNISM 
 
 of her nature and character which she herself must take 
 in order to be true to herself. But this is not true of the 
 modern State, and if it were true it would, in view of 
 actual religious differences, inevitably lead to injustice. 
 For the practical and impartial State the Church is an 
 Association of Associations. The concrete religious unit 
 is an Association of persons in a certain place formed 
 and continuing to exist for the exercise of a certain 
 form of worship. Religious freedom is the freedom of 
 individuals to form such Associations, and the freedom 
 of such Associations to enter into union with one another 
 on such terms as they may themselves determine. This 
 liberty is, as it seems to me, punctiliously provided for 
 by the French Bill. The Church returns to the pre- 
 Constantinian stage, with the important distinction that 
 the State does not discriminate against it as one of the 
 religious Associations with which it is the duty of the 
 State to deal. The Church in France is for the future 
 free to develop herself as a purely spiritual power and 
 by purely spiritual means. The adventitious help or 
 hindrance of connection with the State is removed. Her 
 work will no longer wear the appearance of being part 
 of the national administration. Its cost will be no 
 longer charged, and that quite insufficiently for real 
 effectiveness, to the national Budget. Her officers will 
 no longer have their temporal dignity unworthily 
 enhanced or their spiritual freedom unworthily com- 
 promised by being also State officials. In short, the 
 Church, not being national in fact, will no longer be 
 able to assume the pretence of being national. 
 
 What, then, will be the effect of this measure upon the 
 
THE SEPARATION LAW OF 1905 229 
 
 future of the Church in France ? It is a question on 
 which intelligent French Catholics are themselves much 
 divided. Naturally, the opinion of an outsider is worth 
 little. But at least it may be supposed that there must 
 be grounds for hope when we see such good Catholics 
 and such intelligent and far-seeing minds as M. Fonsegrive 
 and the Comte d'Haussonville ranged on the side of 
 Separation as ardent partisans. The situation at least 
 is clear. There are, perhaps, to make the most liberal 
 computation, 8,000,000 practising Catholics in France 
 about a fifth of its total population. The question of 
 finance will probably not be troublesome. As for the per- 
 sonnel of the hierarchy, it will no doubt undergo an 
 immediate and a radical transformation. The Vatican will 
 be able to nominate on the morrow of Separation to a 
 fourth of the total number of dioceses in France. Besides, 
 many, one might say most, of the present occupants of sees 
 are old men. In a few years the fortunes of the French 
 Church, in so far as they can be determined by the 
 character of its officers, will depend upon the unfettered 
 choice of Rome. There is little doubt that the vacant 
 Bishoprics, and others as they become vacant, will be 
 filled by members of the dissolved Congregations. The 
 chief difficulty will lie in obtaining officers of the lower 
 rank for the spiritual army. The French peasant, and 
 it is from the peasantry that these officers have in the 
 past been drawn, is a natural admirer of official rank. 
 It appeals both to his economic and his aesthetic instincts. 
 He covets its security and its dignity. There will almost 
 certainly be a considerable falling off in the supply of 
 candidates for the priesthood, and that, without unduly 
 
230 MODERNISM 
 
 impugning the motives which lead men in France, as 
 elsewhere, to offer themselves for service in the Church. 
 Besides, it must be remembered that in France, at any 
 rate, the choice of the ministry does not rest with the 
 future priest himself, but with the quite natural and 
 legitimate ambition of parents. His career is already 
 determined by the time he has reached the age of thirteen. 
 As a rule his vocation is fixed on the day that he enters 
 the ''''Petit seminaire" But the greatest danger which 
 the free Church has to face is this very seminary training. 
 It belongs to the iyth century. It is useless for the 20th. 
 Let me quote from a recent number of the Giornale 
 cTItalia some words of a distinguished French Catholic 
 theologian which exactly express what is needed. " The 
 priest who lives in a democratic society in which every- 
 thing is questioned, who wishes to reconquer to the 
 faith a nation which has lost it as it were out of its inner 
 system, must acquire other qualities than the priest who 
 lived in a monarchy and peacefully administered a 
 wealthy parish of the faithful." And apropos of this 
 very matter, he adds, in words which no outsider would 
 have the right of himself to use : " The Church must 
 be satisfied with a little band of apostles rather than 
 seek a multitude of bureaucrats and hirelings." 
 
 The future is not perhaps bright. But at any rate it 
 is the same future which the Church has to face every- 
 where. The inner conditions of character and outlook 
 with which she must everywhere set herself to the accom- 
 plishment of her new mission are the same. And the 
 outer conditions under which she will be called upon to 
 undertake it will, sooner or later, be also the same. They 
 
THE SEPARATION LAW OF 1905 231 
 
 are conditions classically defined in the words with which 
 the dying Cavour turned in farewell to the friar who had 
 just administered to him the last Sacraments, words 
 which resumed the hopes and efforts of his own life : 
 " Frate, libera Chiesa in libero Stato" 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND THE CHURCH 
 OF FRANCE 
 
 IT is not so many years ago that any assimilation of the 
 1907 problems to be faced by the Church in France and in 
 England would have seemed in the last degree far-fetched, 
 and even absurd. In those days, to begin with, we 
 knew little of each other. M. Thureau Dangin and 
 M. Bremond had not as yet made the Catholic witness 
 and aspiration of Anglicanism familiar to the cultivated 
 French public. Even M. Portal and Lord Halifax had 
 hardly begun to shape their generous project of an 
 ecclesiastical Channel tunnel which, like its political 
 counterpart, was so soon to learn from the peremptory 
 voice of authority how premature it was. And if France 
 knew little of ecclesiastical England, we knew just as 
 little of ecclesiastical France. I well remember how, 
 some fifteen years ago, the mild apologetic of Mgr. 
 Bougaud and of the Abbe de Broglie seemed to me 
 instances of an unhoped-for open-mindedness in the 
 writings of Catholic theologians. I little knew that the 
 Catholic Institute of Paris was already big with the 
 promise of a new and vigorous Catholic enlightenment. 
 But the past twelve years, and especially the last five, 
 have wrought a conspicuous change. Theological scholar- 
 ship has become internationalised in an increasing degree 
 
 232 
 
THE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE 233 
 
 and at something like a popular level of intelligence. 
 The cordial understandings so successful and so full of 
 happy augury in the political sphere have found their 
 parallels in the sphere of religion. Men so eminent and 
 so influential in our own Church life as the Dean of 
 Westminster and the Bishop of Birmingham have become 
 the centres of a lively and very healthy interest in the 
 fortunes of the Church of France and in those who are 
 making its fortunes. Those " Merchants of light " whom 
 Bacon desired to see trafficking overseas in the interests 
 of science, now cross and recross the Channel continually 
 in the interests of religion. It is a revolution which is 
 being wrought, one of those silent revolutions which 
 accomplish their work before its scope has been measured 
 or its meaning grasped. 
 
 And perhaps the most unexpected result of this change 
 is a very simple one. It is the discovery that the 
 problems which religion has to solve at the moment, at 
 least throughout Christendom, are everywhere the same. 
 Those problems may present themselves with much 
 local variety of detail, but their essential features recur 
 with an almost monotonous persistence. The religious 
 situation in France, for instance, is with but slight 
 modifications, modifications much slighter and less 
 important than we think, the religious situation in 
 England, America, and Germany as well. It is well, 
 therefore, that when that situation becomes anywhere 
 acutely relieved on a background of menacing circum- 
 stance, we should examine it closely. For it is to some 
 extent our own, even though in our case the menace of 
 circumstance be less fearful or less imminent. If the 
 
234 MODERNISM 
 
 fire has broken out on our neighbour's premises, let us 
 take thought for our own. 
 
 Jam proximus ardet 
 Ucalegon. 
 
 It is, it must be admitted, pardonable if we have not 
 realized this similarity of conditions in the religious 
 sphere before. For it is only in quite recent times that 
 it has begun to obtain. So long as the great masses of 
 the population in every Christian land were submissive 
 to the teaching and discipline of the Church, the problems 
 which occupied the attention of the various religious 
 societies were either problems peculiar to their own local 
 circumstances or problems arising out of their theological 
 differences with one another. They were problems which 
 either left the Churches enclosed within their own separate 
 paddocks or insisted that if they were to meet it must be 
 on the battlefield. But new conditions have raised new 
 problems. And as the new conditions are the same for 
 all, so the new problems are the same for all. It is these 
 new conditions which we are just beginning to scrutinize. 
 We find that we are no longer able, any of us, to count 
 on the submissiveness to ecclesiastical teaching and 
 discipline of the great masses of nominally, even perhaps 
 really, Christian people. In France, as in England, the 
 vast majority of the people stand aloof from the Church 
 as from an institution which is foreign to their interests 
 and their way of regarding life. No more there than 
 here are they hostile to religion as such. But organized 
 religion seems to them, there as here, something unfamiliar 
 and vaguely hostile. There as here they resort to the 
 Church for the consecration of the great moments of the 
 
THE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE 235 
 
 individual life baptism, first Communion, marriage, 
 death. But outside these occasions the Church means 
 nothing to them. They do not seem to be even 
 uncomfortably conscious of its presence in their midst. 
 Its protest has no power to disturb them. And yet, as 
 I have said, they are not actively irreligious. The 
 number of convinced atheists is small. There is every- 
 where a very general belief in God as a universal 
 Providence and as an eternal Judge. Their religion is 
 the practical religion of simple people. It has no interest 
 in the metaphysical subtleties of dogma, and none in 
 the curious refinements of devotion. It was so even 
 while attendance at Mass was a fairly universal religious 
 custom. It is so now that that has in many places almost 
 entirely ceased to be a custom. So far the change in 
 real religious feeling is by no means considerable. But 
 most of us, I think, will feel that even this simple 
 religious belief cannot long survive the habitual divorce 
 of Church and people. 
 
 And here is to be noted one of those local differences 
 between the religious condition of France and England 
 which have a real importance. In England religious 
 feeling has been so trained in the habit of independence 
 that, when it finds itself out of sympathy with the Church, 
 it finds or makes for itself a new home. The theology of 
 dissent, even in its most angular forms, is the theology 
 of the popular intelligence. And if the religion of dissent 
 is gradually becoming less theological and more distinctly 
 practical, it is only reflecting the changing attitude of 
 the people. And when no existing form of dissent is 
 able to satisfy certain sections of our people, they do not 
 
236 MODERNISM 
 
 cease to be religious nor are they willing to forego the 
 benefits which association offers to the religious life. On 
 the contrary they forthwith form Labour Churches, or 
 league themselves together in some such loose religious 
 brotherhood. But in France there is no such outlet for 
 the dissatisfaction of the religiously inclined with the 
 traditional Christian society. As a great French Arch- 
 bishop is reported to have said recently in reply to the 
 question whether the Separation Law was likely to lead 
 to a schism : " There is not religion enough in France 
 to make a schism." Under the keen French irony of the 
 answer there lurks a great truth. The religious training 
 of the Frenchman has made it next to impossible for him 
 to entertain the idea of independent religious organization. 
 Perhaps after all it is the grace of Catholicism, its special 
 virtue, that still works in him there. Something of the 
 old feeling for the ideal of religious unity clings about him 
 still. But if this grace of the Church has thus robbed 
 him of the power of independent action in matters of 
 religion, it is the more incumbent upon her to see that 
 he never needs to become independent of her. It is the 
 more necessary for her to understand the signs of the 
 times so that there may be no occasion for men of the 
 times to abandon her unity for the outer void. If she 
 has trained her children to believe in unity as the first of 
 religious necessities, then she ought to be equal to the 
 continuous development of a unity which will be adequate 
 to the needs of religious mankind. 
 
 And here, indeed, lies the actual weakness of the Church. 
 Like all established forces, she has come to forget that 
 she was made for men, and to believe that men were made 
 
THE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE 237 
 
 for her. She has rooted herself in an inflexible opposition 
 to the two great forces of the modern world, democracy 
 and science. Even where, as here in England, her 
 opposition to these forces has been hesitant and wavering, 
 it has still left the impression of hostility and fear. And 
 nothing can be more disastrous than timid opposition 
 ending in half-hearted concession. What was necessary 
 in order that the Church might be true to her mission was 
 a courageous and sympathetic attempt to understand 
 the active and living forces of the time. Even before 
 she could measure the scope of their action or estimate 
 the exact character of their influence, her faith ought to 
 have taught her that the very fact that they were living 
 forces commended them to her sympathy and intelligence. 
 The word of God, which the Church has been specially 
 set to learn in order that she may teach it again, is given 
 in living experience and in all the movements and hopes 
 to which that experience instinctively points. It is 
 hers, in virtue of that directive spirit which is her eternal 
 dower, to probe these workings of a Divine instinct in 
 the general life of man, and to extract from them their 
 essential and permanent lessons. For those lessons are 
 the growing revelation of God which only she can unfold, 
 which at the very least she has been appointed by God 
 to unfold. 
 
 Now the special interest of the crisis through which 
 the French Church is passing is that it brings into a 
 clear light the dangers to which the Church is everywhere 
 exposed, and the measure and character of the Church's 
 failure which has exposed her to those dangers. The 
 French habit of mind is logical. It tends to carry to a 
 
238 MODERNISM 
 
 definite conclusion the tendencies which are at work in 
 it. Indeed, the same may be said of all the Latin races, 
 and it is the fact that the Roman Church represents in 
 the main the religion of the Latin races that has made it 
 the victim of a false logic I mean of the logic of a false 
 position. And here let me say that when the Roman 
 Church turns to meet sympathetically the living forces 
 of to-day, as already many of her noblest and greatest 
 sons are doing for themselves and trying to teach her to 
 do, she will in virtue of that logic inherent in the races 
 she spiritually controls move much faster and farther in 
 the direction of the new truth which is opening before 
 the whole religious world than any other part of that 
 world. But meanwhile her logic has made her present 
 official attitude the most hopeless and reactionary in 
 Christendom, and the French Church has suffered from 
 thoughtlessly committing herself to that attitude in a 
 country which has done more than any other to give 
 consistency and force to the modern spirit. Let us take 
 the two forms in which this spirit has expressed itself, 
 and consider the attitude of the Church with regard 
 to them. The first is the principle of democracy, 
 democracy in its widest sense, the government of the 
 people to use once more the hackneyed definition by 
 the people, for the people. That principle was banned 
 and anathematised by the Syllabus of 1864. It is the 
 outstanding accomplishment of the pontificate of Pius IX. 
 To the spirit of that document the French Church has 
 been fatally faithful. Ever since 1870, her one effort 
 has been to overthrow the Republic or to undermine it 
 by a sinister and intriguing policy. [She has allowed 
 
THE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE 239 
 
 herself to become the ally of a desperate and discredited 
 political party. She resisted a democratic measure for 
 the establishment of a national system of education in 
 France with vehement denunciation, and filled the 
 European press with her outcries against an atheist 
 government. I remember how I thought in the early 
 Eighties that France was a country of atheists, and that 
 M. Ferry, whom the Catholic press now occasionally 
 claims as a Liberal statesman, was the head and front 
 of a great conspiracy to banish the name of God from 
 the minds of Frenchmen. And all the time she was 
 covering the face of France with the houses of religious 
 orders which the laws passed by the Catholic monarchy 
 had refused to authorize, and establishing, with the easy- 
 going tolerance of a Republican Government, a vast and 
 powerful religious militia pledged to wreck the Republic 
 itself by all the crooked and underhand intrigues which 
 are possible only to a spiritual power. And when this 
 same spiritual power,* existing on extra-legal sufferance, 
 had worked its crowning infamy and disgraced the fair 
 name of France before the whole civilized world, the 
 Church raised more vehemently than ever the cry of 
 persecution because France, having come to herself, was 
 minded to eliminate the poison from her system. That 
 is the political record of the Church in France during 
 the last thirty odd years. It is that record, and that 
 record alone, that has put an end to her semi-political 
 existence. 
 
 Is it necessary for me to point out the danger to which 
 the Church in England exposes herself by even appearing 
 
 * It is, of course, the Religious Orders that are referred to. 
 17 (2405) 
 
240 MODERNISM 
 
 to be the subservient ally of one political party or political 
 order ? When the House of Lords and the Tory Party 
 can always count on the blind support of the Church for 
 their measures and their policy, or even when the country 
 thinks that that is the state of things, is it well with us ? 
 Of course I know how different are the degrees of back- 
 sliding in the two countries. It is impossible that the 
 measure of criminal stupidity should be so great with us 
 for two reasons : first, because any possible political 
 alliance in this country must be with one of the recognized 
 political parties which work our constitutional machine, 
 and not with a party whose sole object is to subvert the 
 existing constitution ; and secondly, because the Church 
 here has no one centre of authority, and no centre of 
 authority at all outside the limits of the national will. 
 Here we may have bishops like Dr. Perceval and Dr. 
 Gore, who are often to be found on the side of popular 
 right, and whose individual authority in that matter 
 may be claimed as the voice of the Church with as much 
 justice as the individual authority of other bishops. Yet 
 we reckon authority in this country in the last resort by 
 count of heads, and it is a standing weakness for the 
 Church that its authority so measured is consistently 
 pledged to one political party. The inevitable result of 
 this attitude is disestablishment, and it is an extraordinary 
 witness to the political patience of Englishmen that 
 disestablishment has not come long since. Of course 
 you will understand that I do not think of disestablish- 
 ment, either for the Church of England or for the Church 
 of France, as a curse, but as a blessing. But in both 
 countries the Church has acted so as to draw down its 
 
THE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE 241 
 
 imagined curse upon its own head. In France it has 
 descended. In England it will sooner or later descend. 
 
 And would that all the consequences of reaction were 
 as little harmful as this. But that, alas ! is far from 
 being the case. What is really dangerous in such policy 
 is not the mere blind alliance of the Church with the 
 fortunes of a political party, even a reactionary one. It 
 is the transparency of the motive which has produced 
 that alliance. The Church is afraid of the new life which 
 is surging up among all Western peoples, and she is 
 afraid of it not for cowardly reasons, not through fears 
 for her temporal fortunes. It is to her credit that never 
 in her history was she less swayed by concern for temporal 
 goods. But that, alas ! is not counted to her for 
 righteousness with the multitude. For instinctively the 
 multitude feels that she is afraid of life itself, that she 
 shrinks from trusting it as the medium of a revelation 
 of things that are true and things that are honourable. 
 And there the multitude is right. She has lost faith in 
 the revelation of God through history. She wants to 
 hold the present and the future in the leading-strings of 
 the past. She has become for the multitude a spiritual 
 mother or grandmother, whom it venerates still, but to 
 whose apron-strings it will not be tied. The democracies, 
 thrilled with the vigorous lust of life, need more than 
 ever the guide which could help them to sift the inspiration 
 of the new forces and ideas, to prove the untried spirits 
 whose possession intoxicates them. And the old guide 
 has failed them. She distrusts all the spirits because 
 they are new, because they do not yield to the traditional 
 tests which she has been accustomed to apply. She 
 
242 MODERNISM 
 
 preaches her doctrine of renunciation and submission as 
 if it could serve an age which is stung by a kind of 
 Dionysiac rage of life. And, finding that her preaching 
 of such doctrines is vain, she entrenches herself more 
 firmly than ever in a mood of defiant authority. 
 
 Here, again, of course, it is quite true that the Church 
 of England has not offended so deeply as the Church of 
 Rome. Indeed, it would be more true to say that 
 English, or rather Teutonic religion, whether Roman, 
 Anglican, or Protestant, has not offended so deeply in 
 this regard as Latin religion. It is a matter of national 
 temperament rather than of the idiosyncrasies of different 
 religious societies. The Teutonic races have always 
 cultivated the active virtues more efficiently than the 
 passive, and therefore in an age which demands action 
 and faith in action, their religion is less endangered. 
 But even with us there is a certain suspicion of indepen- 
 dent thought and action, a certain exaltation of the 
 virtues of submission and obedience which is of doubt- 
 ful efficacy in our present conditions. The note of 
 undiscriminating authority is too often sounded by the 
 official voice of the Church. At any rate the honest lay 
 thinker has come to feel that he cannot look to the 
 Church for any sympathy with or intelligence of his 
 labour. He never thinks of submitting his treasures to 
 the Church for her judgment upon them. When his 
 enquiries land him in difficulties which rend the heart or 
 cloud the spirit, he takes it for granted that the Church 
 will pass him by on the other side. They are not the 
 kind of difficulties, he thinks, to which she will have any 
 answer. 
 
THE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE 243 
 
 But I am already encroaching upon the second 
 expression of the modern spirit to which the Church has 
 proved herself unsympathetic. Once the Church was 
 the focus of the scientific movement among men, the 
 leader and guide of man's attempt to know. She must 
 again become such. St. Thomas was the greatest of 
 Christian teachers because he was the supreme master of 
 all the science of the Middle Age. The Church will not 
 be herself again till she has produced a new St. Thomas, 
 another master of both the analytic and the synthetic 
 method as great as he was. But meanwhile the only 
 analysis which finds any favour among orthodox theo- 
 logians is a purely dialectical analysis, the analysis of the 
 mathematician, the logical exposition of the contents of 
 a given thesis. And of synthesis the ordinary theologian 
 does not even admit the need. For him the final 
 religious synthesis was reached long ago. Truth is a 
 sealed book, or at least a book the last page of which 
 has been written. And this in an age when the human 
 mind is feverishly engaged in forming provisional syntheses 
 of the most various and contradictory character! The 
 Church ought to be in the thick of the fray, disengaging 
 whatever of new and vital truth there may be in all this 
 fever of speculation through the power of that spirit of 
 life and truth which possesses her. But instead she is 
 laying the dead hand of authority on all speculation and 
 rebuking it with her " non possumus" And for this 
 supreme folly, and indeed supreme dereliction of one of 
 her essential duties, the Church of France has con- 
 spicuously suffered. It was inevitable that it should be 
 so. There is no country in the world where intellectual 
 
244 MODERNISM 
 
 activity is more general, or, I may add, more thorough 
 and sincere. In such a country to disregard the problems 
 of thought is to be condemned beforehand to futility 
 and powerlessness. And the Church has not merely 
 disregarded them, but brushed them impatiently aside 
 as unworthy of her attention, and condemned their 
 provisional solutions as soul-destroying heresies. Mean- 
 while she has buttressed herself on her self-chosen ground 
 of devotion, with the result that she has shut out from 
 her pale all but the unintelligently devout and a few of 
 those steadfast and loyal souls who will not be repulsed 
 by her coldness or her suspicion of their independent 
 mental attitude. For the little coterie of the devout she 
 invents new marvels of devotion every day, divorcing 
 herself and the cause of religion which she has in charge 
 with increasing certainty from the intelligence of the 
 time. This routine of a devotion which becomes more 
 and more superstitious is growing to be the sole word of 
 religion which the Church has to utter to a spiritually 
 distracted age. The devout secure all her favours ; they 
 practically direct, or rather dictate, her policy. They 
 run her newspapers and speak her mind to a world 
 which can afford to smile at the fatuous stupidity of 
 it all. And when the intelligent clergy protest at 
 such a prostitution of the function of the greatest of 
 all human teachers, they are met with the thunders of 
 the Osservatore Romano and official denunciation of 
 their unorthodoxy or disloyalty. 
 
 I think we can recognize some of these dangers, again 
 I hope in a lesser degree, among ourselves. The narrowing 
 of the Church to a little circle of what I may call experts 
 
THE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE 245 
 
 in devotion ; the practical excommunication of the 
 common people who would hear the word gladly if it 
 were expressed in symbols which they could understand, 
 but who know nothing of and care nothing for outlandish 
 types of devotion ; the dreary fuss of the clergy over 
 minute points of ritual and adornment which minister 
 only to religious priggishness in youths and maidens at 
 an age when priggishness is a danger and religious priggish- 
 ness a special danger ; the religious dictatorship of a 
 little knot of ecclesiastical laymen ; that arrogant and 
 omniscient tone which is too often adopted by our 
 clerical press these are some of the ways in which we 
 have all unconsciously reproduced that situation in 
 France, against which all the noblest spirits of the 
 French clergy are strenuously fighting. 
 
 And think of why all this has come about. It has 
 come about through a false exaltation of the Church 
 which has belittled the Church, as all self-assertion and 
 self-importance always does. She is here, beyond our 
 praise or our blame, independently of our exaltation or 
 our neglect. She is here, with the Divine Spirit eternally 
 in her heart ; here, accredited with that divinest of 
 missions to serve humanity ; here, set to listen for the 
 word of truth and capture its harmony as it breaks in 
 rude discords through the agelong experience of humanity ; 
 here, to be present to every sincere endeavour after truth 
 and right, recognizing it for her own and consecrating it 
 for the life of the future with her sanctions ; here, just 
 as she has come to us, her face marred and bruised more 
 than any man's, out of the long warfare against evil 
 which she has fought without flinching ; here, in the 
 
246 MODERNISM 
 
 variety of her human experience and the manifold 
 wisdom of her human methods ; here, in the seamless 
 robe of her Divine purpose ; here, One, Holy, Catholic, 
 Apostolic, in her spirit. And we have found nothing 
 better to do than to sterilise her will and her redemptive 
 effort by forcing her for a generation to demonstrate 
 about herself and to flaunt all her credentials and those 
 not always even genuine ones in the face of a scoffing 
 world. This is what the best sons of France have been 
 proclaiming for a decade to be the recusancy of the 
 Church of to-day, and the cause of her present bank- 
 ruptcy. I fear that some part of the indictment 
 applies to ourselves. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE SYLLABUS OF THEOLOGICAL ERRORS 
 
 September, 
 
 THE Decree, Lamentabili Sane, of the Holy Roman and 1907 
 Universal Inquisition, to which an apt historical reminis- 
 cence has already, whether legitimately or not, given the 
 popular title, " The Syllabus of Pius X," is a document 
 whose immediate and obvious interest is naturally for 
 members of the Roman Communion only. But from 
 many points of view it is inevitable that the attention of 
 the whole Christian world should be held by the judg- 
 ments of so imposing a tribunal. The curiosity which 
 provokes to interest in our neighbour's affairs is not 
 always idle or malign. It may sometimes be the honest 
 and humble recognition of the risks of a common 
 adventure. 
 
 And assuredly in the present crisis of theological 
 speculation throughout Christendom such risks are both 
 numerous and formidable. The Christian theologian of 
 to-day is a seeker in a new intellectual region. Vast 
 unfamiliar spaces surround him. The pioneers of science 
 and history are daily bringing in their reports of the new 
 lands which he must subdue to the familiar uses of human 
 habitation. The climate tries him by its strangeness, 
 and even more by its savage and unhumanised rawness. 
 The rank natural growths which surround him are 
 charged with a deadly poison to which he must find an 
 immediate antidote, with an unconscious malice which 
 
 247 
 
248 MODERNISM 
 
 his skill must speedily exorcize. He must fell, clear, 
 subdue, transform. It is his to humanise a new world, 
 to make a new spiritual home for men in the midst of 
 strange conditions. He has the old faith to work with, 
 the faith that in himself and his fellow-men is revealed, 
 both as need and power, and to some degree as knowledge 
 proceeding from that need and power, the essential 
 character of the ideal spiritual city. That faith he brings 
 with him as a living tradition from the old home he has 
 had to abandon, from the old familiar world which he 
 will never forget, but in which he will never live again. 
 He must fit it somehow to this new world into which he 
 has come. He must subdue all these new natural forces 
 into its service. He has no least shadow of doubt that 
 these forces exist only to be subdued by him to this end. 
 He knows the risks and dangers of such an enterprise, 
 but he knows also that those risks must be faced, those 
 dangers met. He knows that there is only one course 
 which is absolutely fatal to pretend that there are no 
 risks, that this new uncouth world needs no subdual, to 
 insist and to hypnotise himself by his insistence into 
 believing that he is in his old world still, and that all will 
 be well if only everyone else will believe as he does. 
 
 The Christian theologian, then, who has realized the 
 new situation is under no illusion. He knows that his 
 mission is a dangerous one, but he knows too that the 
 danger of declining it, or of pretending that no excep- 
 tional mission is necessary, is infinitely greater. And 
 in facing these new problems, in undertaking this un- 
 familiar mission, he has made a discovery which alleviates 
 his sense of danger, which at least heartens him to meet 
 
THE SYLLABUS OF THEOLOGICAL ERRORS 249 
 
 all possible perils of the enterprise. It is that in this 
 new land of the spirit his ancient theological enemies are 
 pledged of necessity to the same adventure with himself. 
 They are both moving forward in faith to the conquest 
 and ordering of the unknown. A sense of comradeship, 
 distant as yet and formally unrecognized, but neverthe- 
 less strong in the growing consciousness of the common 
 task, is gaining hold upon the ancient foes. Each of the 
 pioneering bands watches with interest the dispositions 
 of the other, and with something that is near to sympathy 
 its measure of success. 
 
 It is on this account that those who are not of the 
 Roman Communion are interested in this new Syllabus 
 of theological errors. We have for years followed with 
 increasing sympathy the efforts of the Roman pioneers 
 to clear a passable track for the spirit through the 
 tangled undergrowth of that new intellectual world in 
 which we have all suddenly found ourselves. Our 
 sympathy has been the greater in that we recognized the 
 more arduous nature of the conditions under which they 
 laboured. Attached to an army in which the necessary 
 discipline of the camp had hardened through ages into 
 the formal and hampering punctilio of the court, they yet 
 strove with a quiet dignity and a tenacious courage to 
 persuade etiquette out of its formal scruples and into a 
 realization of the nature and magnitude of the task in 
 hand. And now we understand that this Syllabus is 
 the deliberate and long-pondered judgment of Roman 
 authority upon their efforts. The day of the mere 
 pioneer is past. His work, which is always necessary, 
 has been accomplished. His report has been received 
 
250 MODERNISM 
 
 at headquarters and solemnly considered. We are now 
 to hear the general order founded upon that report, in 
 obedience to which the whole army will move. 
 
 For many who have not closely followed the Liberal 
 movement in the Roman Church, the first interest of the 
 Syllabus will be its authoritative revelation of the actual 
 positions held by the present-day theological pioneers 
 of that Church. They have heard, perhaps, vaguely of 
 certain alleged audacities of theological renewal on the 
 part of a few Roman writers. The names of Tyrrell and 
 of Loisy may have filtered through the distorting 
 medium of newspaper clamour, and have thus come to 
 symbolize some fantastic mood of revolt or reform in 
 Rome, they know not which, and they care perhaps as 
 little to know. If they are intelligent and educated 
 laymen, they have long since lost all interest in that 
 weaving of ropes out of sand which they have found 
 modern theology to be. And they are mildly amused 
 at the assumption which all this fuss about Roman 
 Liberalism implies, that one more desperate attempt at 
 flogging the dead horse of theology into a painful 
 semblance of life can possibly interest them. No doubt, 
 they think, it is nothing more than a new sleight-of- 
 hand trick which some of these amazingly clever Roman 
 jugglers have invented to revive the jaded attention of 
 a sceptical public. Well, if that is their thought, let 
 them buy a copy of the Tablet of July 27th, and see 
 what the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition accuses 
 these men of actually teaching. They will find 
 there sixty-five propositions, precise and categorical in 
 their form, representing, according to this authoritative 
 
THE SYLLABUS OF THEOLOGICAL ERRORS 251 
 
 guardian of Christian truth, " errors which are being 
 daily spread among the faithful." And though those 
 who know most about the movement of which I am 
 speaking may fail to recognize some of these " errors " 
 as the actual teaching of its leaders, yet, lest there should 
 be any doubt, the Roman correspondent of the Tablet 
 tells us in the same number that he " has been asked 
 to emphasize the fact that the errors condemned in the 
 Syllabus are precisely those that are being taught and 
 spread, and that the propositions containing them are 
 contained actually and not merely constructively or 
 deductively in the writings from which they have been 
 taken." Now there is no indication, either in the 
 Syllabus itself or in any of the more or less official com- 
 ments upon it which I have read (and I have read many, 
 both in Italian, in French, and in English), that any of 
 the condemned propositions have been taken from non- 
 Roman writers. The Syllabus has therefore, through 
 the medium of the highest official authority, summarised 
 for us the actual theological speculation of modern 
 Liberal Roman writers. It is no small service for a 
 busy public whose interest in these matters needs the 
 stimulus of vivid simplification, even if that simplifica- 
 tion happens to be unfair, or in some instances (see 
 Propositions 19 and 65) grotesque. The outstanding 
 and, we may hope, fruitful result of this resounding 
 condemnation of the Roman Inquisition is that the 
 whole world may now know that the problems which 
 face Christian faith everywhere are being felt with the 
 same force in the Roman Communion as they are felt 
 outside it, and have provoked attempts at solution 
 
252 MODERNISM 
 
 as fearless and far-reaching as any which have been 
 ventured by the boldest free lances of the most unfettered 
 of Christian Communions. 
 
 We are thus enabled, on the authority of the Roman 
 Church itself, to test the value of its boasted doctrine of 
 Infallibility. Here are men whose devotion to the 
 Roman Church cannot be questioned, who have suffered 
 much through their devotion to it, and have yet, we fear, 
 to suffer much more, and yet whose attempt to think out 
 what the Christian faith means has forced them at the 
 very least to recognize that the problems which Christian 
 faith has now to solve are exactly such as the ordinary 
 Christian without any infallible guidance finds them to 
 be, has forced them further to solutions which do not 
 seem appreciably to differ from those reached by fallible 
 private judgment. Never surely had a Church, whose 
 infallibility has been for nearly forty years an article of 
 faith, such an opportunity of justifying her crowning 
 act of belief in her Divine guidance as has been accorded 
 to Rome during that period of intellectual revolution 
 which has been almost exactly coeval with her own 
 declared power to meet it. Yet the total result is that 
 those of her sons who have been most intellectually 
 alive, and who have devoted their intellect to the resolu- 
 tion of difficulties which none can escape, are in no better 
 plight than the unprotected victims of private judgment, 
 and have received at the end for all their pains the coup 
 de baton of official authority. 
 
 Again Rome has spoken. And what has she said? 
 Not one word of enlightenment upon a situation the 
 most intricate and perilous. She has simply condemned 
 
THE SYLLABUS OF THEOLOGICAL ERRORS 253 
 
 sixty-five propositions, " characterized " (as the Tablet 
 tells us) " by that precision of expression in which Rome 
 excels, which the Latin language is so well adapted to 
 convey." And yet even of this merit of precise ex- 
 pression, save in so far as it is exhibited in translation 
 into the Latin language, the Roman correspondent of 
 the same journal cruelly robs her, since he " has been 
 asked to emphasize the fact " that the condemned pro- 
 positions are " contained actually in the writings from 
 which they have been taken." All these sixty-five 
 propositions have grown out of a sincere attempt to deal 
 with difficulties which no thinking mind in our time can 
 escape. Yet they are condemned, and there is an end. 
 We are left where we were. No sign reaches us of 
 sympathy with or understanding of the new situation 
 which has arisen. Do the Roman authorities think 
 that we are living still in pre-Copernican, pre-Darwinian, 
 pre-Niebuhrian days ? Or do they know perfectly well 
 that we are not, and yet refuse to do anything to accli- 
 matize the eternal Christian faith in the changed world 
 in which, by grace or evil craft of the masters of modern 
 astronomy, of modern science, of the modern historical 
 method, we are privileged or compelled to live ? Ap- 
 parently it is not the part of an infallible authority to 
 teach its children, who have begun to feel that they have 
 legs and that there is a real solid earth beneath them 
 upon which perhaps those legs were meant to find the 
 delight of their own power, how to walk safely and 
 warily. At any rate it confines itself to a futile scolding 
 of the adventurous children who are clumsily trying to 
 use their legs as best they can, and to a coaxing 
 
254 MODERNISM 
 
 recommendation to the others to remain for ever in their 
 comfortable cradle. Or, to use the words of the author 
 of a recent Open Letter to the Pope,* " Authority, 
 incapable of entering into the spirit and understanding 
 the writings of its faithful and deserving servants, does not 
 confute, does not discuss, but condemns, and condemns 
 because it does not understand." 
 
 But this Syllabus is not merely a condemnation. It 
 is a travesty, and by reason of that very " precision of 
 expression which the Latin language is so well adapted 
 to convey." The Tablet is evidently delighted with 
 these " short .paragraphs in the Latin text of the 
 Decree " which have sublimated the poison so discreetly 
 diffused in " lengthy passages of flowing Italian, or 
 brilliant French, or refined yet strangely puzzling 
 English." Now poison is not poison until it is concen- 
 trated. It exists, I believe, as a natural and healthy 
 constituent in most of the substances we usually eat 
 and cannot well refrain from eating unless we are to 
 perish. It is only when it is concentrated that it becomes 
 dangerous, that it is what we call poison at all. And 
 these sixty-five propositions constitute a travesty of 
 Liberal Roman speculation, just because the " short 
 Latin paragraphs " in which they are set forth are such 
 a concentration. I say this, remembering well that they 
 are alleged to be " contained actually in the writings 
 from which they have been taken." That may be 
 perfectly true, though my knowledge of the writings 
 from which presumably the condemned propositions 
 have been drawn, and it is a fairly wide one, does not 
 
 *"What we Want An Open Letter to Pius X." John Murray. 
 1907. 
 
THE SYLLABUS OF THEOLOGICAL ERRORS 255 
 
 always enable me to find these propositions " actually 
 contained " in them. But apart from this altogether, 
 the Syllabus is a travesty of the teaching of Roman 
 Liberals. I can imagine a Roman Liberal signing whole- 
 heartedly, if not all, yet many of these condemnations. 
 For what has been done ? From apologetic writings 
 whose very essence is the accommodation of the Christian 
 faith to altogether novel conditions of thought and 
 knowledge, whose force lies in a careful attempt at 
 discrimination of elements which were formerly held to 
 be indissolubly fused together, whose validity depends 
 upon the qualifications and reserves which a complex 
 subject-matter demanded and which these writings 
 actually contained, certain crude and unrelieved pro- 
 positions have been excerpted and submitted for con- 
 demnation in short paragraphs of that Latin language 
 which is so remarkable for its capacity of precise ex- 
 pression. Is it possible to conceive of any means less 
 likely to secure the truth or to condemn error ? After 
 such a process, we are as much in the dark as ever as to 
 where truth may lie or even as to where exactly error 
 lurks. The error which is condemned is a pure abstrac- 
 tion, far indeed from that concrete error which may still 
 linger undetected and unreproved in the minds and 
 writings of these victims of infallible incapacity. That 
 word returns to us : " Authority condemns because it 
 does not understand." 
 
 And its want of understanding is the real danger 
 which still has to be faced. This Syllabus confuses, or 
 refuses to recognize, the real issue. It still dumps down, 
 without a word of explanation, without a hint that it 
 
 18 (3405) 
 
256 MODERNISM 
 
 \ 
 
 realizes any need of explanation, the faith-cum-science 
 construction of an entirely past habit of mind. But 
 there is a new science, a new history, a new psychology. 
 The universe, human development, the individual soul, 
 have been revealed to us under new forms. We under- 
 stand them all, or try to understand them, under new 
 categories. There must be a new fusion of the ancient 
 faith with this new science. And that fusion will take 
 place of itself when, and it cannot take place until, one 
 piece of honest work has been done. It waits until the 
 analysis of the old faith-cum-science construction has 
 been completed. And it is the honest acceptance of 
 the results, even if provisional, of the new science (the 
 results of any real science are always provisional), and 
 above all the profound penetration of the contem- 
 porary mind by its presuppositions and methods, that 
 can alone bring about the completion of that analysis. 
 Meanwhile its progress is sufficiently advanced to enable 
 at least some of us to surmise the forms which faith in 
 God and in Christ must inevitably take in some not dis- 
 tant future. Those forms will be determined, as they 
 always have been determined in every living epoch of 
 Christian thought, by what men actually know of them- 
 selves and of the world, not by some abstract metaphysic 
 crowned with whatever halo of traditional glory. The 
 sixty-five condemned propositions of the new Syllabus, 
 travesty as they may be and most certainly, in their 
 detached crudity, are of the teaching of Liberal Roman 
 theologians, are after all valuable in that they reveal 
 through all their crudity how far the freshest and most 
 vigorous minds of the Church of Rome have gone towards 
 
THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI " 257 
 
 recognizing the necessity, and even suggesting the actual 
 outlines of these forms. No other value can well be 
 accorded this document, except perhaps this that it is 
 one more demonstration of the practical futility and the 
 theoretical absurdity of what orthodox Roman theologians 
 call Infallibility. They are careful indeed to tell us before- 
 hand that this document is not infallible, but they insist 
 that it is nevertheless " binding upon Catholics in the 
 sense that they must acquiesce in the teaching therein 
 contained with an assent at once full, perfect, and 
 absolute." A new device, I suppose, for claiming all 
 the advantages, without incurring any of the risks, of 
 oecumenical decisions ! But the plain outsider expects 
 Infallibility to be really infallible by clearly proclaiming 
 the truth when the dangers of error are so great and 
 unavoidable. He is, as usual, disappointed, and the 
 Syllabus of Pius X goes the way of that of Pius IX to 
 the limbo of things forgotten and contemned. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI " 
 
 December, IT is the same freakish accident of first words that gave 
 to the world the recent decree of the Inquisition under 
 the amusingly apt and descriptive title Lamentabili, 
 and has again so ironically named the latest Papal 
 Encyclical Pascendi. It is, indeed, difficult to see how 
 Pius X can persuade himself that he has here discharged 
 that duty of feeding the Lord's flock which has been 
 " divinely entrusted to him." What he has done is to 
 condemn, with every added instance of contempt and 
 reproach, those who were attempting to lead the flock 
 into the fresh fields and pastures new which the Lord 
 of life had prepared for it. For himself, he has once 
 more forbidden the flock to wander beyond the narrow 
 pen of scholasticism where every scanty blade has long 
 since been nibbled to its hard and sapless roots. A part 
 of the Lord's flock is to be harried in order that the rest 
 may be starved, or rather made content with its now 
 habitual starvation. 
 
 It is not assuredly the condemnation of what this 
 Encyclical presents to us, under the name of Modernism, 
 as a closely-knit and wholly consistent intellectual 
 scheme for the deformation of Christianity that is the 
 most serious feature of the fatal situation it has created. 
 Indeed this supposed Modernist system is but a perverse 
 figment of the imagination of the clever and inveterately 
 
 258 
 
THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI " 259 
 
 scholastic theologian to whom Pius X entrusted the 
 drafting of the Encyclical report says of M. Billot of the 
 Roman College of the Jesuits. No one who knows 
 anything of the various movements co-ordinated by 
 this writer, whoever he may have been, under the name 
 of Modernism, can fail to detect the unfairness or wilful 
 blindness of that lust of system-mongering which has 
 impelled him to his task. Practical Church reformers, 
 for instance, like Don Romolo Murri, or philosophic 
 apologists like M. Fonsegrive, are among those whose 
 aims and achievements the Encyclical would expressly 
 condemn. Yet they are both of them neo-scholastics, 
 obedient to the impulse given by the Encyclical Mterni 
 Patris of Leo XIII. Again, a certain simile is quoted 
 with impatient contempt as " that of one of the leaders 
 of Modernism." Yet it is a simile which has been used 
 by a distinguished English Catholic writer who has often 
 most loyally, if somewhat subtly, defended the most 
 disastrous excesses of Roman authority. The truth is 
 that there is no necessary intellectual cohesion, and 
 often none in fact, between the various movements 
 which the Encyclical masses under a common title and 
 a common condemnation. They have indeed a con- 
 nection, but that connection is not logical, but vital. 
 They all spring out of a common impulse of life. And 
 that is just the reason that they are all alike condemned. 
 Life has its risks, or rather becomes life only through 
 incurring risks ; and Roman authority does not will 
 that there should be any risks in religion. It wants a 
 religion which on the side of intellectual expression will 
 be absolutely safe ; and that, by reason of the nature of 
 
260 MODERNISM 
 
 truth, means a religion that is intellectually dead. It 
 is not an unusual, and perhaps not an unnatural, desire 
 on the part of religious authority. Yet it is just an 
 ancient and venerable religious authority that might 
 have been expected, in virtue of its long experience, to 
 free itself from the illusion of such a desire. God reveals 
 His truth and His goodness through the activity of the 
 human mind and will, through the quest of truth and 
 goodness by actual living souls. So at least we thought 
 we had learned, but His Vicegerent seems to think the 
 notion so absurd that it is only necessary to state it to 
 expose its absurdity. 
 
 It is not then a particular self-consistent philosophico- 
 religious theory which is condemned by this Encyclical, 
 but religion itself trying to express itself in its living 
 reality along the various lines of activity which the 
 Encyclical has chosen to group together as Modernism. 
 For some years an immense religious revival has been 
 seething in the bosom of the Roman Church as else- 
 where ; there, indeed, perhaps more conspicuously than 
 elsewhere. This revival has taken the general form 
 which every far-reaching religious revival must in time 
 assume, of seeking the Divine will and way in the most 
 generous movements of contemporary life, or at least of 
 seeking there their illustration and interpretation. The 
 Christian thinker has sought for a revelation, or rather 
 for a satisfying form of revelation, in contemporary 
 thought. The Christian scholar has lost his fear of that 
 revision of historical fact which unprejudiced critical 
 enquiry seems to impose. The practical Christian has 
 found in the active forces of contemporary life a fresh 
 
THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI " 261 
 
 inspiration and direction of his religious hopes and aims. 
 He would revive and fortify the spirit of the Church by 
 modifying its antiquated and hampering forms. Above 
 all he would remind authority of its duty of fostering 
 and guiding life, and not allow it to content itself with 
 merely distrusting and rebuking life. And through all 
 this various expression of tendencies and endeavours it 
 is a vital religious spirit that has been working. The 
 resistless breath of life has passed upon the dry bones of 
 use and custom, and, clad in joyous flesh and blood, they 
 are marching to the possession of a living earth. It is 
 just at such a moment that authority ought to find its 
 opportunity. If it is to prove itself worthy of its role, 
 it ought to place itself with confidence at the head of the 
 living host, to welcome its ardours, to knit together its 
 energies, to chasten if need be its headlong impulsiveness. 
 The particular expressions of the reforming impulse are 
 accidental, and may need correction. But at least some 
 expression is necessary, just because life is there. And it 
 is surely the function of any authority which can be 
 accepted as worthy, to rescue life from the excesses of 
 its recovered liberty, and not merely to immure it once 
 more in the prison from which it had escaped. 
 
 Yet that seems to be in effect the response of Roman 
 authority to this courageous attempt to renew the religious 
 life of the Roman Church. There is not in this pro- 
 nouncement of an infallible authority the slightest sign 
 of recognition that religious faith is beset by any diffi- 
 culties whatever, except indeed those which spring from 
 the spiritual pride or the intellectual presumption of 
 vainglorious and ignorant men. The very difficulties 
 
262 MODERNISM 
 
 which they feign, they have themselves created through 
 these moral defects. The whole sum of philosophical 
 speculation since the days of St. Thomas is scornfully 
 dismissed as the " ravings of philosophers." Abundant 
 ridicule is heaped upon that conception of an inner sense of 
 God native to the human soul by which the mystics who 
 have adorned Rome above all other Communions habitu- 
 ally lived and realized their spiritual life. A crude 
 psychology is as confidently appealed to as if no other 
 were possible which would make a kind of absolute 
 distinction, a distinction inherent in the nature of things, 
 and not merely in our various manipulation of our inter- 
 penetrating faculties, between sentiment and reason. 
 Nay, this psychology would actually antagonize the two, 
 and regard sentiment as a kind of natural and diabolical 
 enemy which reason has always to subjugate and control. 
 The conception of sentiment as already charged with 
 an inherent reason which needs to be evoked and denned, 
 is not so much scouted as not even entertained as tenable 
 by reasonable beings. Knowledge is not so much 
 affirmed as confidently implied, without any need of 
 affirmation, to be the result of the operation of reason as 
 a separate faculty upon the data of a mechanically acting 
 sense-perception. A deductive philosophy which, if it 
 could be rigorously enforced, would annul every gain of 
 science during the last three centuries by a simple demon- 
 stration of the false method which inductive science has 
 employed, is once more enthroned on the seat of know- 
 ledge by this intellectual ukase. Religion is chained 
 to the mummified corpse of Scholasticism preserved with 
 considerable pomp in Roman schools for the reverent 
 
THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI " 263 
 
 inspection of those who frequent those museums of the 
 intellect. It is absolutely forbidden, upon pain of 
 immediate dissolution into atheism, to have any truck 
 with the ravings of living philosophers. This is the 
 guidance of authority in the midst of a great religious 
 crisis. 
 
 But this is not all, nor is it indeed the most alarming, 
 if it is the least excusable, aspect of this intervention of 
 authority. What is worse is that the Encyclical revives 
 in its most arrogant and relentless form the conception 
 of religion as mere submission voluntary, or if need be 
 enforced to a closed and rigid system. It is unfortunately 
 a conception which fits in too easily with the habits and 
 traditions of the Latin races. It is almost impossible 
 for the Anglo-Saxon or the Teuton, whether he be Roman, 
 Anglican, or Protestant, to conceive how entirely religion 
 is identified with government and order in the Latin, and 
 especially in the Roman mind. The old imperial prin- 
 ciple and imperial idea still dominate the life and especi- 
 ally the religion of these races after fifteen centuries. 
 For them religion has always been, and still is, mainly a 
 consecration of the social order. Attendance at Mass is 
 still a customary social duty punctiliously observed by 
 great masses of people who never think of " practising " 
 their religion where it claims them as individuals. And 
 it is just these masses who had never heard of Modernism 
 until this Encyclical was issued, and who, having now 
 heard of it, will immediately dismiss it from their minds 
 with the careless reflection that " Rome has spoken," 
 and that there is an end of some new and uncomfortable 
 religious novelty. It is this attitude of the laity which 
 
264 MODERNISM 
 
 provoked that saying of a French ecclesiastic at the time 
 of the Separation Law, " There is not religion enough in 
 France to make a schism." This indifference to vital 
 religion, this disposition to regard religion as merely 
 external order and government and decent recognition of 
 it, will be accentuated or, if that is not possible, will be 
 authoritatively sanctioned by this decision. Meanwhile 
 there has to be considered its effect upon the small but 
 vastly important intellectual elite among the laity, the 
 men of University training who are familiar with the 
 mind of their generation, and who, just because of that 
 familiarity, have been drawn to a serious interest in 
 religion and even to a devout and earnest " practice " 
 of it. It is they and a large section of the younger clergy 
 in France and Northern Italy, and even in Sicily those 
 who ought to know are bold enough to say a majority of 
 them who will be straitened in mind and spirit by this 
 action of authority. They had dreamed of a Catholicism 
 which would be worthy of that great name, which was 
 about to conquer and subdue its essentially schismatic 
 mood of a moment, even if that moment had counted 
 as four centuries. And here they find themselves flung 
 back upon a mood wilfully uncatholic and sectarian, 
 upon a mood which would definitely divorce their Church 
 from the living world and enclose it for ever within 
 fenced walls. Every device of an organized spiritual 
 police is to be employed to procure an absolute docility 
 and the unmurmuring silence of death within the world- 
 defying walls of the spiritual city. Perinde ac cadaver is 
 to be extended from the Society of Jesus to the whole 
 Church as its sufficient and compelling motto. And 
 
THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI " 265 
 
 this corpse-like submission is to be achieved by teaching 
 the clergy to think as nobody in the evil world can any 
 longer think ; by extending the Inquisition (which has, 
 says a Roman Cardinal, justified itself by keeping Spain 
 Catholic !) to every diocese ; by guarding the faithful 
 from the injury of inoculation with the poison of 
 Modernist literature an injury " greater than that 
 caused by immoral reading " ; by Episcopal policing of 
 Catholic booksellers ; by snatching from the hands of 
 the faithful (the Tablet mildly translates " put out of 
 reach of the faithful," but the inimitable Latin language 
 is more pregnant with its " e manibus fiddium auferre ")* 
 every injurious book ; by removing Modernist pro- 
 fessors from their chairs and setting them to menial 
 work ; by a censorship so universal and efficient that no 
 " bad book " (i.e., Modernist writing) may henceforth 
 succeed in getting printed ; by preventing the clergy 
 from meeting to discuss anything that ought to interest 
 them, especially their Bishops and the Apostolic See ; 
 finally, by a perpetual and universal system of delation 
 whereby everything done throughout the universal world 
 shall be whispered in the secret chamber at Rome. The 
 Pope has exclaimed in a lyrical outburst of horror: 
 " Procul, procul esto a sacro ordine novitatum amor." If 
 he had only been less afraid of novelty, the telephone 
 or even the Marconigraph might have been redeemed to 
 high spiritual uses. 
 
 Yet it may be safely predicted that this gigantic 
 scheme of spiritual police will fail of its object, and fail 
 
 * It ought to be stated that the Encyclical quotes this gem from 
 Leo Kill's Apostolic 11 Constitution Offtciorum; but how delightedly 
 it must have adopted it and turned it to its own account. 
 
266 MODERNISM 
 
 too of that which assuredly cannot be its object, but 
 would nevertheless be its inevitable effect if it succeeded, 
 the annihilation of the Roman Church as an effective 
 spiritual force in the world. It will not succeed because 
 the men against whom it is directed are inspired by an 
 intense religious zeal and sustained by an intense 
 religious faith, and because their zeal and their faith are 
 alike fed by their communion with the Roman See as the 
 centre of the living religious tradition of Christendom. 
 If religious tradition meant for them something intel- 
 lectual, the right holding of a particular interpretation 
 of the faith, then that communion might not be necessary 
 to their spiritual life. But the tradition which they find 
 most fully illustrated in Rome is the tradition of the 
 religious experience of innumerable saintly souls. From 
 that spiritual communion nothing, not even formal 
 excommunication at the hands of Roman authority, 
 can or will separate them. Father Tyrrell has just 
 explained their attitude and determination with his usual 
 clearness and strength in the pages of the Grande Revue.* 
 And if, to entertain for a moment what I believe to be 
 the impossible, Rome should succeed in forcing them at 
 last out of that measure of faithfulness to her which 
 alone she will permit, then one of two things will happen. 
 Either she will continue in her obstinate blindness, and 
 there will be an end of her spiritual dominion, or she will 
 hasten once again to build the tombs of her martyred 
 prophets and to reform herself on the lines which their 
 prophecy had marked out and their martyrdom deepened. 
 Meanwhile, wherever the Catholic temper is alive in 
 
 * October 10, 1907. Article entitled, " L'Excommunication 
 Salutaire." 
 
THE ENCYCLICAL " PASCENDI" 267 
 
 Christendom, these men will be honoured for their faith- 
 fulness to the Catholic ideal. It is only where the 
 decaying remains of a merely sectarian Protestantism 
 still fester as a rival and response to the unsavoury 
 sectarianism of the present mood of Roman authority, 
 that they are greeted with the unintelligent and un- 
 chivalrous cry, " Serve you right ; what business have 
 you there ? " Thus it is that unbridled absolutism and 
 unbridled individualism induce the same sectarian tem- 
 per and proclaim with the same assurance the necessity 
 on the one hand of compelling all to accept the same 
 intellectual expression of religious experience, and on 
 the other of dividing over every expression of it which 
 may commend itself to the individual mind. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 (a) WORKS NOTICED IN THIS VOLUME 
 
 DENIS (1'Abbe CHARLES). L'Eglise et I'fitat : Les Lefons de 
 I'Heure Presente. Paris, Roger et Chernoviz, 1902. 
 
 HOGAN, J., P.S.S. Les Etudes du Clerge, traduit de 1' Anglais par 
 1'Abbe A. Boudinhon. Paris, Lethielleux, 1901. 
 
 MIGNOT (Mgr. E. I., Archeveque d'Albi). La Methode de la 
 Theologie . Discours pour la seance de rentree de 1' Institut 
 Catholique de Toulouse (13 Nov., 1901). Paris, Lecofire. 
 1902. 
 
 The Method of Theology (English translation of above). 
 
 Catholic Truth Society, 1902. 
 
 HOUTIN (1'Abbe ALBERT). La Question Biblique chez les Catho- 
 liques de France au XlXe. Siecle. Paris, Picard et fils, 
 1902. 
 
 L'Americanisme. Paris, Nourry, 1904. 
 
 LOISY (1'Abbe ALFRED). LEvangile et I'Eglise. Paris, Picard 
 et fils, 1902. 
 
 The Gospel and the Church (English translation of above). 
 
 Pitman, 1903. 
 
 Autour d'un Petit Livre. Paris, Picard et fils, 1903. 
 
 DESJARDINS (PAUL). Catholicisme et Critique. Paris, Cahiers de 
 
 la Quinzaine, 1905. 
 
 LABERTHONNIERE (le Pere L., de 1'Oratoire). Essais de Philoso- 
 phic Religieuse. Paris, Lethielleux, 1903. 
 VON HUGEL (Baron FRIEDRICH). Du Christ Eternel et de nos 
 
 Christologies Successives. Extrait de La Quinzaine, June 
 
 1. 1904. 
 Lettres Romaines. Paris, Roger et Chernoviz. Extrait des 
 
 Annales de Philosophic Chretienne, 1904. 
 FOGAZZARO (ANTONIO). // Santo. Milano, Baldini Castoldi e Co., 
 
 1906. 
 BRIGGS (Rev. CHARLES A.), and VON HUGEL (Baron FRIEDRICH). 
 
 The Papal Commission and the Pentateuch. London, 
 
 Longmans, 1906. 
 LE ROY (&DOUARD). Dogme et Critique. Paris, Bloud et Cie., 
 
 1907. 
 
 269 
 
270 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 (b) OTHER WORKS OF, OR ABOUT, LIBERAL 
 CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 
 
 TYRRELL (GEORGE). Lex Orandi. Longmans, 1903. 
 
 Lex Credendi. Longmans, 1906. 
 
 Oil and Wine. Longmans, 1906. 
 
 A Much-abused Letter. Longmans, 1906. 
 
 Through Scylla and Charybdis. Longmans, 1907. 
 
 Two articles in the Times (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 1907) on the 
 
 Encyclical " Pascendi." 
 
 The Prospects of Modernism. HIBBERT JOURNAL, Jan., 1908. 
 
 TYRRELL (GEORGE) and PETRE (M.D.). The Soul's Orbit. Long- 
 mans, 1904. 
 
 PETRE (M. D.). Where Saints have Trod. Catholic Truth 
 Society, 1903. 
 
 Catholicism and Independence. Longmans, 1907. 
 
 WILLIAMS (W. J.). Newman, Pascal, Loisy, and the Catholic 
 
 Church. FRANCIS GRIFFITHS, 1906. 
 PALMER (W. SCOTT). The Church and Modern Men. Longmans, 
 
 1907. 
 HECKER (Rev. ISAAC THOMAS). The Church and the Age. New 
 
 York, Catholic Book Exchange, 1896. 
 ELLIOTT (Rev. WALTER). The Life of Father Hecker. 2nd 
 
 edition. New York, Columbus Press, 1894. 
 SPALDING (Mgr. J. L., Bishop of Peoria, 111., U.S.A.). Opportunity. 
 
 Opportunite (traduit de 1' Anglais par 1'Abbe Felix Klein). 
 
 Paris, Lethielleux, 1901. 
 
 (This work is known to me only in the French 
 translation. I have not been able to ascertain the 
 name of the publisher of the American edition or the 
 date of its publication, as the British Museum Library 
 does not contain a copy.) 
 BLONDEL (MAURICE). L' Action. Paris, Alcan, 1893. 
 
 Lettre sur les exigences de la Pensee contemporaine en matiirt 
 
 d' apologetique et sur la methode de la Philosophic dans 
 
 I'etude du probleme religieux. (Annales de Philosophic 
 
 Chretienne). 1896. 
 MIGNOT (Mgr. E. I., Archevfique d'Albi). Critique et Tradition, 
 
 extrait du Correspondant (10 Janvier, 1904). Paris, de 
 
 Soye et fils, 1904. 
 LABERTHONNIERE 1'Abbe L.). Le Realisme Chretien et I' Idealism* 
 
 Grec. Paris, Lethielleux, 1904. 
 LABERTHONNIERE (1'Abbe L.)., CHEVALIER (JACQUES), et LE 
 
 GENDRE( MAURICE). Le Catholicismeetla Societe. Paris, 
 
 Giard et Briere, 1907. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 271 
 
 LE ROY (&DOUARD). Comment se pose le problime de Dieu. 
 
 Ex trait de la Revue de la Metaphysique et de Morale. Mars 
 
 et juUlet, 1907. 
 HOUTIN (1'Abbe ALBERT). La Question Biblique au XXe Siecle. 
 
 Paris, Nourry, 1906. 
 
 La Crise du Clerge. Paris, Nourry, 1907. 
 
 SAINTYVES (P.). La Re forme Intellectuelle du Clerge. Paris, 
 Nourry, 1904. 
 
 Les Saints Successeurs des Dieux. Paris, Nourry, 1907. 
 
 Le Miracle et la Critique Historique. Paris, Nourry, 1907. 
 
 Le Miracle et la Critique Scientifique. Paris, Nourry, 1907. 
 
 DIMNET (1'Abbe ERNEST). La Pensee Catholique dans I'Angleterre 
 
 Contemporaine. Paris, Lecoffre, 1906. 
 
 DE BONNEFOY (1'Abbe JEHAN). Les Lecons de la Defaite. Paris, 
 Nourry, 1907. 
 
 Vers L' Unite de la Croyance. Paris, Nourry, 1907. 
 
 Le Catholicisme de Demain. Paris, Nourry, 1908. 
 
 BREMOND (1'Abbe HENRI). L' Inquietude Religieuse. Paris, 
 
 Perrin, 1901. 
 
 Ames Religieuses. Paris, Perrin, 1902. 
 
 Newman : Essai de Biographic Psychologique. Paris, 
 
 Bloud, 1906. 
 
 The Mystery of Newman. (English translation of above) .with 
 
 preface by the Rev. G. Tyrrell. Williams & Norgate, 1907. 
 BUREAU (PAUL). La Crise Morale des Temps Nouveaux. Paris, 
 
 Bloud, 1907. 
 LE MORIN (J.). Verites d'Hier. La Theologie traditionnelle et les 
 
 Critiques catholiques. Paris, Nourry, 1907. 
 LEFRANC (E.). Les Con flits de la Science et de la Bible. Paris, 
 
 Nourry, 1906. 
 MICHAUD (Dr. E.). Les Enseignements essentiels du Christ. Paris, 
 
 Nourry, 1907. 
 BIROT (1'Abbe L.). Le Mouvement Religieux. Paris, Lecoffre, 
 
 1901. 
 FONSEGRIVE (GEORGE L.). Le Catholicisme et la Vie de I' Esprit. 
 
 Paris, Lecoffre, 1899. 
 
 Catholicisme et Democratie. Paris, Lecoffre, 1898. 
 
 Lettres d'un Cure de Campagne. Paris, Lecoffre, 1895. 
 
 Lettres d'un Cure de Canton. Paris, Lecoffre, 1895. 
 
 Le Journal d'un Eveque, pendant le Concordat. Paris, 
 
 Lecoffre, 1897. 
 
 Le Journal d'un fiveque, apres le Concordat. Paris, Lecoffre, 
 
 1898. 
 CHAINE (LoN). Les Catholiques francais et leurs difficultes 
 
 actuelles. Paris, Storck, 1903. 
 19 (2405) 
 
272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 CHAINE (LEON). Menus Propos d'un Catholique Literal. Paris, 
 
 Nourry, 1908. 
 SABATIER (PAUL). A propos de la Separation des Eglises ft de 
 
 I'Etat. Paris, Fischbacher, 1905. 
 
 2nd edition of same, enlarged. Paris, Fischbacher. 
 
 Disestablishment in France (English translation of above). 
 
 Fisher Unwin, 1906. 
 
 Lettre Ouverte a S.E. le Cardinal Gibbons <J propos de son 
 
 Manifeste sur la Separation des Eglises et de I'Etat en 
 
 France. Paris, Fischbacher, 1907. 
 RIFAUX (Dr. MARCEL). Les Conditions du Retour au Catholicisme. 
 
 Paris, Plon-Nourrit, 1907. 
 KLEIN (1'Abbe FJELIX). Le Fait Religieux et la Maniere de 
 
 I' observer. Paris, Lethielleux, 1903. 
 
 Quelques motifs d'esperer. Paris, LecofEre, 1904. 
 
 Au pays de "la Vie Intense." Paris, Plon-Nourrit, 1904. 
 
 FOGAZZARO (ANTONIO). Ascensioni Umani. Milano. Baldini, 
 
 1899. 
 SEMERIA (GIOVANNI). L'Eredita del Secolo. Genova, Donatti, 1900. 
 
 Le Vie detta Fede. Roma, Pustet, 1903. 
 
 Scienza e Fede. Roma. Pustet, 1903. 
 
 MINOCCHI (Prof. Salvatore). La Crisi Odierna del Cattolicismo 
 
 in Ger mania. Firenze, Ariani. 1907. 
 GALLARATI-SCOTTI (Marchese TOMMASO). Discorso Inaugurale 
 
 del Primo Congresso della Lega Democratica Nazionale. 
 
 Milano, 1906. 
 Quello che Vogliamo. Letter a aperta di un gruppo di Sacerdoti 
 
 (privately printed and circulated). 
 What we Want. (English translation of above.) Murray, 
 
 1907. 
 // Programma dei Modernisti. Risposta aU'Enciclica di Pio 
 
 X, " Pascendi Dominici Gregis." Roma, Societa Inter- 
 
 nazionale Scientifico-Religiosa Editrice, 1907. 
 The Programme of Modernism. (English translation of above.) 
 
 Fisher Unwin, 1908. 
 
 (c) SOME WORKS OF TECHNICAL SCHOLARSHIP BY 
 
 LEADING LIBERAL CATHOLIC SCHOLARS 
 LOISY (1'Abbe ALFRED). Histoire du Canon de I'Ancien Testa- 
 ment. Paris, Picard, 1890. 
 
 Histoire du Canon du Nouveau Testament. Paris, Picard, 
 
 1891. 
 
 Etudes Bibliques. Paris, Picard, 1901. 
 
 Les Mythes Babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genese. 
 
 Paris, Picard, 1901. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 273 
 
 LOISY La Religion d' Israel. Paris, Picard, 1901. 
 
 E-tudes Evangeliques. Paris, Picard, 1902. 
 
 Le Quatrieme fivangile. Paris, Picard, 1903. 
 
 Morceaux d'Exegese. Paris, Picard, 1906. 
 
 TURMEL (1'Abbe JOSEPH). Histoire de la Theologie Positive depuis 
 I'origine au Concile de Trente. Paris, Beauchesne, 1904. 
 
 Histoire de la Theologie Positive depuis le Concile de Trente 
 
 au Concile du Vatican. Paris, Beauchesne, 1907. 
 
 Saint Jerome. Paris, Bloud, 1906. 
 
 L' Eschatologie a la fin du IVe. Siecle, extrait de la 
 
 Revue d' Histoire et de Litterature Religieuses, Macon, 
 1900. 
 
 Le Peche Originel apres Saint Augustin. (La Revue d' His- 
 
 toire et de Litterature Religieuses), 1903 and 1904. 
 BATIFFOL (Mgr. PIERRE), fitudes d' Histoire et de Theologie 
 
 ^Positive. \ere serie. Paris, Lecoffre, 1902. 
 
 2me serie. Paris, Lecoffre, 1905. 
 
 DUCHESNE (Mgr. Louis). Pastes fipiscopaux de I'Ancienne Gaule. 
 
 3 vols. Paris, Fontemoing, 1894. 
 
 figlises Separees. Paris, Fontemoing, 1896. 
 
 Origines du Culte Chretien. Paris, Fontemoing, 1898. 
 
 Christian Worship. Its Origin and Evolution. (English 
 
 translation of abovej C.K.S., 1903. 
 
 Histoire Ancienne de I'Eglise. Vol. 1. Paris, Fontemoing, 
 
 1906. 
 
 Histoire Ancienne de I'figlise. Vol. II. Paris, Fontemoing, 
 
 1907. 
 VACANDARD (1'Abbe E.). L' Inquisition et le Pouvoir Coercitif de 
 
 rfiglise. Paris, Bloud, 1906. 
 DELEHAYE (le Pere HIPPOLYTE, S. J.). Les Legendes Hagio- 
 
 graphiques. Bruxelles, Societe des Bollandistes, 1905. 
 
 The Legends of the Saints. (English translation of above.) 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, 1907. 
 CHEVALIER (le Chanoine ULYSSE) . Notre Dame de Lor ette. Paris, 
 
 Picard, 1906. 
 DUFOURCQ (ALBERT). Etude sur les Gesta Martyrum. Paris, 
 
 Fontemoing, 1900. 
 TLXERONT (PAbbe J.). La Theologie Anteniceenne. Paris, 
 
 Lecoffre, 1905. 
 DUPIN (A.). Le Dogme de la Trinite dans les trois premiers siecles. 
 
 Paris, Nourry, 1907. 
 HOUTIN (1'Abbe ALBERT.) La Controverse de I'Apostolicite des 
 
 figlises de France au XlXe. Siede. Paris, Fontemoing. 
 CALMES (le Pere TH.). L'fivangile Selon Saint Jean. Paris, 
 
 Lecoffre, 1904. 
 
274 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 LAGRANGE (le Pere M. J.). La Methode Historique. Paris, Lecoffre. 
 
 Le Livre des Juges. Paris, Lecoffre, 1903. 
 
 Etudes sur les Religions Semitiques. Paris, Lecoffre, 1905. 
 
 GIGOT (Rev. FRANCIS E.). General Introduction to the Study of 
 
 the Holy Scriptures. New York. Benzinger. 
 
 Special Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament. Part I, 
 
 The Historical Books. New York, Benzinger. 
 Part II, Didactic and Prophetical Books. New York, 
 
 Benzinger, 1906. 
 
 SCHELL (Dr. HERMANN). Christus. Mainz, Kirchheim, 1904. 
 KRAUS (Dr. F. Z.). Cavour. Mainz, Kirchheim, 1902. 
 
 Essays. 2 vols. Berlin, 1896. 
 
 Dante, Sein Leben und Sein Werk. Berlin, 1897. 
 
 EHRHARD (Dr. ALBERT). Der Katholizismus und das Zwanzigste 
 
 Jahrhundert. Stuttgart & Wien, 1902. 
 
 Liber aler Katholizismus ? Stuttgart & Wien, 1902. 
 
 ZAPLETAL (VINCENZ, O. P.). Alttestamentliches. Freiburg 
 
 (Schweiz), 1903. 
 
 SEMERIA (GIOVANNI). Dogma, Gerarchia, e Culto nella Chiesa 
 Primitiva. Roma, Pustet. 1902. 
 
 Venticinque anni di Storia del Cristianesimo nascente. Roma, 
 
 Pustet, 1900. 
 
 // primo Sangue Cristiano. Roma, Pustet, 1901. 
 
 // Pensiero di San Paolo nella Letter a ai Romani. Roma, 
 
 Pustet, 1903. 
 
 La Messa nella sua Storia e net suoi Simboli. Roma, Pustet, 
 
 1904. 
 
 BUONAIUTI (Don ERNESTO). LoGnosticismo. Roma, Ferrari, 1907. 
 MINOCCHI (Prof. SALVATORE) . / Salmi tradotti dal testo originale 
 
 e commentati. Roma, Pustet, 1905. 
 
 Storia dei Salmi e dell' Idea Messianica. Roma, Pustet, 1902 . 
 
 II Nuovo Testamento tradotto e annotato 1. I Vangeli. Roma, 
 
 Pustet, 1900. 
 
 Le Profezie d'Isaia, tradotte e commentate. Bologna, 
 
 Matteuzzi, 1907. 
 
 Many important articles of both critical and general interest 
 are also to be found in the Revue d'Histoire et de Litterature 
 Religieuses. (1896-1907), the Studi Religiosi (1901-1907), and the 
 Annales de Philosophic Chretienne. The two former reviews 
 ceased to exist with the end of the year 1907. 
 
 (This Bibliography makes no pretence to be exhaustive. It has 
 been formed for the most part from works in my own possession, 
 and the date given is occasionally, therefore, that of a second or 
 later edition. In some cases I have not been able to trace the 
 date of publication.) 
 
INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 ALBERTUS Magnus, 38 
 Alexander V., 206 
 Americanism, 104-111, 204 
 Annales de Philosophic Chrf- 
 
 tienne, 27, 112, 177 
 Ardant (1'Abbe), 33 
 Aristotle, 37, 99, 216 
 Astnic (Jean), 19 
 Averroes, 38 
 Aynard (Senateur), 167 
 
 BACON (Roger), 39 
 
 Balfour (A. J.). 107 
 
 Balzac (Honore de), 25 
 
 Barthou (Jean Louis), 166 
 
 Bargy (M.), 110 
 
 Batifiol (Mgr. Pierre), 33, 35, 193 
 
 Belot (Gustave), 154 
 
 Bergson (Henri), 149, 178 
 
 Billot (le Pere), 259 
 
 Birot (1'Abbe), 33, 215 
 
 Blondel (Maurice), 32, 95, 105, 
 
 112-128 
 
 Bodley (J. E. C), 25 
 Bossuet (Eveque de Meaux), 51, 
 
 52 
 
 Bougaud (Ev6que de Laval), 232 
 Bourget (Paul), 25, 27, 168 
 Boutroux (Emile), 149, 178 
 Bremond (1'Abbe Henri), 130, 
 
 232 
 
 Briand (Aristide), 224 
 Bricout (1'Abbe J.), 177 
 Briggs (Prof. Charles A.), 139- 
 
 148 
 
 Broglie (1'Abbe de), 175, 232 
 Brown (Prof.), 142 
 BrunetiSre (Ferdinand), 24, 32, 
 
 168, 178 
 
 CAJETAN (Cardinal), 182 
 Calmet (Dom), 182 
 Calvin (Jean), 24 
 
 275 
 
 Cavour, 231 
 Centra (Pio), 195 
 Clemenceau (Georges), 217 
 Combes (Emile), 208, 209. 211, 
 
 216 
 
 Commonwealth, 213, 227 
 Comte (Auguste), 39 
 Coppee (Fran9ois), 168 
 Comely (le P6re), 43 
 Croix, La, 168 
 Cromwell (Oliver), 146 
 Cursus Scriptures Sacra, 43 
 
 DABRY (1'Abbe), 33, 186 
 
 Dante, 148 
 
 Denis (1'Abbe Charles), 27-32, 
 
 177 
 
 Denzinger's Enchiridion, 21 
 De Rossi, 41 
 Descartes (Rene), 99 
 Desjardins (Paul), 88-94 
 Didon (le Pdre), 172, 175 
 Dimnet (1'Abbe Ernest), 184 
 Doumer (Paul), 166 
 Dreyfus Affaire, 165, 168, 209 
 Driver (Dr. S. R.). 142 
 Duchesne (Mgr. Louis), 32 
 Duns Scotus, 18, 149 
 Dupuy (Charles), 217 
 Durand (le Pere), 194 
 
 ENCYCLICAL &terni Patris, 202, 
 
 259 
 E Supremi Apostolatus, 
 
 219 
 Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 
 
 258 
 Providentissimus Deus, 45, 
 
 49, 203 
 Epimenides, 39 
 
 FABRE (Ferdinand), 25 
 Ferry (Jules), 165, 239 
 
276 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fleming (Mgr. David), 139 
 Fogazzaro (Antonio), 129-138 
 Fonsegrive (George L.), 25, 32, 
 
 178, 217, 229, 259 
 Fontaine (le Pere), 33, 194 
 France (Anatole), 166 
 Frassen, 149 
 Fuzet (Archevque de Rouen), 
 
 33, 176, 214, 215, 216, 218 
 
 GALILEO, 39 
 
 Galtier (M.), 195 
 
 Gambetta (Leon), 165, 167 
 
 Garnier (1'Abbe), 33 
 
 Gassendi, 39 
 
 Gayraud (1'Abbe), 29, 32. 171, 
 193 
 
 Gibbons (Cardinal), 49, 108, 110, 
 204 
 
 Giornale d' Italia, 230 
 
 Gore, Dr. (Bishop of Birming- 
 ham), 233, 240 
 
 Goyau (Georges), 32 
 
 Grande Revue, La, 266 
 
 Grandmaison (le Pere de), 193 
 
 Gratry (le Pere), 174 
 
 Gregory IX, 21 
 
 Grosjean (1'Abbe) , 186 
 
 Guibert (Cardinal), 45 
 
 HALIFAX, Viscount, 232 
 Hamerton (P. G.), 25 
 Handel-Mazzetti (Mme.), 130 
 Harnack (Adolf), 45, 55, 62, 64. 
 
 185, 190, 191 
 
 Haussonville (le Comte d'), 229 
 Headlam (S. D.), Ill 
 Hebert (Marcel), 64, 94, 186 
 Hecker (Isaac Thomas), 109, 
 
 110, 200, 207 
 Hesiod, 39 
 Hogan (J., P.S.S.), 35, 36, 41, 
 
 42, 43 
 Houtin (1'Abbe Albert), 46-54, 
 
 104-111. 186 
 Hugel (Baron Friedrich von). 
 
 112-128, 139-148 
 Hugo (Victor), 127 
 Hulst (Mgr. d'), 175. 188. 189 
 Hummelauer (le Pere de), 43. 
 
 194 
 Hutton (R. H.), 181 
 
 INGE (W. R.), 76-87 
 Ireland (Archbishop of St. Paul, 
 Minnesota), 110 
 
 JANSSEN (Dom), 142 
 Jaures (Jean), 176, 216 
 Julicher (Adolf), 190 
 Justice Sociale, La, 192 
 Justin Martyr, 19 
 
 KANT (Immanuel), 98, 198 
 Klein (l'Abb6 Felix), 33, 65, 66 
 Kraus (F. Z.), 207 
 
 LABERTHONNIKRE (1'Abbe L.), 
 
 74, 95,-103, 105 
 La Bruyere, 51 
 Lacordaire (le P6re), 174 
 Lacroix (Eveque de Tarentaise), 
 
 176, 215 
 
 Lafargue (P.), 25 
 Lamennais (Felicite de), 174 
 Lamentabili Sane (Decree of the 
 
 Inquisition), 247, 258 
 Lavisse (Ernest), 89 
 Le Camus (Evdque de la Ro- 
 
 chelle), 33, 65, 66, 173, 176 
 Leibnitz, 100 
 
 Lemire (1'Abbe), 29, 32, 171 
 Lenormant (Fra^ois), 175 
 Leo XIII. 38. 49, 108, 139, 195- 
 
 204, 207, 208, 210, 211. 213, 
 
 259. 265 
 
 Le Roy(Edouard), 149-162 
 Leroy-Beaulieu (Anatole). 168 
 Lettres Romaines, 112-128 
 Lintilhac (Senateur), 216 
 Loisy (1'Abbe Alfred), 32. 45. 
 
 51-75, 105, 112. 118, 128, 
 
 185-194, 217 
 Louis XIV, 107 
 Loyola (Ignatius), 216 
 
 MACMAHON (le Marechal), 165 
 Manning (Cardinal), 209 
 Marsilio Ficino, 148 
 M61ine (Felix Jules), 167, 217 
 Mignot (ArchevSque d'Albi), 33, 
 
 36, 39, 41, 42, 43, 48, 52, 65, 
 
 66, 173, 176, 215 
 Milton, 147 
 
INDEX 
 
 277 
 
 Montalembert (le Comte de), 174 
 Montfort (Simon de). 176 
 More (Sir Thomas), 130 
 Murri (Don Romolo), 259 
 
 NAUDET (1'Abbe), 32 
 Newman (Cardinal), 130 
 
 Observateur Franfais, 186 
 O116-Laprune (Leon), 32 
 Osservatore Romano, 244 
 
 PASCAL (Blaise), 19 
 
 Percival, Dr. (Bishop of Here- 
 ford), 240 
 
 Perraud (Cardinal Evdque 
 d'Autun), 65, 66 
 
 Perreyve (Henri), 174 
 
 Petavius, 19 
 
 Pindar, 127 
 
 Pius IX, 238, 257 
 
 X, 21, 139. 205-212, 213- 
 
 220, 247-267 
 
 Plato, 99 
 
 Poincar6 (Senateur). 167 
 
 Portal (1'Abbe), 232 
 
 PressensS (Francis de), 209 
 
 QUINET (Edgar), 53 
 Quinzaine, La. 112, 149, 217 
 
 RAMPOLLA (Cardinal), 46, 220 
 
 Renan (Ernest). 67, 188 
 
 Revue de Metaphysique et de 
 
 Morale, 149, 186 
 Revue d'Histoire et de Literature 
 
 Religieuses, 45 
 Revue du Clerg6 Franfais, 35, 
 
 177, 178, 193 
 Ribot (Alexandre), 167 
 Richard (Cardinal), 45, 46, 55, 
 
 185, 190, 216 
 Robinson, Dr. Armitage (Dean 
 
 of Westminster), 233 
 Rod (Edouard). 130 
 Rose (le Pdre), 187 
 Rosegger (Peter), 130 
 
 Roselly de Lorgues, 51 
 Rouvier (Senateur), 221 
 
 S. CLEMENT of Alexandria, 19 
 S. Cyprian, 60 
 
 S. Francis of Assisi, 126, 127 
 S. Thomas Aquinas, 20, 21, 38. 
 
 187, 202, 243, 262 
 S. Vincent de Paul, 100 
 Sabatier (Auguste), 188 
 Sainte-Beuve, 104 
 Sangnier (Marc). 33 
 Savonarola, 148 
 Seignobos (Charles), 89 
 Serres (Marcel de), 51 
 Servonnet (ArchevSque de 
 
 Bourges), 33, 176 
 Shelley, 127 
 Sifflet (1'Abbe), 33 
 Sillon, Le, 33, 192 
 Simon (Jules), 165 
 
 (Richard), 19, 51, 52 
 
 Six (1'Abbe), 30, 33 
 
 Spalding (Bishop of Peoria, 111., 
 
 U.S.A.), 106, 107. 110, 111 
 St6phan (TAbbe), 171 
 Strauss (D. F.), 53 
 
 Tablet, The, 250. 251. 253, 254, 
 
 265 
 
 Temps, Le, 195, 206 
 Testem Bcnevolentia, 49, 204 
 Thomassin, 19 
 Thureau-Dangin (Paul). 232 
 
 (Francois), 65, 66 
 
 Turinaz (Evfique de Nancy), 33, 
 
 34, 168, 177, 216 
 Tunnel (I 1 Abbe Joseph), 32, 193 
 Tyrrell (George), 250, 266 
 
 VIGOUROUX (1'Abbe). 142 
 Virgil, 127 
 
 Vives y Tuto (Cardinal), 187 
 Vollot (1'Abbe). 51. 52 
 
 WALDBCK-ROUSSEAU, 165, 166 
 
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