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PASSING PROTESTANTISM AND
COMING CATHOLICISM

PASSING PEOTESTANTISM AND
COMING CATHOLICISM

BY
NEWMAN SMYTH

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1908

Copyright 1908 by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published March, 1908

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CONTENTS I Paqe
PASSING PROTESTANTISM  1
II
MEDIATING MODERNISM  40
III
COMING CATHOLICISM  132

PASSING PROTESTANTISM AND
COMING CATHOLICISM

PASSING PROTESTANTISM
The world challenges to-day the hope of
Christianity. What is its promise for hu
man life ? The question of the scholar may
be, What is Christianity ? The faith of the
people will depend more upon the answer to
the question. What can Christianity now do
in the world ? History, now making before
our eyes, has the fascination of swift move
ment and unknown possibilities. The news
of the day may open vast and untraversed
social and international problems. Within
our churches the thought, often anxious for
the morrow, is present — What shall be the
religious life of the people?
Throughout the following inquiry we shall

2 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
seek to throw a searchlight in one direction
only; we shall ask what the prospect seems
to be for a reunited Christianity, by which a
greater work of faith may be wrought than
the world has ever known. It is beyond the
scope of this essay to inquire concerning the
possibility of a reunion of the Eastern and
Western Churches; the signs of that lie as
yet beneath our horizon. But all over our
Western Christianity there is promise of a
dawning day. We shall ask whether with
good reason we may discern any signs of our
times that the age of Protestantism is pass
ing, and the age of a new Catholicism is
coming. We shall acquaint ourselves with
Modernism in the Roman Church, which
may prove to be a mediating way between
the two. We shall then understand better
with what reasonable hope we may expect
to see again the one "Holy Church through
out all the world," which the first Christian
confessors saw, and which Protestantism
has lost awhile.
We have no historical justification for re-

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 3
garding these ages of Protestantism as neces
sarily a final period of Christianity. Our
time may prove to be a transitional era, as
other periods of Christianity have been be
fore it. No mistake is easier or more fatu
ous than for those who happen to be living
at any hour of history to imagine that the
world has come to a full period in their in
stitutions; as, to take but a single instance,
it would have been folly if the feudal barons
had supposed that their social system was a
finality. Indeed, Protestantism in its re
ligious economy bears a striking resemblance
to feudalism. Its ecclesiastical confessions
remind us of the feudal castles on the Rhine;
they are like so many strongly built fortifica
tions, guarded with moat and tower, and
many an angle and loop-hole for shafts of
defence in the assaults of theological con
troversy, provided sometimes with dungeons
also for heretics. Each ecclesiastical castle
likewise has its surrounding vineyards, and
its devoted serfdom over whom it extends
its protecting power. But now the castles

4 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
by the Rhine are in ruins, or at best have
been restored into peaceable modern habita
tions, while by them all the Rhine, as of old,
flows on and on. The religious feudalism of
armed separations, frequent strifes, and
close, fortified ecclesiasticisms, like the eco
nomic feudalism, has proved to be by no
means a Christian finality.
Already Protestantism is well advanced in
a third period of its lifetime. For, so far
from its being true that it represents a per
manent form of Christian life, it is significant
that it has already passed through two
periods of growth and activity, which may
be compared to the time of early manhood
and of middle age. The first of these pe
riods, which are already completed in the
history of Protestantism, may be distin
guished as the epoch of its protest against
the one church then dominating the world
— the time long since accomplished of
the warfare of Luther and the reformers
against the crushing supremacy of Rome.
All the conflicts of religious liberty — ^how the

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 5
reformers warred and how they reigned, and
what they did, are they not written in the
book of the chronicles of the kings of our
Israel! But Luther's battle hymn, "A
mighty fortress is our God," has long since
become in our congregations a song of vic
torious faith, and no more a battle call. We
sing it believingly, triumphantly, very much
as we might use Deborah's Commemoration
Ode in the Old Testament.
The second age of Protestantism was an
era of systematic construction. The Refor
mation was more than a protest. Martin
Luther's brave act in nailing his theses on
the door of the church at Wittenberg was
not all of Martin Luther. Behind the deed
was the man; and the spiritual personality
of the man became the power of another
world-age. In his great history of Prot
estant theology, Professor Dorner has put in
the foreground the positive principle of the
Reformation, which was embodied in Lu
ther's personality, "the potentialized self of
an age"; it gave to Protestantism a vitality

6 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
and a history such as no mere protest could
have achieved. From its beginning the new
creative spirit of the Reformation was evi
dent; for a considerable period later it
manifested itself in the construction of new
churches and the formation of distinctive
creeds. By the end of the seventeenth cen
tury these were in the main completed. Then
the thought of the Reformation having
moved into them, for the next hundred years
and more it lived in them, defended them,
as men will their homes; and it was content
with occasionally repairing and refurnishing
them, but without desire to tear them down
and build new ones. During this period of
Protestantism the foundations of our larger
denominations were laid, and our chief ec
clesiastical enclosures built up. We must
turn back to those earlier theological con
troversies and the definitions of doctrines
then current, if we would understand the
language of the Protestant creeds which are
still retained in many evangelical churches,
or if we would comprehend the sub-con-

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 7
scious ideas which still rule, as ancestral
influences, the minds of many orthodox
congregations. It is not indeed true that within these con
fessions thought has remained imprisoned;
the strictest Protestant creeds have in them
open windows, and the law of liberty is
recognized among them all. Nor is the
question here in point, how far these doc
trinal statements may be susceptible of
modification or interpretation, so that they
may still be kept and used, as old houses may
be happily occupied when fitted up with
modern improvements. The single fact
which lies in the present line of our his
torical logic is, that the character of creed-
building and church-making marks dis
tinctively an age of Protestantism which
belongs to its past. Some new sects, it is
true, have been born in these last days, and
others may come to untimely birth; but it
is here to our purpose to note that the lines
of chief division through the Protestant
world were run long ago; that for two hun-

8 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
dred years Protestantism has not been much
occupied in making new denominations or
in devising new formulas of faith. On the
other hand, it has of late years been breaking
up rather than making creeds. We may
therefore justly reason that a movement of
religious thought and life, which has already
passed through two marked stages eof de
velopment — the epoch of protest and the era
of reconstruction — is a providential prepara
tion for something beyond itself; as our
civil war, and the subsequent period of re
construction, have proved to be only an
epoch of transition into a greater nationality.
There lies before us in its vaster possibility
another Christian age to come. Already we
are facing its problems. Shall the Prot
estant era — its religious warfare accom
plished, and its confused years of reconstruc
tion drawing happily to a close — issue in a
grander Catholicism? The answer of faith
is — the greater Christianity is already at the
door. A first reason for this hope is that in our

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 9
times there are to be discerned signs of the
passing of the Protestant age of history.
These are to be seen alike in the success and
in the failure of Protestantism.
It were an easy and grateful task to depict
the^splendid successes of Protestantism. Our
free churches have their glory in them. They
are the pride of our New England inheri
tance. They are the ancestral virtues upon
which our homes are built. They are the
constitutional foundations of our American
citizenship. They constitute the historic
security of democracy throughout the world.
They have opened the door wide for all
the sciences to come into our modern civil
ization; and they have made thought as
free as the angel whom the early Christian
prophet saw flying through mid-heaven
with an everlasting evangel. Protes
tantism has its triumphal arch, and upon
it are depicted the victories of hard-fought
fields, and the procession of the mighty
oppressors of the nations, led captive by
it; and the names of the heroes of its

lo PASSING PROTESTANTISM
faith remain inscribed in perpetual honor
upon it. But it is a completed arch. Its
crowning achievement is the victory which
it has won forever for the spiritual liberty
of the individual man. Henceforth the right
of private judgment for every man can never
be abolished or destroyed. This keystone
has been placed secure for all time in the
triumphal arch of Protestantism, and no
powers of darkness shall remove it from its
place. In the main the distinctive work of
Protestants as Protestants has been done.
Hereafter there may remain the lesser and
decreasing labor of extending civil liberty to
remoter regions, or in Christian lands of
adding here and there some finishing touches
to the Reformation's historic masterpiece of
the Emancipation of the Spiritual Man.
Henceforth the truth is free which makes us
free. In this fulfilment of its providential mis
sion lies the sign of the passing of the Prot
estant age. For a work achieved is always
the sign of another and a greater work to be

PASSING PROTESTANTISM it
accomplished. When one success has been
won, a new task invites the spirit that is in
man. This is so both in the individual life
and in the course of history. Successes of
men and of ideas are never ends, but means
to further ends. They are not epitaphs, but
invitations. They are not dead memories,
but living inspirations. This law of progress
holds true of the Divine revelation itself, the
record of which is preserved in the world's
Bible. The law came by Moses; but the
age in which the law was given, rendered
necessary the age of the prophets. Not to
destroy but to fulfil — the ever larger fulfil
ment of the law and the prophets — is the
historic work, still in process of accomplish
ment, of the Son of man who said, "My
Father worketh hitherto, and I work"; it
is the unceasing work of Him who sitteth
on the throne who said, "Behold I make
all things new." This is historically true;
in the great tidal movements of human life
no wave can remain too long uplifted at its
height; one after another the great waves

12 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
break upon the shores, and God's tide comes
flowing in.
We pass then from this assurance that
Protestantism has, on the whole, attained the
end for which it was sent, to consider what
further it is obviously failing to accomplish.
For in what a movement fails to do may be
given the sign of another service for a new
age to fulfil. It is no dirge that we shall
have to sing. They are the pessimists who
do not see the incompleteness of the fore
runner's work, and whose eyes are holden so
that they cannot perceive the presence of
One greater than he, for whose coming the
best past has been preparation. If we point
without hesitation to the darkest clouds of
the present hour, it is because we see also
across them the sweep and the radiance of
the bow of promise.
We are not to be understood as asserting
a complete inability of Protestantism even
where its ineffectualness is most obvious.
We are not oblivious of its splendid out
spokenness against all unrighteousness. We

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 13
can see some Christian man or woman pur
suing every evil thing under the sun. The
missionary spirit is superb; but its means
are belittling. The failures of Protestantism
are partial; but they are obvious. They
may be summed up in a word when we ask,
to what extent are the Protestant churches
losing control of the forces of life ?
Human affairs in the last analysis are
problems of forces. Institutions, laws, eco
nomics, social conditions, constitute a prob
lem of forces; history is a dynamic, and the
study of history, as truly as of physics or
biology, is a study of energy. Hence there
can be no profound insight into human life,
and still less a prophetic discernment of the
better conditions that may be obtained, un
less one feels the forces which are working
beneath and all through the world in which
men live and act. We bring our Protestant
ism, therefore, to a real test and a decisive
judgment, if we search it through and
through with this question, Is it mastering
the controlling forces of life ?

14 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
Before the Reformation a dominating
factor was the authority of the Roman
Church. Upon the whole mediaeval world
was set the stamp of the Papacy. More
over, the authority of the Papacy was an
effective authority. It worked. It main
tained undisputed control over whole spheres
of human life.
This kind of authority has long since been
discarded among us; but has Protestantism
gained authority of its own ? Or by virtue
of any power inherent in it, is it keeping a
supreme religious control of the modern
nations which it has created and made free ?
Is religion the master-passion of Protestant
communities? For Christianity must be
come the mastery of human life, or it is not
the final religion. If our existing forms of
religion are losing such control, we must
look for another coming of the Son of man
as one having authority.
Now it is just this loss of religious authority
which the churches of the Reformation must
confess. At this point we are not dealing

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 15
with causes, but facing facts. We have to
do with actual human conditions. Excep
tions there may be in many places; and
compensations also for apparent loss. But
putting these for the moment one side, and
looking broadly at the facts of life, we must
admit the relaxation of authority in our
Protestant churches.
Religion among us has lost authority in
the family life. The contrast is a marked
one between the hold which Rome keeps
even to this day upon the family, and the
weakening of religious restraints among the
children of Protestants. Admitting that
Rome may be losing adherents in its own
territory, the fact immediately in point is
that, wherever Romanism is acknowledged,
it speaks with authority to the whole family.
From the cradle to the grave, from baptism
to the last unction, it consecrates and it
makes its own the life of man. It con
fesses, it marries, and it refuses to divorce;
it commands, it warns, it blesses; and it
sends, supported by its staff, into the next

i6 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
world the faithful over whom it always
watches. So true is this, that even its chil
dren who may depart for years from its
altars and throw off its yoke, in frequent in
stances, when they are about to die, return
to their baptismal vows and send in the last
hours for the priests whom they have for
saken. Protestantism has too seldom such
inherent and inherited authority among its
own free families. We baptize; we teach in
our Sunday schools for a little while; we
marry and we divorce; we keep some men
in our places of worship, we lose others from
our own household; rarely do we bring back
those who have gone from us; and, instead
of a sustaining sacrament for the hour of
death, too often the reasonable hope of im
mortality withdraws itself in the last dark
ness from the hearts of many over whom we
have not always watched.
If one should question this fact of the
diminishing control of the churches over the
family life, an evidence of it, sufficiently
suggestive, may be found by observing the

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 17
recurrence of the same family names, gen-
•eration after generation, in the early records
of the Puritan churches, and comparing with
it the absences and the gaps in the family
names in our recent church registers. It
is not merely that our families are smaller,
or our children more scattered; it is not so
usual in these days for whole families to
belong to the church.
Coincident with this loosening of the bonds
of religion in the family is the further fact
that Protestant churches are not maintaining
their influence over considerable areas of
thought. It is not simply that worldliness
and unbelief are coming in; but much re
ligion is withdrawing from the churches. In
almost any community there may be found
considerable numbers of people who are not
in their habits of mind irreligious, nor with
out faith in their hearts. But they belong
to no church, confess no creed, and rarely
attend any public worship. They may seek
after new cults, or remain content with feel
ing themselves to be religious in general with

l8 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
no beliefs in particular. There is a kind of
religious literature not generally known
among our church membership, seldom
recognized by theologians, but to be found
in the bookstores, and having large sales
among such persons outside our com
munions — a literature which is somewhat
mystical, quietistic and spiritual, but neither
churchly nor very distinctively Christian.
The growth and spread of this kind of litera
ture outside the domain of the Church is a
noteworthy phenomenon. The older mys
ticism, the former quietism, flourished within
the Church. Now it springs up largely out
side the churches, and beyond their creeds.
The existence of large spaces of religious
nebulousness without flxed points of lumi
nous faiths, may find a partial explanation in
still another characteristic of these latter
days of the Reformation. I refer to the lack
of religious education. At this very point
where our fathers were firmly entrenched,
their descendants have been driven back
with broken ranks. We are not giving in

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 19
this country a good common-school religious
education to the people. One may recog
nize hopefully many recent efforts to repair
this disaster; but the fact of it must be ad
mitted. Once the language of theology was
not an unknown tongue in New England
homes. Words had not become obsolete
"That have drawn transcendent meanings up
From the best passion of all bygone time."
The highest themes of religious thought had
not taken refuge from the world in the
studies of Christian specialists. It matters
not whether the fault lies with a general in
tellectual negligence, or in an absorbing in
terest of mind in other pursuits. It is not
enough to lament that the art of religious
thinking in pulpits or pews is becoming one
of the lost arts. Christianity cannot evade
its own intellectual responsibility; it has no
moral right to leave the minds of men adrift
between its creeds, or too far at sea beyond
its concern. An intellectual revival is one
of the needs of the times.

20 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
Wherever the fault may lie, it is a loss if
the points of contact are broken between the
current of thought in the Church and the
general mental activity of the day. The fact
is apparent that the thoughts of many at the
present time are not to be found within the
field even of the teaching of the churches.
They do not read the religious literature
which might find them. The serious ques
tionings of many young men and women are
not brought to any intellectual confessional
within the Church. The resultant condition
is much in evidence wherever educated young
men are gathered. They have, no doubt,
some religion, probably more than they may
know. But they are not frequenters of the
churches; and their doubts are their creeds.
There are not a few who are religiously
very much in the position in which a traveller
is said once to have been left when he
reached Constantinople. Upon the arrival
of his vessel, he was put into a boat and sent
ashore. But the Turkish officials at the
landing found something wrong with his

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 21
papers, and sent him back to the ship. The
officers of the ship refused to receive him
because he had no papers authorizing him
to embark. And so the story left him pass
ing to and fro between the ship and the
shore, with no power to rest either on the
land or sea. Such is the religious state of
many minds. Protestantism does not at
tract them, and Rome repels them. They
have not the credentials of belief upon which
they may gain admission to Evangelical
churches, and, having disembarked from the
faith which once held them, no alien religion
waits to receive them. So our Christianity
seems to leave them adrift in uncertainty,
and the night comes on.
Besides all this, to run rapidly through the
enumeration of the failures of our Chris
tianity, nothing by general consent is to be
deemed more fatal to religious efficiency
everywhere than the loss of the unity of the
Church. We might here take to ourselves
the Pope's phrase, and say of our destruction
of the oneness of the Church, that it is "the

22 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
synthesis of all heresies." At lea.st it is the
summation of the losses of Protestantism.
In the second century the first great
achievement of Christianity was the up
building of the Holy Catholic Church, belief
in which we confess to this day in the
Apostles' Creed. That work was not com
pleted in a day. The passing centuries added
to it their memorial stones. Superstitions, it
is true, entered through its gates, to mingle
with its worship, and to confuse the sim
plicity of its faith. But from the midst of
those early ages the one Church stands out
as concretely, visibly, grandly, as a cathedral
above the city's toiling streets:
"Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes
Confronted with the minster's vast repose.
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot
Of faith so nobly realized as this."
The Reformation destroyed the visible
unity of the Western Church. Erasmus
wrote in 1521: "Luther has made a prodig
ious stir. . . . There is some slight hope

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 23
from Pope Leo; but if the enemies of light
are to have their way, we may write on the
tomb of a ruined world, ' Christ did not rise
again.' "
It was not the tomb of Christianity that
was left; but the Reformation was the tomb
of the Roman embodiment of Church unity.
It would be but an academic task to
wonder whether the new learning of that
day might not in time have produced a
sufficient reform within the Roman Church,
had not the sudden lightning bolt of Luther's
Reformation rent it in two. Our question is
not what shattering convulsion was inevita
ble in the sixteenth century; the providential
question which we have now to face is: By
what necessity are we bound to regard this
age of a divided Christianity as a last age
either for Protestantism or for Roman
Catholicism ? Shall the Spirit of Unity find
a worthier embodiment?
The ruins of a former Universal Church
are not to be viewed as one might the failure
of some social ideal to realize itself, as Plato's

24 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
republic remained an unsubstantial ideal of
ancient philosophy. What we have to con
template is the disappearance of a Church
unity which once had taken form and be
come visible on the earth. And if withal the
spirit of it should vanish, that would be irrep
arable loss. But just this is the religious
peril of our divisions; the ideal of the one
Church wanders among us, like an unem-
bodied spirit, from church to church, until
we almost cease really to believe in it. The
ideal is put far from us as a millennial dream;
it fades from our ordinary religious thought
as a momentary glory passes from the
evening sky. The all too common unbelief
in this supreme ideal is witnessed by the
complaisance with which even broad-minded
men in all the churches are contented to
welcome lower and beggarly substitutes for
it. The ideal of one organic Church gone
out from the firmament of their faith, they
will follow some flickering expedients of
fraternal conventions, or courtesies of lim
ited exchange of ministerial functions, and

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 25
friendly greetings on neutral platforms, and
other such manifestations of mutual respect
and occasional charity. Such approaches of
religious bodies are indeed to be welcomed,
as flags of truce may be between long hostile
forces; but this is not the marching on as
one triumphal host of Love for the overcom
ing of the world. The recovery of the ideal,
the shining of it as a great light into the
eyes of all the churches, even though it be
blinding as the vision of the ascended Lord
who had been crucified, is our Protestant
need, if we are to have in this century a
gospel for all men, as Paul had for the
Gentiles. With the decay of the ideal of the one
Church, paralysis also falls upon its working
unity. This is the now evident consequence
of a divided Christianity — it is a weak
Christianity. It is ineffectual for the work
to which it is sent among men to-day.
A further inefficiency, which we note in
passing, results from the lack of unity within
each single denomination. In different de-

26 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
grees an uneconomic competition occurs
within every denomination. Biologists have
learned to recognize the "struggle between
the parts" of an organism; but nature in
her processes of growth sees to it that the
organism as a whole shall control for its
vital increase the competition of the cells
among themselves for existence. It is not
so with our churches. Within the limits of
the same denomination, in the narrow space
of a single community, the competition be
tween churches of the same name goes de
structively on, and with little or no organic
control for the welfare of the denomination
to which they belong. Such crowding and
struggling between churches of the same
name resembles the fatal proliferation of
cells in a diseased tissue; it is not the har
monized and healthful development of an
organic whole. But this is a spectacle upon
which the early Christians never looked. It
was not to be seen in any city or town when
the faith and love of those first called Chris
tians spread with amazing rapidity through-

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 27
out the Roman Empire. Wasteful com
petitions within the same denomination in
the same locality indicate a degenerative
process, which Christianity must overcome
at the cost of much sacrifice, and, if need
be, of some heroic surgery.
The missionary obligation of the gospel
presses home the immediate duty of a re
covery of the lost unity of the Church. The
distinction between Home and Foreign mis
sions is rapidly disappearing; it is neither
with the one nor the other that in any
place or land the Church has exclusively to
do. It is International Christianity with
which anywhere and everywhere the Church
of God has to do. But international mis
sionary work has weak support when de
pendent on separate denominational threads.
Once the Roman Church was as a strong
cable, one end of which was fastened firmly
to the whole mechanism of human society.
It controlled the world, and moved it whither
it would. In Protestantism it has frayed
out into so many separate strands. No

28 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
single thread of it is strong enough to move
the whole social mechanism; it is like so
many ra veilings; at most one strand may
move a few wheels.
It will be replied with truth that the fail
ures upon which we have been dwelling are
by no means exclusive failures of Protestant
churches; that similar losses are apparent
in Roman Catholic lands. The modernists
within the Roman Church themselves bear
witness to this; they urge the decay of faith,
the rise of socialism, the forsaking of the
churches by multitudes of the people, as
reasons for their appeal to the Pope for
reform and liberty, for the reconciliation of
the Church with modern thought. This
fact, however, lies in the same line as our
reasoning. It parallels our argument. It
calls for a reconsideration on all sides of the
question of the hour: What inevitable neces
sity is there for the continuance of a divided
Christianity? How long before a new
Catholicism shall come to the hour of its
nativity? Our part as Protestants is first

PASSING PROTESTANTISM

29

with the confession of our own failures. It
is full time for us to take to heart, and with
more denominational sincerity and churchly
humility than has ever been done, the sin,
not of original schism, but of continued
schism. Are we to-day justly chargeable
with that ?
As children of the Puritans, many of us,
heirs of the liberty which they have won for
us, we do not admit that there was the sin of
schism in their enforced separation from the
national Church of England. The sin of
divorce does not consist in the divorce itself,
but it is to be sought in the cause of it. A
divorce in the household of religion is wrong,
if the reasons for it are wrong; if it arises
from tempers which should have been con
trolled, or differences which might mutually
have been adjusted; or from passions which
are sinful. It is justifiable only when the
sanctity of the marriage bond has itself first
been violated; when the wrong entering in
has struck with fatal lust at the love in which
the home is constituted. This is the New

30 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
Testament law of divorce. And it holds
with an equal validity in the Church of God.
Protestantism justifies itself historically
on this ground, that the schism was not of
its own choice or making; that its separation
was a compulsory disunion; that the cause of
it was the violation of the faith and love in
which alone the Church can continue to live
with fidelity and truth; that continuance in
the then existing bonds of the Papacy would
have involved surrender of the sanctities of
religious life, and the engendering of a suc
cession of evils that ought not to be brought
to the birth. The Protestant separation was
necessary because of what the Reformers
regarded as the adulteries of the Roman
Babylon. This claim of lawful separation
Protestantism reaffirms and justifies by the
record of the wrongs which its revolt has
removed from the earth, and the blessings
which its warfare has brought to the modern
nations. It is, however, another and an alto
gether different question whether a pres
ent schism may not be wrong although a

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 31
past schism may have been right. It is an
open question how long a schism can be
continued without unreason and sin. And
it is even a more searching question whether
a separation which formerly was necessary
may not have left together with its unques
tioned blessings an inherited temper of
schism, which, lurking in the blood, lingering
too long in the habits, betraying itself in the
pride of a church, remains as a menace to the
religous hope of the world.
Hence it has come to pass that the Prot
estantism of to-day is met by a call to con
fess its sin against the unity of Christ's
Church. A clear recognition on the part of
all non-Roman churches of their part and
share in this evil is the first condition of
effectual repentance of it. If, as on our
part we must continue to maintain, an abso
lute Papacy, subversive of the historic Epis
copate, as it has been destructive of the origi
nal democracy of the Church, is a sin against
the Holy Spirit of liberty, equally and by the
same sign, an absolute independency is a

32 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
sin against the Holy Spirit of communion.
Both are a sin against the Holy Spirit of edu
cation. Persistence in either without re
pentance, and at the sacrifice of the very life
of the Christ among men, might prove to be
the modern sin without forgiveness against
the Holy Ghost.
Moreover, we cannot fail to notice the es
cape of social and political factors from the
direct influence of the churches as churches.
The question must be raised. Is our Christi
anity organized for moral leadership in all
the affairs of business and civic life ? Never,
indeed, were Christian philanthropies so
abounding. And a revival of social and
civic righteousness among us is already
come. Nevertheless, the love of the Son of
man waits for some nobler revealing of its
presence. Its sufficient ethics and its simple
fraternity are not known with power among
all men. Political reform is not to be
wrought by religious preaching at long-dis
tance telephone from the places where things
are done. A Christianity loaded with blank

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 33
moral cartridges is impotent to subdue the
mob of social passions. A world of titanic
industrial forces is not to be ruled by a
Christianity divided in its own house against
itself. A populace vehement for social jus
tice, and weary of charity, imagines it sees in
the Churches a religion that has come down
from the cross to save itself, and hence is
powerless to save others. Democracy is
confronted by a double peril; it must over
come, or be itself overcome by, the power of
lawlessness and the lawlessness of power.
Facing the plain facts of life, in view of the
awful urgency of many conditions of modern
civilization, can we hide from ourselves the
conclusion that a Church, disorganized and
without unity of effort, waging a brave guer
rilla warfare, but with no grand strategy,
cannot be expected to overcome all un
righteousness, or to bring in the peace of
God's love among all classes and conditions
of men?
What, then, is the sign written large across
these failures of the Protestant ages ? Should

34 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
it be answered, these disappointments of our
separate Christian efforts signify nothing
larger to be hoped for, such answer would
be denial of the mastery of Christ himself
over the forces of the world. For believers
not to look for something further, would be
to assume the attitude from which proceeded
Peter's denial. We read that before the
morning was come, when Jesus was judged
in the house of Caiaphas, Peter sat with
the officers to see the end. He thought
that the end was come. He knew not that
the end of man's way was a new beginning
of God's way. He thought that all was over,
and said, "I know not the man." But the
dawn was already in the sky, and the king
dom of heaven was at hand. Our tempta
tion does not overtake us because we must
see the end of an eventful hour; it will befall
us if we sit down to see the end. It is the
temptation of discouragement without vision;
base denial might follow if we should only
say, Protestantism is passing, and should not
be quick to add, Catholicism is coming.

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 35
Least of all should a paralysis of prophecy
fall upon the heirs of the Reformation, whose
fathers looked for a better country, and for
whom hope is a birth-right, and progress a
destiny. In one of the earlier days of our
colonial history, when an end seemed to
some of our forefathers about to come to
their limited plan of government, some of
them feared that the interest of Christ was
miserably lost; but a greater-hearted son of
the Reformation spoke out in a truer
prophecy these words: "Our answer should
be of faith and not of fear." Such may well
be the answer of all Protestant churches to
the present call of the times for a Catholic
Christianity. The Church has never the right to lose the
spirit of prophecy. To keep it, and humbly
to exercise it, is a first condition of progress.
Often indeed we may find ourselves mistaken
in our programme of events; our predictions
may be quickly brushed aside; the forces
making history are indeed vaster than man's
comprehension; but the spiritual gift of see-

36 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
ing visions and dreaming dreams is a char-
ism perpetually bestowed upon the whole
body of believers; and for the Christian
Church as a whole to lose it, would be to lose
touch with the work of the Spirit of Christ
in the world. The Church militant is also
the Church expectant; it must be the Church
expectant, if it is to become more and more
the Church triumphant. A religious pessi
mist may possibly retain his place in the
Church militant; but our fellowship with
the Apostles must be in the Church ex
pectant. While following through this essay one
line of this Christian expectation, we do not
forget, although we may pass by without
notice, other hopeful approaches toward the
prospect of a larger Christianity, all of them
converging in the promise of another of the
days of the Son of man.
"I see," said the Bampton lecturer re
cently, in the pulpit of St. Mary's, at Oxford,
"the rise of a new religious order, the great
est that the world has known, drawn from

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 37
all nations and all classes, and, what seems
stranger yet, from all churches."' Is that
true? Were this merely an individual utterance,
it might not lead a sober-minded reader to
pause even in the reading. If only a solitary
observer should turn prophet and say, "The
dawn Cometh," the voice might not disturb
the slumberous ease of a comfortably housed
faith. But this word is not a single utter
ance, and, though it be from out the dark,
such voices are now calling to one another
from all sides.
There is no surer mark of a prophetic
truth than this, that it seems to rise of itself
above the horizon, and is found shining in
all men's eyes. An idea springs up spon
taneously in the mind of the Church; it
comes not with the authority of any one
name, it is not heard as the watchword of a
single party; it bears not the mark of any
class or sect; it is present in the world as
'Peile, The Reproach of the Gospel. Bampton
Lectures, 1907, p. 198.

38 PASSING PROTESTANTISM
Melchizedek was of old, without father, with
out mother, known by its own authority,
bringing its own blessing. That this is a
natural authentication of a new revealing of
God's purpose will not be doubted by those
at least who believe in the immanence of the
Spirit of Christ in the life of humanity. It is
this which we should expect to see, genera
tion after generation, and in our own no less
than in other times — this shining through
history of the true Light, which lighteth
every man coming into the world.
We ask, therefore, whether the Oxford
preacher's hope has in it such authentica
tion. Is the thought of some new, more
universal order of Christianity coming thus
to men's minds spontaneously, generally?
Is it working, even where hardly recognized,
or least to be expected, beneath existing
forms and customs ? Is it in the air — an in
definable infiuence, yet a new breath of the
Spirit, in which thought expands, and faith
receives fresh vitalities ?
For our answer we turn first to the Roman

PASSING PROTESTANTISM 39
Catholic Church; and we face at once the
fact of Modernism. We shall consider what
may be known of the nature, extent, and in
herent possibilities of this movement, which
an Italian newspaper first called Modernism,
and which the Pope by his anathema has
baptized with that name.

II
MEDIATING MODERNISM
Modernism is a renovating movement
within the Roman Catholic Church. A
general idea of it would be conveyed by say
ing that it is an endeavor of loyal Catholics
to adapt the Roman Church to the thought
and life of the modern world. For many
years the seeds of Modernism have been
germinating in quiet places; within the last
five years it has become a widely disseminated
influence. The Vatican is now alarmed at
its extent and vitality; and some Protestant
observers, who are in close touch with it,
believe that it is destined to be the greatest
religious movement since the time of the
Reformation. We shall seek first in the following pages to
interpret its leading ideas, and to appreciate
40

MEDIATING MODERNISM 41
its spirit and hopes. We shall then be pre
pared to consider whether Modernism opens
a way of mediation between Roman and
Protestant Christianity, which eventually
may lead to a truer Catholicism, compre
hensive of us all.
One of the most vigorous leaders in the
Modernist movement has said that its name
is something of a misnomer; for every his
toric development in the Catholic Church
was in its time a modern movement, as was
the scholastic philosophy itself, into which,
as a secure fastness, the Pope would com
pel theology now to retreat. But the name
characterizes an issue. Modernists have all
passed through the scholastic education, and
entered the broad fields, enclosed by no
walls save only the widening horizons of
knowledge, history, science and life, — which
all thinkers must cultivate together as fellow-
helpers to the truth. We adopt, so they tell
us, the name Modernist solely in order that
it may be understood by the people, and be
cause the Pope has accredited it; we prefer,

42 MEDIATING MODERNISM
they say, "to define our religious attitude
simply as Christians and Catholics, living
in harmony with the spirit of their time." '
The Vatican has issued two authorita
tive utterances concerning Modernism, be
sides several allocutions of the Pope. The
first is the Syllabus, which was put forth
in July, 1907; it enumerates sixty-five
erroneous opinions, which are not to be
allowed. A Modernist might regard the
Syllabus as Erasmus did the libel, which, he
said, the Spaniard, Stunica, had presented
to Leo X., containing sixty thousand here
sies extracted from his writings. The other,
later bull of the Pope against Modernism is
the Encyclical on "Feeding the Lord's
Flock (so called from the first words, Pas-
cendi Domenici Chegis), which was promul
gated in September last.
One representation of Modernism is given
in these documents of the Vatican; another
portrayal of it may be gathered from the
' II Programma dei Modemisti, Risposta all' En-
ciclica di Pio X., p. 5.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 43
writings of the Modernists themselves. These
are numerous, but .they are scattered in
newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books in
several languages.
We will look first at the composite portrait
of the Modernist which has been drawn by
Roman prelates, and sanctioned by the
Pope. It is painted in vivid colors. The
lines of it are drawn with decided strokes.
Its features are brought out with emphasis
so marked that none of the faithful can pos
sibly mistake it; and the light thrown upon
it is so glaring that no softening touch re-
heves its harshness, and no expression of its
spirit gleams for a moment over its counte
nance. This portrayal of Modernism, fur
nished to the Pope as the last masterpiece of
the school of the Jesuits, is now hung up for
the astonishment of the Christian world in the
rogue's gallery of the Holy Inquisition as the
latest and a conspicuous example of the pride
and presumptuous self-will which would re
bel against all sacred authority and betray
the divine certainties of the Christian faith.

44 MEDIATING MODERNISM
We may note at a glance in this portrayal
of the Modernists in the Encyclical such
characteristics as these: They are "striv
ing, by arts entirely new and full of subtlety,
to destroy the vital energy of the Church";
they are "enemies of the Church." But
still worse is this characteristic of them:
"They are the most pernicious of all the
adversaries of the Church. For, as we
have said, they put their designs for her
ruin into operation, not from without, but
from within; hence, the danger is pres
ent almost in the very veins and heart of
the Church." "None is more skilful, none
more astute, than they in the employment of
a thousand noxious arts; for they combine
the part of rationalist and Cathohc." And
these double-minded Modernists within the
Church "employ a very clever artifice,
namely, to present their doctrines without
order and systematic arrangement into one
whole, scattered and disjointed one from
another, so as to appear to be in doubt and
uncertainty while they are in reality firm and

MEDIATING MODERNISM 45
steadfast." Indeed, "every Modernist sus
tains and comprises within himself many
personalities; he is a philosopher, a believer,
a theologian, an historian, a critic, an apol
ogist, a reformer." Nor is this all of his
offense; his activities are as manifold as his
personality is diversified. It is a "fact,
which indeed is well calculated to deceive
souls, that they lead lives of the greatest
activity, of assiduous and ardent application
to every branch of learning, and that they
possess, as a rule, a reputation for strict
est morality." They act "as though there
were a frenzy of propagandism upon them."
"They lift up their heads in arrogance, and
pride is in all their hearts; hence their fond
ness for all novelties." "They attempt to
ascribe to a love of truth that which is really
the result of pride and obstinacy." "They
are possessed by the empty desire of being
talked about, and they know they would
never succeed in this were they to say what
has always been said." The Papacy "first
showed them kindness"; then it "treated

46 MEDIATING MODERNISM
them with severity," and at last, although
with great reluctance, it had recourse "to
public reproof." But this was fruitless.
"They bowed their head for a moment, but
it was soon uplifted more arrogantly than
ever." Their case moreover seems to be
hopeless. "This almost destroys all hope
of cure, that their veiy doctrines have given
such a bent to their minds that they disdain
all authority and brook no restraint."
Such being the personal characteristics of
the Modernists, as they are portrayed in the
Encyclical, the thoughts of their hearts are
also exposed for the reprobation of the faith
ful. These the Pope understands better
than they themselves know them. It is
given to him to discern what is in these men,
as only the supreme teacher in the wisdom
given him from above can do. Consequently,
the Encyclical presents the thoughts of the
Modernists in a systematic statement of
their philosophy and theology, such as they
themselves have never ventured to give. We
will here follow only the main lines of the

MEDIATING MODERNISM 47
description of it, not pausing to fill in its
philosophic details.
The root of all their errors is said to be
agnosticism, — that is, a teaching which con
fines man's knowledge within the field of
phenomena. Hence they havccast aside all
the sound proofs of God which the scholastic
philosophy established. "This," we are
told, "is only the negative part of the system
of the Modernist; the positive part consists
in what they call vital immanence." But
thereby, according to the philosophy of the
Vatican, religion is founded only on senti
ment, and all rational foundations are swept
away. To forsake the safe syllogisms of St.
Thomas is to hasten toward atheism. The
whole teaching of the Modernist is tainted
with the original sin of an agnostic philoso
phy, which corrupts all their thought and
which would destroy religion itself. It is
seen "by how many roads Modernism leads
to the annihilation of all religion. The
first step in this direction was taken by
Protestantism; the second is made by Mod-

48 MEDIATING MODERNISM
ernism; the next will plunge headlong into
atheism." This original sin of agnosticism, as it is
imputed to them by the Pope, appears in all
their doctrines. It taints their thoughts on
all subjects, such as dogmas, history, and the
traditions of the Church, the subjection of
faith to science, the criticism of the Holy
Scriptures, the authority of the Catholic
Church, and the Christ of history and of faith.
Protestant unbelievers in the literary and
historical searching of the Scriptures — the
so-called Higher Criticism — will find an un
expected ally in the Biblical commission
appointed by Pius X. for the safe study of
the Bible. The Holy Father might be wel
comed as a most powerful coadjutor in
the American League for the Defense of
the Bible. The Pope's present solicitude,
however, for the inspiration and inerrancy of
the Scriptures has a different source from
theirs. The principle of a supernatural
authority, having compulsory sovereignty
over the faithful, is the mainspring of the

MEDIATING MODERNISM 49
Pope's contention of the infallibility of the
Bible. It is interesting, and very significant, to
observe that one reason which the Pope
gives for the consideration shown to Biblical
criticism by the Modernists in the Roman
Church is "the close alliances, independent
of all differences of nationality or religion,
which the historians and critics of this school
have formed among themselves." A sec
ond cause is "the boundless effrontery of
these men." This remarkable characteristic
should not be overlooked — the Pope himself
has acknowledged and emphasized it— that
scholars who profess themselves to be good
Catholics are in close alliance with the Bib
lical scholars of the Protestant world.
A mortal offense is found in their applica
tion of their false methods of reasoning to
the authority of the Church. To them its
authority is the product of the "collective
conscience"; but this is to deny, as though
it were an error of past times, the Pope's
claim that "authority came to the Church

50 MEDIATING MODERNISM
from without, that is to say, directly from
God; and it was then rightly held to be auto
cratic." The Modernists would say that
"it is for the ecclesiastical authority, there
fore, to shape itself to democratic forms."
But that is the last thing which Pius X. in
tends to do. Nor can he submit to the
subordination of the Church to the State,
which he holds would result from their
pernicious principles.
We need not discuss the disastrous effects,
which, according to the Vatican, follow by a
rapid descent from the original, total philo
sophic depravity of all the Modernists — such
as the more intelligible views which they
would entertain of the nature and efficacy of
the sacraments, or their conception of the
ology as a symbolic presentation of divine
truth, changing and finding ever new ex
pressions and interpretations according to
the habits of mind in different ages, and the
evolution of thought through history. The
fruits of these errors and of the zealous prop
agandism of the Modernists are best de-

MEDIATING MODERNISM 51
scribed in the following words from the
Encyclical: "We have to lament at the sight
of many young men once full of promise and
capable of rendering great service to the
Church, now gone astray. . . . And there is
another sight that saddens us too : that of so
many other CathoUcs, who, while they cer
tainly do not go so far as the former, have yet
grown into the habit, as though they had
been breathing a poisoned atmosphere, of
thinking and speaking and writing with a
liberty that ill becomes Catholics." "Note
here, Venerable Brethren," so Pius X. la
ments, " the appearance already of that most
pernicious doctrine which would make the
laity a factor of progress in the Church."
"The security of the Catholic name is at
stake." "In all Catholicism there is ab
solutely nothing on which it [Modernism]
does not fasten." "What is there left in
the Church which is not to be reformed ac
cording to their principles?" "We should
define it as the synthesis of all heresies." It
is "the sap and the substance of all errors."

52 MEDIATING MODERNISM
As though this peril of the subversion of
Papal authority, and this threatening rebel
lion within the Church against all religion,
were not of itself enough to justify the exer
cise of the Pontifical power for its suppres
sion, the artifices and untiring efforts of the
Modernists call for the utmost vigilance in
every diocese.
These men "reflect that, after all, there is
no progress without a battle, and no battle
without its victim, and victims they are will
ing to be hke the prophets and Christ him
self." "And this policy they follow willingly
and wittingly, both because it is part of their
system that authority is to be stimulated, but
not dethroned, and because it is necessary
for them to remain within the ranks of the
Church in order that they may gradually
transform the collective conscience."
Such is Modernism according to Pius X.
One may not deny the controversial clever
ness of the Encyclical. The mark of the
Jesuit is on every paragraph of it. Extreme

MEDIATING MODERNISM 53
utterances and moderate views, diversified
opinions and scattered sentences, torn from
their context, or forced to their farthest con
clusions, are brought together and com
pounded in the melting-pot of this Jesuitical
zeal, from which there issues a resultant
system which no Modernist would own, and
which none need defend. The Encyclical is
a caricature, not a portrait; but the con
demnation of the Pope falls indiscriminately
upon this whole mode of thought which he
cannot appreciate. What is the meaning of
Modernism? What may be its prophetic
value for the Roman Church ? What is its
call to the Protestant world ? Is it another
Renaissance, or is it a passing breath of
free thought ? Is it only a new rationalism,
or is it a new experience of religion ? And
does it carry within it energy of the truth
which makes free?
To appreciate it we should know some
thing of the men who are moved by this new
spirit. From among those who stand out in
the open, and upon whom the condemnation

54 MEDIATING MODERNISM
of the Pope has already fallen, we will select
a few preeminent representatives of this
large and increasing comradeship of liberal
Catholics. One of them we find in Eng
land, another in France, and others in Italy.
In England Father Tyrrell is a well-known
leader, a servant elect of God for some
message, and called by his energetic person
ality, his searching honesty of thought, his
consuming flame of spirit. He has been
suspended by the authority of St. Peter's
successor from exercising all priestly func
tions, although, like an Apostle of old who
had followed the Master through the whole
length of the Holy Land, until he had come
to Csesarea Philippi, Father Tyrrell, after
long discipleship and much questioning, has
discovered for himself the Christ in the man
Jesus, and henceforth would confess the
foundation-faith which flesh and blood has
not revealed to him.
The history of his own travail of soul is
written in his last book, bearing the sugges
tive title, "Through Scylla and Charybdis."

MEDIATING MODERNISM 55
By his inward purifying and illumining ex
perience of religion he has been consecrated
to a mediating priesthood between science
and faith; and there cannot be taken from
him, to use his own expression, this "royal
priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, to
which the official priesthood is related as a
sacrament to its substance, or as the ma
terial and temporal to the spiritual and
eternal." {Ibid., p. 384.)
Modernism had its early spring in Bib
lical and historical criticism; and the first
representative of this method of searching
the Scriptures within the Roman Church,
now that Schell in Germany is dead, is the
Abb^ Loisy in France. The following vivid
description of him has been given by a
French professor, who went one day to hear
him lecture, and who was impressed by the
Abba's manner, and the smile which lit up
his face, as he gave a critical elucidation
of a perplexing Scripture.
"Curious to know how, in his chair of
professor in the Sorbonne, M. Loisy com-

56 MEDIATING MODERNISM
bines these two men which he says are in
him" (the critic and the behever), "I went
to hear one of his lessons.
"The course has for its object the ex
amination of the Gospels to find in them the
elements of a critical life of Jesus Christ.
It takes place in rather a small room, ar
ranged to accommodate students who take
notes and not an unoccupied public. But
the current celebrity of the Abbd Loisy is
such that the hall was filled and a part of the
audience had to stand, overflowing even into
the corridor for lack of room." He found a
seat quite near the Abb€, but where he could
only see his profile. He continues: "At his
first words I was not impressed. . . . And
then I was provoked at not seeing the man's
front view, and his profile seemed to me as
insignificant as his words.
"But all of a sudden what a change ! The
Abb6 was reading a text, verses 51 and 52 of
the fourteenth chapter of Mark, where oc
curs that inexplicable episode between the
moment when the soldiers arrest Jesus and

MEDIATING MODERNISM 57
that when, the disciples having fled, they lead
him to the house of the high priest. Mark
says that a young man followed Jesus, hav
ing for a garment only a linen cloth, and that
when other young men sought to lay hold
on him, he left the linen cloth in their hands
and fled naked.
"While reading that the voice of M. Loisy
was lowered, and, when he had finished, his
profile ht up with a smile which illuminated
all of his face that I could see, and which
passed from mouth to mouth all over the
audience, including a dozen Abb^s, only one
of whom, either obstinately frowning or not
understanding, did not smile.
" Oh ! that smile of the Abb^ Loisy ! Who
ever has seen it will never forget it.
"It is not the smile of a malicious person
who banters or jeers; it is not the smile of a
pedant who scoffs; it is not the smile of a
dissenter who is proud of his dissent; it is
the smile of a reasonable man who exercises
his reason, and who does so for the pleasure
of exercising it, because that exercise is

58 MEDIATING MODERNISM
properly the end, the essential function of
life, because we are only in this world to act
with reason.
"I asked myself a little while ago whether
the Abb^ Loisy would submit to the eccle
siastical censures. I followed with interest
what was told us of the attempted efforts to
make him prevent his condemnation by a
retraction pure and simple; I should like to
have been present at that interview which,
they say, took place at his home, in Bellevue,
when five envoys of the Pope — three ec
clesiastics and two laymen — came to adjure
him to desist. My curiosity has need of no
more anecdotes or confidences about the case
of the Abb^ Loisy. I have seen his smile; it
is that of a man who will never give up. The
Holy See may prepare his excommunication.
It is possible that from a man who seems in
such feeble health there may be torn words
or a line of writing; there will never be torn
from him a true submission. That smile
the Holy See could only suppress by means
of the funeral pile; now, there is no longer

MEDIATING MODERNISM 59
the funeral pile, and if there were, I see from
here that smile persisting through the smoke
of the execution."
"That is what I said to myself while lis
tening to the Abb^ Loisy. Meanwhile he
went his way, a little slowly, but invincible,
explaining what he calls the 'editing' proc
ess of Mark, . . . applying the critical
method, not only with ingeniousness, but
with joy, in the simple and dignified tone of
a disinterested thinker. The audience en
tered with sympathy into the honest work of
this frank and well-armed thought. We
lived there, during an hour all too short, in an
intellectual atmosphere whose purity in
vigorated us."'
While the Abb^ Loisy represents the his
torical and Biblical scholarship, which has
been one of the upland springs of the Mod
ernists' thought, Senator Fogazzaro has
given voice to the feeling of the people,
which, after too long ebb of irreligion, seems
jM. Aulard, quoted in Houton's La Question
Biblique, p. 133.

6o MEDIATING MODERNISM
now to be coming in as a flood tide of social
religious renovation. It has been said with
truth that his novel "II Santo" bears very
much the same relation to reform in the
Roman Church that " Uncle Tom's Cabin "
bore to the anti-slavery agitation. A cause
which finds living expression in a great novel,
which the people take to heart, cannot fail.
Nor is the influence of "II Santo" cutoff by
the single stroke of the Holy Father's pro
hibition of it. To the decree indeed which
has put it on the Index, Fogazzaro has con
sented, very much as a loyal citizen submits
to a decision of authority, which he cannot
admit to be just. But it is a mistake to
suppose that therefore Fogazzaro has re
canted. On the contrary, in a lecture given
afterward in Paris, in January, 1907, he
stated with clearness and firmness his posi
tion. He said:
"If it is the fortune of a book to raise a
tempest, the hour of attack and violent de
fence does not lack sad moments for the
author who sees his thought disfigured by

MEDIATING MODERNISM 61
adversaries of bad faith, and sometimes even
by friends more zealous than wise. And
then the author dreams of an assembly de
voted to the discussion of which his work is
the object, ready to listen to him, not as an
accused man who is on the point of being
condemned or released, but rather as a wit
ness whose testimony has been unnaturally
forced or misunderstood, and who asks to
be heard once more in order to reestablish
his proof of the truth, before authorized per
sons who will take action upon it with
scrupulous and intelligent honesty." He ex
plained and reaffirmed the ideas of Giovanni
Selva, and especially his view that there is
a sacred affinity between the truth which is
the object of faith and the truth which is the
object of science, and that consequently
hardly a truth has been gained from science
from which religion does not absorb vital
succor and grow.
"Giovanni Selva thinks that religion is
above all action and life. For the practice
of the Gospel is more important than in-

62 MEDIATING MODERNISM
tellectual religious progress. Love comes
before faith. This is the culminating point
of the doctrine of Giovanni Selva, who for
precisely such reasons does not rebel against
the decrees of authority, but no more does
he deny that which his own conscience be
lieves to be true."
The audience greeted with enthusiastic
applause this declaration by Senator Fogaz
zaro of his continued fidelity to the truths
to which his prohibited novel bears witness.
A distinguished figure among the Mod
ernists, a born leader of men, who commands
a devoted following in Italy, is Don Romolo
Murri. He is portrayed as a man of pale
countenance, large forehead under dark hair,
having piercing eyes, an aquiline nose, finely
chiselled features, his whole person express
ing distinction and will. His appearance in
spires confidence. One says of him, "He
will not turn aside." His language, when
asked to recant, was " respectful and direct,
as that of a free spirit and a brave man."
These were his words: "Priest I am, Priest

MEDIATING MODERNISM 63 .
I remain, respectful of authority, faithful to
my duties. I have suffered long years of
grief through love of the truth, and I feel in
myself the painful conflict which at this hour
of profound crisis agitates Catholicism. I
maintain always — without regard to my pos
sible deficiencies — that the ideas which in
spire my criticism and my action assure to the
religious society a renewed vigor and a more
fruitful civil influence. I ask a sympathetic
silence of free and beUeving souls."
He has not himself been silenced by the
ban which has been placed upon his speech.
Recently he collected his scattered writings,
and published them in a volume, which, he
says, is "a book of war." He is not merely
a scholar to whom there has been opened the
enlightenment of modern learning; he does
not seek simply to set the historian and
Biblical critic free from an enforced sub
mission to tradition; he is a man wrestling
with the problems of social and political life;
he is the inspirer of the Christian Democrats
of young Italy. He sees democracy con-

64 MEDIATING MODERNISM
fronted by "the political combination which
is called Catholic." He goes among the
people, and he laiows that "many Catholics
hate Catholicism because they do not under
stand it, and they do not understand it be
cause what they see around them is a carica
ture of it." He laments "a poverty of the
ideal in Italy"; but he sees also "a revival
of idealism on the part of a few." "What
Italy lacks," he says, "is moral energy. A
bad stench as of something decayed oozes
from all the pores of her political life. The
cause of it lies in the lack of real religion.
The principal cause of it belongs to those
priests who represent reaction." Murri de
clares: "We desire a Christianity more pure,
more intense, more practical, more Christian,
more conformed to its original, more con
formed to the Gospel." Such is the temper
and spirit of those men who are not willingly
rebels against authority, but who would
modernize Roman Catholicism in the free
spirit of democracy, for the renewal of the
moral and religious life of the people.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 65
Surrounding such outspoken leaders, there
are groups of scholars and priests, some of
whom are becoming well recognized; others
are as yet too withdrawn from publicity to be
personally singled out for Papal condemna
tion. The latter are sometimes spoken of
as Catholics "who would conform them
selves constantly to the actual situation,
concealing their originality, and attacking
obliquely the errors which they wish to de
stroy; as living in an atmosphere of defiance,
and also, it must be said, of apprehension of
the Roman measures which can at any time,
and without a word of explanation, brush
aside the fragile fragrance and the whole
ideal of their dream of renovation." This
explains and excuses, it is said, "the attitude,
more or less timid, more or less embarrassed,
and always wandering, of their writings."
This description, however true it may seem
at times to their policy, fails to do justice to
the spirit which is possessing them.
It is not just to characterize their evasions
of Papal excommunication as Jesuitical,

66 MEDIATING MODERNISM
For their immediate task is a double, but not
inconsistent one — to deny the Roman Csesar-
ism, and to affirm the true Catholicism.
The publishers of the liberal Catholic Re
view, II Rinnovamento, in Milan are adroit,
but they do not recant, when in reply to the
Papal threat of major excommunication, they
merely change somewhat the management,
announce that at present they will avoid the
discussion of certain topics — and continue the
publication of the Review! It is the deter
mination of the Modernists honestly to do
their best to respect and to avoid direct colli
sion with Papal authority, while they con
tinue their work of bringing authority itself
to the judgment of a higher tribunal, the
collective conscience, namely, of the Catholic
Church. They will yield to external au
thority only that they may in time compel it
to become subject to reason. This is not,
indeed, the position which events quickly
forced Martin Luther to take; neither is it
exactly the position of Erasmus, who waited
for a General Council, and saved his own

MEDIATING MODERNISM 67
reputation by refusing a cardinal's red hat.
These words of certain Italian Modernists
have a bolder ring; they are willing to suffer
as Erasmus was not; they see before them
not preferments, but penalties: "We know
well that our word will have no weight with
you; and to-morrow, we are certain espio
nage, censure, calumny, will ' be renewed
against us with redoubled vigor. Every
thing will be done to make us apostates. But
we will stand firm at our post, prepared to
endure everything, to sacrifice everything ex
cept the truth. Our voice, reverent indeed
but frank, unambiguous, sincere, will be
ready to expose every action of yours which
is not inspired by wisdom and equity. We
mean to be not rebels, but sincere Catholics,
to the salvation of Christianity. . . . We
have desired to say this to you at the solemn
moment in which, to our confusion and dis
tress, you have willed to strike at our dearest
friend. Amid the bitterness which it has in
flicted upon our hearts, we send him a greet
ing and an augury. May Don Romolo

68 MEDIATING MODERNISM
Murri drink the bitter cup of his suffering,
not as a beaten foe who rebels against the
conqueror, but as a free man, clear-sighted,
generous, and assured that his sacrifice is
being made for the high Christian ideals of
Justice and Truth."'
Of Murri, and these others, who, like him,
are suffering for conscience' sake, no word
of reproach can be spoken, like that which
Luther wrote to Erasmus, when he invited
him to be a spectator of the magnificent
tragedy in which he was not fitted to be an^
actor. From the persons engaged in this reform
we turn now to consider their method of
thought. Modernism is not to be understood as one
might understand the platform of a political
party, which has been drafted in a oommittee
room, and adopted by delegates for the pur
poses of a campaign. Modernism is a certain
' What We Want, an open letter to Pius X. from
a group of Priests. Translated by A. L. Lilley.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 69
attitude of mind corresponding to our times;
it is a tendency of thought rather than a body
of doctrine; it is an intellectual method rather
than a creed; it is a vitalizing spirit making
all things new, rather than a full grown and
completed theology. Like all great move
ments of life and thought it comprehends
within itself diversities of beliefs, and its
voice is as the voice of many waters. Its
exponents are by no means agreed in all
things among themselves; there are radicals
and there are moderates among them; there
are minds adrift, and there are minds sailing
straight along clear courses; all, however,
have cast loose from their anchorage on the
old scholasticism, and are borne on the flood
of a vast tidal movement.
Thus Father Tyrrell says: "It would then
be unreasonable to expect my work to be
anything but unacceptable to those who do
not believe in the proximity of a deluge or
the necessity of an ark. I address myself,
therefore, to those who believe in both, for
the simple reason that they are already

70 MEDIATING MODERNISM
afloat." This characteristic, at least, is com
mon to all the Roman Cathohc Modernists —
they are in the stream, they are afloat on the
mighty flood of the world's present thought
and life.
Certain general principles of their think
ing may be discerned, and a still stronger
coherence may be found in their common
methods and aims.
We notice first the sources of their new
thought. A large number of them in France and
Italy have been led to their present position
through their critical and historical studies.
To the charge of the Encyclical that they
have been misled by an a priori and agnostic
philosophy, they reply that the allegation is
false. Our position, they declare, is verj
different from the representation of it given
in the Encyclical. That description of it
the writer of the Papal letter has drawn from
his own ignorance of modem thought. Phi
losophy does not control their criticism; on
the contrary, criticism has led them to their

MEDIATING MODERNISM 71
present mental attitude. They have adopted
and followed with intellectual candor the
methods of critical and historical research
which now are prevalent generally among
scholars. They apply these methods to
Biblical criticism, and to the development of
the Church, its traditions, and its dogmas.
Before the Encyclical was written, charging
them with agnosticism as the root of all their
errors, they had addressed an appeal to the
Pope in which they said, "We bring to con
temporary agnosticism good news." And
besides this declaration of a group of Italian
priests. Father Tyrrell has said, "Revelation
is to theology what the stars are to astron
omy." It would have been a fairer elabora
tion of their thought, had the writer of the
Pope's letter explained that the stars remain
the same through all the ages, while men's
conceptions of the stars have changed from
age to age. The stars endure forever, but
man's astronomy changes as his knowledge
grows. So, the Modernists would hold, the
Divine realities, which are the objects of our

72 MEDIATING MODERNISM
contemplation, abide always in the firma
ment of faith; but our theology of them
changes with the thoughts of men. Pro
gressive Catholics are seeking to understand
the eternal realities in the interpretations of
modern theology.
Since their appeal, to which the Pope
turned a deaf ear, soon after he had con
demned them, they made their reply to
the Encyclical, reaffirming their whole posi
tion with clearness and courage. Accused
of an atheistic philosophy, they answer:
"This confession of impotence which ag
nosticism makes in the presence of the
mystery of the universe is radically different
from our spirit. Our apologetics has been
precisely the endeavor to escape from an
agnostic doctrine of knowledge, superseding
it, just as agnosticism already had repre
sented the effort to supersede a materialistic
positivism." '
They have generally adopted the present
'7/ Programma dei Modemisti, Risposta aW
Enddica di Pio X., p. 94.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 73
evolutionary manner of thought. In pre
senting the Christian faiths to the minds of
men — that is, in what is known as Christian
apologetics — they use the methods and re
sults of science without hesitation. This
company of priests in their appeal to the
Pope do not hesitate to say, "The evolution
of faith cannot fail to be coordinated with
the intellectual and moral evolution of man."
It is their aim "to make this life of faith," of
hope, and of love, live again for modern
society, which is so ardently aspiring after
the divine; and to induce it to accept in
their entirety the truths of Christianity, by
adapting them to its historical and psycho
logical habits of mind, as formerly they were
adapted to a metaphysical habit of mind."
They hold that the evolution of dogma is an
evident historical fact which corresponds
with the laws of the evolution of the human
mind. They do not deny the necessity of
dogmas; they say, "As for theology, we
affirm that there always has been a theology,
and always will be; and, moreover, we also

74 MEDIATING MODERNISM
are engaged in making one." They claim
therefore that theology "has varied from age
to age, and can and must change in our time
also, assimilating its culture, if Christianity
still wishes to answer to the spiritual de
mands of our time." They say boldly to the
Pope, "You have preferred the men of the
syllogism to the men of profound knowledge
as though the salvation of the Church lay,
not in the objective establishment of his
torical truth, as your predecessor desired it
should, but in maintaining intact traditions
which are devoid of meaning and founda
tion.'" Still more striking is Father Tyrrell's man
ner of asserting that the Gospel is subject in
its forms of expression and in its doctrinal
interpretations to the habits of thought
prevalent in different ages: "Had Christ
come in another age to another people, the
Gospel, written in different words and deeds,
had been still the same Gospel, the record of
the same Power and Spirit, albeit in conflict
' What We Want, p. 55.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 75
with another class of oppositions and ob
structions." '
In his reply to the Encyclical Father
Tyrrell is a match for the rapier of the
Jesuit;^ with thrust as keen he answers the
claim of the Holy See that reUgion is derived
from deductive reasoning; that God is to be
reached by an argument, and not through
an inward experience; and that the Roman
Catholic Church in its entirety was im
plicitly the immediate creation of Christ
himself on the earth. "A bold contention,"
he says, "that all ecclesiastical development
is simply a mechanical unpacking of what
was given in a tight parcel 2,000 years ago."
He justifies the use of the word modernism
as "an expression of the opposite conten
tion — of a belief in time, in growth, in vital
and creative evolution." He strikes back
' Opus dt, p. 297.
' Tyrrell was deposed from the order of the Jesuits
on account of his refusal to disavow his letter to a
scientific man. He has published it under the title
" A Much Abused Letter."

76 MEDIATING MODERNISM
with a vigorous blow when he declares of
the Encyclical that "all this vast contro
versial construction is poised on the apex
of a science-theory and psychology that
are as strange as astrology to the modern
mind."
_ WejLQtice_nexl the Modernists' principle
of the development of the institutions and
dogmas of the Church.
The only kind of development of the
Roman Church which the Papacy will toler
ate, resembles the idea of development
which prevailed as the scientific theory of
evolution in the eighteenth century. It is
known as the theory of preformation — the
chick exists already preformed in the egg;
its growth consists simply in bringing out
what was previously packed in the shell.
It is development by explication of what is
already there. With this older theory of
preformation modern science contrasts the
conception of a specific predetermination of
life in the germ, and its development, through
the co-working of the internal and external

MEDIATING MODERNISM 77
factors of evolution, some of which are known,
others of which are unknown; and this evo
lution occurs through a process of variation
and adaptation under the law of natural
selection. The Modernist's view of evolu
tion in the Church and its theology resembles
the now accepted scientific conception of
organic^evolution, while the Pope has not
yet advanced beyond the crude idea of a
mechanical unfolding of an original deposit
of the faith. The Modernists with their
critical and historical studies of the Bible,
and the Church — whatever idols of the schools
they may cast down — are not about to destroy
either the historic fact of the continuous life
of the Church, or the normative power of the
original Gospel of Christ. On the contrary,
with an intelligible and reasonable convic
tion, they can hold their faith in the per
manent energy of the life of Christ in Chris
tianity. "I spoke," says the Saint, "of the
eternal vitality of Catholic doctrine, of the
power which the soul of Catholic doctrine
possesses, of continually transforming its own

78 MEDIATING MODERNISM
body, increasing its strength and beauty un-
limitedly." This conviction of the Saint follows di
rectly from the Modernist belief in the im
manence of God in man, and the permanent
presence of Christ in his Church.
Here they are influenced by one of the
profoundest and most vitalizing faiths which
are pervading and renewing the Protestant
world. In its spiritual simplicity this is the
belief that God is in man, as well as above
man; that the Divine is present in the
thoughts of men, to be known in the ex
perience of men, as well as a God above us,
transcending the measure of our life. God
exists first for us not at the end of an argu
ment, or as the probable conclusion of some
course of reasoning; but primarily He is felt
in our sense of dependence upon Him, and
known in the perception of reality which is
given in our whole experience of the moral
values of our true life. God proves himself
to us, before we can prove Him to ourselves.
Our reasoning, whether from nature or from

MEDIATING MODERNISM 79
history, is reasonable just because the Divine
reality is before our thought, and in our
thought, and beyond all our thought. The
Pope regards this vital faith of the Modern
ists as though it were a vain reliance upon
mere religious sentiment with a loss of all
mental grasp upon a Divine Power above us,
and consequently a fatal plunge into atheism.
They state again with firmness their position
in this reply: "We are then immanentists,
but the immanentism is not that gross error
which the Encyclical seems to believe; it is,
on the contrary, the way followed in order to
attain to the perception of the Divine by all
the best Christian tradition." '
How little religion is with them a mere
sentiment appears from such words as these,
which the aiuthors of the Papal condemnation
had before them when they put them under
the ban : " God in Christ, and Christ in the
Church — that is the profound conviction by
which all our actions are inspired."^ And
'¦ II Programma dei Modemisti, p. 104.
a What We Want, p. 7.

8o MEDIATING MODERNISM
again such words as these: "For us, pro
foundly Christian souls, religion, far from
being a vague, mystical feeling which
soothes the spirit and isolates it in a barren
egoism, is a Divine reality, which kindles
into life and exalts the souls of men, and,
laiitting them together in a bond of brother
hood, directs their life toward a supreme
and common goal.'"
The Abb^ Loisy, who is one of the more
radical Biblical critics, denies with the same
positiveness the allegation that their his
torical criticism destroys the substance of
their Christian faiths. When in outward
submission to the authority of the Pope he
gave up his lectures in the Sorbonne, he
protested with energy that he was not sepa
rating reason and faith; he said: "Catholic
priest I am, and Catholic priest I shall re
main; there are not in my mind two air
tight compartments, one for science and
reason, the other for faith and religion."^
1 Ibid., p. 5.
2 La Question Bibligue, etc., Houtin, p. 137.

MEDIATING MODERNISM

And the followers of Loisy, of whom there
are many notwithstanding his enforced re
tirement, repeating the words of their leader,
declare: "Catholics we have been. Catholics
we remain; critics we have been, critics we
remain. In accepting the established scien
tific results without any conclusion against
that which is of a superior domain — that
of faith — we can have confidence that we
shall not depart from the supernatural
order.'" Many Protestants will find themselves
more in sympathy with this allegation of the
Pope against the modern school of Biblical
critics and historians, that they separate the
Jesus of history from the Christ of faith,
leaving the former in uncertainty and the
latter in an ideal glorification. It is true that
the Modernists generally, both Protestant
and Catholic, study history as history, and
justify faith as a spiritual apprehension of
the religious facts of history. They hold
that the method and logic of these two in-
1 lUd., p. 191.

82 MEDIATING MODERNISM
quiries are different, and each of them is to
be pursued to its own end; and in so doing,
it must be admitted that at times they seem
to leave the province of historical knowledge
and the realm of faith at an unbridged
distance from each other. But an abrupt
sundering of the two does not necessarily
follow from their principles; the separation
is in reality bridged by their beliefs in the
immanence of God in nature, and of the
Spirit of Christ in the Church. If they
seem to deny any interference of the super
natural, it is only because'they believe that
the natural is made for the permanent in
dwelling of the supernatural. How com
pletely the Encyclical mistakes their view of
Christ, and how they continue to worship in
His name, may best be shown by their own
words — such as the following which occur
in their spirited reply to the Encyclical:
"The Christ is in himself one and the same,
but He may be considered as the object of
history and the object of faith. As a man, the
person of Jesus and His outward actions were

MEDIATING MODERNISM 83
known by means of sensible experience, and
in that sense He belongs to history: as
Christ, in as far as He is united to God in
a most unique manner, and is a mediator
between God and us of His revelation and
grace. He can only be known by a spiritual
and divine light, and in this sense belongs
not to history but to faith." "An example
occurs to us which will render our thought
more clear. The mathematician, as such,
can not catch a harmony which reveals itself
instead to a musical mind : but that does not
mean that such harmony may not be real,
nor that the musical mind creates it. The
musical mind finds it where others would not
find it. The same thing might be said in
our case. Religious facts contain mysterious
meanings which pure science does not catch;
faith, with its singular faculty, penetrates
these meanings and succeeds in living them.
That does not mean that it creates them:
it finds them.'"
With them the Christian faith is not, as
' II Programma dei Modemisti, pp. 66, 114.

84 MEDIATING MODERNISM
the Pope would have it, a mere sentiment,
unstable as flowing water, upon which no
reasoned faith can be founded; it is the
touch of their life upon the Divine reality;
it is a feeling of God which involves an in
tellectual apprehension of God, as percep
tion is given in sensation. It is our human
sense of dependence on God. In the history
of the Church it is not merely the conscious
ness of Christian men that is to be con
sidered; it is their consciousness of Christ —
of the Christ himself, who is spiritually dis
cerned. This is not a devitalized rational
ism, it is rather a rationalized mysticism.
Their thought in its inner principle is no
more agnostic than Schleiermacher's "Dis
courses on Religion" were. They answer
truly that "the tolerance of the Encyclical is
extended rather to the deist who separates
God from his world"; its condemnation falls
upon those Christian theists who find God
in men. In this faith in God's manifestation
of himself in and through human experience,
progressive Catholics are certainly in the

MEDIATING MODERNISM 85
same stream that has vivified and renewed
our whole modern theology.
In harmony with these convictions is the
Modernist's view of religious authority.
From the profound conviction of religion
as an indwelling energy and life, the Mod
ernist's conception of the source and nature
of the authority of the Church naturally
follows. It was Martin Luther's personal
experience of the faith that justifies, which
led him away from Rome, and left him stand
ing alone under the whole heavens before
God. It is the inward experience of spiritual
religion which leads the neo-Catholics away
from Rome, and leaves them, not outside
the Church, but determined to stand within
it, appealing to the collective conscience of
the Church. Here, then, is the real issue
between the Modernists and the Papacy. It
centres in the principle of authority. Where
in the last appeal does the authority of
Christ reside ? The problem of practice as
well as of thought is this — how is it pos
sible to reconcile liberty of the spirit with

86 MEDIATING MODERNISM
any outward order? to find the source
and vitality of religion in immediate per
sonal experience, and a succession of
personal Christian experiences from age
to age, and yet to maintain Christianity
as a visible and supreme authority in the
world ?
With the problem thus clearly recog
nized, we proceed to let the Modernists
define for themselves their attitude toward
the Roman Magisterium, or ecclesiastical
authority. They protest with one voice that they are
not rebels against authority. They would
recognize and obey all external authority
which seems to them to be historically Chris
tian, naturally developed in the progress of
the Church, profitable for men, and not de
structive of the inward vitality of Christian
experience. In an allocution to which they
have replied, Pius X. had said: "And rebels,
indeed, they are, those who profess and
spread abroad under artful forms monstrous
errors on the evolution of dogma; on the

MEDIATING MODERNISM 87
return to the Gospel — the Gospel, that is to
say, stripped, as they put it, of the explana
tions of theology, of the definitions of Coun
cils, of the maxims of asceticism; on the
emancipation of the Church, but conceived
after a new fashion — an emancipation which
will enable them not to revolt, so that they
may not be cut off, and yet not to submit,
so that they need not abandon their own
convictions; and, finally, on adaptation to
the times in everything — in speech, in writing,
even in the preaching of a charity without
faith, which, while extremely tender to the
unbeliever, is opening up the path to eternal
ruin for all."
They reply, "Authority condemns because
it does not understand." They say, "As
Christians, we accept the authority of the
Church, as the careful dispenser of eternal
truth inherited from Christ, to regulate and
govern our religious life, and to interpret and
supply its hving needs and claims. We
accept, further, the dogmas and rites by
which all souls, in the communion of faith,

MEDIATING MODERNISM

hope, and charity, may participate in the
life of the living Christ."'
They confess indeed to their tenderness
for unbelievers, and for the welfare of the
Church as well; but with a fine insistence
upon history they return to the Pope his
admonition: "St. Paul's tenderness also had
to face opposition, and it came from Peter,
who in his turn was tender towards the
timid scruples of the Pharisees. But the
tenderness of Peter availed only to prolong
for a little the agony of the Judseo-Christian
community. The tenderness of St. Paul for
the unbeliever infused into Christianity a
force of permanent vitality."
We will let Father Tyrrell define their
principle of authority; none among them has
spoken with more boldness or clearness.
"Deferential within the limits of conscience
and sincerity to the official interpreters of
her [the Church's] mind, they must, never
theless, interpret such interpretations in ac
cordance with the still higher and highest
' What We Want, p. 47.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 89
canon of Catholic truth; with the mind of
Christ. It is He who sends us to them;
not they who send us to Him. He is our
first and our highest authority. Were they
to forbid the appeal, their own dependent
authority would be at an end."' Again
Father Tyrrell affirms, "Of unconditioned
obedience to an avowedly conditioned au
thority the Catholic religion knows nothing."
To him the issue has become defined as a
conflict between absolutism and conscience
— the collective conscience of the Church.
"Any interpretation of papal infallibility
which finds the organ of Catholic truth in
the miraculously guided brain of one man;
which renders futile the collective experience
and reflection of the whole Church, destroys
the very essence of Catholicism in favor of a
military dictatorship which is the apotheosis
of individualism. To interpret the Church's
collective mind is the office of bishops, coun
cils, and popes; as it is the office of a judge,
not to make, but to interpret, the law. He
' Opus dt, p. 19.

90 MEDIATING MODERNISM
is below it, not above it. They are witnesses
to, not creators of, the Church's faith and
practice. They speak ex cathedra so far as
they say what she says; and in so doing what
they say is infaWible in the way that she is
infallible.."' He holds that "for purposes
of law, order and unity" such interpreta
tions must "prevail in foro externa over any
non-official interpretation. But no man who
submits himself to what, rightly or wrongly,
he believes to be the Church's mind, is a
heretic in foro conscientioe , for he submits to
that higher informal tribunal from which all
formal and official tribunals derive their au
thority." f
Divine authority is indeed primarily the
truth as witnessed by the Spirit in the indi
vidual conscience; but, "Along with this
sense of the Divine Immanence has grown
that of the authority of the general over the
individual mind and conscience, as being a
relatively more adequate organ and expres
sion of God's truth and God's will; as fur-
> Ibid., p. 355.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 91
nishing a standard from which the individual
may not fall short, and which he must first
attain before he is competent to criticise and
develop it."' He regards those who "de
part from current and well-established tradi
tional beliefs solely on the strength of some
personal view" as "following private judg
ment in its bad sense." By distinguishing
the bad and socially harmful exercise of this
right from the opposite, he would find a safe
guard against mere individualism; but he
would also save the liberty of the individual
conscience and its function as an organ of
Divine truth in this wise: "But when it is
clear that a counter-belief is gaining ground
in such a way that it represents the 'con
census' of the future; when the same con
clusion is reached simultaneously and in
dependently by different thinkers, one may,
and at times one ought, to follow the belief
that lives in the spirit (however small the
number of its supporters) rather than that
which stagnates in the formula (however
1 Ibid., p. 367.

92 MEDIATING MODERNISM
vast the multitude of its passive adherents);
for in so doing one departs from the dead
letter only to conform oneself to a truer,
higher, and more authoritative expression of
the hving spirit." '
The following citation seems to be a novel
definition of authority for one who holds
himself to be a loyal Catholic: "Authority,
then, is not an external influence streaming
down from heaven like a sunbeam through
a cleft in the clouds and with a finger of light
singling out God's arbitrarily chosen dele
gates from the multitude, over and apart
from which they are to stand as His vice
gerents. Authority is something inherent in,
and inalienable from, that multitude itself;
it is the moral coerciveness of the Divine
Spirit of Truth and Righteousness immanent
in the whole, dominant over its several parts
and members; it is the imperativeness of
the collective conscience."^
These, and similar conclusions with re-
' Ihid., p. 369.
"¦ Ibid., p. 369.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 93
gard to sacerdotalism, he regards as "the
inevitable results of a more adequate em
phasis of the Divine Immanence." He
throws the energy of his appeal from Csesar-
ism to Catholicism into this virile and im
perative question: "Where is that God to
whom alone both Pope and Council claim to
be responsible? Is He immanent in the
whole Church where we can ultimately learn
His mind and will; or is He away beyond
the stars where we can know nothing of
either, save what the episcopate is given to
know by some mysterious intuition? By
what vehicle does He speak and communicate
with us? By voices from the clouds or by
the gradual evolution of His Mind and Will
in the collective spirit of mankind ?" ' This
is much the same attitude towards the au
thority of the Church that Luther took tow
ard the authority of the Bible, when he re
plied to the papist who tried to confute him
by quoting Scriptural texts to him: "The
Scripture is under Christ as a servant. I
1 lUd., p. 380.

94 MEDIATING MODERNISM
care not for that; . . . but I trust in Christ
who is rightly Master and Lord over the
Scriptures." It has the ring of Luther's voice when the
Saint in the presence of the Pope said,
"Though they hurl vituperation and thunder
bolts against me, not until the hour of my
death will I cease crying aloud: What will
Christ say? What will Christ say? To
Him I appeal."
This appeal of Modernism Pius X. will
not hear. These are the voices which he
imagines he has power to silence.
i Having thus described Modernism, its
principles and its spirit, we may now seek
an answer to the eager question, How far will
it prevail, and what under its influence is
the promise for Catholicism ?
One conclusion seems inevitable; an un-
reformed Romanism cannot endure forever. •
An Apostolic primacy which has advanced
itself to a spiritual dictatorship, has waiting
for it in history the judgment of the Son of

MEDIATING MODERNISM 95
man. That remains a question only of
God's time. But, on the other hand, one
cannot readily admit the conclusion that the
Roman Church has been built up by the past
centuries simply for the purpose of being
doomed to destruction by the coming age.
It is far easier to think that it has been provi
dentially preserved for reformation within,
under the influence of the reformation with
out, in order that ultimately through both
reformations some larger providence for the
whole world may be fulfilled.
To answer, therefore, the question con
cerning the future possibihty of a renewed
Catholicism, we should begin by observing
to what extent the same elemental forces,
which are pervading human thought and
life outside the Roman pale, are now work
ing, however silently, within it. Perhaps none
could give better evidence with regard to this
than the Italian priests, already quoted, have
done, in this declaration: " Christianity exists
in the world as a law of Love and of Truth. It
is love and truth that inspire those two factors

96 MEDIATING MODERNISM
of modern civilization — science and democ
racy. That we may make it Christian we
have welcomed them, seeking to make them
our own, without reserve, without fear, with
out excessive concern for the past. " '
With such allies what cause can fail ? With
such aims what sacrifice can be withheld?
With such hope what greater work of faith
can love not do?
This is no strange thing that the same en
ergies of modern life which have pervaded
the Protestant world, should press for en
trance from every side into the enclosure of
the Roman Catholic dominion. Men's minds
must live and breathe to-day in the same in
tellectual atmosphere; the Roman Catholic
mind cannot, if it would, escape from the en
vironment of free education. It may adapt
its faith to it slowly; it may for a time refuse
to go forth from its close systems into the
freedom of it; but live in it, it must; it must
breathe in the general intellectual atmos
phere of the day, or die. Experimental
1 What We Want, p. 23.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 97
science has driven out abstract dogmatism.
Eventually scholastic systems of divinity must
give way to the religion of experience.
Working effectually with democracy and
science are the influences of the educational
institutions which are maintained by free gov
ernments; and together with these is the grow
ing power of the laity in religious reform. We
have already noticed how the Pope has taken
alarm at the increasing interference of the
laity in religious affairs, and that he laments
the encouragement of it as one of the mon
strous errors of the progressive Catholics.
Education in the public schools and higher
institutions of learning cannot fail in time to
create a Roman Catholic laity who will show
themselves intolerant of all intolerance in the
realm of knowledge as well as in the state.
They will desire, indeed, not so much an irre
ligious education, but a freer rehgious educa
tion. An interesting instance of this occurred
year before last, when a large number of par
ents in an informal plebiscite, taken among
the working classes of socialistic Milan, asked

98 MEDIATING MODERNISM
that their children in the elementary schools
should receive some form of religious edu
cation. In Germany, educated Catholic laymen are
those who "respectfully present observations
and demand guarantees " ; this German move
ment, so well informed an observer as Paul
Sabatier regards as "having both more and
less importance — less importance on the sur
face, more importance beneath," than is
generally known.
This impression is confirmed by the un
intended evidence afforded in a Pastoral
Letter of German Bishops which was sent
out last December. In it they repeatedly
urge that diligent efforts be made to illumine
the more educated laity, and to overcome a
certain disquietude among the more edu
cated and fear of the effect of the Encyclical
in regard to their taking part in the progress
of human culture.'
On the other hand, no one will deny
the immense power of the organization of the
' See La Civilia Cattolica, February 15, 1908.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 99
Roman Church throughout the world. The
Vatican is using all that power to destroy in
the seminaries every trace of Modernism, and
in every diocese to repress the publication
and to prevent the sale of writings suspected
of any taint of it. No evasions of Papal
edicts can be tolerated; not only are the Bish
ops to be on the alert against it, but they
themselves are to be watched, as they are di
rected to appoint a Vigilance Committee in
each diocese to search out any writings that
may convey to the minds of the faithful the
germs of this most pernicious heresy.
Those who realize the tremendous power
of Rome will say. Modernism will be crushed,
as Jansenism in France has been; as history
shows that the Roman Inquisition has put
out, time and again, individual consciences.
To such persons the powers of darkness seem
to be greater than the all-surrounding light.
It does not seem so to the Modernists, who
have caught its beams upon their thoughts.
They beUeve in the penetrating and pervasive
energy of the light of history, science, and per-

MEDIATING MODERNISM

sonal faith, which has already shone fully
upon themselves. They may be cast down,
but not destroyed. Loisy relinquishes his
professorship, and continues thinking and
writing. Fogazzaro consents to have his
Saint put under the ban, and he lectures upon
the views of Giovanni Selva. II Rinnova
mento changes an editor, bows to authority,
and announces that it will continue to be
published. The priests who told the Pope
"What we want" — the same or another sim
ilar group of them — receive his condemna
tion, and immediately review it in another
book. That is put upon the Index, but not
until after its translation into French and
English. Thus the mirrors which reflect the
light may be shifted, but the light of modem
learning is ceaselessly reflected within the
Roman Church.
Moreover, the repressive policy of the Holy
Father opens more windows than it closes.
His extreme interdicts arouse courage greater
than the fear of excommunication. His En
cyclical, by its violent unreason, is a great aid

MEDIATING MODERNISM

to reason. His reactionary pontificate forces
the growth of free thought. In France it cuts
down the independence of the Bishops — and
prepares the soil for the upspringing in due
season of a fresh assertion of the coordinate
authority of the Episcopate. "If," says
Sabatier, "the Holy Father lent a more at
tentive ear to what is going on in France, he
would hear even those whom he rather un
happily calls 'his Bishops' in contradistinc
tion to those created by Leo XIIL, saying
that they have obeyed ' from a sense of dis
cipline . . . in the darkness.' A general who
is obeyed only from a sense of discipline and
in the darkness is not far off from defeat."
In other lands those who are in a good posi
tion to observe, declare that Modernism has
increased more during these last five years
than for twenty-five years before. Thirty
years ago, it is said, it would not have oc
curred to the Italians that they could be
really religious, and yet not accept in their
entirety the teachings of the Church. Com
petent witnesses within, as well as interested

MEDIATING MODERNISM

observers without Roman Catholicism, unite
in the judgment that a crisis is impending.
Thus the Abb€ Houtin writes: "The outcome
will be either to excommunicate at once a
great number of heretics, and thereby pro
voke much trouble in the Church, or to tol
erate the innovators who will continue their
formidable propaganda quickly."
"In any way, however, the Pope may de
cide, he has before him something which he
will not be able to arrest. This is the popu
larization of history. With this penetration
of historic knowledge among the people the
present crisis will become unceasingly more
radical and more terrible. . . . But confront
ing the Papacy are no longer the humble, re
spectful, timid men of former times.'"
Papal absolutism culminated in 1870 in
the dogma of Infallibility. Has it already
passed its culmination? and has the break
ing crest of the wave been reached in the
opening years of this century ?
' The Crisis in the Catholic Church, Fourth Inter
national Congress.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 103
It is difficult for most Protestants to believe
that any good can come out of Rome. They
are still under the inherited conviction that
between Romanism and civilization it is a
fight to the finish. One of the first things
they will ask is. What practical politics of re
form are possible within the Roman Church ?
Ideas, they are wont to say, are in the air;
show us your programmes. They forget, in
deed, that there are powers of the air, and
that these powers sometimes sweep down
suddenly over the plain. Ideas often make
their own policies. Christian truths are the
living energies; policies of men are but their
vehicles. The ideas keep moving on, al
though at many stations their means of trans
portation may be changed.
Often we may see the forces that are gath
ering for some historic conflict, although no
one can confidently predict the place or the
tactics of the impending battle, not even the
generals themselves. Gettysburg was an
accidental battle-field; the issue was the fiat
of the Almighty. So the Catholic reform,

I04 MEDIATING MODERNISM
we may rest assured, must come to pass;
for we can now see the mighty influences
in the field of religion which are working
together to bring about an irrepressible con
flict. But the place and the time, the point
where the issue shall be decided — who shall
predict? The result, when the decisive
hour is come — ^who can doubt?
The numbers of the Modernists cannot be
told; no enrolment of the chief supporters
of this movement can be publicly given.
In some dioceses of France and of Italy,
we are told on good authority that nearly all
the young priests have been won over to the
new ideas, while in neighboring dioceses the
proportion may not be a sixteenth or even
less. In the seminaries where there may be
a professor who is so true a scholar that he
thinks any thought is orthodox which is true,
or one who has a prophetic soul of sincerity,
the fecundity of such influence is marvelous.
If the older priests cannot keep step with
their younger brothers, they give to them
their sympathy. They have a " note of warm

MEDIATING MODERNISM

lOS

friendship for men whose intellectual posi
tion they may not comprehend."
At present the Modernists represent a gen
eral tendency rather than an organized party.
They have had several meetings and consul
tations in different places, and enough about
them is known to show that they are gather
ing a large and rapidly increasing follow
ing. Abbd Houtin says, their most mod
erate prototype has for his pseudonym
Giovanni Selva; and his sponsor Senator
Fogazzaro says: "His true name is Legion.
He lives, thinks, and works in France, in
England, in Germany, in America, as well
as in Italy. He wears the priestly garb and
the uniform of the soldier, as well as the coat
of a civilian. He shows himself at the uni
versities, he hides himself in the seminaries.
He fights in the press, he prays in the inmost
recesses of the monastery. He almost no
more preaches sermons, but he holds con
ferences. He is exegete and historian, theo
logian and scholar, journalist and poet. He
does not always write. He is at times only

io6 MEDIATING MODERNISM
an impassioned reader, only a believer, as
also a thinker. He is a republican, he is a
loyahst, he is a Christian democrat, he is
simply a liberal. " '
If the Holy Father has reason to be
alarmed by the manifold personality of the
Modernist, he has no less cause for his ap
prehension that they will leave nothing un
touched by their reformatory hands. When
we put together from their various writings
the objects which from their several points of
view they desire to see accomplished, the list
of their aims reaches considerable propor
tions. The transformation and purification
of the government and administration of the
Church; reduction of the number of Italian
cardinals, and an increase of foreign car
dinals in the government at Rome; decen
tralizing the pontifical power, changing the
papacy from a too monarchical into a more
constitutional rule; abandonment of its bad
' Ibid. Quoted from Les Idees Religieu^es de
Giovanni Selva in Demain, 8 f^vrier, 1907. Also
reported in Corriere Delia Sera, January 19, 1907.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 107
systems of coercion; restoration of the au
tonomy of the Episcopate; publicity of trials,
responsibility for decisions; reforms in the
studies in the seminaries, and education of
the clergy to meet modern demands; par
ticipation of the laity in the government of the
Church; changes in the Congregation of the
Index and other councils of the Vatican; de
crease in the external devotions and a spir
itual renovation of religious ceremonials; re
moval of corruptions; a priesthood better
trained in modern ideas and fitted for social
service; and to some extent the modifying of
enforced celibacy; these, and other measures
of renovation and progress in response to the
needs of modern life, besides their demands
for liberty to pursue critical, historical, and
scientific studies within the Church, and the
right to remake theological interpretations of
the facts and faiths of Christianity, constitute
a sufficiently extensive prospect of innovation
to justify the apparent panic of the Encyc
lical. Any enumeration, however, of the various

io8 MEDIATING MODERNISM
evils which Modernists would have removed,
fails to represent the largeness and positive
vitality of the movement as a whole. It has
been justly observed that Modernism differs
from previous liberal attempts in this respect
that these have been revolts against particular
dogmas, practices or superstitions; but the
Modernists have something better to do.
They would clear the whole air of the
Church. They would purify the stream at
the fountain. They v/ill not be content with
cutting off this or that parasitic error; they
will enrich the soil of faith with all knowledge,
and enhance the life of the plant.' In short,
they would see a general renovation within
the Roman Church, and they would not lead
an exodus out of it. This estimate of the
breadth and hopefulness of the movement,
which intelligent observers outside it have
formed, agrees with the feeling inspiring it,
which finds expression in such words as these
of the Italian priests whom the Inquisition
at Rome has cast out: "In the history of the
1 See Sabatier, Du Renouveau Catholique.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 109
Church this singular paradox is always veri
fied; that doctrinal crises have resulted the
more peaceably, the broader their founda
tions have been; and that conversely the more
grievous the schisms that have originated, the
more the point in question was limited."'
Modernism is not a schism, breaking off at a
single point; it is laying broad foundations of
religion in history, science and democracy.
As to their policies, they do not all have the
same. Some have well-defined programmes.
Others seek only "to disseminate their ideas
among an intellectual elite of ecclesiastics and
laics, to prepare opinions and to wait for the
favorable time to see the reforms bring them
selves to pass." Some are absorbed in social
questions; others have their eyes upon the
rights of science; still others are "deeply con
cerned with the moral aspirations and mys
teries of the human soul." Some are oc
cupied with the questions of Biblical criti
cism, and their weapons are mainly those of
all modem historical students. Others again
1 II Programme dei Modemisti, etc., p. 126.

MEDIATING MODERNISM

are concerned with the development of dog
mas and the relations of faith to the modern
mind. From this diversity their power is
gathering from many quarters.
Varied as are their interests and their stud
ies, the determination of the papacy to ex
terminate them all, unites them in a common
cause. Their propaganda is much the same.
From their different positions, they will con
tinue the same common campaign. Their
policy is to respect authority outwardly, so far
as they can without yielding their own posi
tions in reason and conscience, or abandon
ing Christian social reform. There they will
not recant. They will keep on thinldng, writ
ing, reading, voting, working among the poor,
and publishing their books. Their attitude
in general resembles that of the early Puritans
in England, so far as they have adopted a
habit of passive resistance. They will not
suffer the prohibitions of the Congregation
of the Index to work as fast as the printing
presses of the world may do in disseminating
broadcast their views. As soon as one book

MEDIATING MODERNISM iii
is forbidden, another seems ready to take its
place. Fogazzaro's Saint did not prophesy
things altogether remote when he said: "I
see, in the future. Catholic laymen striving
zealously for Christ and for truth, and find
ing a means of instituting unions different
from those of the present"; — which he de
scribes as men banding together "for the
united defence of God and of Christian moral
ity in the scientific, artistic, civil, and social
fields; for the united defence of legitimate
liberty in the religious field.'" Every se
verer measure of the Pope can only prove ef
fectual in compacting the progressive Catho
lics in a closer comradeship. The result of the
warfare upon them Father Tyrrell is sure
will be to drive the two wings of the moderates
together, and to gain for them the support of
multitudes of Catholics. He says: "Should
the repressive measures of the Encyclical be
successfully carried out, it is to be feared
that Modernism, to whose astounding energy,
versatility and diffusion the Encyclical bears
' The Saint, p. 294.

112 MEDIATING MODERNISM
witness, will be simply driven underground
to the catacombs, there to grow and strength
en and organize itself against the not distant
day when it shall be able to break forth again
with gathered impulse. ... In spite of sand
barriers the tide will come in — not peace
ably, but with dangerous rush.'" The cata
combs of "The Saint," it will be remem
bered, are a room, holding a considerable
number of people, in a layman's house on a
street in Rome.
The effect of the Papal policy in forcing
scholars into open resistance to authority Is
illustrated in the recent removal of Professor
Minocchi from his chair In a Catholic In
stitute in Florence. With the prior knowl
edge of his diocesan superior he had given
a lecture on the first chapters of Genesis, in
which he held that the narratives are not to
be taken historically, but should be regarded
as symbolic teachings of religous truths. A
newspaper report of his lecture attracted at
tention, and forthwith the heavy hand of
1 Letter to the London Times, Oct. 1, 1907.

MEDIATING MODERNISM 113
authority was laid upon him. He was com
manded to make a recantation of such views.
In his reply he said that he was ready to
admit whatever could be shown to be his
torically true, and, moreover, that he accepted,
the Catholic theology concerning the origin
of man's conscience and his sin. But he
added this firm confession: "I will not hide
from you that I have yet to understand this
other riddle concerning this narrative in
Genesis that, after so many decisive dis
coveries of the historical and anthropological
sciences, such a categorical affirmation of
the historicity of the Garden of Eden they
wish to impose to-day upon me, an honest
man and a scholar. Never, never will I
make such base surrender of my Catholic
conscience to scientific views which I know
to be very false. Never will I offend God
in denying the known truth in order to
please men. And for this reason, as a Cath
olic, respectful to the will of authority, I
bow myself to the decisions of my superiors,
hardly concealing the joy of giving for God

114 MEDIATING MODERNISM
and Christ, by this affirmation of conscience,
testimony to the simple truth of Christian-
ity." An indication of the increasing disquietude
of mind which the repressive policy of the
Vatican is producing, may be seen in a touch
ing account of an interview of a French Bish
op with the Pope, which Sabatier says was re
lated to him by the Bishop himself three days
after it occurred. The aged Bishop with
much frankness remonstrated with the Holy
Father against the supplanting of Episcopal
authority, by those who, speaking in the
name of the Pope, seemed to forget the Divine
institution of the Episcopate, and to "see in
the Bishops only channels of transmission."
He urged the Holy Father to convoke an
other Episcopal Assembly, and to leave it ab
solutely free to deal with all the questions
before them with open doors, "so that all
thoughtful and rehgious people in France and
elsewhere should witness its serenity and in
dependence, and the loftiness of its debates."
He went home to find to his disappointment

MEDIATING MODERNISM 115
that the Pope had decided to convoke no such
general assembly.
As one result of the whole papal policy in
France, Sabatier further informs us that
" after some signs of discouragement the ma
jority of the ' Green Cardinals ' (as they are
called) have again rallied together, satisfied
that it is not the hour for sounding a retreat
which has struck, but for resuming the
burden of toil. . . . Feeling themselves pro
foundly Catholic, they mean to tell the
Church calmly but resolutely what are their
hopes and their needs." These French
prelates who are moderates ask indeed for
nothing extraordinary; but it is significant
that they seem, according to this testimony,
willing to assert their full canonical rights, to
demand publicity of debate and trial, and
above all to insist that "the domain of au
thority shall be strictly defined." '
A somewhat less hopeful view than Saba
tier's is taken by Prof. Jean R^ville in a sur
vey of the situation of the churches in France.
1 Letter to the London Times, August 12, 1907.

il6 MEDIATING MODERNISM
"Catholicism," he remarks, "may perhaps
reform itself, but it can only be from the root,
against Rome, and not with Rome. The
Roman organization may burst asunder from
an excess of centralization, but it is not possi
ble to change it in a secular direction." He
recalls the lesson that "the whole history of
the church shows us that ever since the thir
teenth century all reforms of the church have
proceeded from the people or lower clergy";
and in France he fails to find enough real
faith among the masses of the people for them
to uphold a reform. It can, however, hardly
be said that the leaders of the progressive
Catholic movement are generals without
troops. It seems rather to be true that in
many places the people are waiting for the
Saint and the Prophet.
We may quote once more Sabatier's judg
ment — perhaps no one who is not a Roman
ist, is more conversant with what is hap
pening: "We are witnessing a crisis in the
domain of authority. The Pope on the one
hand, the Modernists on the other, are the

MEDIATING MODERNISM 117
representatives of two mentalities, of .two
civilizations, confronting each other. Which
of the two will prevail ? To state the ques
tion is to answer it. Life and youth must
necessarily prevail; and then will be fulfilled
the prophecy of the venerable Abbot Jo
achim of Flora regarding the third age of
humanity." We have thus endeavored to gain some
adequate conception of what Modernism in
the Roman Church is, and what with a rea
sonable hope we may think it not impossible
for it to do. The Pope, under a higher guid
ance perhaps than he may know, has chosen
for his motto, "Restore all things in Christ."
Could that be begun in deed and in truth in
the Vatican, the hopes of the Modernists
would be fulfilled, and the world might soon
see the rise of a new Catholicism. But
herein, so far as the Papacy is concerned, lies
"the hopelessness of this hope."
The parish priest who lived and worked
among the people of Venice with much of the
love of the Son of man in his service, and who

Ii8 MEDIATING MODERNISM
held himself aloof from the politics of the
Vatican, now that he has been transported
to the chair of St. Peter, and is surrounded by
the schemes and ambitions that gather in
Rome from all other quarters of the Christian
world, seems himself to have become one of
the blind leaders of the blind; and there are
many who will regard the Encyclical as very
likely the last ditch into which the papal
absolutism has fallen. Or was that Italian
priest (who here must be nameless) right
when he exclaimed: "The present Pope is a
parenthesis!" Some parentheses of history
have been long drawn out; but always God's
sentence goes on to its full period. The
present reaction of Pius X. is an interrup
tion; Modernism runs in the main line of the
thought and intent of Christian civilization.
There may possibly be an anticipation of the
charity of history in the more kindly judg
ment which some well-informed observers
are disposed to take of Pius X. No doubt his
deepest desires are evangelical; and, as so
often has happened with God's servants, an

MEDIATING MODERNISM 119
overruling providence may bring those de
sires to pass by the defeat of the measures
which he has been led to take for their ac
complishment under the influence of unwise
councillors, less worthy than himself. The
Grospel, which the Holy Father has at heart,
may be set free by the convulsive effort of
the Roman absolutism to prevent its own
dissolution.' The first effort of the Vatican
is to bring the Latin Church into subjection.
On the one hand the teaching power of the
Church is put forth in every possible way for
the purpose of destroying the Modernist
errors. Priests echo in the pulpits, and
magazine and newspaper writers repeat in
the press the words of the Encyclical with a
dreary monotony of identical phrases. With
the approbation of Cardinal Merry del Val
a Catechism on the Encyclical has been
pubUshed with questions and answers for
the uninstructed, which remind one in form,
'Such is the view taken by Mr. Lilley in his
preface to the translation of the Programme of the
Modernists, p. xxiii.

MEDIATING MODERNISM

if not in substance, of some Protestant cate
chisms which once children had to commit
to memory. On the other hand, the writings
of Modernists are followed with swift con
demnation. A liberal Review, for instance,
"Nova et Vetera," was issued at Rome on
the tenth of last January; on the twenty-
eighth of the same month, three days after
the issue of the second number, it was fol
lowed by an edict of prohibition. The pub
lishers announce that it will be continued.
They say, "We appeal to the Church of
to-morrow." Nor do the seminaries escape
the eye of authority. A student was found
with a copy of the forbidden reply of the
Modernists in his possession, and immedi
ately on that account he was expelled from
the seminary, and sent home. Demands of
recantation, removals of professors, and
threatened penalties of excommunication
are now frequently reported. Quiet scholars
and devoted priests are thus forced in spite of
themselves to become spirits of reform. The
news agency of the Vatican is charged with

MEDIATING MODERNISM 121
boycotting journals supposed to be favor
ably inclined to the Modernists. In short,
the whole power of the Roman Curia seems
to be exerted to enforce the deliverance of
Pius X. on the opinions of the Modernists.
In Germany the storm has not yet broken
forth as violently as in France and Italy; but
premonitions of it have reached the univer
sities. Removals of professors in several
Catholic faculties have been agitated, and in
some instances Catholic students have been
forbidden to attend their lectures. But the
attempt to subject education in the Univer
sities to the dictation of the Vatican cannot
be carried far without involving an issue
with the State; and it remains to be seen
whether the present diplomacy of the Holy
See understands Germany any better than
it has France.
What the present temper of many German
Catholics is, may be judged by the following
extracts from a letter of an aged German
priest, which was originally written in Latin,
and with the concurrence of several like-

MEDIATING MODERNISM

minded priests and educated laymen sent to
the Pope. Afterward a German translation
of it found its way into print; and it has
come to me from a reliable correspondent.
The writer says :
"Although I am an old man, I have never
in my life been so painfully touched by any
thing as by your EncycUcal." He laments
that the Pope has "treated theologians who
are distinguished for piety and learning as
though they were hostile to the Christian re
ligion. Yet these men have no other inten
tion than to restore all things in Christ, which
is the very aim that you have set for yourself.
Certainly they believe that they can better
attain this end, if with proper consideration
for the conditions of the times, they seek to
some extent to defend the Christian religion
with new weapons and by the employment
of the prevalent knowledge of to-day. But
efforts of that kind displease the advisers
who stand at your side, who lack all under
standing for what seems to be necessary and
exceptional, in order to win the hearts of the

MEDIATING MODERNISM 123
educated, and to compose or to modify that
strife which in our time breaks out every day
more harshly between the faith of revelation
and human knowledge." The scholastic phi
losophy, which the Pope requires to be taught
as the basis of all sound thinking, he character
izes as "antiquated, and as having to-day no
weight among the educated as the ground or
justification of the Christian religion."
"Do you not see," he asks, "how great is
the difference between former times and
ours ? The times have changed. Hence the
method of teaching is to be changed, if the
enemies of the Christian religion are really
to be turned back, and it be brought to pass
that men of the modern times may feel
themselves attracted to the Christian Catho
lic doctrine. In vain you trouble yourself to
turn backward the wheel of time and to
bring about a return to those times which
to-day by all the educated are regarded, so
to speak, as blind. Whoever does not keep
pace with the times; whoever does not ob
serve the signs of the times, will not be of the

124 MEDIATING MODERNISM
slightest influence in preserving the cause of
Christianity, as at present appears before
our eyes in France. Especially should
pains be taken that certain human fables,
which in the course of the centuries have
crept into the Christian religion, should not
be given out as the doctrine of Christ."
" Do you not see in what a difficult position
you put all our professors, who have to teach
Catholic theology in the State Universities?
Surely they will be despised by their col
leagues in the other faculties; the finger of
scorn will be pointed at them, as upon persons
from whom there has been taken every free
motion in the investigation of truth, and who
at all times are surrounded by guardians,
watchers and censors, whom you will have
introduced. And how many and what great
controversies will result therefrom between
the Bishops and the teachers of theology?
How many and great enmities between col
leagues themselves? How greatly will the
number increase not only of malicious calum
niators, but also of hypocrites, who would

MEDIATING MODERNISM 125
justify their own faith? For these reasons,
believe me, not only many, and indeed the
most learned among the clergy are enraged
over these instructions, but also not a few
among the laity, at least so far as they are to
be counted among the educated. To these
men it is odious that men who have to in
struct the youth, should be put in so unworthy
a position. Yes, many among the clergy and
the laity will not be pleased with the manner
in which you meet with commands our
Bishops, who now seem to be no more suc
cessors of the Apostles, but rather slaves,
who have to obey the word of the Apostolic
See. Under such circumstances it is not
surprising that others are vexed and indig
nant and cry out without any respect for
your authority.
"As formerly the old Romans sent their
legions to subjugate our forefathers, so now
the Roman hierarchy send their Encyclicals
to bring to submission the Bishops together
with their dioceses.
" Consider well that the human spirit may

126 MEDIATING MODERNISM
be repressed, but never for a lasting time
crushed entirely, which is especially true of
the Germans. For the more learned among
us one is, so much the more is every kind of
subjection hateful to him; and the longer our
professors bear in silence a shameful sub
jection, so much the more vehemently some
day will they break forth with one accord to
regain their lost freedom."
The writer of this forcible protest con
cludes by saying, "I am willing, if the Holy
Father desires it, to go to Rome, not to justify
my writing — for it is God that justifies — but
to explain further and more fully what seems
to me most salutary, so far as Germany is con
cerned, for the government of our Church."
In America the warfare of the Vatican
against the modern world has not as yet come
to open hostilities. The same commands of
Pius X., which have been issued to the rest
of the Catholic world, have been laid upon
the American Bishops. They are enjoined
to exercise all vigilance in exterminating
from American soil the seeds of these pemi-

MEDIATING MODERNISM 127
cious heresies. The Encyclical contains
also an incidental thrust at " the principle of
the Americans that the active virtues are
more important than the passive." But up
to the present time the American prelates,
by their seeming acquiescence in the voice
of authority, have shown their facility in the
practice of the passive virtues rather than a
disposition to exercise the active virtues in
a conspicuous campaign against democracy
and Modernism in this free country. If the
Curia should compel the American Catholic
Episcopate to lay the axe at the root of
Modernism in the American Church; if the
Holy Inquisition should once demand that
search be diligently made for the sowers of it
in every Catholic diocese and school in this
country, no one could tell what forces now
latent might be suddenly liberated, or predict
what world-transforming results might ensue.
If we turn once more to Italy, where
the conflict Is now most closely joined,
who are better prophets than these Italian
priests who are willing to suffer for their be-

128 MEDIATING MODERNISM
lief s ? And this is what they say in reply to the
Pope. We take these words from their book
which had hardly been issued before the
Roman Inquisition put it on the Index and
threatened its authors with excommunica
tion: "The movement of minds, in an age
of Intense and widely diffused culture such
as ours, is not a slender stream which can eas
ily be arrested by a dam; it is an irresistible
tide, which authority should wisely direct,
not foolishly obstruct." . . . Of the "anach
ronistic men who live in contact with the
world without learning its aspirations, its lan
guage, its ideals," they say: "This part of the
clergy who occupy almost all grades of the
hierarchy, cannot prevent us, having received
our scholastic education, from learning that
language, and comprehending those ideals,
from accomplishing the work of reconcilia
tion and synthesis between the old Catholic
tradition and the new thought and the new
social aspirations."
A vivid impression of the present situation
in Italy is conveyed In the following private

MEDIATING MODERNISM 129
letter which has recently been received from
an ItaUan priest of unusual intelligence,
whose name I must refrain from giving for
very much the same reason that led Sabatier
to say, when asked about the names and
numbers of his liberal Catholic correspond
ents, " Itdoes not belong to me to aid Pius X.
in poUcing his church."
This writer distinguishes between the more
radical and the moderate Modernists. It
will be observed that he also intimates to what
the effect of the Pope's severity may lead.
"The (radically) modernist movement is
fortunately not much diffused through Italy,
and would probably not have gone so far had
the necessity not been put upon it by the
usual rough way In which the Vatican has be
haved itself for some time. It is true that
the evil existed, but it would not have as
sumed so serious and so pronounced a form
had it been treated more gently. This pil
ing up of orders and precepts, this condemn
ing and suspending of priests, makes some
react and go where they did not intend to at

130 MEDIATING MODERNISM
first. It Is a face that the fear of Modernism
has made many Bishops lose their heads so
completely as to find Modernism even in the
bicycle, which many have forbidden. This
exaggeration, which in a large measure comes
from the old-fashioned instruction given in
the seminaries, has been to my mind the chief
cause of so much rebellion. As I said to you
before, in a conversation held In my garden,
the Holy Father through his character and
education knows nothing of diplomacy and
appeasing flattery, and goes straight to his
end without questioning whether around him
there may not be a world which does not
think precisely as it did in the Middle Ages,
regarding the principle of authority. In the
last analysis, in all Italy the rebellious Mod
ernists may be counted on the tips of one's
fingers; but it is a fact that there are thou
sands, myself among them, who while leav
ing intact the sacred heritage of faith and an
cestral tradition in the things of faith, wish a
reform in all the old rubbish which the cen
turies have heaped upon religion, old rub-

MEDIATING MODERNISM

131

blsh, which has nothing to do with faith.
The young clergy wishes to hve the Ufe of its
time, to be modern without being radical. I
myself believe that, as always, from the evil
a great good will come because between those
who pull too far in one direction and those who
pull too far in the other, those who stand in the
middle finish In the right; and we are those
who stand in the middle. The reactionaries
have the power, but they have neither the
youth nor the knowledge; so it is true that
they are able to condemn, but not to confute.
"The situation then Is more simple than
may be imagined abroad. To me this strug
gle indicates the perpetual vitality of a faith
which would be ended If it confined itself to
a past, without being sure of its capability of
adapting itself also to the present."
This last sentence strikes a note which re
sounds over and over again through the words
of all the Modernists; it is this vital adapta
tion of faith to its modem environment
which distinguishes the renewed Catholicism
from that which is perishing in the Vatican.

Ill
COMING CATHOLICISM I
Modernism in the Roman Church is but
one-half of the whole providential movement
now opening before us; the other half of it is
to be observed in progressive Protestantism.
The whole providence is to be looked for in the
meeting of both of them. Each throws light
upon the other; and, comparing the two, we
may discern one higher purpose in them both.
We turn again, therefore, to our own hori
zons, to look for the signs of the dawn of the
day after Protestantism. If we should close
our account of the ages of the Reformation
with the summary in the first chapter of its
splendid successes and its apparent failures,
we should be too unmindful of the abiding
life which has manifested itself in it, and
which shall not pass away. There are
132

COMING CATHOLICISM 133
prophecies and tongues of these Protestant
years, which already have ceased; and what
ever of Christianity it holds in part shall be
done away; but, more than its faith and its
hope, the greatest thing now In the Protestant
world is its Love — and into that Protestant
ism itself shall pass when that which Is per
fect shall come.
If our Protestant Modernism is to be some
thing more real than a new theology with its
critical knowledge and Its airy tolerance; if
our hope of the unity of the Church in love
is to become more than a prayerful dream; if
our faith in the Universal Church is to be not
a mere listening to dying echoes of Christ's
prayer, but a resolute following of his Hving
Voice; then we must be filled with a consum
ing zeal against the idols of our own theo
logical and ecclesiastical making; and, with
a humbled but renewed understanding, we
should learn what are the elements and first
principles of the oneness of the Church for
which the Lord prayed, that the world might
believe.

134 COMING CATHOLICISM
The rise of Roman Modernism brings a
new challenge to the Protestant churches —
what shall the same spirit work among us ?
If, on the one hand, Roman absolutism
would crush the rising Catholicity of which
the world in its unbeliefs has need, shall its
light also be scattered among the divisions of
Protestantism? If Romanism is a walled
enclosure, shall Protestantism be like a con
juror's chamber of many mirrors, set at all
angles, and so multiplied at every turn, that
the visitor, once having entered, can find no
way out; and, wherever he looks, beholds ever
the reflection of his own passing form ? Or
shall the new Roman Catholicism find, when
it comes, a Catholicism that has arisen from
Protestantism, waiting to meet it and to
match it? The question for our twentieth
century Christianity is as broad as this; and
no temporizing of ours with it will satisfy
the providential insistence of it upon the con
science and the heart of the Christian world.
By this it is not meant that expedients of
temporary union, or programmes of working

COMING CATHOLICISM 135
cooperation, may not have their present
value, and hence their temporary justifica
tion; provided, however, they are not for a
moment accepted as substitutes for the real
unity of the Church. As means to that end
they may be hopefully used; as ends in them
selves they would be failures of the ideal of
the Lord's prayer that all may be one. Fed
erations of churches are to be regarded as at
best only way-stations in the progress of the
Church; the line of development of true
Catholicity runs on and on, and our denom
inations are called to be through passengers.
They shall not otherwise finish their course
In faith.
Moreover, It cannot be too clearly recog
nized that the unity of the body of Christ is
neither Church uniformity nor Church union;
it is the wholeness of the Church. The first
step, therefore, for all churches to take is
to be true in thought to the fundamental
oneness of Christ's Church.'
' The remarks of Bishop Brewster of Connecticut
are here well worth quoting. "Unity means one-

136 COMING CATHOLICISM
Fidelity to that, above all other and lesser
loyalties, is the supreme obedience for all
Protestant churches to render. The one
ness, the wholeness of Christ's Church — this
is a truth not for our thought to play with,
but a truth to be done with all our might.
Furthermore, the acknowledgment may
well be made on all sides that downright
earnestness has not as yet been shown in
dealing with the overtures of unity which
years ago were put forth in the so-called
Chicago-Lambeth articles. They were dis
cussed for a season; and with somewhat of
an academic pleasure in the discussion on
the part of those engaged in it; but they have
failed to be taken in deed and in truth alike
ness; union is the binding together of things that
are not one. . . . Union is outward, accidental and
circumstantial. Unity is inward and essential.
Union is mechanical; it is put together. Unity is
vital; it is the oneness of a common life wherein the
parts grow together. The endeavor after Christian
Union may achieve Alliances and Federations. And
still is perpetuated actual separation." The Cath
olic Ideal of the Church, p. 28.

COMING CATHOLICISM 137
by the body which proposed them, and
among the denominations to which they were
addressed. The Episcopal Church has not
proceeded to conform her constitution to her
overtures; and no denomination has sought
to put them to the test of an actual trial.'
Nevertheless, one sign of Catholicity is
now written large over the whole diversity
of Protestant denomlnationalism; — it is the
universal desire for Christian unity. This
is in the air; It has become an irrepressible
idea in the mind of every church. But Cath
olicity Is not in itself Catholicism. Catho
licity is a temper of mind, a quality of spirit;
Catholicism is a manifestation of It In some
evident form, a spirit clothed upon with
some body. The spirit of Cathohcity, rising
from the death of sectarianism, will not be
made perfect until it shall appear in some
embodiment, finer, indeed, and more free, so
evidently fashioned of the spiritual elements,
' See The Peace of the Church, by Dr. W. R.
Huntington, p. 231 sq. A beginning in this direction
was made at the last Episcopal General Convention.

138 COMING CATHOLICISM
and so luminous with Love, and yet so visible
wherever disciples are met together, that In
its presence the glory of Christ may be made
manifest, even as He prayed.
We shall miss altogether the point of de
parture for further advance toward Church
unity, if we proceed from the separation of
the Christian denominations, as though that
were the fundamental fact, or the only actual
state of Christianity. On the contrary, our
separations are the superficial appearance,
not the underlying fact. We have not to go
far beneath the surface of present-day Prot
estantism; we need only to remove the easily
detached soil in which our several Church
organizations are planted — the good soil, it
may be, enriched by years of cultivation,
and still sustaining growths of rich fruitful-
ness; — we have but to strike down beneath
the surface facts to the underlying rock, to
discover that, after all is said, the oneness of
Christianity is the primary, indestructible
fact upon which rest alike the soil, and
fenced enclosures, and all fruitful trees and

COMING CATHOLICISM 139
ripening harvests. The underlying unity
has existed, and does exist, as really, al
though not as visibly, as our differences
exist. Our discussion of the problems of the
union of the churches should start from the
fact that the Church is Catholic; that, as
the primary fact, there is one Catholic
Church throughout the world. The real
problem given us in our day to work out is,
not to create that unity, but to manifest it;
not to make it anew out of the destruction of
our individual inheritances, but to make it
manifest as the one Life through all the
forms and organs of it. Our problem, in a
word, is the vislblhty of Church unity.
Hence, our logic will revolve In a vain
circle, if the first premise of our reasoning
be not this primary Church-fact of the actual
unity of Christ's society; and our endeavor
will be stopped before insurmountable bar
riers, if it does not begin from this starting
point of Christian faith that we all do be
long to the one Church of Christ.

I40 COMING CATHOLICISM
Nor shall we do justice to the historic and
continuous fact of the one society of Jesus
with His disciples from the beginning until
now, if we are satisfied with a dim percep
tion of that unity as an impalpable charac
teristic of the Church Invisible, and remain
content to hold the two churches sharply
distinguished in our thought — the one visi
ble, the other invisible; the one divided, the
other catholic. This is not true to the living
actuality. Membership in the one Church
is not the privilege only of the blessed, nor is
its unity as Invisible as are the spirits of the
dead; we belong here and now to Christ's
one Church; and though now that falls far
short of Its perfect manifestation, neverthe
less it is at least as visible as is the baptismal
sign of it. Rome itself acknowledges us all
as belonging to this visible Christianity,
when it recognizes the validity of Christian
baptism by whatever hands of priest, or lay
man, or nurse it may be given. And Father
Tyrrell is profoundly true to the primary
fact of Christianity when he writes, not of

COMING CATHOLICISM 141
the invisible Church merely, but of the
"formless church which underlies the hie
rarchic constitution." It is real though form
less; in it is life, though the life within it may
not depend on any existing organ It pos
sesses. It exercises authority; God's spirit
in it "exercises a silent but sovereign criti
cism"; it has vital energy adapting itself
with inexhaustible grace to the ever-changing
demands of its environment in human
thought and life; it is this Church, all too
formless, we may think, yet always in the
world, from which our successive religious
organizations have developed, and the death
less life of which Is made manifest through
them all.
If we begin with a clear recognition of the
existence of the one Society of Christ on the
earth, we shall already stand on higher
ground, which commands our lower divi
sions. The reason for hopefulness is not
merely that there is growing among us a
common Christian consciousness; that out
in the open, as it were, we are breathing the

142 COMING CATHOLICISM
same air, and walking in the same Light
from above. Nor is it simply our impa
tience with confessional restrictions, or our
longing for some one organization large
enough to hold us all. It is something
simpler, and at the same time nobler, than
this. It is the enthronement of the idea of
the Christian Society. It Is in many quar
ters the recovery of the Idea of the one his
toric Christian Society; and in other quar
ters, where that idea has not been kept in
the background, it is the freeing it from ex
ternalities and forms unessential to it. It
is a return to the simplicity of it as it was in
the beginning, and it is an advance, Hke-
wise, toward the complete Church which is
His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all
in all.
The original, the historic, the Universal
Church is constituted in personal relations.
Christ with Peter, the confessor, began the
Christian Society. The Church was founded
in a personal and vital relation ; not upon the
confession, nor upon the individual man was

COMING CATHOLICISM 143
the Church built; it was the man in his con
fession of the Christ, who was recognized by
the Master as the beginner with Him of the
fellowship which, once having begun, should
never be destroyed. In this confessed and
vital personal relationship the foundation of
the Church was laid. In the same manner
also was it continued. Organized in no
formal association, but in a living friendship;
continued in the obedience not of servants,
but of friends; the Church was wherever
Jesus Himself was in the midst of His disci
ples. It went with Him through Judea and
Galilee, and it was with Him in the upper
chamber, and it has been and is to be mani
fested henceforth in a sacred and perpetual
visibility in the Lord's Supper. Wherever
the eleven went, and men and women met
and brake bread In the Master's name, the
Society of Christ was visibly continued;
others had fellowship with them, as we read
in St. John's epistle — the fellowship in the
Life which was manifested. And so it has
remained unto this day. This unbroken

144 COMING CATHOLICISM
line of personal continuity, this oneness of
the whole succession of Christian confessors,
is the historic reality which the Church rep
resents and confirms.
If we draw near together in this primary
Church idea; if all together we find firm
footing upon the one Church-fact; we shall
have gained the first principle, we shall have
taken the first and decisive step in the way
toward a reunited Protestantism. Stand
ing in this position, we shall discover more
clearly the difference between that which is
primary, and those things which are second
ary, in the development of Christian life and
organization. Having laid hold of the first
elements of the living unity of the Church,
we shall suffer them no more to be obscured,
or confounded in the secondary processes of
its historic development, or any of its suc
cessive adaptations to the conditions of its
life. Nothing Is more important for a real
synthesis of seeming opposltes of religious
ideas than to come to just this knowledge of
what is primary, and what lies altogether

COMING CATHOLICISM 145
along the secondary line of the problems
given us providentially to work out. The
controversy over the episcopate may thus
be put in the way of settlement, if our divi
sions over it are found to lie along the sec
ondary and not primary line of our common
faith. A biological analogy may aid us in deter
mining the natural relation of orders of the
ministry to the organic life of the Church.
Life begins with a single cell. For the per
petuation of life It is not necessary that
different organs should be developed; an
organic cell needs neither head nor nerve-
centre, nor separated functions except of the
most rudimentary kind, in order that lis life
may be preserved and passed on from one
generation to another. The potencies of
distinct organs, capable in time of complex
and stable differentiations, may indeed be
determined in the first germ and vitality of
it; but no one of the later developed char
acteristics of it are essential to its continued
life. We might say that the life is in the

146 COMING CATHOLICISM
whole of it, rather than dependent on any
part of it, and that in response to its environ
ment increasing distinctions within it are
determined by the Ufe of the organism as a
whole. They proceed from it, they serve it,
they continue its life, while they derive their
vitality from it.
Now the orders of the ministry in the
Church concerning which so much con
troversy has been waged, resemble the organs
of a body. The biological analogy has
point in so far as it may serve to disabuse us
of the notion that any organic orders are
primary, and, from the beginning of life in
the germ, necessary to the existence of the
Church. The analogy might be carried
further to show how a certain interchange-
ableness of their functions might have been
natural in the earlier stages of the develop
ing Church during the last years of the first
century. Differentiated orders of ministry,
however, which are not necessary to the
existence, may in time become indispensable
to the continuance of the Church. Thus

COMING CATHOLICISM 147
historians are agreed that the episcopate in
the second century was a providential means
of preserving the true tradition and doc
trine of the Church. Moreover, it holds
true that if, Uke an organ, some one order
of the ministry had been cut off, another
might have taken up its function, or it might
have been regenerated anew from the life
of the Christian Society. There are exam
ples of regeneration of parts in earlier stages,
and later even of substitution of functions —
one part doing somewhat the work of another
part — in organic development. So likewise
in the history of the Church differences of
its administration may be functions of its
Ufe; distinct orders of ministry may acquire
specific characters for its use; but they are not
the Ufe; they are aids to Its growth and fruits
of its Ufe; but the Church has life in itself.
Primarily and essentially it Is the perma
nent immanence of the Spirit of life in the
Church which preserves the historic unity
of it. The forms and orders by means of
which its unity has been made visible, are

148 COMING CATHOLICISM
of importance; they may be held to- be
divinely ordained, as its whole growth is;
but they are of secondary institution. They
may be accepted as facts in a providential
order of development by those who could
not admit the historical theory of a direct
institution of them by Christ or the Apostles.'
To require that would be to enforce in the
field of Church history a theory of develop
ment which has been discarded in the field
of natural science. The assumption that
the Papacy, or any differentiated order, was
originally created by Christ, or that whole
systems of mediaeval dogmas were deposited
in Apostolic words, is unjustified by his
torical Investigations.
' This position is granted by the Bishop of Car
lisle, who speaks for many Christians besides him
self in these words: "However dearly we prize the
historic succession of the episcopate, can we reason
ably maintain that it is indispensable to the validity
of the Word and sacraments ? " "Its [the Church's]
unity must be the unity of living, loving personal
relationship.*— if i66ert Journal, January, 1908.
Other churches might adopt as expedient what is
not claimed as indispensable.

COMING CATHOLICISM' 149
A simple supposition will serve to bring
out clearly the truth that the organic con
tinuity of the Church is thus guaranteed in
the Ufe of the organism itself, and is not
necessarily dependent upon any organs or
orders for its development. It is not diffi
cult to imagine that in the most wide-spread
of the early persecutions of the Christians,
in the days of Diocletian, every vestige of
episcopacy might have been destroyed; as
the emperors of that period in the inscrip
tions, commemorative of their triumph, de
clared that the name of Christian was de
stroyed. Suppose that in Rome not only
were the successors of the Apostles Peter and
Paul put to death, but all the presbyters and
deacons likewise of the church at Rome;
expand the supposition until it embraces all
quarters of the known world to which the
edicts decreeing the destruction of the Chris
tians, who would overthrow the republic,
were sent; conceive that the boast of the
Emperor was literally fulfilled in every city
where Christians were consumed by slow

150 COMING CATHOLICISM
fire, as at Antioch; and through all the re
mote provinces also, as in Phrygia a whole
Christian town was surrounded, as Eusebius
states, by a cordon of armed men, then set on
fire, and all the inhabitants were forced to
burn; imagine that as a result of such uni
versal desolation not a solitary officer of the
church, upon whom consecrating hands had
been laid, could have been found left in the
Roman Empire: — would then the triumph
of the Emperors over the Christ have been
final ? Would subsequent history have jus
tified their boast, "The Christian supersti
tion is everywhere destroyed"? Did the
life of the Church depend upon keeping
unbroken any tangible chain of Apostolic
succession? or of any order of Presbyters?
Could the historic unity of the Church of
God in any age be destroyed by the perse
cutor's sword? Would the Spirit of the
ascended and expectant Christ have lost all
recreative power In humanity because one
line or another of the communication of its
energy might have been interrupted? So

COMING -CA THOLICISM 1 5 1
long as anywhere in that whole Roman
world two or three were left to meet together
in the name of the Lord, the Church visible
would have remained on the earth, in its own
vital faith and in the presence of the Christ
in the midst of them possessing His authority,
and the fulness likewise of spiritual energy
for the reorganization of its life, and the
manifestation of His love unto the end. If
we could suppose that to-day by some visita
tion like that which fell upon the first-born
in Egypt all ecclesiastical orders should per
ish together — bishops, presbyters, priests, —
and the Pope himself should be dead with
none left for his successor; the Gospel would
not perish from the earth, the Church would
not be buried in the sepulchre of its ministry.'
The whole magnetic field of Christianity
would not be left empty of spiritual energies
merely because all the connecting wires for
a brief hour might be down. It were easier
rather to imagine that from such supposed
violence of destruction throughout the
' So also Huntington, Opus dt., p. 194.

152 COMING CATHOLICISM
Church, a Christian Society might rise again,
with its divisions become only memories of
its past, and Its Inexhaustible life clothed
upon with a body more celestial. And to it
again, as One of old appeared on the
mountain to that first body of disciples,
would come the Voice, saying, "All author
ity hath been given unto me in heaven and
on earth." And they who might be left
could still claim his promise, " Lo, I am with
you alway, even unto the end of the world."
Furthermore, a vast deal for the working
out In practice among Protestants of the
idea of Church unity will have been gained,
if we shall come to mutual recognition of
this primary principle of CathoUcism. For
if we stand together here we shall discover
that we are already on a plane above many
obstacles to Church unity which lower down
seemed insurmountable. We have been
like mountain climbers who start from dif
ferent points to reach the height. Their
separate trails through the thickets at the
mountain's foot lead them sometimes near

COMING CATHOLICISM 153
each other, but oftener far apart. The foot
hills rise at times between them; at moments
they may catch glimpses of one another
through the opening undergrowth, or call to
each other as higher up in some clear space
they stand on opposite sides of a deep
ravine. Only, as they climb, the ravines be
come less deep, the streams, nearer their
mountain springs, are easy to step across.
All the way up they have had different views,
and many outlooks at resting points on the
ascent they can never forget. But at the
mountain-top all lesser heights and the deep
fissures are below them, and their many
partial views are blended in the one broad
prospect away to the horizon line, which
together they behold. Our church separa
tions are all lower down. The Christ was
the first to stand alone as upon the mountain-
top; and looking down toward those who
should foUow after him, and gazing up into
the glory of the heavens, he prayed to the
Father of all that they may be one even as
we are one. The company of the Apostles

154 COMING CATHOLICISM
first followed him to the height, and theirs
was one faith and hope. If our churches
would be in their succession, they must leave
their divisive dogmas and their partial views
beneath them.
Differences which we have too easily
looked upon as necessary and funda
mental, we may learn are only histor
ical and developmental. The same spirit
ual evolution which has occasioned, and at
different times profited by, theological con
troversies, may also pass through them and
lead to something better beyond them; pos
sibly by slight variations in the forms or
specific characters of existing ecclesiastical
systems a higher realization of Christian
faith and love may be developed.
It is noteworthy in this connection that
the Lambeth articles of Church reconciliation
do not confound the distinction between the
primary and the secondary line of beliefs,
upon which we have just been insisting.
The fourth proposition which the Lambeth
articles lay down as a possible basis for

COMING CATHOUCISM 155
unity, does not make the continuity of the
Church depend upon the tenuous thread of
an Apostolic succession — a thread which has,
it must be generally admitted, some ques
tionable knots in it. This overture asks
simply and broadly for recognition of the
historic episcopate, and that, moreover, as it
may be freely adapted to different conditions.
One may accept this and beUeve, if he has
been wont so to beUeve, In an unbroken
tactical transmission of authority from Peter
to the last ordained priest to be seen among
men. Or another may accept it without
hanging his faith upon any theory of external
transmission of grace, contented to stand on
the broad. Church fact — that of the one un
broken Christian Society, which the Lord
owns everywhere by the fruits of his Spirit.
Still another, with but slight changes In his
habits, might conform to the polity of the
episcopate, while remaining a Congregation-
alist in his valuation of the functional inde
pendence of the local church. Nor is ritual
uniformity rendered necessary by it. A con-

156 COMING CATHOLICISM
formity is not desirable, which, if enforced,
would compel a new non-conformity.
The writer of the Pope's Encyclical had
perhaps a truer insight than he knew when
he saw that the Modernist may have many
personalities In one. This can be, because
many differences are reconciled in his inner
experience of the Christ who draws all men
unto himself. He can find harmony in
diversities of doctrine and worship because
his religion is within him a growing ex
perience of the love of God for all men. He
will learn ever new occasions for the Mas
ter's word to his zealous disciples, "He that
is not against us is for us." For this reason,
because he has in himself the gospel of rec
onciliation, he will cease to be at heart a
Churchman, a Denomlnationalist, or a be
liever known and designated to himself by
any other adjective than Christian, unless in
deed it be the word. Catholic. Whether he
be in the Roman or any Protestant commun
ion, he would restore that word. Catholic^
to its original meaning. And in all possible

COMING CATHOLICISM 157
forms of fellowship he would help make the
true meaning of that word visible.
A right order of faith was followed in the
confession of a former Scotch divine, " I am
first a Christian, next a Catholic, then a
Calvinist, fourthly a Psedo-Baptist, and fifthly
a Presbyterian." It is not necessary to our purpose to enter
into the discussion of the secondary separa
tions now existing between Protestant
churches, such as differences which may be
deemed of importance concerning the sacra
ments, or the doctrines of faith. But we will
not pass by without notice one practical cause
of sectarian confusion, which may prove to
be almost the last obstacle to a more united
Christianity. This is a difference, as it is
sometimes characterized, between mental
ities; a difference which occasions many
intellectual and temperamental divisions.
Here it should not be forgotten that a visible
unity of the Church would by no means re
quire uniformity. It is a very light way of
dismissing the urgent problem of Church

158 COMING CATHOLICISM
unity by observing that uniformity is neither
practicable nor desirable. An irrepressible
question of Church history is not to be solved
by a wave of an academic hand. Catholi
cism, in the earnest endeavor to make itself
a visible reality for the salvation of the faith
of the modern world, does not dream of de
manding uniformity; should it seek to en
force that, it could become only another
Roman Catholicism. Not thus can there be
one flock in Christ's many folds.
' Passing by various minor temperamental
differences, more easily adjusted, and always
to be tolerated, we must recognize one radical
difference of views which runs through the
whole thought of modern times. It may be
described in a word as the difference be
tween the static and the dynamic conception
of everything. Just this is a fundamental
fissure between the Papacy and Modernism.
It is like the difference between a house made
by hands and a tree that has grown. In the
view of Pius X. the Roman Church was
made by Jesus Christ himself, or built up

COMING CATHOLICISM 159
at once by his Apostles on the Unes which he
had prescribed. The after-ages have to live
in it, and to keep It always the same. It
contains the deposit of faith, of which the
Pope is the divinely appointed custodian.
To the Modernists the Church is the vine,
the life of which is Christ, and the branches
of which the succeeding ages bring forth.
Fogazzaro's Saint loves to say that the vine
can ever renew itself, that its life cannot die.
A similar mental diversity, although not so
marked in degree, is to be observed In the
course of many discussions among Prot
estants concerning the Church. But is any
intellectual divergence among Protestants
necessarily a practical obstacle to the re
union of the Churches? Are not many of
our differences purely mental difficulties
which rise up as mountains in our concep
tions of truth, but which faith may easily
remove as having no reality ?
It would seem to be answer enough to say
that the love of Christ in the heart goes be
neath all structural diversities in the Intel-

l6o COMING CATHOLICISM
lects of men. And with regard to the par
ticular point just under consideration — the
article concerning the historic episcopate —
there are no differences in men's thoughts of
it, which are valid as reasons in love for their
standing apart on account of it. In this,
and in other matters of forms and ordinances,
beUevers who hold quite different theories
might find on the broad facts of Christian
history common standing-ground. That
which philosophy has put asunder, life
may join together.
From this cursory observation of out
standing difficulties, we return to our start
ing-point; our most vexed problems in the
effort to reach Church unity are not to be
found either in the depths of the Christian
consciousness, or on the heights of the Chris
tian ideals; they meet us and trouble us only
on the plain of our habits, conventions, prac
tices; they are therefore removable. We
can put them aside, if we will. They are
secondary, however important tliey may
seem; they are not primary; they are actual,

COMING CATHOLICISM i6i
but not real; sentimental, but not funda
mental; mental, but not vital.
Episcopacy holds the key to the door
through which other churches may be in
vited to enter Into a Catholicism large enough
to hold them all. But the door to the
Father's house wherein all denominations
may sit down together, must be opened wide,
and the archway lifted high, so that no
church need stoop to enter In. There are
lesser fidelities of the several denominations
which they owe to themselves and their own
history, which are to be respected in the
invitation to the larger loyalty of the Uni
versal Church. The clergy of any church,
whose ministry for generations past has been
owned of the Spirit by its fruits, should not
be asked to dishonor their fathers or to dis
own their own ordination vows, In order
that in the love of unity they may receive a
further episcopal consecration. Other con
gregations should not be expected to forget
their habits of unwritten prayer, endeared

l62 COMING CATHOLICISM
by many sacred memories while they may
be ready to unite in liturgies which have
been hallowed by the years. No denomina
tion need be asked to forsake utterly its own
rich inheritance from the past, as it may
seek with all the saints to know the love of
Christ which passeth knowledge. All the
churches should be invited to bring with
them their ancestral treasures into the one
household of faith; and they should find
space to hang the portraits of their most
honored fathers and teachers, among those of
other consecrated servants of God, on the
walls of the refectory where all they who
are called Christian may again break bread
together with gladness and in singleness of
heart. The Episcopal Church, by virtue of its
tradition and position, has, as no other, I am
venturing to say, the opportunity and the
call to become the mediating Church among
all the churches. How it shall heed this call,
in what definite and practical ways It may be
guided to meet this opportunity, seems to be

COMING CATHOLICISM 163
the first and immediate question of protestant
reunion. Others must wait for its answer.
We would not, in saying this, forget that
the Lambeth overture may still be regarded
as a standing offer of reconciliation from the
Bishops of the English Church. But it was
in 1888 that this offer was made, and it has
been suffered to drop out of sight. Some
interchange of fraternal greetings then oc
curred as a consequence of it; but nothing
was done. In this country, perhaps more
than in any other land, the conditions are
favorable for active endeavors for this end.
Without discourtesy the wish might be ex
pressed that the American Episcopate might
find means to put the Lambeth Quadrilat
eral, or some new overture, so directly be
fore the eyes of other Christian bodies that
responsibiUty for neglecting it would lie upon
their conscience. Shall the proposition of
the Lambeth articles, which made a good
beginning, mark the end of the mediation of
the Episcopal Church in America in behalf
of the reunion of the churches ?

l64 COMING CATHOLICISM
Meanwhile, any efforts are to be en
couraged which may put a stop, even in
slight degree, to the fearful economic waste
of competing ecclesiastical organizations.
In view of the world-wide opportunities for
the gospel of service, this waste of the re
sources of Christianity seems sinful. How
can it ever be justified when the Householder
returns to ask an account of his stewards?
It is keeping the pound given to the Church
laid up in an ecclesiastical napkin; it is
not putting It into the bank of the world's
exchange to gain ten pounds.
The further practical suggestion may be
offered that tentative efforts for the realiza
tion of the idea of Church unity may be
made, not only through public discussion of
the problems of possible combinations of
Church efforts or interests, but also by pri
vate conferences and clubs of representatives
of different churches, and, as a result eventu
ally, by successive conferences between offi
cial committees of leading denominations for
this purpose. The churches can be doers of

COMING CATHOLICISM 165
this truth of Church unity, if they will to do
it. One of the declarations of the Bishops,
when they put forward the Chicago-Lam
beth olive branch, might well be adopted
over and over again in the councils and
assembUes of the different Churches; the
expression, namely, of a readiness "to enter
into brotherly conference with all or any
Christian bodies seeking the restoration of
the organic Unity of the Church, with a
view to the earnest study of the conditions
under which so priceless a blessing might
happily be brought to pass."
To all Christian bodies now Richard Bax
ter's pathetic lament in his " Penitent Con
fession" might be addressed: "O how little
would it have cost your Churchmen in 1660
and 1661 to have prevented the calamitous
and dangerous Divisions of this Land, and
our common danger thereby, and the hurt
that many hundred thousand souls have re
ceived by it? And how little would it cost
them yet to prevent the continuance of It ? "
Not as a vain, penitential regret, but as a

l66 COMING CATHOLICISM
call to action, may the question come home,
" How little would it cost us now to prevent
the continuance of it?"
It is a happy omen that in some ways the
practice of the truth of Church unity is be
coming prevalent. Evidence of this is to be
seen along the advancing missionary line.
Old soldiers know too well how demoraUzing
it was when a regiment at the front was mis
takenly fired upon by a regiment under the
same flag from behind. Fewer such tragic
mistakes are now to be witnessed among
religious bodies of firing upon one another
from behind. Moreover, in our cities, we
are beginning to learn the tactical folly
of misplaced churches and unconsolidated
forces. And at least we may set our faces
against tendencies to strengthen any denom
inational system for the sake of its separate
welfare and pride.
Meagre though the results of such en
deavors may seem at first in comparison with
the end to be attained, nevertheless in so
doing we shall not be merely marking time;

COMING CATHOLICISM 167
is it now too much to affirm that by such
beginnings, and in the further use of all
available means, an inter-denominational-
ism is making itself ready to greet the prom
ise of a grander Church unity ? Eventually
may Episcopacy be led by the Spirit to suffer
it to come to its own among us all!
It may seem less gracious to mention ten
dencies which are diversions or arrests of the
general movement toward the reunion of the
Churches. But some by-ways have already
been pursued full far enough to show that
they do not promise to return farther on
into the highway. For example. Church
unity is not to be attained by following some
among the Anglicans, who would find a way
around the Papacy back to the conditions of
faith which were left finished and fixed by
the first Ecumenical Councils prior to the
separation between the Eastern and Western
Churches. Such Churchmen remind one
of Dante's mistaken prophets, who were
doomed to walk with their heads reversed
on their bodies, so that, when they would go

i68 COMING CATHOLICISM
forward, their eyes could see only what lay
behind them. To be pro-Roman is not to
be pro-Catholic.
Neither can the desired end of Christian
unity be gained by a Congregationalism that
would protect its own life by excreting a new
ecclesiastical shell, larger indeed, but harder
than the old, enclosing itself In a system of
standing councils, executive committees,
general superintendents, moderators en
during for a while — extemporized bishops
clothed with a little brief authority, but
without halo of traditional reverence. Still
less can the way toward the City of God,
the gates of which are never shut, be pur
sued much farther by a Presbyterianism
that would compel its teachers to dwell
within its confessional walls, allowing them
indeed to go out into adjacent fields for
their days' work with other scholars, but ex
pecting them to return every night to rest
safely within the gates. Least of all can the
end in the unity of truth and love be reached
by a pathless pursuit of liberty and fraternity

COMING CATHOLICISM 169
through the economic tangle and into the
socialistic swamp, sustained by a natural love
of humanity, and led hither and thither by an
ethical impulse in which the Golden Rule is
owned, and the Lord's Prayer is forgotten.
Since such ways as those just mentioned
are proving to be by-ways, which do not come
together, the question returns. How, then,
can a way through the bewilderment of the
creeds of Christendom be found? These
Modernists are learning an answer for us all.
Protestantism may find itself more indebted
than we know to those Roman Catholic
thinkers and historians for the answer which
they have been compelled to discover in
order to save the loyalties of their own faith.
It is given in their principle of the historical
development of the dogmas of the Church.
That truth is in all their thoughts; and it
keeps them within their Church, while it
emancipates them from all bondage to its
traditions. Concisely stated. It is the truth
that the dogmas of the Church are successive
developments of the reflective hfe of the

I70 COMING CATHOLICISM
Church. And they may be fruits fresh every
season. Creeds are not to be acknowledged
as contracts between believers; they are to
be received as the garnered stores of past
religious experience for the use of the living
mind of the Church. The creeds of Christen
dom are not mere repetitions, they are neces
sary growths of the Christian faith. Dogmas
are symbols, interpretations, from time to time
men's best appreciations of the truth. They
are true as they bear witness to the true
Christian life in the language of each age.
And it is the orthodoxy not of a single creed,
or of a finished formula, but the truth of aU
Christian creeds which the one Catholic
Church rejoices to own. This has been his
torically, and it must be always, a continuous,
yet a changing orthodoxy, because it is a grow
ing confession of the faith which is ever spring
ing up anew from the life of the Christ with
men. Take any creed as a closed formula,
and such creed would be but as the cerement
of faith. Confess any Christian creed as a
symbol of the truth, and it becomes an ex-

COMING CATHOLICISM 171
pression of fellowship with the whole thought
of the Church as it knows, and follows on to
know the Lord.
Accepting this principle of the vital de
velopment of dogmas, we can throw away
the idea of a creed In which it is regarded as
though it were like a rubber band, which
may be so stretched that it will hold almost
everything, or become with age so hard that
it can bind nothing. Rather the doctrinal
formulas resemble the pearls and jewels of
diverse colors which are strung together on
the same unbroken thread; or better, since
nothing in religion is to be mechanically con
ceived, for us to confess the creeds as true
growths of the same Christian faith and life
is only to perceive that a tree must have bark,
and that the bark must grow with the tree.
In short, for our argument must not Unger
at this point, apply without hesitation the
first principles of organic evolution to the
development of the Church and its dogmas,
and you will have secured both the integrity
and historical continuity of its life, and at

172 COMING CATHOLICISM
the same time the progress and ever renewed
adaptations of it to the knowledge and life
of the world.
What is directly to the point here is that
this principle of the Roman Catholic mod
ernists gives back to Protestants a key to
the solution of their problem of unity amid
doctrinal diversities. It seems providential
that Roman Catholic theologians, in their
imprisonment within bolted dooBS, behind
iron bars of authority, such as Protestantism
in its strictest dogmas has never known, have
found a key which may open aU doons of
creedal bondage; — a skeleton k^, indeed,
for the principle just mentioned is simple,
but it will open the doors of many doctrinal
separations. Our scholaES and historians
are using the same principle. This key fits
easily our history and thought. But now
that these Roman Catholics are putting it
Into our hands again, if Protestants will take
up this first principle of the historical de
velopment of dogmas, and think it out fully,
and follow It all through their own doctrinal

COMING CATHOLICISM 173
difficulties and dissensions, they will find a
way — not indeed out Into a homeless creed-
lessness — but on into the unity of the house
hold of faith; and then, like the Psalmist of
old, they may sing because they are de-
Uvered from their doctrinal distresses and
set In a large place by the Lord.'
Living among men in the love of the Son
of man as the servant of all;, obedient in
every thought to the truth that makes free,
possessing as Its own the fulness of its creeds,
and ever following on to know the Lord;
praying always that with all the saints it
may be strong to know the love of Christ
which passeth knowledge ; — such more visibly
shaU be the One Catholic Church, seeing
which the world might believe.
Shall men behold It in our day ? Is this
practicable ? How shall It come to pass ?
' For a helpful historical exposition of the prin
ciple of development of dogmas, the reader may be
referred to the Abb^ Loisy's book, "The Gospel and
the Church," which is one of the best replies to Har
nack's attempt to extract from history a single
Gospel truth as the essence of Christianity.

174 COMING CATHOLICISM
Even at the present time it is hardly a too
venturesome assertion to make that from
the larger reUgious communions in this
country it would not be difficult to find
leading representatives in each, thoroughly
loyal to their own inheritance, who, if two or
three of them could meet together, each with
power to act for his own body, would find
it quite possible to agree upon fundamental
articles of unity; and after that nothing but
conventions, expedients, and secondary af
filiations would be left to be worked out
naturally in time.
The mere suggestion, just ventured, that
it is conceivable how representative thinkers
in different churches might find a common
meeting ground of their ideas of the Church,
is of itself reason enough to believe that in
this hope of the reunion of the churches we
are not "coquetting with the impossible."
Among the laity a great, underlying senti
ment is prevailing, to which the leaders, when
they appear, will not make a vain appeal.
The patriotism of the better country awaits

COMING CATHOLICISM 175
the providential call, as the guns of Fort
Sumter awoke the patriotism of the Union.
The time, men are saying, seems ripe for
something. There are many that say, Lo
here! Lo there! and among these, socialism
loudest of all. But to socialism the keys of
the kingdom of heaven on earth are not
given. To the real Christ all authority is
given. In some more visible embodiment
of His Spirit, in such new Catholicism, these
Protestant ages by His further coming, shall
not be destroyed but fulfiUed.
II
The reunion of the Protestant churches
would be the completion of but one column
only of the triumphal arch of the one true
Church. The other column stands apart —
the Roman Church — ^its base, as it claims,
the rock on which the church is founded,
built of the memorial stones of the ages, un
shaken in its massive proportions. Shall the
two columns remain forever apart ? Rather

176 COMING CATHOLICISM
has it not already come to the point where
on either side may be discerned the begin
ning of the curve, which, when carried up
to completion, shall make the one perfect
arch? With the prospect before us of a better
affiliation of the Protestant churches, we
look with a greater interest at the providen
tial possibilities of reform within the Roman
CathoUc Church. Recalling what we have
already observed concerning the renovating
energies of Modernism, we are now con
cerned with the further inquiry, What,, if we
suppose its work to be successfully carried
out In time, will a reformed Romanism
bring to Protestantism? Will it offer any
thing that Protestantism can grasp? As a
consequence, will any closer relation or
practical cooperation be made possible be
tween them? The saying has been some
times repeated, "I believe in the Roman
Catholic Church as it shall be a thousand
years from now"; if Modernism prevails,
shaU we be able to say, "I believe in the

COMING CATHOLICISM

177

Universal Church which is coming, and now
is in the world"?
To most this may seem a hard saying and
a romantic faith. But history is swiftly
made now. By the modem mastery of
forces, mountains which cannot be removed,
are tunnelled through. It is not impossible
to faith to believe that ways of commerce
may be opened even through seemingly im
passable religious separations. And they are
not to be put aside as visionaries, who, having
themselves overcome some Protestant fears,
beUeve that other separative misunderstand
ings in time also may be overcome.
Generally the old-time cry, "No Popery,"
is now regarded as superfluous. To fill our
Protestant trumpets with that sound would
be a vain call to a civil strife against Imagi
nary foes. Nor do we find in our hymnals
the words which at the close of the seven
teenth century were sung year by year in
every Evangelical congregation in Germany,
"Defend us by Thy word, O Lord,
From Pope and Paynim's murderous sword."

178 COMING CATHOLICISM
We on our part may well drop past contro
versies, while we stop to listen to this appeal
to us of a French Catholic: "O sons and
heritors of the Reformers of the sixteenth
century! You see beginning in this Church
of Rome, which condemned your fathers
without listening to them — ^you see beginning,
I repeat, a religious struggle, better in
formed and more radical than that of Wick-
liffe, of John Huss, of Luther, and of Calvin.
Great is the sorrow and distress of us who
see crushing down upon us the ancient and
venerable dome under which we had be
lieved we might safely remain. For you,
who have never considered Rome as the
whole Church and have held her action to
be often only a tyrannical oppression — for
you there is nothing surprising In our de
struction, our sufferings, and the struggles
which we must encounter. Your fathers
and you, even you, have known the same
vicissitudes, and in the sweat of your brow
and the tears of your heart have recon
structed for yourselves religious shelters

COMING CATHOLICISM 179
where you live in peace and full of energy
for the service of God and of humanity. In
our present anguish your experience remains
our encouragement and our hope.'"
We should return a hard answer to such
an appeal, should we say with self-satisfied
ease, " Come and dwell with us in any of our
many pleasant shelters." Protestantism
would play again the r61e of the tempter,
should it offer the kingdoms of its world to
the Truth that would return in the power of
the Spirit to its own Galilee. But Modern
Catholicism does appeal to Modern Protes
tantism, for appreciation, for sympathy now,
and for readiness for whatever affiliation may
hereafter become possible.
Conjectures, only thrown out as to the
probabiUties of the future, may serve to give
some definiteness to our thought concerning
the ways of approach of this greatest recon
ciliation of all. The writings and tendencies
of the neo-CathoUcs leave with us materials
' Houtin, The Crisis in the Catholic Church. Fourth
Int. Cong.

i8o COMING CATHOLICISM
from which such Imaginations may be easily
drawn. In the theological tendencies of the Mod
ernists there are already indicated some lines
of closer approach — they may seem like the
dotted lines on the map of a railway not yet
built, but a conjectural line may afterward
become an accomplished work of engineer
ing. Such possibilities are before us in the
views of dogma to which we have just re
ferred. For they show a better way than
logic by which unity amid much diversity
of beliefs may be reached. By the logical
method agreement can be gained only by
the exclusion of incompatible ideas. In the
developmental way, logical incompatibles
may be assimilated in the collective Ufe,
the living, working unity of the Church; —
only that which is destructive of the body
being cast out. Institutes of theology, how
ever valuable, must be separative construc
tions; developments of theology, adapted to
growth and vital needs, may become organic
harmonies. The true symbol for Christian

COMING CATHOLICISM iSl
theology is not to be found in the Old Testa
ment, but in the New. It is not like the ark
of the law, to be guarded by a perpetual
priesthood, as a sacred deposit which no man
may touch; rather the symbol of Christian
theology may be dravsm from the river of the
water of life, in the midst of the street, where
the thoughts of all the nations walk in the
light of the City of God.
Father Tyrrell may reassure us that the
neo-CatholIc theology eventually may not
prove uninhabitable for children of Protes
tant descent, when he says of Modernism:
"It does not demand a new theology or no
theology at all; but a moving, growing theol
ogy—it does not demand a new intellectual
framework of Catholicism, or no framework
at aU; but a recognition that the framework
has grown in the past and should be suffered
to grow in the future under the guidance of
the same life and Spirit."
We on our part may hear something more
than a visionary's voice in this conclusion
of this Modernist: "Taught by history, God's

i82 COMING CATHOLICISM
great logic mill, which has worked out both
these sixteenth-century solutions, the solution
of unfettered authority, and the solution of
unfettered liberty to their impossible results,
he (the Modernist) will see the necessity of
going back to the point of divergence . . .
whether, in the light of three centuries of
necessary but costly experience, the problem
of liberty and authority may not now admit
of some happier solution, and on the ruins of
two opposing systems be built up something
more durable than either."
In a recent lecture on Catholicism and
Protestantism in Germany that preeminent
historian. Prof. Adolf Harnack, laments
the fact that the German people up to the
present time remain divided into two camps,
and that this condition complicates all rela
tions and heaps up everywhere hindrances
and obstacles. Then with a noble impatience
he asks: "Are we obliged to regard this
condition as settled and to acquiesce in it?
The question is so seldom raised among us
that it seems thereby already to be decided.

COMING CATHOLICISM 183
Nearer approach of the confessions (Prot
estant and CathoUc) passes with most of us
as an Utopia, to think of which Is not worth
while, but Is, indeed, a betrayal almost of
one's own confession. But, on the other
hand, though only a glimmer of possibility
and hope of improvement Is here at hand,
yet it is seen that it would be conscienceless
to neglect It. . . . Slackness is it, religious
and theological slackness, to refuse this
question off-hand, or to thrust it aside."
Moreover, the renovation of Roman Ca
tholicism by the modern spirit would bring it
into more acceptable relations to our modes
of thought in regard to its forms of worship
and the sacraments. The critical, historical
spirit has already accomplished something
to drive away the superstitions which swarm
around sacred places and relics. But it goes
further and will restore in Christ the sim
plicity which has been overlaid In forms of
worship that are too externalized for our
use. One instance of this return through his-

i84 COMING CATHOLICISM
torical criticism to an earlier and simpler
worship appears in the following passage
concerning the Eucharist, which was written,
not as might be imagined by one of our own
number, but by these Italian priests, and
addressed to the Pope; it may be read as a
pleasing surprise by those unfamiliar with
their thought.
"So, again, to explain the Eucharistic
Mystery, we cannot, for similar reasons,
adopt the theory of transubstantiation, un
less no one is to understand. But we shall
say that the faithful, after the words of con
secration, while with the senses of their
bodily life they wiU see only bread and wine,
will yet with the soul, by means of a super-
phenomenal experience — of faith, in short —
be In contact with the real and living Christ,
who, before he died, gathered his disciples
to a fraternal feast to communicate to them
for the last time the 'Bread of Eternal Life'
— will be in contact with the Christ sus
pended upon the cross, the Victim of justice
and peace."

COMIN CATHOLICISM 185
At this point, in regard to ritualism and
forms of worship, where the differences be
tween Protestants and Roman Catholics
seem most irreconcilable, they may be found
in reality to be most easily removable. For
these are differences in forms, not opposi
tions in the substance of faith. They will
tend to disappear as on the one side the
Modernists' reform of the worship of the
Roman Church prevails, and as on the other
side a truer appreciation of the legitimate
use of religious symbolism Is more generally
attained. The Modernists know the need of a more
spiritualized worship, and they would purify
the religious symbolism of their Church
from uses which are really irreligious. They
would retain the ritual in which their most
intimate experience of religion has found,
and may continue to find, its reverent ex
pression and an ever-present help; but they
would use it as symbolism, and prevent the
abuse of It as superstition. They them
selves are the unsparing critics of legends of

1 86 COMING CATHOLICISM
the saints, which are accepted by the blind
faith of holy souls; they expose with un
hesitating candor the pious fables that gather
around sacred relics and their miraculous
efficacy; they insist that the Roman Church
must throw aside "the heavy baggage" of
numerous forms and devotions, which over
load faith with superstitions; they would
have the worship of the Church so reformed
that it may offer a truer symbolism for the
support and sustenance of the inner life of
believers. It is not a question whether we can give
up all symbolism in religion; the only ques
tion is, how can the Church use religious
symbolism without abusing it. The symbol is
not in Itself an evil thing, whether it be a light
before an altar, a silver star in the Chapel
of the Nativity at Bethlehem, or a statue of
Luther kissing the open Bible, or a flower
before a pulpit. The efficacy of a symbol
may be the same gracious influence whether
it descends from the face of a Madonna
to some heart in need of the Divine pity,

COMING CATHOLICISM 187
or if it follows from the word-picture of the
mother, which the revivalist is wont to draw.
A devout soul may feel the presence of things
invisible and ineffable as with the hearing of
the ear they are made real in the music or
spiritual words of some plain meeting-house;
and he may be touched with the same emo
tions, and find the same hope which enters
within the veil. If he should bow with the
silent worshippers in some Cathedral chapel.
It is never by the symbol, altar, or cross, or
sainted face — ^it is only when the symbol is
made an idol, that the truth is betrayed. It
is true that the more sensuous and the more
numerous the forms and ritual are, the nearer
Ues the peril of an idolatrous use of symbol
ism; but the Gospel is a gift to the senses
and the imagination, which a sincere faith
need not deny. It was the Christ who said,
when he was speaking of his Father's king
dom, "Behold the Ulies of the field"; and
when he would not leave his disciples com
fortless, it was He who said, "This is my
body "; and the word of the beloved disciple

COMING CATHOLICISM

is not. Keep yourselves from the signs of
baptism, the Cross, and the Cup of Com
munion, but, "Little children, keep your
selves from idols."
Questions of ritualism, we are saying,
therefore — higher, or lower, simple as the
motion of an outstretched hand in benedic
tion, or pictorial as those which the cere
monial of a reformed Catholicism may re
tain — are not necessarily stumbling blocks
in the way of Christian fellowship, and they
need not remain as a cause of reproach be
tween Christians, who, whether in the more
elaborate liturgy of the Temple, or on the
mountain of some simpler devotion, would
worship the same God in sincerity and in
tmth.' In social and family circles this greatest
religious separation becomes less and less a
' Loisy's candid discussion of the historical de
velopment of the Catholic Worship indicates how
the Modernist's view opens the way for needed adap
tations and spiritual reforms in worship. — The
Gospel and the Church, Sec. VI.

COMING CATHOLICISM 189
bar to personal intercourse and cooperation.
In philanthropies and in the pursuit of civic
righteousness Protestants and Catholics are
working and fighting together.
Now in this land the fierce strife between
Papist and Puritan is to be remembered only
to be forgotten with thanksgiving. Rome is
no longer In this country a dreaded menace
to civil Uberty. Democracy has so far
entered into the heritage of American Ca
tholicism that here in a free state our swords
are beaten into ploughshares and our spears
into pruning-hooks. Too much blood of
freemen of Roman Catholic descent has
been shed on the battlefields of our American
Union, and too many priests of the Roman
CathoUc faith have been seen ministering to
the suffering and dying amid the strife by
which government of the people by the
people has been made the perpetual covenant
of this nation with all its citizens; too firmly
established in the will of the people are the
laws and the Uberty of this country, for us
to take alarm at any spectre of priestly

190 COMING CATHOLICISM
domination, or to invoke the spirits of our
ancestors to return to fill our ears with their
woes against the modern Babylon. Other
social and civil dangers lie before us in the
near future; but they are anarchic perils
alike for the Roman Catholics and for us.
Between Protestants and Catholics the hour
of truce long since has come. Our charities
bear white flags. Our civic reforms draw
recruits from both camps. But if one age
of persecution, combat, and bloodshed has
long passed; if another day of lessening fear
and increasing mutuality, more than our
forefathers dreamed, is already here; who
shall say that a third age of more positive
religious comradeship may not draw near?
Even at an hour when we may not be looking,
the Son of man cometh.
The one point where reconciliation seems
most impossible is the claim of the primacy
of St. Peter, if that means the spiritual sov
ereignty of the Pope. So long as Archbishop
Ireland deems himself constrained to insist
upon that, Professor Briggs, with all his de-

COMING CATHOLICISM 191
votion to true Catholicism, must remain at
that point a Protestant.'
Papal absolutism marks a final issue, and
that both in doctrine and in practice. But
it is no inconsiderable gain that the separa
tive issue is thus narrowed to one main
point. Break through that, and the rest of
the middle-wall of partition offers no longer
an insuperable obstacle. And that point
has already been carried by the historians.
Historical research has undermined the
foundation of it. From either side modern
historians have torn down that wall, and are
now greeting one another as comrades.^ It
was Melanchthon who once said that the
Pope might be acknowledged if he would
abdicate his jiis divinum. Such abdication
of a Divine right is now demanded by the
^See discussions between them iu the North
American Review, February, April, September,
1907. I would acknowledge my obligation to Pro
fessor Briggs for much aid in suggestions and valua
ble information, more than I can indicate.
2 See Harnack's appreciation of the agreement of
Protestant and Catholic historians. Opus cit., p. 16.

192 COMING CATHOLICISM
voice of history. Of an absolute supremacy
of Peter Jesus did not speak, and early his
tory knows nothing. Mediaeval history put
the Caesar's crown upon the Bishop of Rome,
and modern history has judged that by its
fruits. In this century the demand for the
renunciation of Papal sovereignty — this Is the
hopeful sign — has not broken forth as the
thunder of the Reformation from without;
after the whirlwind of the Reformation and
the earthquake of the dissolving Roman Em
pire, and the fire of the French Revolution,
it is heard now in the still small voice within
the heart of the Roman Church. The claim
of spiritual absolutism once removed, the
remainder of authority in the primacy of the
Bishop of Rome would form no insurmount
able obstacle In the way of free intercourse,
and of working fellowship between the two
great bodies of Christians. Such remaining
authority of St. Peter's successor, or sub
stitute, limited and restrained by the co
ordinate authority of the episcopate through
out the world, might be respected by those

COMING CATHOLICISM

193

who could not subject themselves to it. And
with its exercise in grace and truth, this
fellowship of believers might become in
time as manifest, the ways of coming and
going between the reformed Roman Cath
olics and other churches could be thrown
open as wide, and their hospitality become
as broad, as already is the case, for the most
part, among the Protestant churches.
With regard to differences of belief. Profes
sor Harnack recalls a pertinent and en
couraging lesson of history, when he says of
the task of setting aside or softening Prot
estant and Roman confessional divisions:
"If one objects to it that at this time no one
can imagine how and under what forms
CathoUcism and Protestantism can ever
draw near one another, it is to be remembered
that three hundred years ago no one could
have conceived beforehand how Lutheran-
ism and Calvinism could have been fused
together. And yet we have to-day the
EvangeUcal Union, and thousands know
themselves as evangelical Christians without

194 COMING CATHOLICISM
any suspicion of that opposition which once
bade Lutherans and Calvinlsts contend more
bitterly than Lutherans and Catholics."
We may gain further confidence against
"the argument of despair" with regard to
ultimate reconciliation of religious opinions,
if we recall how many are the forgotten con
troversies of our own history. In faded
pamphlets and in books long unread on the
shelves of our libraries their records remain
unsought and unknown; all the passion of
them gone, and only the Infrequent reader's
amusement at the fierce vehemence of their
pages left. Who among us, to mention one
instance of many, can recall the musical con
troversy which once threatened to disrupt
many New England churches ? The " Anti-
psalmists" of those days opposed the intro
duction of written music and regular singers,
as though it were a new invasion of the
Roman Antichrist. They clung to what
they called "the good old way" of singing
without rule and in the spirit. In the gen
eral loss of musical knowledge at the close of

COMING CATHOLICISM 195
the seventeenth century musical barbarism
threatened to overrun New England. With
a bitter cry It was contended that every man
must be free in the church to sing as he
pleased, and that the introduction of written
music would lead to the use of written pray
ers, and that would lead to Episcopacy, and
that to Popery. But the reformation in
Psalm singing, which began about 1720, and
which, like most reformations, was accom
plished only through persistent efforts against
most conscientious scruples, has long since
become a forgotten triumph of our inheri
tance of praise. Through our history a toil
some way of progress In worship may be
traced. Our New England Puritanism suc
ceeded In the seventeenth century in gaining
freedom of worship; in the eighteenth cen
tury it produced some harmony in worship; in
the nineteenth it diversified and enriched its
worship; from the first to the last it has
sought for Immediateness and spirituality of
worship. These elements our churches may
bring as their f uU historic contribution to the

196 COMING CATHOLICISM
worship of the one Church, whose liturgy
shall be at once simple and beautiful, uni
form and diversified, spiritual and free.
The lesson of many forgotten contro
versies enters into the reasonable hope of
future reconciliations which historians like
Dollinger have entertained. He was a noble
but pathetic figure when he was forced to
abandon the Roman fold, and to form with
others the Old Catholic Church; when even
in his separation, with the light of hope upon
his face, he stood, praying for the reunion of
the churches. He uttered the belief and the
hope in which he desired to live and to die,
as he repeated these words which a former
Prussian official, who had long been con
cerned with the ecclesiastical affairs of both
Churches, wrote at the end of his public
career In 1857: "I am certain the time will
come, before the newly Inserted stones are
mouldered, when a common Te Deum will
be sung in the cathedral of Cologne."
Some reunion of Christendom is in itself
no more impossible than was the sudden

COMING CATHOLICISM 197
appearance in history of the Judaeo-Christian
Church. No one could have foretold that
before he saw it. It came as a surprise to
Peter in his dream on the housetop; and the
realization of that dream in the primitive
Universal Church Is the wonder of the first
age of Christianity in the eyes of modern
historians. Yet looking back upon it, we
may also see how naturally it came to pass
as the fulfilment of the long prophecies of
history, and as the immediate manifestation
of the Life that was in Christ. So one might
drop at this point his discourse on the reason
able hope of Church unity without troubling
himself further with difficulties of the im
agination concerning the form in which it
may hereafter be made visible. We do not
know with what body It may come. Never
theless, many wIU wish to conceive more
definitely in what way the idea of Christian
unity may become more visible; and a step
or two farther our thought of it may venture
to go. Any conception of a possible realiza
tion of, or approximation toward, Church

198 COMING CATHOLICISM
unity which we may imagine, though it may
never come to pass in that form, may serve
as an aid to our faith in it, and an incentive
to our endeavor for it.
One such suggestion concerning a Uni
versal Church may be derived from the
political process through which Internation
alism is taking form and substance. This
is the more suggestive inasmuch as Inter
nationalism is alike the dream of the working
classes and an ideal of the statesman, al
though in quite different ways. A federa
tion of industrial interests throughout the
world, and a peaceful reign of international
law, are now much advocated. These ideas
have entered as a social ferment into the
politics of the world in this century. They
will take more tangible form, though exactly
how, it might be difficult to predict. But
shall Internationalism come on apace in the
world, and Catholicism tarry in the Church ?
Cosmopolitanism prepares the way for a
true Catholicism.
Now, for the practical power of a united

COMING CATHOLICISM 199
civilization in its industries and in the main
tenance of the peace of the world, no cen
tralized sovereignty is thought of as necessary
or possible; it is not another Csesarlsm that
is about to come. The existence and
efficiency of Internationalism is to be secured
and made apparent by compacts, conven
tions, representative courts; and by the
breaking down, or at least the opening of
doors through tariff walls. International
law, although it is at present largely un
formulated, is a felt presence on every sea,
and a protection of all nations in every port.
The analogy Is sufficiently striking to In
dicate how the formless Church, behind and
working through all Christian communities,
may find means and organs of making itself
a felt factor and a representative authority
throughout the whole religious world. The
forerunner of a world's peaceful commerce
and industry calls to the churches to repent
of their strife.
If we are asked to give greater definiteness
to the idea of a possible organic oneness of

200 COMING CATHOLICISM
the churches, another biological illustration
may further answer this end. Only in the
existing inchoate state of Christianity we shall
have to draw the illustration from the earlier
forms of organic life, and not from the high
est. For some time to come it may be only
the rudimentary forms of Christian unity
and cooperation that may succeed In the
struggle of ecclesiastical competitions. Biol
ogists observe at an early stage of develop
ment, following the primitive state of isolated
individual cells, a form known as colonial
life. The units are still single cells, but they
are now grouped together as a common cell-
aggregate. Sometimes they are to be seen
hanging together in a line of mutual de
pendence — a linear-aggregate; sometimes
they are held together in a globular mass
within a common gelatinous envelope. They
begin to take on different functions as the
process of cell combination goes on, and they
become in still higher forms more and more
mutually dependent and helpful. So life
brings its elementary units first into looser

COMING CATHOLICISM 201
connections, easily broken, and then into
more differentiated parts and cooperative
functions for the nutriment and preservation
of the whole. So naturally and spontaneously
Christianity began its life in the world; and
so it must begin again the formation of the
Church as one whole. Our illustration may
be pressed only so far as it renders it easier
to see that from beginnings of perhaps
tentative and loosely bound aggregates of
churches, firmer and more serviceable or
ganic connections may develop and inter
lace themselves. A working dependence
may grow of itself into a better ordered unity.
The final and perfect form of it, at the end
of the long ascent of Christian life, shall be
what the great-minded Apostle foresaw at
the beginning — the full-grown man who has
attained unto the measure of the stature of
the fulness of Christ— His Church— the ful
ness of Him that fiUeth all In aU.
The beginnings of this perfect Church are
within our reach, although the consummation
of it transcends our conception. But the hope

COMING CATHOLICISM

is no hallucination, the near end of which may
be grasped. Some practical possibilities of
renovation in the Roman Church have been
suggested. It has been said that a modern
ized Pope may be sometime elected; but
that, though possible, does not seem to be an
immediate probability. It is more promising
to reflect that the coming power Ues more
and more with the people, and that the Pope
has good reason for his apprehension of the
part which the laity are destined to play in
the progress of the Church. Sooner or later
their Insistence on the limitations of the
authority of the Vatican will have to be
regarded. Constitutional government Is
wrought into the faith of the people. The
Church cannot long survive as an exception.
The demand for "a constitutionalized Pa
pacy" Rome cannot resist and outlive. The
outcry of the Modernists has a double im
perativeness; it is an appeal to history, and a
rallying call for an advance. The Roman
hierarchy is a massive fact; but forces are
mightier than facts.

COMING CATHOLICISM 203
Another General Council has been spoken
of in some quarters. When the time for it
shall have fully come, the leaven of the
modern learning will have so far pervaded
the whole lump that Ultramontanism may
no longer sift its wholesome working out of
the loaf. A General Council, regaining the
voice of reason and conscience, would prove
an immensely reformatory power in Roman
Catholicism. Moreover, if — as Professor Briggs has
what may seem the hardy optimism to sug
gest — the result of another General Council
in which Modernism has gained influence,
should lead as the next logical step to con
ference in any direction with representative
Protestants, an unmistakable advance would
thereby have been taken toward the re
union of Christendom. But this issue Ues
just at present beneath our horizon. It may
appear to-morrow or some other day. This
is not the first time that such a proposition,
which perhaps to most may seem visionary,
has been made. In the seventeenth century

204 COMING CATHOLICISM
efforts for reunion of the Reformed and Ro
man churches were seriously made, and con
siderable correspondence for that end was
carried on. At that time Moranus and
Leibnitz urged that controverted points be
compared at a new Council to be composed
of Catholics and Protestants in common.
These efforts, encouraged by some conces
sions at one time by Pope Innocent XI.
after continuing for some thirty years, proved
fruitless. Political reasons and memories of
persecutions, which at that time rendered
the world unready for them, do not exist at
the present time.'
Concerning many points of dogma which
are divisive, a really Ecumenical Council
might in our time be ready to accept the wis
dom of Erasmus' words, which fell unheeded
in his day of gathering storm: "Our present
problems are said to be waiting for the next
Ecumenical Council. Better let them wait
' For an account of that irenic movement, and its
failure, see Dollinger, Lectures on the Reunion of the
Churches, p. 83 sq.

COMING CATHOLICISM 205
until the veil is removed, and we see God
face to face."
Voices of peace which were hushed in the
tempest of the early hours of the Reforma
tion, and unheeded in the later moments of
lull in the storm (voices of Melanchthon,
Erasmus and his friends, like Wicelius, a
moderate Catholic, who were saying, "We
will listen to Erasmus, to those who love
Christianity better than they love a fac
tion," — of Sir Thomas More, and John von
Staupitz, Luther's teacher, and Cassander,
Bossuet, Spinola, Molanus, Leibnitz, and
Grotlus, and other irenic spirits), may be
heard again in these evening hours, now that
the shouts of the warriors have ceased, and
the world's harvest waits for the reapers'
sickles. It would exceed the scope of this essay to
attempt to divide among the several churches
the responsibilities for the continued divi
sions of Christendom, or to measure the part
of any one of them in the obligation of this

2o6 COMING CATHOLICISM
present Irenic movement. Encased in de
nominational customs, isolated in imper
vious dogmas, withdrawn In Churchly pride,
or shut up in a narrow cell of private devo
tions, this sect or another may delay to
welcome the dawn of the rising CathoUcism.
But we may be assured that the "wonder
working providence of God," as our New
England forefathers saw it and called it, will
not suffer too long any body of Christians to
thrust aside the supreme obligation of the
Universal Church which is bound up in the
Lord's commission to his followers to make
disciples of all nations. And his beatitude
is given, not to the peaceable, but to the
makers of peace.
Well may all denominations of Protes
tants take to heart these words which many
years ago a peacemaker in the Roman Cath
olic Church, the profound and devout his
torian and theologian, Mohler, wrote in his
"Symbolism:" "Both communions should
stretch out a friendly hand to one another \a
the consciousness of a common guilt. This

COMING CATHOLICISM 207
open confession of guilt on both sides will
be followed by the festival of reconciUation."
The common obligation of reconciliation
cannot be measured by the mere word,
tolerance. Tolerance may mark the achieve
ment of the past age; it is not a great enough
word to signify the duty of the twentieth cen
tury. For this coming age the very word
tolerance, as Harnack says, should be
deemed "a proud and hateful word." The
full measure of our obligation of Catholicity
is — Love.
To prepare the way for the coming of
the kingdom in which all the prophets of
the "Holy Church throughout all the world"
shall be fulfilled, each and every Church
has need to rise to the nobleness of the
Baptist who could say of Him who was to
come after him, "He must increase, but
I must decrease." At a moment when John
the Baptist was at the height of his power,
in the midst of his success, in a place of his
baptizing where there were many waters,
when his own disciples brought to him tid-

2o8 COMING CATHOLICISM
ings that He who was with him beyond Jor
dan, was baptizing; this man, so strong and
self-contained, who had all Jerusalem at
his feet, was noble enough to say, as one
speaking to himself, and with a new glory
in his soul, "He must increase, but I must
decrease." Such is the superb nobleness required of
all the churches at this epoch-making hour.
The Christianity that now is, must give its
baptism to the Christianity that is to be.
Roman Catholicism shall be humbled to the
dust If it confesses not, "There cometh
after me he that is mightier than I." Prot
estantism shall fail, and be scattered to the
winds, if it denies before the coming One,
"I have need to be baptized of thee."
Such is the judgment which Modernism
brings to the Papacy — for its reformation or
its doom. Such, likewise, is the article of
the standing or the falling church which the
providence of God presses upon the accept
ance of the Protestant communions. In this
larger, nobler loyalty all our lesser loyalties

COMING CATHOLICISM 209
may be taken up. From the baptism of
this Spirit may proceed — perhaps sooner
than men may think or dream — the age of
the One Holy Catholic Church. And if the
age of Protestantism which passeth away
was with glory, much more that which re-
malneth is with glory.

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