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MEDIEVALISM

MEDIEVALISM

A REPLY TO CARDINAL MERCIER

GEORGE TYRRELL

As level clouds that blush to fiery red
When the day dies, or rises from the dead,
Saw I the face of Heaven with shame o'erspread. Dante, Par. xxvii. 25

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1908
A 11 rights reserved

CONTENTS

THE LENTEN PASTORAL .
A REPLY TO CARDINAL MERCIER .
I. THE IMMUNITY OF BELGIUM
II. THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF MODERNISM .
III. THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM

IV. THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 52

V. GROWTH OF THIS CONCEPTION .
VI. THE VATICAN DEFINITION ....
VII. "THE APOSTATE DOELLINGER" . . .
VIII. THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF PROTESTANTISM
IX. A SUPPOSED LEADER OF MODERNISM
X. HIS INDIFFERENCE TO HISTORY AND DOGMA
XI. HIS KANTIAN PREPOSSESSIONS .
XII. HIS DARWINIAN PREPOSSESSIONS
XIII. HIS INDIVIDUALIST PREPOSSESSIONS .
XIV. MODERNISM AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM .
XV. MODERNISM AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT
vii

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CONTENTS

XVI. ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM
XVII. OTHER ASPECTS OF MODERNISM
XVIII. POSSIBLE TRANSFORMATIONS OF MODERNISM
XIX. THE DEATH-AGONY OF MEDIEVALISM
XX. THE MORAL ROOT OF THE CONFLICT
XXI. CONCLUSION 
APPENDIX . 

PAGE 143159
163
171
179
183

THE LENTEN PASTORAL
DESIRE JOSEPH MERCIER, Cardinal Priest of
the Holy Roman Church; by the Grace of God
and of the Apostolic See Archbishop of Malines,
Primate of Belgium ; to the Clergy and Faithful of
our Diocese, health and benediction in our Lord Jesus
Christ.
Most dear Brethren,
On the 3rd of July, 1907, the Holy Father
caused to be drawn up a catalogue of errors which he
condemned, and which later were grouped together
under the name of Modernism. On the 8th of the
following September, in order to explain the reasons
underlying this condemnation of Modernism, he gave
to the world an Encyclical remarkable for its fulness,
clearness and vigour. Thank God, these errors, which
have principally taken root in France and Italy, find
scarce an adherent in Belgium. Your preservation
from them is due to the watchfulness of your Pastors,
and to the spirit of scientific impartiality and Chris
tian obedience that animates the representatives of
higher education in this country of ours.
Nevertheless, My Brethren, I regard it as a duty of
my pastoral charge to acquaint you in some measure
with this papal Encyclical which will be hereafter
known to ecclesiastical history by its opening words :

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

Pascendi Dominici Gregis, or more simply by its first
word Pascendi.
Since the Holy Father addresses his letter to all
the particular churches ; that is, to the bishops,
priests, and laity of the Catholic world ; he plainly
intends that each one should draw profit from it.
Moreover, the document is of such importance,"* and
has already attained such historical value, that any
one who is interested in the life of the Church should
be acquainted with, at least, the substance of its
contents. Finally, My Brethren, as soon as the Pope had
spoken — nay, before he had spoken, and as soon as
the telegrams announced his utterance as imminent,
— the infidel press set about misrepresenting it.
Neither journals nor reviews of the anti-clerical party
in this country were honest enough to publish the
text, or even the general tenor of the Encyclical ;
but with an eagerness and unanimity, explicable only
by party prejudice, they quibbled with the word
Modernism, and tried to make their credulous readers
believe that the Pope had condemned modern
thought, which, in their vague language, means
modern science and its methods.
This impression, so unjust to the Pope and to those
who obey him, has perhaps in all good faith been
shared by some of you ; in which case we would
now undeceive you.
We propose therefore, My Brethren, to speak to
you about Modernism in order to make you compre
hend the motives that have led to its condemnation
by the supreme authority of the Church.

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

What then is Modernism ? or rather, since we
are not going into details that would interest but
few of you, what is the parent-idea or soul of
Modernism ?
Modernism is not the modern form of science, and
therefore the condemnation of Modernism is neither
the condemnation of that science of which we are
justly so proud, nor the repudiation of its methods
which Catholic scientists rightly regard it an honour
to put in practice and to teach.
Modernism consists essentially in maintaining that
the devout soul should draw the object and motive
of its faith from itself and itself alone. It rejects
every sort of revealed communication that is imposed
on the conscience from outside ; and thus, by a
necessary consequence, it becomes the denial of the
doctrinal authority of the Church established by
Jesus Christ, the contempt of the hierarchy divinely
appointed to rule the Christian community.
Christ did not come before us as the inventor of a
new philosophy, uncertain of himself, committing a
body of reformable opinions to the free discussion of
his followers. In the strength of his divine wisdom
and sovereign power he not only presented to, but
imposed upon, men the revealed word which showed
them eternal life and the only way to attain it. He
proclaimed a moral code for them and gave them the
helps necessary to put its prescriptions in practice.
Grace, and those sacraments which give it to us, or
which restore it to us when, having lost it, we wish to
recover it by repentance, constitute the sum-total of
these helps — the means of salvation.

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

He has instituted a Church. As he could be with
us only a few years, before leaving us he conferred
his powers upon his Apostles to be transmitted to
their successors, the Pope and the bishops. The
episcopate, in union with the Sovereign Pontiff, has
thus received and alone possesses the commission to
make known officially and to interpret the doctrines
revealed by Christ ; it and it alone has the right to
condemn with authority all errors inconsistent with
those doctrines.
The Christian is one who trusts the teaching of
the Church and accepts sincerely the doctrines she
proposes for his belief. He who repudiates or
questions her authority, and by consequence rejects
one or more of the truths she compels him to
believe, cuts himself off from the ecclesiastical com
munity. The excommunication pronounced by the Pope
against obstinate Modernists, and which our enemies
represent as an act of despotism, is the most simple
and natural thing in the world.
My Brethren, we have here merely a question of
honesty. Yes or No ? Do you believe in the divine
authority of the Church ? Do you accept exteriorly
and interiorly what, in the name of Jesus Christ, she
proposes to your belief? Yes or No? Will you
consent to obey her ?
If yes, then she puts the sacraments at your
disposal and undertakes your safe conduct to
Heaven. If no, you deliberately break the bond that united
you to her, of which she had tied and blessed the

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

knot. Before God and your conscience you belong
to her no more. Do not persist in remaining hypo
critically in her midst. Honesty forbids you to pass
yourself off any longer as one of her sons ; and she
who will not and cannot be an accomplice in your
sacrilegious hypocrisy requests you, and if neces
sary summons you, to leave her ranks.
Plainly, however, she rejects you only so long as
you yourself will it. The day when, repenting of
your error, you return to a loyal recognition of her
authority she will welcome you with motherly com
passion and with all the affection of the Prodigal's
father. Such then is the constitution of the Catholic
Church. The Catholic episcopate, of which the Pope
is head, is the heir of the Apostolic College and has
authority to instruct the faithful in the Christian
revelation. Just as the head concentrates in itself the life of
the entire organism and directs its action in co
ordinating all its movements, so in the same way the
Pope ensures the unity of the teaching Church, and
every time that there arises a doctrinal dispute
among the faithful or the bishops the Pope settles it
by an act of his supreme authority. His power is
without appeal.
To resume : Each time that a Christian at any
moment of his existence asks himself these two im
portant questions : —
What should I believe ? Why should I believe it ?
the answer should be : I must believe what is
taught me by those Catholic bishops who are in

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

agreement with the Pope ; I must believe it because
the episcopate united with the Pope is the organ of
transmission of the revealed teachings of Jesus
Christ. Be it said, by the way, that the organ of trans
mission is what is called in one word Tradition — to
which the belief of the faithful corresponds.
Well then, My Brethren, this Modernism which
the Pope has condemned is the denial of just these
simple teachings which you learnt in your childhood
when you prepared yourselves for your first com
munion. The ideas that have given birth to Modernist
doctrines were sown and fostered in the Protestant
soil of Germany and were forthwith transplanted to
that of England, and have pushed their shoots as far
as the United States.
The Modernist spirit has extended to Catholic
countries and has given birth to errors on the part of
certain writers, forgetful of the Church's tradition,
whose enormity alarms the sincere consciences of
men simply loyal to the faith of their baptism. This
spirit has infected France ; Italy has suffered griev
ously from it ; certain English and German Catholics
have been affected by it. Belgium is one of the
Catholic countries that has best escaped its pernicious
influence. You understand, My Brethren, that we are distin
guishing between the doctrines of Modernism and
the spirit that animates them.
Its doctrines, disseminated in the writings of
philosophers, theologians, exegetes or apologists,

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

have been admirably systematised in the Encyclical
Pascendi ; but since you have had the good fortune to
escape their infection I will not here trouble myself
to show you how they are in contradiction with Faith
and with sound philosophy.
But what I more fear for your souls is the contagion
of the Modernist spirit. This spirit is the issue of
Protestantism. You know what Protestantism is.
Luther denied the Church's right to teach the Revela
tion of Jesus Christ with authority to the Christian
community. The Christian, he contends, depends
on himself alone for the knowledge of his faith ; he
derives its elements from the sacred Scriptures which
each can interpret directly under the inspiration of
the Holy Spirit. He will not allow that there is in .
the Church an hierarchic authority established to
transmit revealed teachings faithfully to the world ;
to interpret them with full right and assurance, and
to guard their integrity unceasingly.
. The essential point at issue between Catholicism
and Protestantism lies there.
Catholicism says that the Christian Faith is com
municated to the faithful by an official organ of
transmission — the Catholic episcopate — and that it is
based on the acceptance of the authority of that
organ. Protestantism on the contrary says that
Faith is exclusively an affair of individual judgment
applied to the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.
Authority on one side, individualism on the other.
A Protestant Church is therefore necessarily in
visible ; it is the presumed agreement of individual
minds as to the same interpretation of Scripture.

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

Protestantism, so formulated, has been condemned
by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century ;
and there is no longer any one who dares to call
himself a Protestant and at the same time to con
sider himself a Catholic.
But the Protestant spirit has leaked here and
there into the Catholic conscience and given rise to
conceptions in which we find, all at once, piety
of intention, the proselytising zeal of a Catholic,
and the intellectual aberrations of Protestantism.
M. Frederic Paulsen, professor at the rationalistic
Protestant university of Berlin, notices this curious
fact, apropos of the Encyclical Pascendi:
"It seems clear that all the doctrines condemned
by the Encyclical are of German origin, and yet
there is perhaps not a single theologian who defends
Modernism in the theological Faculties of Germany." 1
The observation is significant.
But it is not only to-day that one finds in the
university-world of Germany traces of the Protestant
spirit. When in 1868 Pius IX ordered the assembling of
an ecumenical council, Doellinger, an eminent and
learned Catholic, professor at the University of
Munich, who afterwards openly seceded, wrote, con
cerning the part played by bishops at such councils :
"The bishops should go to the Council to bear
witness to the faith of their diocesans; the defini
tions should give expression to the beliefs of the
collectivity." Notice, My Brethren, already we have the agree-
1 Internationale Wochenschrift , 7 Dez., 1907.

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

ment of individual consciences substituted for the
rulings of authority.
The most penetrating observer of the present
Modernist movement — the one most alive to its
tendencies, who has best divined its spirit, and is
perhaps more deeply imbued with it than any other,
is the English priest Tyrrell.
Now in the numerous works he has published
these ten years back we find, besides pages of deep
piety (which for our part we have read with profit
and a sense of sincere gratitude to the author) — we
find, often in the spirit that animates these very
pages, the fundamental error of Doellinger ; that is
to say, the parent-idea of Protestantism.
Little wonder, for Tyrrell is a convert whose early
education was Protestant.
Ever and almost exclusively attentive to the in
ward workings of the spirit ; little if at all pre
occupied with the traditional teachings of dogma
or with ecclesiastical history; anxious before all to
keep in the Church those of our contemporaries who
have been upset by the noisy assertions of un
believers who, now in the name of natural science,
now in that of historical criticism, would pass off
their own philosophical prejudices and conjectural
hypotheses for assured conclusions of Science in con
flict with our faith, Tyrrell, at a distance of forty
years, has made a new attempt analogous to that of
the apostate Doellinger.
Revelation, he thinks, is not a deposit of doctrine
committed to the charge of the teaching Church, and
of which the faithful are to receive authoritative

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

interpretation from time to time. It is the life of
the collectivity of religious souls, or rather, of all men
of good will who aspire to realise an ideal higher than
the earthly aims of egoists. The Christian saints
form the ilite of this invisible society, this com
munion of saints. While the life of religion pursues
its invariable course in the depths of the Christian
conscience, " theological" beliefs are elaborated by the
intellect and find expression in formulas adapted to
the needs of the day, but which lose in conformity to
the living realities of Faith what they gain in pre
cision. The authority of the Roman Catholic Church
— the bishops and the Pope — interprets the interior
life of the faithful, recapitulates the results of the
general conscience, and proclaims them in dogmatic
formulae. But the interior life of religion remains
itself the supreme directive rule of beliefs and dogmas.
In addition, the intellectual effort being subject to a
thousand fluctuations, the code of beliefs is variable ;
and the dogmas of the Church, on their side, change
their sense, if not necessarily their expression, with
the ages to which they are addressed ; still, the
Catholic Church remains one and faithful to its
beginnings, because, since the time of Christ, one
and the same spirit of religion and holiness animates
the successive generations of the Christian com
munity, and all agree at bottom in the same senti
ment of filial piety towards our Father who is in
Heaven and of love for humanity and the universal
brotherhood. Such, my most dear Brethren, is the spirit of
Modernism.

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

The parent-idea of the system has been powerfully
influenced by the philosophy of Kant, himself a
Protestant and the author of a special theory which
opposes the universal certitude of Science to the
exclusively personal certitude of the religious senti
ment. It has also doubtless been influenced by that
infatuation, as general as it is shortsighted, which
inclines so many good men to apply, arbitrarily and
a priori, to history, and especially to the history of
our sacred books and dogmatic beliefs, the hypo
thesis of that evolution which so far from being a
general law of human thought, is not even verified
in the restricted department of the formation of
animal and vegetal species.
But in itself the idea, which first inspired many V
generous champions of Catholic apologetics and
caused them to fall into Modernism, is at root
identical with that Protestant individualism which ^
is substituted for the Catholic conception of a
teaching authority officially established by Jesus
Christ, and commissioned to tell us what, under
pain of eternal damnation, we are compelled to
believe. This Modernist spirit is in the atmosphere all
round us, and it is for this reason no doubt that
the Pope, guided specially by Divine Providence,
addresses to the Catholics of the whole world
an Encyclical whose doctrinal import concerns, it
seems, scarcely more than a relatively small fraction
of France, England, and Italy.
The doctrines repudiated by the Encyclical are
such as to shock the Christian conscience by their

X

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

bare mention. But there is something seductive in
the tendencies of Modernism ; they make an im
pression on certain minds otherwise loyally attached
to the Faith of their Baptism.
Why is this? Why has Modernism such an
attraction for youth?
We find two causes for this phenomenon in two
quibbles which I wish to expose in the second part
of this Pastoral Letter.
The infidel press proclaims loudly that in con
demning Modernism the Pope has opposed himself
to progress and denied Catholics the right to march
with the times. Deceived by this lie, which certain
Catholic controversialists have imprudently ac
credited, some sincere souls, hitherto faithful to the
Church, begin to waver and to be discouraged,
imagining most erroneously that they cannot at once
obey their Christian conscience and serve the cause
of scientific advance.
I will make it a matter of duty to answer this
calumny of a hostile press in a communication
addressed especially to the clergy, of which they
may utilise certain extracts for your benefit wherever
they think fit.
But is it indeed very necessary to convince men of
good faith in Belgium, that in order to be on the
Pope's side against Modernism one need not be less
with the times in honouring and furthering the pro
gress of science ?
Thank God, as we have already said, Belgian
Catholics have escaped the heresies of Modernism.
The representatives of philosophy and theology in

THE LENTEN PASTORAL 13
our universities and free faculties ; and those of the
seminaries and religious congregations have unani
mously and spontaneously declared and proved in a
document signed by each of them that the Pope by
his courageous Encyclical has saved the Faith and
protected Science.
Now have not these same signatories the right to
turn proudly to their accusers and ask them, in the
name of those Catholic institutions that they repre
sent : What science is there that we have not served
as well, if not better than you ? Do our masters fear
comparison with yours ? Do not the pupils formed
by us, when brought to public competition with yours,
readily surpass them ?
Sacrifice proves the depth of conviction and the
sincerity of love. Are you aware, my Brethren, of
any generosity on the part of unbelievers to the
cause of science? If so, I am glad to hear it, and
ask you confidently to compare it with the millions
of francs contributed by the generosity of Belgian
Catholics to the work of primary, secondary, and
higher education.
The second quibble that favours the spread of the
spirit of Modernism among the youth, and renders it
sometimes attractive to the masses, is the unconscious
assimilation of the constitution of the Catholic
Church to the political organisations of our modern
countries. Under parliamentary government each citizen is
supposed to be invested with a share in public
affairs ; the revolutionary theories set afloat by J. J.
Rousseau and formulated in the Declaration of the

14 THE LENTEN PASTORAL
Rights of Man (1789) have indoctrinated the masses
with the crude idea that the directive authority of a
country is the sum of the individual wills of the
whole community. The representatives of authority
are thus considered as delegates whose exclusive
function is to interpret and execute the mind and
will of their constituents.
And this is the conception of authority that
Doellinger wanted to apply to the bishops united at
the Vatican Council. Tyrrell, in his turn, applies
it to the bishops as well as to the faithful, lay or
ecclesiastic, of the Christian community so as to
leave the bishops, and even the Pope, who is the
supreme authority, no more than the right of record
ing and authoritatively proclaiming the thoughts,
desires, and feelings of the scattered members of the
Christian family, or rather of the communion of
religious souls.
This analogy, My Brethren, is deceptive. Civil
society, following a natural law, springs from the
union and co-operation of the wills of its constituent
members. But the Church, as a supernatural society,
is essentially a positive and external institution, and
must be accepted by its members as organised by
her Divine Founder. It belongs to Christ Himself
to dictate His will to us.
Listen, then, to the supreme and imprescriptible
instructions that the Son of God, made man, gives
to his apostles :
" Go," he bids them, " into the whole world, and
preach the Gospel to all creatures : he who believes
the Faith that you teach him and is baptised shall

THE LENTEN PASTORAL 15
be saved ; but he who refuses to believe shall be
condemned." The evangelist S. Mark who quotes these words
on the last page of his Gospel concludes his narra
tive thus :
"And the Lord Jesus Christ, after he had thus
spoken, was taken up into Heaven and seated at the
right hand of God his Father; while the apostles
went out in all directions to preach the Gospel with
the help of the Lord."1
Well, then, the bishops continue the apostles'
mission. The faithful must hear them, believe their
teaching, and obey them under pain of eternal
damnation. If any one refuses to obey the Church, says our
Lord again, consider him as a publican and a pagan ;
that is, as a man who has no faith.2 For "Verily
I say to you whatsoever you shall bind on earth
shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever you shall
loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven."3
CONCLUSION
Cling, My Brethren, to the corner-stone of your
Faith. Depend on your bishop, who himself depends
on the successor of Peter, the bishop of bishops, the
immediate representative of the Son of God, our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Watch vigilantly over the treasure of your Faith,
without which no other possession, no sort of good
work will profit you for eternity.
1 Mark xvi. 15-20. 3 Matt. xvin. 17. s Matt. xvm. 18.

16 THE LENTEN PASTORAL
Perfect yourselves in religious instruction.
My Brethren, is it not astonishing that, as a young
man grows up, he takes a pride in developing his
bodily strength, in adding to the amount of his
knowledge, in forming his judgment, in deepening
his experience, in improving his speech, in refining
his style, in mastering the ways of the world, in
keeping in touch with the course of events. Every
man takes his professional studies to heart. Tell
me, where is the lawyer, magistrate, physician, or
merchant who at the age of forty would not be
ashamed to own that he had learnt nothing new
since he was twenty ?
Now is it not true that many a Catholic of twenty,
thirty, or forty years would, if asked, be forced to
confess that since his first communion he had learnt
nothing, and perhaps forgotten a good deal, of his
religion ?
I understand that in this period of confusion irre-
ligion should make conquests ; and I deplore the
fact. But what I less understand is that an intelli
gent believer, conscious of the favour God has con
ferred upon him with the privilege of Faith, should
be content not to know what he believes, or why he
believes it, or to what duties towards God and man
his solemn baptismal promises bind him.
Every educated man ought to have a catechism in
his library, if not to commit it anew to memory, at
least to meditate on the text. The best catechism
is that of the Council of Trent with its marvellous
clearness, precision, and method, in which, by order
of the Fathers of that Council, a commission of com-

THE LENTEN PASTORAL 17
petent theologians has condensed the substance of
Faith, and Morality, and Christian institutions.
To learn the object of their Faith, educated
Catholics ought moreover to possess a manual of the
Church's dogmatic teachings (such as Denzinger's)
and the chief papal encyclicals addressed to our
generation, especially those of Leo XIII of glorious
memory, and of His Holiness Pius X.
Then they ought to have at hand, if not the whole
text of the Bible, at least the New Testament ; that
is to say, the Gospels, the apostolic epistles, and the
narrative of the Acts of the Apostles. They ought
also to have a History of the Church and an Apologetic
Treatise. To interest and foster his piety, every man should
possess the Roman Missal and a Treatise on Liturgy
to explain to him ' the ceremonies of the Mass and
the chief rites of the Church's religious worship.
The Jmitation of Christ, Bossuet's Meditations on
the Gospel, the Devout Life of S. Francis of Sales,
together with some saints' lives to show us the
Gospel in action, would, taken together, furnish, at
a very moderate price, the minimum of a religious
library for a Christian family.
Every family, however humble, should possess
some books on religion and piety. We shall shortly
give more definite information on this subject, here
but touched on, for the benefit of French and Flemish
readers. I have sometimes run my eye over the libraries of
friends devoted to the liberal professions ; I have
found works on science, literature, and secular history;

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

but how often have I sought in vain for a shelf of
religious literature !
Is it very wonderful that a boldly formulated diffi
culty should easily get hold of minds so ill-equipped
for resistance? Then they get alarmed and turn for
aid to apologetic.
Doubtless apologetic has its uses in the Church.
Attacks call for defence. Sick men send for the
doctor. But hygiene is better than physic. Study
rather the explanations and proofs of Catholic
doctrine ; saturate your minds with its teachings ;
acquaint yourselves with the history of the Church ;
inform yourselves about the labours of her aposto-
late. After that : Watch and pray. By the integrity of
your lives, the purity of your morals, by the humble
acknowledgment of your need of God and his
Providence, repress the self-interested reasonings of
unbelief and you will, as often as not, see the doubts
that rise in your mind and obscure its outlook dis
persed like clouds before the light of the sun. And
if now and then a doubt on some special point occurs
to you consult a treatise on apologetic ; or better
still, seek an enlightened guide ; for, the solution you
shall thus receive will be suited to your particular
mentality and momentary requirements ; it will be
far more useful than one addressed indefinitely to a
large public of readers or hearers at once.
My dear Brethren, in reality we do not sufficiently
appreciate the blessings of Faith. Man is so con
stituted that he ceases to notice what is habitual.
How often do you thank God for your good sight or

THE LENTEN PASTORAL 19
hearing ; for sound lungs and heart ? Were you
threatened with the loss of them, you would at once
realise their value and be keenly grateful for their
restoration. My Brethren, the Protestant nations are sick.
The poison of free enquiry has been working on
them for now four centuries. Observe how religious
souls are harassed by the thousand and one sects
who clamour for their adhesion without any title for
their special claim.
I remember an Anglican minister who was con
verted to Catholicism about 1895. With his charac
teristic straightforwardness he taught his parishioners
the Divinity of Jesus Christ as he himself believed
it. A fellow- minister, pastor of a neighbouring
parish, denied the same openly in the presence of his
flock. The devout population, in dismay, asked for
a solution of the controversy. The bishop of the
two parishes stood up for the Godhead of Christ,
but was notoriously disavowed by his archbishop.
What guidance can such confusion afford? Is it
conceivable that we should be obliged to believe the
Gospel, and that there is no one qualified to tell us
its meaning?
The Anglican minister, whom I remember very
distinctly, could not bring himself to think so.
Social unity of Faith is impossible without authority ;
authority in the matter of Faith is incomplete with
out the privilege of infallibility. Thus he said and
thus he believed. He recognised the authority of
the Pope, and became, in his turn, an apostle of the
Roman and Catholic Faith.

20 THE LENTEN PASTORAL
And it is at this moment, when religious Protestants,
harassed by liberalism and tossed with doubt, are
crying out in despair for the help of authority, and
saying : " Lord, save us : we perish!" that Modernists
would rob us of that Head which the sectaries envy
us, and would ask us to make again that experiment
whose failure has been proved by four miserable
centuries. No, my dearest Brethren, let us not repeat that
wretched experience. Let us gather more closely
than ever round Peter, the Vicar of Jesus Christ.
The unity of the Christian Faith is saved only in the
Catholic Church ; the Catholic Church is firm only
on the throne of Peter. "We will turn, therefore,"
said S. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons at the end of the
second century, " towards the greatest and oldest of
the Churches, known to all, the Church founded and
established at Rome by the two glorious apostles
Peter and Paul ; we will show that the tradition
which she holds from the apostles and the Faith
which she proclaims to men have reached us through
the regular succession of her bishops ; and this will
put to confusion all those who whether through
vanity, or blindness, or evil desire, take up indis
criminately with any opinion that pleases them.
For such is the superiority and pre-eminence of the
Church of Rome that all the Churches — that is to
say, the faithful from all parts of the globe — ought
to be in agreement with her ; and that in her,
believers, whencesoever they come, find the apostolic
tradition intact."1 1 Adv. Haer. m. 3.

THE LENTEN PASTORAL

[Here follows the Lenten fndult.]
The present Pastoral Letter and the Lenten Indult
that follows it, shall be read in the pulpit in the
Churches, public chapels, religious communities and
colleges of the diocese. They shall be posted up
there, and so remain till the end of Lent.
Given at Malines, etc.,
* D. J. Cardinal Mercier, etc.

MEDIEVALISM
A REPLY TO CARDINAL MERCIER
Your Eminence, —
Since you have thought fit to mention me by
name in your Lenten Pastoral (1908) as the most
typical embodiment of the Modernism which you
are there denouncing; since you profess to draw
your description of that movement from my writings ;
since your Pastoral has received the special com
mendation of the Holy Father ; and since you have
now chosen to give it the permanent and wider
publicity of a brochure, you can hardly wonder if I
assert the inalienable right of every man to speak in
the defence of what he believes to be the truth.
For many reasons, I confess, Your Eminence's
action has surprised me. I have certainly no claim
of friendship to urge against one with whom I have
never had any direct communications ; but our in
direct communications, initiated two years ago by
Your Eminence, were certainly not unfriendly. That
the steps which you then took in my behalf were the
occasion of all my subsequent ecclesiastical difficul
ties was surely not due to lack of good will on your
part, but to the machinations of others. Still it was
a reason for thinking that Your Eminence would be

A REPLY TO CARDINAL MERCIER 23
the last bishop who would willingly add to those
difficulties of which you had been the innocent occa
sion, or who would do anything to complicate an all
but hopeless situation. Is there not something in the
Gospel about "the bruised reed" and "the smoking
flax ? " Was any man ever yet made better by being
pilloried before the world ? Even the Encyclical
Pascendi, which does not err on the side of excessive
tenderness and charity, is content to signalise errors
without mentioning names. Is it not enough to be as
zealous as the Pope ?
Possibly it is that same Encyclical which has led
you to look upon your past kindliness as an indis
cretion, as something to be repudiated and explained
away. In that case you will welcome this reply as
proving that your sympathies were due to a complete
misunderstanding ; and as exonerating you from the
slightest complicity with Modernism.
I am not ashamed of " Modernism." When you
speak of me as "the most penetrating observer of
contemporary Modernism . . . the man most pro
foundly imbued with its spirit," I should feel flattered
were I coxcomb enough to believe myself level with
those leaders of the movement whom I follow, from
whom I have learnt everything, and from whom I
have yet so much to learn. But, for Your Eminence,
Modernism is the deadliest of heresies, and heresy the
deadliest moral obliquity ; and of this obliquity you
present me, first to Belgium, and now to the world,
as the most deeply imbued representative. Seeing it
was quite unnecessary, I can hardly think it was
friendly, or even charitable, to take such uncalled-for

24 MEDIEVALISM
action, which would have come much better from the
Archbishop of Westminster. It is in England and
not in Belgium that I am known and read.
Again, you are good enough to say that you owe
me a debt of gratitude for some things I have written
in those very pages which you describe as " animated
with the fundamental error of Doellinger and the
parent-idea of Protestantism." It is no doubt a light
debt, but heavy enough to have turned a more
delicate balance in my favour; nor could I have
imagined that, when some years ago I trustingly put
one of my suppressed books Oil and Wine into what
I supposed were your sympathetic hands, I was
supplying a weapon to be used against myself later.
And finally, Your Eminence is aware of the recent
censures declared against those who speak and write
in favour of Modernism or Modernists, or against the
Encyclical Pascendi. Is it quite generous to assail
men by name who can defend themselves only by
what you consider a rebellion against legitimate
authority — to strike those who are bound hand and
foot? If you foresee such rebellion are you not
responsible for it ? if not, do you not take advantage
of your adversary's helplessness ? Or is it noble to
attack me before a public whom you can forbid to
read my reply should it prove inconvenient ?
These are the reasons why I was surprised and, I
must say, disappointed to find myself pilloried in
Your Eminence's Lenten Pastoral.
But there were other surprises of a more important
and less personal description. I had long heard of
Your Eminence as a man of general culture, in sym-

A REPLY TO CARDINAL MERCIER 25
pathy with the intellectual needs of the day. True,
your special interest had been in the scholastic
revival at Louvain. But unlike the neo-scholasticism
at Rome, that at Louvain seeks honestly to reconcile
itself with the results and methods of science and to
patch the new cloth of contemporary culture on to
the old medieval garment ; and this laudable en
deavour has been (I am told) in great measure due
to the encouragement and inspiration of Your
Eminence. When, therefore, I heard of your elevation to the
Cardinalate my first feeling was one of sincere regret.
For the nearer one draws to the centre, and the
further from the circumference, of the official Church
the tighter and heavier are the fetters imposed on
one's mental and moral liberty ; and the harder it is
to realise one's own personality. Whence the
Roman adage : Promoveatur ut amoveatur. Still it
was some consolation to know that in the ranks of
the Sacred College there would now be at least
one man in intelligent sympathy with the mental
exigencies of the times and capable of moderating
the extravagances of ignorance and fanaticism.
So far as Your Eminence's Pastoral Letter is an
unfettered expression of your own personal convic
tions, and not merely a dutiful conformity to the
ideas and sentiments of the Encyclical Pascendi, I
must own that my sanguine anticipations were un
grounded. It is true that in your estimate of the
constitution of the Church ; of the scope and mean
ing of the Gospel ; of my own aims and endeavours,
I seem to see a certain inconsistency — a conflict as it

26 MEDIEVALISM

were between a broader and a narrower spirit. But
there is no doubt as to which is the conqueror and
which the conquered, or as to the ascendency of the
official view over the personal — of obedience over
inclination. Permit me then to make a few comments on the
text of your Pastoral Letter.

THE IMMUNITY OF BELGIUM
YOU begin by thanking God "that the errors
which have spread over France and Italy have
found almost no advocates in Belgium," and this
happy state of things you ascribe to "the vigilance
of the Pastors ; to the scientific impartiality and
Christian obedience of the teachers" — a reflection
not quite complimentary to the French and Italian
episcopate. Your Eminence, if the consensus of the bishops
were valid against the assurance of the Pope, one
would easily believe that there were no such move
ment in the world as Modernism. For Germany has
been pronounced unspotted by the Holy Father
himself; England declared guiltless by the Arch
bishop of Westminster; the Americans affirm that
it is an exclusively European malady; the Italians
say that the Encyclical was intended for France;
the French, that it was clearly aimed at Italy. Every
bishop thanks God that his diocese has been pre
served as an oasis of light in the desert of Egyp
tian darkness ; each asks : Is it I ? none confesses :
It is I.
But in default of actual knowledge, I am quite
willing to believe that Belgium is exceptionally, if
27

28 MEDIEVALISM

not wholly, free from the disease; not precisely
owing to the causes which you assign, but to others
which you mention, though not recognising them as
causes. The picture which Your Eminence gives, in the
Conclusion of your Pastoral Letter, of the sad lack of
interest in the subject of religion on the part of
educated Belgians is not quite in harmony with the
cheerful note that opens your discourse ; and by no
means so eloquent a testimony to the vigilance of
religious pastors and teachers. You complain that
" whereas lawyers, magistrates, doctors and merchants
would be ashamed to own at forty that their pro
fessional knowledge was no greater than twenty years
ago, educated Catholics of the same age are not
ashamed to have learnt nothing about their religion
since their first communion."
You say that you have often sought in vain for " a
shelf of religious literature " in the well-stored libraries
of your cultivated Catholic friends. You speak of
the " conquests made by irreligion " and ascribe them
to this same lack of religious interest and knowledge.
You suggest, amongst other books for the " religious
shelf," the Catechism, the Bible, or at least the New
Testament (whose contents you think it necessary to
enumerate — as it were for pagans), the Roman Missal,
the Imitation of Christ. Could any one who knows
England imagine an Anglican bishop urging the
educated or even uneducated members of his flock to
possess themselves of the Bible and the Book of
Common Prayer? Does Your Eminence suppose
that in those three great Protestant countries — Eng-

THE IMMUNITY OF BELGIUM 29
land, Germany, and America — whose spiritual sick
ness you deplore (" les nations protestantes sont
malades") and to whose influence you trace the
malaria of Modernism, there is a single Christian
household without its Bible and its devotional litera
ture ? Have you ever had the curiosity to contrast
the annual output of religious literature of a Protes
tant country like Germany or England, with that of
a Catholic country like Spain or Ireland ? Have you
ever had the opportunity of observing the keen and
universal interest in religious questions in countries
where the laity still count for something in the life
of the Church? If there are two Catholic countries
in which the output of religious literature to-day
marks a revival of religious interest, they are just the
two which you describe as the centres of Modernism
— France and Italy. And why is this ?
It is because when you have made a desert, you
call it peace ; it is because you mistake the quiet of
Death for the quiet of Life ; the stillness of silence,
for the stillness of harmony ; the poverty of uni
formity, for the richness of organic unity.
I am not blind to the fact that variety without
unity may be almost as great an evil as unity with
out variety ; that where general agreement is not the
goal of all individual effort, and where diversity is
accepted as final and satisfactory, there can be no
progress, but only an aimless analysis and disintegra
tion. It is for that reason that we need an institu
tional Church within whose boundary-walls all these
varieties of individual experience and reflection are
pressed together and forced to seek a synthesis

30 MEDIEVALISM
sooner or later. For thus only do they become fruit
ful for the general advantage. But the military uni
formity of a multitude whose duty is to have no ideas
of their own, but to accept those of their commander,
as wax accepts the impression of a seal, has nothing
whatever to do with spiritual unity, and can only
result in that utter absence of interest in religious
subjects which you observe in the otherwise culti
vated and intelligent members of your flock. I say
" otherwise " cultivated ; for I do not see how he can
be called simply a cultivated man who is dead to the
deepest and most universal of rational interests —
that which unifies and embraces all the rest. It is
just the lack of all response to this interest that
renders the converse of the typical ultramontane lay
man and even of the typical ultramontane priest so
profoundly uninteresting and devitalising. Touch
on this subject and he looks at you with the stone
eyes of a statue.
How could it be otherwise ? Tell the layman, as
the Encyclical does, that his religious thought in no
way contributes to the penetration and better under
standing of the Christian faith; that he has no
business to meddle with or investigate a subject
which is the exclusive concern of the episcopate ; or
rather, of the Pope ; tell him, moreover, that there
can be no real progress in religious knowledge ; that
the fulness of Catholic truth was stereotyped once
and for all two thousand years ago, and is stored up
in the secret archives of the Vatican ; that uncer
tainties are to be solved not by mental struggle, but
by a simple reference to those archives ; tell him all

THE IMMUNITY OF BELGIUM 31
this, and why, in Heaven's name, should he trouble
his head about religion any more than about the
further developments of the multiplication table?
By the time we have got from twice two to twelve
times twelve our interest is dead. We know the
trick, and how to find twenty times twenty if
necessary. Your Eminence is, I believe, a psychologist. You
must then know that what is absolutely simple is
absolutely uninteresting ; that thought is essentially
a movement of enquiry — of asking, seeking, knock
ing. "The lawyer, the magistrate, the doctor, the
merchant" all know that by their independent
thought and ingenuity they can further the general
progress of their professional interests ; that there is
always more to be known and discovered. But the
Catholic is taught at the time of his first communion
that there is no progress to be made in religious
knowledge, and that if there were, he has no active
concern in the matter. Nor is the priest here in a
better condition than the layman; nay, the very
bishops have no longer any other duty than to sit
still and listen to the Pope — to the one and only
active principle of ecclesiastical life before whom
bishops, priests, and laymen are passive as clay in
the hands of the potter, or as dumb sheep in the
hands of the shearer.
Of the two evils, such a sterilising uniformity
seems to me far greater than the divisions and sub
divisions of Protestantism. These, at least, are
evidences of energy and vitality, however wasted for
lack of the unifying pressure of rational authority.

32 MEDIEVALISM
Here are people who live and feel and think their
religion ; who are interested enough to quarrel about
it, as about the most vital of all questions. Here, at
least, is a variety out of which it is possible to make
a unity. But from a mechanical uniformity, secured
by the discouragement and repression of individual
interest and initiative, what can result but that which
has resulted ?
By regimental drill, by governmental coercion, you
may form a political party, you may drive the multi
tudes to Mass and to the Sacraments, you may teach
them the same formulas, you may scare them into
obedience, you may make them wheels in a machine,
but you will never make them living members of a
. living organism ; you will never wake their intelligent
interest or enlist their profoundest enthusiasm.
The lowest degree of truly spontaneous and in
dependent spiritual unity, such as obtains in the
Anglican Church, or even between the different
Protestant sects, is infinitely more significant, strong
and durable than the merely artificial and external
uniformity to which you trust for the preservation of
the Church and the Catholic religion. In spite of all
their theological heresies and divisions, the religious
interest still lives and grows in Protestant countries,
whereas it languishes and dies among Catholics under
this modern craze for centralisation and military
uniformity. What could be more admirably drilled than was
the French Church under Napoleon III ? What was
it all worth in the day of trial and temptation when
everything depended on an intelligent laity, spon-

THE IMMUNITY OF BELGIUM 33
taneotisly interested in their religion, and regarding
it as their own concern and not merely as a clerical
monopoly ?
Your Eminence, if there is as little educated in
terest in religion among your flock as you say, if men
are unaffected by New Testament criticism only
because they have never read the New Testament,
believe me the history of the French Church will
soon repeat itself in Belgium — " Ye shall all likewise
perish." If, then, there is no Modernism in Belgium it may
just possibly be because there is so little educated
interest in religion among the younger laity and
clergy ; because they do not know enough or care
enough about it to feel the necessity of bringing it
into unity with the rest of their thought and know
ledge ; and because they never try to translate into
living ideas, sacred formulas which it is a duty to
repeat, an irreverence to examine. Granted for the
moment that Modernism is pure heresy, yet its
presence in France and Italy is a symptom of re
awakened religious interest ; and where there is
interest there is life and consequently hope. It may
be at least the weed that indicates a fertile soil.
Your Eminence, we should thank God for all His
mercies ; but the absence of Modernism from Belgian
soil may perhaps be a very small mercy ; and the
absence of religious interest a very ominous symptom
of approaching exhaustion and sterility. Is it not
much worse to have to acknowledge, instead of
Modernism, the existence of a " hostile press " ; of
growing irreligiousness ; of a strong anti-clerical

34 MEDIEVALISM

liberalism that competes with you for the ascendency
in political and educational influence? This is no
invasion from outside, but a movement fed by defec
tions from within, and provoked by the very evils
that Modernism seeks to mitigate and remedy — by
an utter disbelief in that divine purpose which guides
the onward and upward struggle of humanity outside
as well as inside the Church.

II
THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE
OF MODERNISM
BY way, therefore, of preserving your flock from
a corruption which so far has left them un
tainted, Your Eminence proceeds to explain to them
the very essence, " the soul," " the parent-idea " of
Modernism. You begin by saying that " Modernism
is not the modern expression of science." Nothing
is more certain. And at once you infer that " con
sequently the condemnation of Modernism is not the
condemnation of science and its methods." The
inference is illogical. For though Modernism is
more than modern science, it implies and includes an
acceptance of the methods and results of that science.
Whether or not these are implicitly condemned we
shall see later (page 121).
Next you proceed to tell us that " Modernism
consists essentially in affirming that the devout soul
should derive the object and motive of its Faith from
itself and from itself alone. It rejects every sort of
revealed communication imposed upon the conscience
from outside ; and so by a necessary consequence it
becomes the denial of the doctrinal authority of the
Church established by Jesus Christ, the contempt of
35

36 MEDIE VALISM
the hierarchy divinely appointed to rule the Christian
community." Your Eminence, will you allow one whom you too
flatteringly describe as "the most penetrating observer
of contemporary Modernism " to qualify the above
definition as a most astounding and paradoxical mis
representation ? It is the statement of one who has
either never studied the works of a single representa
tive Modernist ; or else has read them so hastily and
superficially as to be unqualified to pass judgment in
the matter. Every single clause of the statement is
the direct opposite of the truth. Moreover, it is in
flagrant contradiction with the very inadequate de
scription you give of my own position a few pages
later. For there you show how, according to me, Catholic
truth is elaborated by the collective religious expert
ence and reflection of the whole Church ; how it is
interpreted, formulated and imposed by the official
hierarchy. We have thus a body 6f doctrine of
which the Church is the organ and guardian ; which
no single individual has elaborated out of his own
conscience ; which is presented to his belief from out
side ; which possesses all the authority of the collec
tive mind over the individual mind. And in the face
of this you can describe us as pure individualists ;
each deriving the motive and object of his Faith
from his own spirit, denying all external teaching, all
hierarchic authority. You present as the extremest
form of Protestantism what is essentially the Catholic
conception of religion as a collective life and thought
and sentiment — in a word, as a tradition.

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF MODERNISM 37
Is it that Your Eminence felt in duty bound first
to repeat unwillingly but with blind obedience the
travesties of the Encyclical Pascendi for the edifica
tion of your flock and to stir them up against those
men whose adhesion to the Church you had to
describe as a " sacrilegious hypocrisy " ; and that,
having fulfilled this disagreeable duty, you thought
you might then make a little quiet sacrifice to
Charity and Justice, and let them see that even the
most typical Modernist was not such an imbecile as
to cling to the Church while denying the necessity of
a Church? Such was my first explanation of the
extraordinary discrepancy between your definition of
Modernism and your presentment of my position.
But the real explanation does less credit to Your
Eminence's penetration and judgment. The truth is
that you do not see the discrepancy in question.
Having described how I substitute a spiritual for a
mechanical conception of the mode of revelation —
which is by no means the same as denying an ex
ternal revelation — you sum up my position thus :
" The authority of the Roman Catholic Church — the
bishops and the Pope — interprets the inner life of
the faithful, gathers up the results of the collective
conscience, and proclaims them in dogmatic formulae.
But the interior religious life itself remains the supreme
criterion of belief s and dogmas."
By underlining these words you plainly intend to
convict me of the pure individualism described in
your formal definition of Modernism. You suppose
that I make the individual, and not the collective,
religious life the source and criterion of dogmatic

38 MEDIEVALISM ^^^^_
truth. You do not see that such an interpretation
of the underlined words makes blank nonsense of
those that precede ; which, therefore, you have strung
together without any true idea of their connection or
bearing. And since you imply that you are ac
quainted with my writings, you must have read them
to singularly little purpose not to know that my con
sistent aim from first to last has been to defend the
Catholic principle, " securus judicat orbis terfarum,"
against every sort of individualism — whether that
which makes each man's private judgment its own
rule, or that which imposes the private judgment of
one upon all the rest.
The aim of the theological party in which Your
Eminence trusts so implicitly is to persuade the un
educated and half-educated multitudes that there is
no choice but of one or other of these individualisms ;
that those who refuse the new-fangled dictatorial
conception of the papacy — i.e. of a privileged private
judgment to which all must submit — have no alter
native but absolute self-sufficiency.
The alternative, Your Eminence, is Catholicism,
the subjection of the private and individual to the
public and collective mind of the Church. But you
were bound to show that I must be a Protestant,
since I am not an ultramontane ; and so you under
line words which out of their context might perhaps
bear a Protestant sense, but which, where they stand,
could have only one possible meaning for an un
biassed intelligence. That the religious life of the
Church is the source and criterion of doctrinal truth ;
that experiment is the criterion of theory as the

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF MODERNISM 39
fruit is of the tree, is a point that I will not even dis
cuss. It is a truth that theological pride hates and
kicks against, but which it dares not deny in the
teeth of the Gospel or merely in the name of a dis
credited knowledge-theory.

Ill
THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF
CATHOLICISM
AND now having presented Modernism as the
J~\ purest, so-called "Protestant" individualism,
and as the repudiation of a divinely established hier
archic Church with authority to teach and rule, your
Pastoral goes on to develop that individualistic
conception of papal authority which you would per
suade your readers is the only possible or actual alter
native. Because Modernists repudiate this unhistori-
cal latter-day ultramontanism you pretend they must
necessarily be Protestants pure and simple.
Before going further, I would ask you a plain
straightforward question. There are about one
hundred million Christians of the several Eastern
Churches whose fault is an all too rigid adherence to
the traditions of the past ; who perpetuate, with the
fidelity of a stone monument, the beliefs of the early
centuries; who hold to the same creeds, the same
sacraments, the same priesthood as do their Western
brethren. Are they pure individualists? Do they
deny the need and existence of a teaching Church ?
And yet do they not repudiate your modern inter
pretation of the papacy as an heretical and fantastic
40

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM 41
innovation unknown to antiquity? Is the Greek
Church Protestant?
You will hardly like to attribute such a venerable
antiquity to Protestantism, and yet you will have to
do so. For you quote as " the fundamental error of
Doellinger" and as "the mother-idea of Protestant
ism" his words: "The bishops should go to the
Council to testify to the faith of their diocesans, and
the definitions should be the expression of the beliefs
of the collectivity."
That, Your Eminence, is the unbroken and univer
sal tradition of the Eastern Churches ; nay, even the
Roman Church has not yet dared to deny it. And
you call this Protestantism and Individualism ! Your
Eminence's vocabulary is surely somewhat bewilder
ing ! Modernists can hardly be surprised to find
themselves dubbed Protestants by one who can
accuse Dr. Doellinger and the Eastern Churches of
individualism in religion. It can only be that
absorption in the problems of scholasticism has left
Your Eminence no sufficient leisure to study this
chapter of the history of dogma.
It is to the Catechism you go for your Church-
theory : " Let us call to mind the teachings of the
Catechism on the constitutipn and mission of the
Catholic Church." It is a more expeditious source of
information than the traditions of the Church, the
Fathers, the Councils, the history of dogma. But is
it so sure? Have not the popular catechisms,
together with the seminary manuals, of these two
past generations been carefully revised and re-edited
in the interests of a particular interpretation of the

42 MEDIEVALISM
Vatican Council and to exclude the only one that
can save the Roman Church from the imputation of
heresy and apostasy? Are they not the work of
that faction of absolutists which strove all but
triumphantly, in 1870, to destroy the constitution of
the Church ; to make ornamental nonentities of the
bishops ; and to substitute, as the rule of faith, the
private judgment of the Pope instead of the public
judgment of the whole Church as represented by the
entire episcopate ?
At the beginning of the last century the Catholics
of England and Ireland read in their approved
Catechism (Keenan's Catechism) that the doctrine of
papal infallibility was the invention of Protestant
calumniators. Catechisms, therefore, are not a very
safe rule of faith.
The Church-theory of these recent catechisms is
exceedingly simple — dangerously and meretriciously
simple. We all know it. In these days when the tares
of the heresy have declared their nature so unmistak
ably and when bishops are groaning under the prac
tical bondage brought upon them by their easy and
obsequious compliance in 1870, it is more possible to
trace their roots back into the past. It is easy to see
how, at a time when men knew nothing of the
Church's past and were destitute of the historico-
critical sense, it was possible to elaborate and gain
credit for such a theory on the strength of very
worthless a priori reasons, supported by half a dozen
misinterpreted texts of Scripture and by a whole
body of forged decretals. It is easy to see how such
a Church-theory was needed to justify the contested

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM 43
claims of a Church which, not content with its lawful
precedence, desired to gather the spiritual power of
all the other Churches into its own hands and so
to bring the whole world under its own rule and to
use that absolute spiritual power as a weapon of uni
versal domination. Without such a spiritual claim
the domination of the medieval papal monarchy had
been impossible. And to this crude simplification
S. Thomas Aquinas, duped by the false decretals and
ignorant of history and of the need of history, lent
the support of his most deservedly great name. We
know how the Court of Rome has clung to it, and by
what methods it has been fostered and furthered ;
how the Society of Jesus has lived for its service and
after three centuries nearly forced it upon the Vatican
Council ; how that Society still works hand in hand
with the Curialists to secure the complete obliteration
of the ancient Catholic principle which sees in the
Pope merely the witness to and the representative of
the collective mind and will of the Universal Church;
which holds his utterances as ex cathedra only when
he speaks in that capacity — only when it is manifestly
the whole body which speaks to us through that par
ticular organ.
You begin your exposition of the Catechism most
admirably by telling us that Christ did not come to
found a philosophical school or to deliver the world
over to interminable disputations ; that he came to
reveal to us eternal life and the way to attain it ;
that " He promulgated a code of morality and gave
us the means to put it in practice " ; that " grace and
the sacraments . . . constitute the sum total of these

44 MEDIEVALISM

means, the entire economy of salvation." Nothing
could be more true, more evangelical. The Kingdom
of Heaven and the means to attain it ; the ideal and
the dynamic — that is the whole Gospel. Would to
Heaven they would take it to heart who try to turn
the Church into a school of subtle disputations ; who
confound revelation with theology, faith with theo
logical orthodoxy ; who would drive men out of the
Church and into eternal perdition over problems that
transcend the wit of man, and have no conceivable
bearing on the spiritual life ; who attach salvation to
formulas which they themselves do not understand,
and which, examined closely, are found absolutely
void of any intelligible meaning. Would that you
yourself held consistently to this summary of Chris
tianity and did not take away with one hand what
you have given with the other. But it is too evi
dent that you regard the Church as commissioned,
not to preach the Gospel like her Master, but to teach
theological science, which her Master never did.
Twice you insist, and with a gusto that reminds one
of Tertullian, that we must accept theological defini
tions, as such, and as distinct from the revelation
which they protect, " under pain of eternal damna
tion." I say nothing as to the dubious authenticity
of the text which you quote in support of this most
un-Christlike sentiment ; but your exegesis is some
what uncritical and fantastic.
"Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every
living creature. He that believeth (the faith which you
teach) and is baptised shall be saved, and he that
believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark XVI. 15).

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM 45
The words I have put in parentheses are, I think,
Your Eminence's private gloss, for I cannot find this
reading anywhere. I do not object to them ; though
I have no doubt that by "faith" you mean, and
intend your readers to understand, correct theology.
But can you seriously think that " Preach the Gospel "
means " Teach theology " ?
Does it not mean that the Apostles are to do what
Christ did ? Do you find Christ, in this same Gospel
of S. Mark, imposing theological definitions "under
pain of eternal damnation " ? " The time is accom
plished ; the Kingdom of God is at hand ; repent
and believe the good news" is the sum and sub
stance of his preaching. He has no entirely new
doctrine about the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven,
nor as to the meaning of repentance. He but im
parts a new life, a more spiritual tone to very simple
ideas already current among his hearers. His work
was to kindle the cold hearts and strengthen the
faltering wills of those who knew the way right well
but could not, or would not, walk in it ; it was the
work of a preacher or prophet, and not of a theo
logian. And so when he says " He that believeth
and is baptised shall be saved, and he that believeth
not shall be condemned," he simply means that
those who believe that the Kingdom is at hand, who
" repent and are baptised for the remission of their
sins " (Acts II. 38), shall enter into that Kingdom ;
while those who do not shall be left outside the Ark
of Salvation in the day of the general Deluge.
Your Eminence's reference to Matthew XVIII. 17 is
not much more felicitous. Our Lord is there shown

46 MEDIEVALISM
to us as founding the custom of the primitive, but
already decadent, Church, by which Christians were
forbidden to carry their litigations before pagan
judges or to scandalise the world by their internal
dissensions. If two believers could not agree to
gether nor accept the arbitration of a neighbour,
the affair was to be decided by the religious com
munity. If they refused the judgment of the
community and appealed to. the profane courts,
they were guilty of schism and became as out
siders — as heathens and publicans. There is not
in this text even the shadowiest support for the
notion of a Church imposing theological definitions
"under pain of eternal damnation." Did Christ,
the friend of heathens and publicans, consign the
heathens and publicans to eternal flames for their
heterodoxy? Did he, like Tertullian, revel in the
prospect of seeing unbelievers punished in the tor
ments of hell ? None dare say so ; and if any think
so "they know not of whose spirit they are" — the
spirit of the unconverted Boanerges; of those who
have hated, burnt, and tortured their fellow Christians
in the proud empty name of theological orthodoxy.
No, Your Eminence, no man has ever yet been saved
or lost by theology since the world began : men have
been lost for desiring and, as far as was in their
power, procuring the excommunication, the temporal
and spiritual perdition of their neighbours; for de
stroying with their theology the souls for whom
Christ died.
If you had followed my writings at all carefully
you would know that I believe firmly in the necessity

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM 47
and utility of theology ; but of a living theology that
continually proceeds from and returns to that ex
perience of which it is the ever tentative and
perfectible analysis. The simplest and most elemen-/
tary religious experience involves some theological
thought and imagery. What I deny is a theology
that draws ideas from ideas, instead of from ex
perience ; that gives us shadows of shadows instead
of shadows of reality ; that wanders further and
further from facts along the path of curious and un
verified deductions ; that makes itself the tyrant
instead of the servant of religious life ; that imposes
its conclusions as divinely revealed, and " under pain
of eternal damnation." It was his defiance of such a
theology that cost Christ his life at the hands of the
" Curialists " of Jerusalem. What I affirm is that
those who follow Christ as the Way and the Life,
who accept and practise "the moral code which he
has promulgated," accept implicitly the full measure
of theology necessary for salvation. To make that
theology explicit, to deduce its intellectual con
sequences, is useful for the community as a whole ;
but to bind this explicit theology on the conscience
of each and all, to demand more than the implicit
acceptance involved in Christian life and practice, is
to set a stumbling-block in the path of salvation.
Were it not for this tyranny the whole world would
be Christian to-day. After all, S. Mark believed that
his little book contained all that was really necessary
for a Christian to know for his salvation. He was
not consciously contributing to the volume called
the New Testament, or depending on the sup-

MEDIEVALISM

plementary matter of S. Paul or of the other
evangelists. Yet you will look in vain for any
explicit theology in his presentment of the Gospel.
If such explicitness was not necessary then, when
did it become necessary, and who had authority
to make salvation more difficult than Christ
made it ?
If I insist so much on this point, it is because your
conception of the teaching authority of the episco
pate and the Pope rests on the false assumption
that Christ came primarily as a teacher of correct
theology ; that, when he prayed (John XVII.) that his
Church might be one, he was not putting mutual
charity before us as the distant goal of our prayers
and efforts, but was promising us an immediate and
perpetual theological uniformity. For the solution
of theological controversies it is quite evident that
the collective mind of the whole community is a slow
and cumbrous instrument. It moves no quicker in
theology than it does in any other science, but
blunders on through all sorts of errors and excesses
till it stumbles at last upon a more approximate
truth. Even if we exclude the laity and lower
clergy from all competence and participation in
the process, yet the united episcopate is for that
purpose hardly more expeditious ; and the machinery
of ecumenical councils works far too slowly and
laboriously. Plainly the "simplest" plan to secure theological
unity is to refer matters to one infallible theologian
— the Pope — who can settle every question and en
force uniformity at a moment's notice. Since such

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM 49
an expedient is alone sufficient to secure theological
unity it is plain that Christ ought to, and therefore
must, have so arranged matters ; and there is more
than one ambiguous text in support of this a priori
demonstration. But, Your Eminence, if Christ had intended and
provided for such theological uniformity, how do you
account for the long and bitter ante-Nicene contro
versies about the Blessed Trinity, the Hypostatic
Union, the personality of the Holy Spirit, i.e. about
the most central doctrines of our theology? How
came it that generations of Christians lived holily
and died happily ignoring or denying points that were
only settled by some ecumenical council after per
haps centuries of uncertainty ; or that SS. Augustine
and Bernard and Thomas Aquinas rejected the Im
maculate Conception, which was a debated point till
1854 ? If certainty was so vitally necessary why was
it withheld so long ? Why should men of to-day be
forced to believe " under pain of eternal damnation "
what S. Thomas and S. Bernard denied with im
punity ?
And more especially, if your reading of the Vatican
Decrees is right ; if the Popes, independently of the
episcopate and the Church, have power and authority
to decide theological controversies at a moment's
notice, in virtue of miraculous illumination ; how, in
the name of Reason, were they ignorant of this pre
rogative for so many centuries ; or, if they were not
ignorant of it, how are they not responsible for all
the divisions and heresies which have torn the Church
to pieces when a word would have put an end to

50 MEDIEVALISM
them? That there should be such prolonged un
certainty even on points of Faith is hardly compatible
with your view as to Christ's promise of theological
uniformity. But that the very rule of faith itself should
need to be defined in 1870 is manifestly incredible.
You tell us that the papal infallibility is Christ's
divinely instituted means for securing doctrinal uni
formity and certitude; and yet this doctrine was
itself uncertain for nearly two thousand years !
Never was there a more vicious circle.
No, Your Eminence. The dogmas and definitions
of popes and councils on their theological side are
but the protective husks of revelation — of the Gospel
of Christ. It is only the revealed kernel and not
the theological husk to which they can bind our
consciences. If they add a jot or tittle to the easy
yoke and light burden of Christ's teaching, let them
be anathema.
Let us face facts. The Way and the Life and the
Truth have been made plain to the simplest from the
very beginning. The truths by which our souls live
and are sanctified are few, and are clear to all.
About further points, theological uncertainty is not
of the slightest direct spiritual consequence for the
individual ; it may often be more wholesome than cer
tainty. And so to pretend that Christ ought to have
and therefore must have provided for theological uni
formity is to fly in the face of facts and to misappre
hend the scope and meaning of the Gospel as
summed up in the words : " Repent, for the King
dom of Heaven is at hand."
This confusion of Faith with theology, and of

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF CATHOLICISM 51
unity of Faith with theological uniformity, is of
course one of the main supports of the individualistic
interpretation of the Vatican Decrees and of the
refusal to recognise the collective spirit of the whole V
Church as the one rule of faith.

IV
THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION
OF THE CHURCH
AND now I pass to your conception of the con-
„ stitution of the Church as shaped by this
supposed necessity of theological uniformity, as well
as by a confusion of military with spiritual govern
ment and authority. Like all speculative errors, these
live and thrive in virtue of the services they render
to certain interests often very human and unspiritual.
That one Church should claim a monopoly of correct
doctrine and of all jurisdiction ; that it should desire
to exalt itself at the expense of all the rest and
become the one centre of all spiritual and temporal
dominion is natural. That it should be able to do so,
implies that there must be at least some apparent
justification for a claim which else the other equally'
human Churches would as naturally contest.
You tell us, then, that Christ gave all his powers,
not to the whole Church collectively, but to the
Apostles and to their successors the bishops united to
the Pope. For the moment you forget that every
Christian can confer the greatest of all the sacraments
—baptism ; not to speak of the sacrament of matri
mony. 52

THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 53
You say it is only the episcopate united with the
Pope that has the right to interpret revelation
officially. If you mean that it is their office to
gather up, formulate, and proclaim the sacred tradi
tion which lives in the collective conscience of the
whole Church Discens and Docens, lay and cleric, it is
what every true Catholic holds. If you mean that
the tradition lives exclusively in the collective epis
copal conscience, or still worse (as you undoubtedly
mean) in the single conscience of the Pope, your
meaning is repudiated by all the Churches of the
East and was vehemently disputed in the West till,
in 1870, it was apparently but not really approved by
the Vatican Council. If you are right, the whole
Church was in error about her essential constitution
for many centuries of her existence. You speak as
though the episcopate were the whole Church com
missioned to convert and evangelise the lower clergy
and the laity. You forget that the lower clergy and
laity are part of the Church which, as a whole, has
been commissioned to convert and evangelise the
world ; that to the whole Church, and not merely
to the Apostles, it was said " Go and teach all
nations." You forget that every baptised Christian
is a commissioned apostle and teacher ; and as such.
is no mere telephone, but must speak from the fulness
of a living personal interest in the truth of his re
ligion ; that he must think his faith and penetrate
and develop it according to the measure of his educa
tion and understanding. You would have us believe
that the layman's sole duty is to receive the faith
passively as one receives a traveller's tale of regions

54 MEDIEVALISM

beyond his ken; a tale which he repeats to others
word for word for what it is worth, but with no
guarantee of personal experience or conviction. And
then you wonder that your passively receptive flock
are not interested in their religion ; that they do not
feel themselves in any way responsible for its teach
ing; and you search in vain for a New Testament or
a Roman Missal in the libraries of educated Catholics!
No Catholic denies the useful distinction between
the " Christian Teaching " and the " Church Taught."
It is obviously necessary that at any given time
Christians should know what they all hold in common
and what is peculiar to themselves ; that they should
not require of others more than the Universal Church
requires ; and it is for the assembled episcopate to
determine this minimum ; to bear witness to the
accordant beliefs of their several dioceses and to
impose the common faith on each particular member
of the Church, be he layman, bishop, or Pope. If we
bow to such rulings of the teaching Church, it is just
in the measure that the moral unanimity of a truly
free and representative council is presumably and at
least practically equivalent to a consensus of the
whole body of believers. It is only a presumption ;
one that may be and has often been rebutted. The
ecumenicity of a council is to some degree always a
fiction — though a necessary fiction in the interests of
order and unity. What we really bow to is a Divine
Tradition of which the entire Church, and not merely
the episcopate, is the organ and depositary; to which
we attribute just the same sort of inerrancy, neither
more nor less, that we attribute to the Sacred Scrip-

THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 55
tures, which are after all but a few chance leaves torn
from the book of tradition.
I notice that you say, "The episcopate in union
with the Pope is the organ of transmission of the
revealed teachings of Jesus Christ. Be it said, in
passing (en passant), that the organ of transmission
is what, in one word, is called Tradition."
This "en passant" is surely significant. It indi
cates your consciousness that there is here something
out of joint ; something not quite coherent with your
simplification, but which cannot be ignored with any
respect to the history of dogma. " The organ of
transmission is the episcopate " ; " The organ of
transmission is Tradition" — these statements are
not very harmonious. I should have thought that
Tradition was the process of transmission or else the
thing transmitted, and not the organ of transmission.
But for this confusion you have excellent precedent
in the words of Pius IX, La tradizione son io, framed
on the analogy of " L'Etat c'est moi."
Tradition may be used for the process of passing
on, or for that which is passed on, but not for the
persons who pass it on. Even if the episcopate be
the sole depositary of tradition and the sole organ of
its transmission, we cannot say that the episcopate or
the Pope is tradition. If Your Eminence will reflect
a moment it will be clear that tradition is to the
episcopate or to the Pope what the law is to the
judge. It is a rule set above them by a higher
authority ; a rule which they must apply and in
terpret, but which they did not make and may not
alter. Tradition is the faith that lives in the whole

56 MEDIEVALISM
Church and is handed down from generation to
generation, of which the entire body, and not a mere
handful of officials, is the depositary and organ of
transmission. Of this rule and law the Holy Spirit
diffused in the hearts of all the faithful is the author;
the episcopate merely the servant, the witness, the
interpreter. But I question whether, even on your own grounds,
you have any right to say, " Tradition is the Episco
pate " and not rather " Tradition is the Pope " — La
tradizione son io.
You speak always of " The Episcopate in union
with the Pope," or "The bishops who are in agree
ment with the Pope," as the final authority in
matters of doctrine. In deference to history you
cannot very well leave out the bishops ; but the con
dition which you impose on their authority renders
their existence purely ornamental and nugatory.
They really interfere with your simplification ; and
that you should have to tolerate such a discordant
element does credit at least to your uneasy historical
conscience. If there is still a nominal episcopate
it is not the fault of the Curialists, or their new
theology. For if I can trust a certain body of wit
nesses only when their testimony agrees with that of
one particular witness ; if the testimony of this one
alone is quite sufficient without theirs, is not their
testimony utterly superfluous and worthless ? Why
should I trouble about the bishops at all, if I must
first find out whether they agree with the Pope ? Is
it not as though a Protestant were to say that his
supreme rule of faith was the episcopate so far as in

THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 57
agreement with the Bible? Do you not see that
this is equivalent to saying that the Bible, and the
Bible only, is his rule of faith? Do you not see
that your own expression means that the Pope and
the Pope only is the rule of Faith? — that we must
sit in judgment on our bishops and test their ortho
doxy by this rule ?
But the new theology drags the bishops into the
formula to conceal the fact that the whole constitu
tion of the Church has been turned upside down by
this new-fashioned individualistic interpretation of
the papacy.
Your bishops are simply on parade at a papal
ceremony. You may call them "co-judges" and
" co-definers " ; but they are not. Their judgment
counts for absolutely nothing. Their sole honour is
to lead the chorus of universal acclaim and passive
submission as the principal representatives of the
Ecclesia Discens. If they "teach" by transmitting
what they learn from the Pope, so does every simple
priest and every lay catechist. Let us not pay our
selves with words. The episcopate singly and collec
tively has passed over to the Ecclesia Discens and the
Pope alone is the Ecclesia Docens — "La tradizione
son io." If no bishop or number of bishops can
hinder the Pope's dogmatic decision, in what sense
can they be considered as joint-authors of that de
cision ? As theological consultors they rank no
higher than simple priests who belong to the Ecclesia
Discens. What difference do you make between the bishops
and the Ecclesia Discens in relation to the Pope,

58 MEDIEVALISM
when you write " Whenever a doctrinal dispute
breaks out among the faithful or among the bishops,
the Pope settles it by his supreme authority " ?
Guard your words how you will, your thought
leaks out between them at every turn.
It is better, then, to state this simplification honestly
and nakedly, instead of hiding its shame with the
rags of the ancient Catholic tradition.
The Pope is the Church. To him alone Christ
has committed the apostolic mission, the deposit of
revelation, the plenitude of doctrinal authority and
of spiritual power and jurisdiction. Him alone he
has commissioned to teach and sanctify, not the
world, but the bishops, the clergy, and the faithful :
" Feed my sheep ; feed my lambs." If the episcopal
or clerical sheep have any doctrinal or spiritual power
over the lambs it is as mere delegates of the Pope,
as streams deriving from that single fountain of all
supernatural life and teaching. The shepherd is no
part of his flock. He stands outside and above it as
a being of another and higher species. They are
absolutely passive and receptive under his guidance.
They have no mind or will of their own singly or
collectively. "The doctrinal and juridical authority of the
Church," writes P. Liberatore, S.J., in 187 1 "is gathered
up and concentrated in the Roman Pontiff. From
his chair springs the light that is blazed and spread
abroad to enlighten the universe. His throne is
exalted above the thrones of all subordinate prelates,
and from the tiara that. circles his brow stream forth
the rays that are reflected from the episcopal mitres

THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 59
of the whole world." Thus the bishops shine merely
as planets with a light borrowed from the Pope— the
sun and sole source of their illumination.
The individual mind and will of the Pope (miracu
lously illuminated, of course) is precisely the mind
and will of the Church. I do not know by what
courtesy the bishops are still called shepherds, except
it be that those sheep who follow the shepherd are,
for purposes of guidance, as good as the shepherd
himself. But at that rate it seems to me that any
good Catholic "in union with the Pope" might be
called a shepherd and a member of the Ecclesia
Docens. In this view it were of course absurd
to regard the collective mind of the flock as the
depositary and organ of that divine tradition of
whose sense the Pope is the sole judge. " La tra
dizione son io " — it is only into the depths of his
own religious conscience that the shepherd need look
to discover the truth needed for the guidance of his
mindless flock.
Your Eminence ; a boy in his teens, as ignorant as
he was morally vicious, was once elected to be the
Vicar of Christ. He had not at the moment of his
election the most rudimentary knowledge of his
Catechism. You maintain that the great Christian
tradition and deposit of Faith was suddenly infused
into that empty godless little brain ; that he had
only to look within himself in order to instruct the
whole episcopate as to the true sense of revelation.
Plainly your Church-theory is tenable only on the
supposition of a continual miracle as wonderful as
the conversion of water into wine, and which would

60 MEDIEVALISM
give us a right to look for a uniform and superhuman
wisdom in the supreme government of the Church,
for which there is not a vestige of historical evi
dence. It is not wonderful, then, that you apply to the Pope
the title of " bishop of bishops," which even Gregory I
indignantly repudiated as a nomen blasphemice and
as a maxima stultitia. For in your new theology
the Pope is related to the bishops precisely as a
bishop is to his priests. Their dependence on him
is absolute and unqualified. He still calls them
"brethren," to conceal the breach with the ancient
tradition. But they have begun to address him as
Father, since, as a fact, they are no longer his
brethren but his sons or, rather, his servants. They
are bound to obey with the blindness of slaves, and
not even with the intelligent sympathy of sons. Yet,
Your Eminence, Christ did not say to Peter " Con
firm thy sons " or " thy servants," but " Confirm thy
brethren " ; still less did he say " Rule thy servants "
— Dominare in medio servorum tuorum.
I notice that you distinguish this "bishop of
bishops " from his servant bishops as being " the im
mediate representative of the Son of God." Twenty
years ago my Jesuit Professor of Theology did not
venture to teach as more than probable the view that
the other Apostles drew their authority not imme
diately from Christ, but only mediately through
Peter. It was then enough to say that union with
Peter was the condition of any valid exercise of
their immediately divine authority. Now we have
developed a little further. The eleven Apostles

THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 61
spring from Peter, the episcopate springs from the
Pope, as the branches from the root of a tree. Once
more the Pope is their father and not their brother.
The right of command, the duty of obedience,
have no place anlong brethren. Their agreement
must be a spiritual and spontaneous agreement.
Even Christ did not lord it over his Apostles. He
was in their midst as a servant. He called them not
servants but friends. The now hollow-sounding title
of " Servant of the servants of God," which the Pope
dares not discard, bears witness to the ancient tradi
tion of the Church, and agrees ill with that of
" Bishop of bishops." The promises made to Peter
were made to every Apostle and bishop as such ;
and in the early centuries every bishop regarded
himself as successor of Peter and heir of those
promises. Formerly a bishop was the highest ecclesiastical
official in his own diocese. He was answerable to no
other official, but only to the universal Church of
which he was the organ or officer. But now that your
new theology has concentrated the universal Church
into the person of the Pope, we have a sort of double
episcopate in each diocese — the Bishop of Rome and
the local bishop, the latter being merely the delegate
or Vicar-General of the former. Of this system
there is not a trace in the first six centuries of
Church History, from which we learn that the Pope
is neither over the bishops as their master, nor under
them as their delegate, but alongside of them as first
in the rank of his brethren ; that this teaching heir-
archy is neither above nor below the whole Church,

62 MEDIEVALISM

of which it is an organic part, and which, as a whole,
lives, wills, and speaks, not only through, but in
union with, that organic part.
How did such a revolution come about ?
When Christ said to his disciples "As the living
Father hath sent me, so send I you," or, " He that
heareth you heareth me," he was not deciding
"which of them should be the greatest." That
question he had answered when he set a little child
in their midst ; or when he stooped down and washed
their feet ; or when he warned them against the
spirit of domination. He was not giving juridical
authority to the hierarchy of the Church over the
laity. Nay, he was not thinking of the hierarchic
Church at all. He was thinking of the unconverted
world and of the little band of believers — the light of
the world ; the salt of the earth — which was to con
tinue his own apostolic mission in the same spirit
and by the same methods.
To each and all of them he gave authority and
command to preach the Gospel — not to coerce and
excommunicate one another. The internal division
and organisation of that missionary body into rulers
and ruled ; teachers and taught ; active and passive ;
the relegation of the Church's missionary work to a
secondary place ; the concentration of her interest on
the task of holding herself together, of securing in
ternal unity by subjecting one half of her members
to the other half— all this, Your Eminence, is what
we poor Modernists would call a development. At
the beginning there was not a teaching Church and
a learning Church, but a teaching Church and a

THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 63
learning world. Every Christian in virtue of his
baptism was a teacher and apostle.
And to each and all of these apostles he communi
cates his own authority ; his own Spirit ; his own
mission : " Receive the Holy Spirit ; as the Father
hath sent me so send I you."
But what sort of authority do we find him exercis
ing in his missionary work ? Do we see him defining
theological points "under pain of eternal damna
tion " ? I cannot remember an instance. I see that
he draws men, but that he never drives them. I see
a Shepherd who goes in front of his sheep and lures
them on : " If any man will come after me, let him
follow me." I see him exerting not a juridical but a
spiritual authority — the authority that truth exercises
over the mind ; and goodness, over the conscience ;
and love, over the heart and affections ; the authority
that true Manhood exercises over men ; true Per
sonality, over persons.
And it was just this sort of spiritual authority that
he communicated to his brethren, kindling their
hearts with the fire which he came to spread upon
earth, and with which his own heart was aflame.
Filled with the same Holy Spirit, they were to be so
fashioned to his image and likeness as to be indis
tinguishable from him in their enthusiasms, aims, and
methods ; " He that heareth you heareth me."
You will say that the Gospel was an enlighten
ment ; that as he was " the Light of the World " so
they were to be the light of the world. Yes, but
what sort of light ? " Let your light so shine before
men that they may see your good works and glorify

64 MEDIEVALISM
your Father who is in Heaven." It was not the light
of a new theology, but that of a new revelation, a new
experience, a new life, a new ideal of human per
sonality. And of that ideal, the Apostles were to be
the embodiment no less than their Master. He
taught by what he was. Such, too, was to be the
teaching authority of his Church : " Hereby shall
men know that you are my disciples, if you love one
another." Here is the genuine " note " of the true
Church : " Behold, how these Christians love one
another." It is, then, of this spiritual authority that
he speaks when he says, " As the living Father hath
sent me, so send I you " ; " He that hath seen me
hath seen the Father " ; " He that heareth you,
heareth me " ; or when he prays " that they all may
be one, as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee"
— not a thought of setting some of his brethren
as rulers over the rest to impose theological uni
formity "under pain of eternal damnation." The
revelation which he committed to them was that of
the Father's divine life as faithfully imaged in his
own life, and to be as faithfully imaged in that of his
Church. It was the " truth " of a type to its arche
type; the "truth" of a Way and a Life, not of a
theory or a theology.
When the little missionary band was yet small;
when it was filled with the enthusiasm of the Spirit of
its Founder ; when they " were all of one heart and
one mind" and " possessed all things in common" there
was little need of any more interior organisation
than was required for successful co-operation in the
work of the apostolate. When it grew to a vast

THE SUPPOSED CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 65
multitude of men, good, bad, and indifferent, the
spiritual influence of the Church in the world de
manded a hierarchy of officials with juridical power
to exclude from the community those whose presence
was a source of discord or scandal. But it was for
their unchristian lives, not for their theological
opinions, that men were first excommunicated. The
first case on record is that of the incestuous Corin
thian. But whereas we are under the jurisdiction of the
State whether we will or no, we are under that of
the Church only by our free choice. I am bound to
obey her officers only as I obey my physician after I
have freely put myself into his hands to be cured by
him. He has no right to domineer over me. He
can only say, '' Unless you obey me you will die."
The rule he has over me is imposed by myself. So
too the rule which the Church has over me derives
from my own conscience ; from my own free act.
All she can say to me is, " If you love me, keep my
commandments." If I do not keep her command
ments she can say, " You do not love me " ; but she
cannot coerce or threaten me. She can tell me I am
in danger of hell, but she cannot send me there.
Her duty is to try and make me love her once
more; to draw me back to her, not to drive me
away from her.
To apply to this juridical and hierarchic power of
the later Church texts that refer only to the
spiritual influence of the primitive and pre-hierarchic
Church was possible and even excusable in an age
devoid of the slightest historical and critical sense.

66 MEDIEVALISM

Yet this misapplication has been and is still the
main support of the medieval Church-theory. Surely
it is time we had done with this superficial exegesis
that has ceased to be excusable.

GROWTH OF THIS CONCEPTION
IT is not then very difficult to understand how
this conception of the Pope's unlimited juris
diction over doctrine and discipline was gradually
evolved out of certain elementary misapprehensions.
The first pre-eminence of the Church of Rome
was one of charity and good works. As S. Irenaeus
tells us in the passage which you treat with a strange
disregard of more recent criticism, and as though it
were undisputed : "Such is the superiority of the pre
eminence of the Church of Rome that the faithful
from all parts of the world must necessarily meet
together there." If you prefer to translate "must
necessarily agree with her" it will not alter the
evident meaning. In that great central ganglion of
the Roman Empire one met representatives from
every Christian community, and could therefore study
the unanimous beliefs and practices of the whole
Church. It was the advantage of the Roman Community to
be thus in continual touch with all the rest ; not to
dictate to them, but to learn from them what was
everywhere held and believed. Hence the opinion of
67

68 MEDIEVALISM 
the Roman Church was practically that of the Church
at large. Her Christianity was the typical Chris
tianity. To be in agreement with her was to be in
agreement with all. This is very different from say
ing that the faith of Rome was the supreme and
independent criterion of faith. It was so only in so
far as it reflected the unanimous faith of all the
Christian communities.
Rome was then the most expeditious, but not the
highest, court of appeal. As yet, she claimed no
jurisdiction over her sister Churches. They vener
ated, admired, and followed her of their own free
will and accord. She drew them, but she did not
drive them. Peter confirmed and supported, but he
did not yet rule his brethren or call them his sons or
his servants. His supremacy was spiritual, not juri
dical. It was a duty rather than a right — a debt of
edification and support and leadership which weighed
more heavily upon him than upon them ; an ideal
which he could never realise perfectly, and from
which he has fallen away utterly over and over again
in the history of the Church.
Seeing herself so universally appealed to ; her
approval accepted as a tessera of orthodoxy ; her ex
communications adopted by other Churches, it was
only too natural that Rome should come insensibly
to regard this deference as a right, and to use the
concession or withdrawal of her favour as a coercive
sanction whereby to enforce her own will on her
sister-Churches. Every day, in every department of
society, we can witness the process by which the
chosen leader among equals becomes the ruler and

GROWTH OF THIS CONCEPTION 69
driver, and by which his free admirers and followers
become his subjects and servants.
That is the process by which the first of bishops
became the " Bishop of bishops " ; and by which his
" venerable brethren " became his sons, his servants,
and (one must now add) his marionettes. Thus it
was that Rome's duty of spiritual supremacy was
transformed into a right of juridical supremacy.
And when the Gospel texts which refer to the former
were applied to the latter, it was only a matter of
time and of scholastic logic to deduce this monstrous
concentration of the whole Church into the person of
a single bishop. And to this development, besides
motives of ecclesiastical expediency, avarice, ambi
tion, and other passions have most undeniably lent
their driving-force for centuries. The debased the
ology of the movement, with its blind logicality, its
perversion of Scripture, its distortion of the Fathers,
is but the after-justification, not the real cause of the
phenomenon. And though perhaps never yet has
such an ideal of absolutism and irresponsibility been
conceived by the mind of man, yet I doubt if this
new theology be not pregnant with yet further de
velopments. We were warned at the time of the
Bull about Anglican Orders that, though not ex
cathedra, it might be infallible. For, it was said, the
Vatican Decree, though inclusive only of ex cathedra
utterances, did not exclude others. Thus Your
Eminence speaks of Modernism as condemned "by
the supreme authority of the Church," i.e. you ascribe
the same weight to the Encyclical Pascendi as to the
Nicene Creed. And certainly the a priori arguments

70 MEDIEVALISM
(from " what ought to be " to " what is ") as well as
the fantastic exegesis which supports so much, will
support a great deal more and extend infallibility
quite logically to every brief and encyclical. They
tell even more strongly for impeccability than for in
fallibility. For does not the Pope inherit all those preroga
tives of Peter that were needful for the edification of
the Church ? Do not theologians tell us that Peter
and his fellow Apostles were "confirmed in grace"
and immune from moral corruption? Can we say
that the Church stands in less need of such edifica
tion to-day than in the apostolic age? Indeed, it
would be curious if the only Petrine prerogatives not
claimed by the Pope were just those which, being
verifiable, would be most convincing — moral in
tegrity and miraculous powers. If the latter was a
need peculiar to the nascent Church we can hardly
say the same of the former. There is, therefore,
some logic in the growing tendency to treat the Pope
as impeccable and above criticism in matters of dis
cipline and government ; to render him the personal
cultus hitherto reserved for canonised saints.
Again, if you interpret "Whatsoever thou shalt
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven " as conferring
juridical not spiritual authority, must you not go
further and confess that God is the Pope's Vicar
in heaven, the passively obedient executor of his
will ? One of your candid brethren, the Cardinal
Archbishop of Salzburg, in his Pastoral of February
2nd, 1905, does not hesitate to say openly what you
all think when he writes : " O inconceivably exalted

GROWTH OF THIS CONCEPTION 71
power! heaven suffers earth to prescribe the kind and
measure of its decisions ; the servant is made the
judge of the world and his Master in heaven ratifies
the sentence which he pronounces on earth." Thus
God Himself is brought down to the level of a
bishop and takes his orders from Rome ; and in
giving the Keys of the Kingdom to Peter Christ
has become a roi faine'ant.
Your Eminence, on the communion-tessera of this
year, approved by the Archbishop of Milan, 1 find
Mary and the Pope twice put side by side : Gloria
alia Madre fmmaccolata : Gloria al santo Padre ! I
have seen one of the crosses sold to the faithful of
Rome on which the figure of Christ is replaced by
that of the Pope. I admit the logic of it all, but I
ask myself: Where is it to end? Have we yet to
learn the immaculate conception of the Pope, or his
real presence in the Sacrament of the Altar ? May
I not justly ask: "Was Pius crucified for you, or
were you baptised in the name of Pius " ? (cf. 1 Cor.
I. 13). Can you wonder if Protestants speak of
" Papolatry " or of the Pope as the anti-Christ who
sets himself up as God in the temple of God ?
Such a system could never have obtained a
moment's credence ; could never have survived for
so many centuries, had it not presented to good and
spiritual men a certain deceptive plausibility. Over
and above the theological sophistries advanced in its
support there were various practical reasons of re
ligious expediency which weighed with those who
would never have listened to reasons of merely
political and temporal expediency. Unity, they be-

72 MEDIE VALISM
lieved rightly, was the "note" of the true Church.
But understanding unity as military and mechanical
uniformity, rather than as the free agreement of inde
pendent spirits in faith, aim, and sentiment, they in
ferred, again rightly, that such uniformity could only
be secured by a military dictatorship ; that Christ
must have made provision for so vital a necessity,
and that, in spite of all contrary evidence, Scripture
and Church History must be interpreted so as to
confirm, or, at least, not to exclude, this hypothesis.
But granted for the moment that unity of theo
logical formula was to be the note of the true
Church and the abiding miracle in evidence of her
claims, would not that evidence have been far more
striking had the whole multitude of the faithful been
moved spontaneously and independently to such an
agreement ; or even had the bishops, without the
somewhat natural expedient of councils, disputations,
wranglings, and intrigues, been found ever saying
just the same thing? It would have meant a
miracle. But this uniformity is supposed to be
miraculous. I have already noted that the knowledge
and infallible interpretation of tradition by a totally
ignorant boy-Pope like John XII or Benedict IX
would be an effect without a natural cause ; and in
some great measure this must be true of every Pope.
Now whereas the independent theological unity of
the episcopate would be a verifiable and serviceable
miracle ; the uniformity secured by their blind sub
mission to the Pope is as natural as that of a regi
ment of soldiers. It is only the testimony of inde
pendent witnesses that has the slightest evidential

GROWTH OF THIS CONCEPTION 73
significance. If, then, we are to reason a priori as to
what God ought to, and therefore must, have done, it
is quite plain that he ought to have provided for the
verifiable miracle of spontaneous episcopal unity,
rather than for a perfectly explicable unity secured
by obedience to a dictator, the miracle of whose
infallibility can never be verified.
That God has made no such provision, may mean
that theology is not yet quite in a position to deter
mine exactly what he ought to do ; or it may even
mean that he does not attach quite as much import
ance to theological uniformity as theologians sup
pose. Similarly as regards the concentration of all the
Church's juridical authority into the person of the Pope
alone. It is defensible as the natural and necessary
means of securing military uniformity of action, with
out which the Church must cease to be a great interna
tional power, fighting political battles with political
weapons. But who gave the Church any such com
mission ? And where is there any trace of such pre
tensions in the first centuries of her existence ? Her
mission was to announce the coming Kingdom of
God upon earth — an event whose accomplishment
lay in his hands and not in hers — and to preach
repentance and a new life to individual souls as the
necessary condition of entering into that Kingdom.
Every man whatever his profession or occupation,
be he politician, soldier, physician, savant, artist,
merchant or what you will, who labours for the
general good, and for the cause of justice and truth,
is labouring for the Kingdom of God on earth.

74 MEDIEVALISM
The Church's concern is not directly with these
things. She has no infallible charisma in political,
legal, scientific, and economic problems. Her work is
the formation of individual souls to the pattern of
Christ ; the production of character, the elevation of
ideals. Her mission is to impress upon every man
the duty of living, not for himself, but for the common
good, for the Kingdom of God, according to the
opportunities of his station ; to kindle in each that
fire of self-devotion which Christ came to kindle upon
earth ; to stimulate faith, hope, and enthusiasm in the
cause of an Ideal before whose immensity and remote
ness the unaided spirit grows weary and discouraged.
For without such faith and hope who could struggle
for the reign of truth and justice upon earth ? What
were it all worth if after a few hundred thousand
years human history will matter as little as that of
any other extinct species ; and if it have not in some
way the eternal value of an episode in the life of the
Eternal ? It is religion alone that can give an infinite
and absolute value to humanity and to the service of
humanity. Does such a mission demand a centralised military
organisation ? Is the immense and complicated
bureaucracy of Rome solely preoccupied with the '
sanctification of individual souls; with repentance
and a new life ; with the mission of John the Baptist
and of Jesus ? No serious man will say so. It is
only the idea that the Church's mission is to control
the business of the whole world instead of teaching
every man to regard his own business as the work of
God, that can account for this extraordinary "de-

GROWTH OF THIS CONCEPTION 75
velopment" of the Gospel. When every man is a
good Christian things will set themselves right
quickly enough ; the Kingdom of God will come
without observation ; will be found in our midst while
we are looking for it in the clouds. That is an in
finitely distant goal or ideal. But it is one to which
we must ever approximate ; and each new stage is,
relatively to the preceding, a realisation of the King
dom of God.
" In necessariis unitas ; in dubiis libertas ; in om
nibus caritas" — unity in essentials, liberty in non
essentials ; charity in all things. But I ask myself,
Are not the essentials far fewer than your new the
ology supposes? "One Lord," Jesus Christ; "One
faith " in the coming Kingdom of God ; " one
baptism" to repentance and a new life. May not
this be the " one thing needful " ? May not all the
rest be permissible, most desirable, but not obliga
tory? May not the mutual charity that tolerates
differences in non-essentials be a higher unity than
that of enforced uniformity ?
Who can read the Gospel and not feel that its
clear quiet light is dimmed and broken with all this
wire-netting of intricate theology by which we pre
tend to protect it from profanation ? Since we own
that theology can add nothing to it that binds our
faith, that dogmas but render its implications ex
plicit, why not be content with the simple, inspired,
unelaborated expression of revelation ? Is it not
enough to believe what Peter believed ?
One thing is certain. If instead of wrangling over
disputed questions about which we can know nothing,

76 MEDIEVALISM 
and of which it would not profit us to know everything,
ecumenical councils had preached liberty in non
essentials ; had rebuked the contentious spirit of the
ology ; had recalled men to the simple revelation of
the Gospel ; had proclaimed crusades against slavery,
dishonesty, intemperance, cruelty, oppression; had
striven to purify and develop the Christian ideal of
character, the face of the world to-day would be very
different from what it is. Or, again — and here, for
once, Pius X will uphold me — if men had always
been able to look to the Bishop and Church of Rome
for a living example of authentic Christianity, in
dividual and social ; if the Vatican had been always
officered with apostolic men, like the early Chris
tians or the early Franciscans, preoccupied entirely
with the salvation of souls, and not with an in
triguing, worldly, often loose-living bureaucracy for
whom centralisation meant money and influence,
Rome might still possess that supreme spiritual
authority which for centuries has been in abeyance —
she might still be the salt of the earth and the light
of the world ; the abiding revelation of that new life
made known to us in and by Christ.
How unreal all this seems compared with what
she has been historically ! How often has not he,
whose duty was "to confirm his brethren," to draw
them together by the force of good example,
been the author of irreparable scandals and divi
sions? Is it not the Popes who with the sword
of theological omniscience in one hand and that
of juridical omnipotence in the other have hacked
the whole body of Christendom to pieces ; have

GROWTH OF THIS CONCEPTION 77
split the East from the West, the Teutonic from
the Latin races ; the whole Church from the living
world? And all this under the pretext of secur
ing a sterilising insignificant external uniformity
— spiritually worthless and even disastrous ; a uni
formity that sucks the life out of the whole body of
the Church for the benefit of the head, that sub
stitutes the judgment, will, and action of a single
individual for that of the orbis terrarum,
" Eh bien," you say, " eh bien, mes Freres, le
Modernisme que le Pape a condamne est la negation
de ces enseignements si simples que vous avez appris
des votre enfance lorsque vous vous prepariez a la
premiere communion."
Yes, Your Eminence, a doctrine " so simple " that
it quietly leaves out of account the host of unanswer
able difficulties — scriptural, historical, and rational —
that have been raised against it ; " so simple '' as to
be absolutely uninteresting and devitalising; "so
simple" that having once mastered it at their first
communion the faithful feel no reason ever to give it
another thought. To obey the Pope and to ask no
questions — that is the whole of religion, not only for
laymen, but for priests and bishops.

VI
THE VATICAN DEFINITION
AND now if I have taken some trouble to expose
. this great medieval simplification ; to strip it
bare of the garment of antiquity under which its
novelty is disguised — of certain terms and forms of
Catholicism under which it has slipped another and
contrary meaning — it is because I acknowledge freely
that in this view of the Papacy Your Eminence is at
one with the Pope and the whole Roman officialdom ;
with nearly all the bishops ; with the greater part of
the lower clergy and with a still greater proportion of
the laity. Still I do not think that a numerical
majority is the same thing as that moral unanimity
which constitutes the consensus ecclesice. Moreover
I do not for a moment believe that the agreement
of the said majority is that of free and indepen
dent witnesses, or that it represents the independent
judgment of more than a very small handful of
interested theologians and officials.
" But," you will say, " it is that of the Vatican
Council ; and there is an end of the matter."
That is what I beg to deny, since my whole posi
tion as a Roman Catholic depends on my denying it ;
on my being able, if necessary by some tour deforce,
78

THE VATICAN DEFINITION 79
to show that the Vatican Council did not succeed in
its efforts to turn the Church upside down and to rest
the hierarchical pyramid on its apex.
I know this requires a certain amount of ingenuity,
a certain risk of sophistry ; but not more than that
of Tract XC by which Cardinal Newman read the
doctrine of Trent into the Thirty-nine Articles of the
Church of England.
All that the Fathers of the Church have said as to
the inerrancy of General Councils and of sacred tra
dition is as nothing to what they have said as to the
inerrancy of those classical pages of tradition which
we call the Bible. With all due deference to the
Biblical Commission and the Holy Office, the hard
and fast mechanical view of Scriptural inerrancy has
yielded for ever to a much looser, more flexible and
dynamic notion of inspiration. The old conception
is as dead as the Ptolemaic astronomy ; those who
cling to it will die with it. The inerrancy of General
Councils must inevitably and a fortiori be re-inter
preted with a similar latitude.
For this reason Catholics are justified in interpret
ing the utterances of authority with a considerably
greater latitude than formerly.
Again, I think it might be very plausibly argued
by any one who has studied the history of the Vatican
Council that it lacked every one of the three condi
tions of a valid council — that it was neither free, nor
representative nor unanimous ; that the bishops were
bullied and coerced ; were kept in ignorance of the
programme till the last moment ; were deprived of
the necessary sources of information ; were forbidden

80 MEDIEVALISM
liberty of discussion among themselves ; that the
Council was packed with bishops in partibus repre
senting nobody; with Italian bishops representing
next to nobody; while vast populations outside
Italy were hardly represented at all ; that, by an un
conscious assimilation of the Church's constitution
to that of a modern popular government, the voice
of a bare numerical majority was substituted for the
morally unanimous voice of the whole assembly ; and
finally that the appearance of unanimity secured by
the cowardly withdrawal of the dissentient minority
was purely illusory.
Such was the contention of the great and staunchly
Catholic Dr. Doellinger and of many other equally
competent judges. But it is one that does not com
mend itself to me, because I know that some of the
most important councils that the Church has accepted
could be easily invalidated by a similar criticism.
Again, I think it may be plausibly urged by the
Old Catholics that the subsequent acquiescence of the
Roman Church in the Vatican decree does not con
stitute an argumentum ad hominem against them and
others who make the Christian orbis terrarum the
supreme judge of faith which the Council represents
more or less imperfectly.
For, first of all, they may say that the dissent of
the whole Eastern Church and episcopate is a some
what serious difficulty. Then, it is easy to show that
this passive acquiescence is a very different thing
from a free, independent acceptance ; that an imposed
listless uniformity lacks all the evidential value of a
spontaneous active unanimity. We know how those

THE VATICAN DEFINITION 81
who for generations previously had been working for
the definition of Papal absolutism, who engineered
the Vatican Council purely in that interest, who all
but succeeded in committing the Roman Church to
that novelty, at once set out to remedy the little flaws
in their handiwork ; to obscure and cover up the
loopholes which the definition left unwillingly in its
attempt to wall-up the fundamental principles of
Catholicism — Securus judical orbis terrarum and
Quod semper, quod ubique quod ab omnibus. To
ignore the possibility of a Catholic interpretation ;
to speak as though they had succeeded in their
design ; to brand and defame as heretics those who
thought otherwise; to reform the catechisms and
seminary manuals in their own sense ; to select as
professors and bishops only obsequious zealots in
the cause of absolutism — all this, and much more,
was only a matter of governmental ingenuity. After
two generations could the results be other than what
they are ? Who can see the work of the Holy Ghost
in the agreement of bishops selected because they
agree to be bishops no longer but delegates of the
one and only bishop ; or in that of priests still more
utterly depersonalised ; or in that of a listless and
indifferent laity — schooled, till their first communion,
in this easy thought-saving simplification, and sub
sequently dead to all further interest in the
matter ?
Yet I do not urge this objection, for, again, I feel
it is one that would tell equally against many a more
venerable council. I ask myself whether a consensus
in purely theological matters could ever possibly be

82 MEDIEVALISM

more than that of a mere handful of experts ;
whether the general acquiescence of the crowd can
have the slightest confirmatory value, any more than
that of a class of schoolboys can be said to confirm
the teachings of their master. It is only the per
fectly spontaneous agreement of spirit with spirit
that lends value to a consensus. If it is the result of
listlessness, or of imitativeness, or of governmental
pressure, or of the fear of eternal damnation, it is
worthless. A general consensus of the faithful can only obtain
in regard to those matters where all may be experts ;
matters within the potential experience of each;
matters which interest and affect their daily spiritual
life — the life of Faith in virtue of which they are
called "the faithful." If I want to be sure of the
normality of my own senses ; to know that my per
ceptions are objective and not subjective, I take the
judgment of the crowd as my criterion. If, however,
it is a question, not of ordinary and universal ex
perience, but of learning, information, and reflection ;
not of phenomena, but of the analysis and interpreta
tion of phenomena, it would be absurd to appeal to
the crowd. If Faith were theology its problems could
never be settled by general consensus.
But because it is not theology, but the Gospel ;
because its object is that life of which Christ is the
Divine Revelation, and not the analysis of that life,
every believer may, as an expert, speak of his own
personal response to the Gospel. Each is a judge of
faith ; and the agreement of all is an infallible judg
ment, eliminating private errors and idiosyncrasies.

THE VATICAN DEFINITION 83
The metaphysical decisions arrived at by many of
the great councils were certainly not such as could
receive the slightest confirmation from the sub
sequent general consent of the Church. What could
ordinary Christian experience witness as to the pre
cise mode of the Eucharistic presence, or as to the
curious problems about grace ? Indeed, it is difficult
to imagine how there could be any sort of significant
acceptance of propositions that, when closely ex
amined, are often found to be mere collocations of
words, to which even theologians, if pressed, are
unable to attach the slightest intelligible meaning.
But ask the faithful about the substance of Revela
tion, about the coming Kingdom of God on earth,
about their ideals of the new life, social and in
dividual, and at once you touch a vital interest.
They will answer you from their own personal ex
perience as independent witnesses. In fine, their
consensus is a criterion of faith, but not of theology.
Their subsequent acquiescence in the Vatican De
crees cannot, therefore, have the slightest confirma
tory value. Its causes are purely extrinsic; but in
no way connected with their religious experience or
judgment. As far as this objection goes, I cannot therefore
see that the Vatican Council is in a much worse case
than other councils. It is not the explicit theology
of such councils, but their implicit reassertion of the
Christian revelation that has represented and has
been confirmed by the faith of the whole Church.
Such a distinction is precisely equivalent to that
which we have been forced to acknowledge between

84 MEDIEVALISM

the scientific, historic, and philosophic values and the
religious value of the Sacred Scriptures.
But apart from this distinction, there are other
reasons for believing that the Fathers of the Vatican
Council did not really succeed in cutting the Roman
Church off from the ancient Catholic tradition. If
Bishop Strossmayer, the ablest and most vigorous
opponent of the majority, subscribed to the decrees
in the end, it was because he felt and said that, as
far as the purposes of the absolutists were concerned,
they were not worth the paper they were written on.
It is not necessary to ascribe this failure of the
absolutists to the miraculous intervention of Provi
dence saving the Church at this suicidal moment.
There are things that men cannot do even if they
would. They cannot make contradictories true at
the same moment, or deny a principle in virtue of
itself. They cannot in the very exercise of authority
cut away the root of that authority. Such was the
impossible task which the absolutists set before them
selves ; and the result is naturally a tangle of contra
dictions. When we find a document asserting or implying
certain universal and fundamental principles, and at
the same time making statements apparently or
really in contradiction with the same, it is plain that
our choice must be in favour of the more universal
and fundamental principles ; that ambiguous state
ments must be interpreted in agreement with them ;
that contradictory statements must be quietly ignored.
Now, though it was the deepest desire of the
absolutist majority to merge the episcopate into the

THE VATICAN DEFINITION 85
papacy, to eliminate every vestige of power that
might in any way act as a check on Rome's claim
to the monopoly of ecclesiastical power, to juri
dical omnipotence and theological omniscience, yet
for very shame they dared not define boldly what
they desired. They were forced to speak of the
bishops as of co-judges and co-definers ; to give them
an infallibility when "in union with the Pope." As I
have shown before (p. 56), this qualification of the
utter nonentity of the episcopate is meaningless and
merely verbal. Still, it acknowledges tacitly that the
Council has no power to abolish the episcopate ; that,
so far as it seems to do so, it may be ignored.
Again, it is a fundamental principle that Councils
may not introduce new doctrines. Their function is
to check innovation ; to affirm that which was from
the beginning. Therefore the Vatican Council can
not validly claim more for the Pope than the Popes
of the early centuries claimed for themselves ; it
cannot make the Pope "bishop of bishops" in the
sense of our new popular catechisms and theology-
manuals ; in the sense repudiated as foolish and
blasphemous by Gregory the Great.
Again, while a Council may claim to define points
of faith according to the rule of faith, it cannot define
the rule of faith itself ; it cannot define what is pre
supposed to all its definitions. So far, then, as the
Vatican Council seems to suppose that the very rule
of faith itself (on whose childlike simplicity and self-
evidence Your Eminence insists) was unknown or
disputed till it was defined in 1870, it is in patent
contradiction with first principles.

MEDIEVALISM

Again, the Council tells us that the infallibility of
the Pope is not other than that which belongs to the
whole Church.
This may mean either that the Church is said to
be infallible only because she possesses an infallible
Pope— much as a flock of sheep in union with its shep
herd might be called intelligent. Or it may mean
that the Pope — like the Council — speaks ex cathedra
and infallibly only when and so far as he truly
represents and utters the general mind of the Church
— when he gives a judgment that is infallible, just
because he speaks in union with the whole Church —
not as over it or under it, but as organically one with
it. The former meaning is that of the party which
convoked and engineered the Council ; the latter is that
which they desired to but dared not openly exclude.
Lastly, when we are told that the Pope's power is
"ordinary" in every diocese, it may mean that in
each diocese there are two bishops with a right to
ordain, confirm, govern, instruct ; of whom one, the
local bishop, acts merely as the vicar of the universal
"bishop of bishops." And this is what the abso
lutists wanted to but dared not quite say. Or it may
mean that although the bishop is the highest eccle
siastical official in his own diocese (of which he is the
sole and not the joint spouse), yet he is responsible
to the universal Church, whose officer he is, and in
whose name some other bishop (as a fact, the bishop
of Rome) may be commissioned to speak and act.
The immanence of an organism in all its parts does
not mean a doubling of those parts. The local and
the universal Church are not two churches.

THE VATICAN DEFINITION 87
By such criticisms it is not hard to show, with
Bishop Strossmayer, that so far as the intentions of
the absolutists are concerned, the Vatican Decrees
are not worth the paper they are written on ; that
they have failed to commit the Church of Rome to
heresy; that it is possible for a moderately honest
man to subscribe to them without denying his
Catholicism. For this reason, while holding to the absolute
soundness of Dr. Doellinger's Catholicism and sym
pathising with his impatience of dialectical subtleties,
I venture to think that Cardinal Newman's and Bishop
Strossmayer's attitude towards the Vatican Decrees
was the wiser one.

VII
"THE APOSTATE DOELLINGER"
AND since Your Eminence has thought well to
jLX. drag the venerated name of Ignaz von Doellin
ger into your pastoral polemic against Modernism ;
to speak of him as " the apostate Doellinger " ; to
find in him an embodiment of the same Protestant
spirit which you have so curiously discerned in
Modernism, permit me to make a remark or two
about this victim of an intolerant ecclesiastical fac
tion — the greatest, the most learned, the most loyal
Roman Catholic of the last century ; one who elected
to suffer the extremest injury that human malice could
inflict, rather than deny the fundamental principle
that divides the Catholic from the Protestant concep
tion of the Church.
It is (as I have said) the endeavour of the new
theological school to persuade men that there are but
two possible religious positions — the independence
of every individual, or the absolute subjection of all
to a single individual. The latter it calls Catholi
cism ; all who reject it are Protestants. Since the
Greek Churches and the English Church and the
Roman Catholic Modernists reject it, they are all
Protestants ; and therefore Dr. Doellinger was a
88

" THE APOSTATE DOELLINGER" 89
Protestant. A serviceable and simple theology for
first communicants ; but surely a little immature !
No doubt it is expedient in the interests of
absolutism to hold up such defenders of Catholic
liberty to the execration of the credulous multitude,
to brand them exultantly as heretics and apostates.
The listless crowd loves ready-made judgments, and
will not inquire too closely into their value. Doel
linger the Protestant and Apostate ; Tyrrell the far-
off echo of Doellinger — that is so simple, so easy to
remember. The process by which a government buries its
iniquities in oblivion and stamps the memory of its
victims with infamy is more ingenious than credit
able. When Dr. Doellinger defended himself so
conclusively against the charge of heresy and apos
tasy, which of his calumniators attempted to face his
reasons? They knew they had only to assert and
reassert ; and that in course of time, when the man
was dead and the controversy forgotten, the docile,
indifferent multitude would go on speaking of " Doel
linger the Apostate " to the end of time. But, Your
Eminence, there is no prescription for crime; and
injustice is not cured by mere lapse of years. Not
only in the judgment of God, but in that of sober
history the name of Doellinger will be honoured and
revered when those of his insignificant tormentors
shall have passed out of memory — " In memoria
aeterna erit Justus, ab auditione mala non timebit."
An apostate means, both by usage and etymology,
one who stands away or separates himself from
the position he formerly occupied. Dr. Doellinger

90 MEDIEVALISM
could say with absolute truthfulness that, to the end
of his days, he maintained the same idea of the
Church's constitution which he had believed all his
life, and which he had taught openly with full eccle
siastical approval for about thirty years prior to 1870.
You will say : Since he always taught the infalli
bility of ecumenical councils, he apostatised from
that position in refusing the Vatican Decrees.
But a valid and truly ecumenical council must be
unquestionably representative ; perfectly free and
spontaneous ; morally unanimous in its decisions.
Understanding the Vatican Decrees as they are most
generally understood ; not distinguishing, with Stross
mayer, between what the majority wanted to define
and what they actually succeeded in defining ; con
ceiving that the decrees turned the constitution of the
Church upside down,1 rested the whole fabric on the
shoulders of a single individual, abolished the dis
tinctive principle of Catholicism, flung a contemptu
ous defiance in the face of history and tradition, what
wonder if his unshaken faith in the indefectibility of
the Church drove him back on the only other exit
from his perplexity — on the supposition that a coun
cil so notoriously wanting in the three conditions of
1 Dr. Fredrick Nielsen, in his History qf the Papacy in the Nine
teenth Century, tells us how Mgr. Pie delighted the Italian and
Spanish Fathers of the Vatican Council by proving the Papal infalli
bility from the fact that S. Peter was crucified upside down ; ' ' Thus
the Pope, as the head, now bears the whole Church ; but it is he who
bears and not that which is borne, that is infallible." And it is by
such trivialities, by such puns and metaphors and fanciful conceits
that the new theology hopes to batter down the concordant and irre
fragable testimony of history ! Is it not a dangerous admission that
the Vicar of Christ has turned Christianity upside down ?

"THE APOSTATE DOELLINGER" 91
validity might be ignored consistently with Catholic
principles. Even if you think he erred in his
estimate of the facts about the Council, your own
theology will not let you deny that ex hypothesi he
was perfectly justified in his resistance ; and for this
reason, to speak (and with a certain relish) of such a
man as an " apostate " is monstrous. The apostasy
was theirs who broke with the past and tried to com
mit the whole Church to their error ; it was not his
who stood firm as a rock in his old position and let
the angry waters rush by.
Your Eminence, I do not know any theologian,
however ultramontane, who as yet teaches that the
Pope is infallible when he excommunicates, or that
there never can be, or never have been, excommuni
cations unjust and invalid owing to the ignorance or
wickedness of the ecclesiastical judges. The fact
that a man is excommunicate does not justify us in
speaking of him as an apostate in default of other
evidence. The excommunicate is one who is thrown
overboard into the sea. The apostate is one who, by
an act of suicide, leaps overboard. No doubt they
are both in the water, and how they got there seems
to matter little. But truth matters a good deal, and
even an excommunicate is protected by the com
mandment which says: "Thou shalt not bear false
witness against thy neighbour."
When you speak of Dr. Doellinger as an embodi
ment of the Protestant spirit; as infected by the
Protestant atmosphere of a German University ; as
influenced by the revolutionary principles of J. J.
Rousseau, you force me to wonder whether your

92 MEDIEVALISM
manifold preoccupations, practical and philosophical,
have permitted you to read a single line of the author
whom you can so stigmatise. The most superficial
acquaintance with his works shows him as a deeply,
even obstinately, conservative thinker, building his
conclusions solely on the basis of that historical
science of which he was one of the greatest masters.
If, in your eyes, he erred, it was by his too rigid fidelity
to antiquity, his refusal to move on with the innovators.
Doellinger a Protestant! Doellinger a disciple of
Rousseau ! A dog is more like to a fish than he to
your presentment of him. The only way I can ex
plain such an extraordinary aberration of judgment
is that, as I have said, every one is a Protestant, for
Your Eminence, who is not an ultramontane ; that for
you there is no middle position between the absolute
religious independence of each individual and the
absolute subjection of all to a single individual. At
that rate the whole Church has been Protestant for
centuries and only discovered her mistake for certain
in 1870.
No doubt the atmosphere of German universities
counted for something in the formation of Dr.
Doellinger's mind. No doubt it is partly responsible
for the Protestant spirit, the latent Modernism, you
deplore in so many of the German clergy of to-day
in whom the disease has not yet declared itself
openly. But I should have thought that the charac
teristic of German universities was not so much their
Protestantism as their sober regard for facts and
realities ; their respect for the rights of history and
science ; their spirit of patient and laborious investi-

"THE APOSTATE DOELLINGER" 93
gation. The dangers you deplore belong to universi
ties as such, and not as German. In the measure
that an university is free from them it is not an
university at all, but a seminary parading as an uni
versity. If you can find Protestantism in Doellinger, it is
not wonderful that you find it in Modernism. Doel
linger was even less of a Modernist than Newman.
What they both had in common with Modernism
was the Catholic and traditional conception of the
Church's constitution; the supremacy of the orbis
terrarum, of the totality of the Church, over even the
highest of her representatives and interpreters ; over
bishops, councils, and Popes. If Newman, like
Strossmayer, accepted the Vatican Decrees, it was
because he could interpret them in a Catholic sense,
as once he had interpreted the Thirty-nine Articles
of the Church of England. Doellinger found it
easier and less equivocal to go to the root of the
matter and deny the validity of the Council. Again,
Doellinger's acknowledgment of the irrepressible
rights of history is shared by every true Modernist.
But his historical studies did not bring him face to
face with those same facts concerning biblical and
ecclesiastical origins which constitute the special
problem for Modernism. He cannot properly be
called a Modernist who does not belong to the
present generation or feel the burden of its peculiar
perplexities and doubts.
Yet when Your Eminence comes to describe the
soul and essence of Modernism, one looks in vain for
any note to distinguish it from the position of Doel-

94 MEDIEVALISM

linger. It apparently consists simply and only in
Doellinger's contention that "The bishops sit in
Council as witnesses to the faith of their flock ; and
that the resulting definitions should express the
beliefs of the entire collectivity." It consists, you
say, in this " fundamental error of Doellinger, i.e. in
the parent-idea of Protestantism." Was there ever
such a paradox? The principle of Tradition, the
essential idea of Catholicism, put forward as the
essential idea of Protestantism ! When you add
that thus " The agreement of individual minds is
substituted for the direction of authority," can you
not see that to make the agreement oi individual
minds a rule of belief is at once to set up an author
ity over the separate individual minds; that it is to
deny flatly your contention that Modernism " rejects
the doctrinal authority of the Church"? Is it not
plain, as I have insisted, that you can conceive no
alternative between the individualism of anarchy and
that of a dictatorship ; that the Catholic and social
conception of authority has simply vanished from the
ultramontane consciousness ? In no other way is it
possible to account for the hopeless confusion of
your argument. When you put forward my own
view, more or less in my own words, you show by
your italics, already referred to (p. 37), that the con
sentient life and thought of the Church have no more
authority in your eyes than the life and thought of a
private individual ; that it is a summation of zeros.
You argue as though twenty men could not lift a
weight together because none of them could lift it
singly. You forget that the oneness which Christ

"THE APOSTATE DOELLINGER" 95
desired for his Church and which was to be the note
of her truth and authority, was an " agreement of
individual minds " — " That they all may be one . . .
so that the world may believe that thou hast sent
me.

VIII
THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE
OF PROTESTANTISM
AND now when I turn to examine this " Spirit of
u Protestantism " which you discover in its
direct antithesis, the principle of Tradition, I cannot
see that your description of it is at all coherent. For,
as it manifests itself in Modernism " it consists," you
say, "essentially in affirming that the religious soul
should draw the object and motive of its faith from
itself and from itselfalone": in the "rejection of any
revealed communication from without." But on Your
Eminence's own showing this is as false of Protes
tantism as it is of Modernism. For you tell us
presently that Protestants draw their faith from the
Bible, which they certainly regard as a " revealed
communication from without" and as the word of
God. They differ, therefore, from Catholics only in that
they select certain classical pages from the book of
Tradition and reject a great deal of the rest. In
both cases it is by an act of personal independent
judgment (aided, no doubt, by grace) that the external
rule of faith is accepted and its utterances then inter
preted. It is by such a personal judgment that the
96

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF PROTESTANTISM 97
Catholic accepts the authority of his priests, and the
Protestant the authority of his Bible. It is by such a
personal judgment that the Catholic interprets what
his priest tells him, and the Protestant what his
Bible tells him. From such a measure of "private
judgment " there is no more escape for the Catholic
than for the Bible Protestant. It in no way implies
that impossible individualism, that religious solipsism,
which you ascribe to Modernism. Such an in
dividualism has no doubt been professed by certain
quietists, Catholic as well as Protestant. But it has
never been practised, for the simple reason that apart
from society and social tradition a man can no more
make a religion of his own than he can make a
language of his own. The only question is, whether
our religious mind is to be formed by society at large,
or by special societies or churches set apart for the
promotion of that particular social interest. With
insignificant exceptions, Protestantism has always
acted on the latter supposition ; it has formed
organised communities, with common professions
and observances, for . the purpose of preaching the
Christian tradition as contained in the Sacred Scrip
tures, and of administering the rites of Baptism and
Holy Communion.
When you tell us that " A Protestant Church is
necessarily invisible " I ask you : " Is the Church
of England (which for you is purely Protestant)
invisible ? Is the Lutheran Church, the Presby
terian Church, the Methodist Church invisible ? "
If you speak of the outward body, they are as
visible as the Church of Rome ; if you speak of the

98 MEDIEVALISM

inward unity symbolised by the outward body, the
Roman Church is as invisible as they are. God
alone knows who are true Catholics in conviction
and heart. Perhaps not half of those within the
visible body ; perhaps millions of those outside :
"Multi intus sunt qui f oris videntur" says Augustine,"
and the converse is not less true — Many are outside
who seem to be inside.
The pure subjectivism which you imagine to be
the characteristic of Modernism and to derive from
Protestantism is repudiated by both alike. A certain
objective rule of faith, a certain personal acceptance
and interpretation of the rule, are common to Protes
tantism, Catholicism, and Ultramontanism.
They differ only as to the objective rule, which is
the Bible, for Protestants ; the Church, including the
Pope, for Catholics ; the Pope, excluding the Church,
for Ultramontanes. The personal judgment by which
the rule of faith is accepted and interpreted is not a
private or subjective judgment. Principles, the pri
mary dictates of Conscience and Reason, are not
private opinions, but the most universal and objective
of all judgments. The true distinction between
Protestantism and Catholicism is that, for the former,
personal interpretation is applied to the Scriptures ;
for the latter it is applied to Tradition. In trying,
therefore, to identify Protestantism and Modernism
Your Eminence betrays a complete misunderstand
ing of both one and the other.
It is to my Protestant education that Your Emi
nence traces my Modernism. You say that my kin
ship with Doellinger's Protestantism is "in no wise

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF PROTESTANTISM 99
surprising, for Tyrrell is a convert whose early educa
tion was Protestant." I submit that nothing could
be more surprising than that an education in a
certain direction should lead to a development in the
diametrically opposite direction. Either you know
nothing of my antecedents or you pay a prodigious
compliment to the vigour of Protestant principles.
Perhaps you have read of me in certain Roman
papers as an " antico pastore protestante," as one long
devoted to the cause of militant anti-popery ; then
suddenly struck down by the blinding light of ultra
montane theology ; and now finally returning again
like the washed sow to her wallowing in the mire.
Nothing could be further from historical truth. Till
the age of fifteen, I took as little interest in religious
questions as any other healthy-minded schoolboy.
It was from a very crude study of Bishop Butler's
Analogy that I woke to a dim sense of there
being a great and pressing world-problem to be
solved for myself and for others, either positively or
negatively. The same reasons that made me hope
for the positive solution made me also hope that the
most widespread and ancient form of Christianity
might after all be found in possession of that solu
tion. Having no adequate idea of the essential
principles and differences of Protestantism and
Catholicism, my objections to the latter being of a
merely popular and superficial kind, it is not wonder
ful that at the mature age of eighteen I was ready
for the step that cost a scholar like Newman half a
lifetime of consideration. Not one of the reasons on
which I acted do I now acknowledge as of the

MEDIEVALISM

slightest validity. They were those of the ordinary
anti-Protestant apologetic of our proselytisers — tricks
of exegesis and dialectical legerdemain. The present
foundations of my Catholicism are far other. At
nineteen I was a Jesuit, and from that time forward
my one preoccupation has been to justify the Catholic
religion for myself and for others. It was in pursuit
of this end that I gradually got beneath the surface
and learnt, at one and the same time, the true
natures and differences of Catholicism and Protes
tantism. As you say in your schools, " the science
of contraries is one and the same science." And
what I gradually learnt was, that my first apprehen
sion of Catholicism as concentrated into the person
of the Pope was theological heresy and historical
ignorance; that the true and distinctive principle
dividing Catholicism from Protestantism was that
which barely escaped condemnation at the Vatican
Council, and for adhesion to which Dr. Doellinger
was excommunicated by Pius IX. And it is to my
Protestant antecedents — to my six or seven years of
purely passive unreasoning Protestantism — that you
trace the conviction that now makes me a Catholic
and prevents that return to the Church of my bap
tism which in so many ways would be such an un
speakable relief to me. For "Who can dwell with
perpetual burnings " ?
What ! thirty years of my reasoning life spent in
defence of the Catholic system and twenty-six of
them under the tutelage of the Society of Jesus were
not enough to obliterate the impression made by
Protestantism on my schoolboy mind !

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF PROTESTANTISM 101
That were, indeed, a high testimony to the vigour
of Protestantism as contrasted with Catholicism.
No, Your Eminence, it was not from Protestantism
that I learnt the principle : Securus judicat orbis
terrarum. But while holding no brief for that
religion I will not deny my indebtedness to it. If
there are certain other Catholic principles by which
I continually judge and condemn my own conduct,
their vigour in my conscience is, I think, due to the
fact that with Protestants they are living forces and
with Catholics they are for the most part dead
formulae. The rights of authority and the rights of
personality ; the development of the community and
the development of the individual, are not conflicting
but complementary ideas. If Protestantism has for
gotten one side of religious life, Roman Catholicism
has forgotten the other. " The Protestant nations are
sick," you say. Sick they are ; but who has sickened
them? Who has made their stomachs rise against
a conception of authority so evil that the risk of
anarchy were preferable? Who has banished the
Catholic conception into complete oblivion so as to
force men to choose between pure individualism and
an ecclesiastical dictatorship ? " The Protestant
nations are sick," but the Catholic nations are dying.
What has sickened those is killing these. Where
the principle of unity and authority has been unduly
weakened it may be restored. At all events the
forces of personality are there, waiting to be organised
and focussed. There is a rich chaos for creative
power to work upon. The sickness is not unto
death but that the glory of God may be revealed

MEDIEVALISM

in a new life. But where authority has eliminated
personality, it has preyed on its own vitals. Active
co-operation in, and responsibility for, the corporate
life are what constitute personality and citizenship.
Of such responsibility and co-operation, the laity,
then the lower clergy, finally the bishops themselves,
have been deprived by a system of centralisation
that leaves the Pope the sole and only responsible
personality in the Church — or rather, outside and
above it. The fruit is that utter decay of interest
in the welfare of the body on the part of its passive
and irresponsible members, of which you complain
in Belgium, and which is the harbinger of such a dis
ruption as we observe in other Catholic countries.
For this reason it seems to me that the Protestant
nations, where religion is either a personal interest
and responsibility or nothing, are more curable than
Catholic nations where the laity count it virtue to
throw the whole responsibility on to the clergy ; the
clergy, on to the bishops ; the bishops, on to the
Pope. When I find Your Eminence discovering Pro
testantism in Dr. Doellinger, and of course in myself,
I cannot help wondering whether you really know
anything about Protestantism beyond the popular
Catholic caricatures, which are about as discerning as
the Protestant caricatures of Catholicism. If you so
misunderstand what lies at your own door, are you
likely to understand what is so much further removed
from you ? Thus I find you gravely relating on the
authority of an anonymous convert from the English
Church that somewhere about 1895 a bishop who

THE SUPPOSED ESSENCE OF PROTESTANTISM 103
had rebuked an incumbent for preaching against the
Divinity of Christ was notoriously disavowed by his
archbishop. Any one with an elementary know
ledge of the English Church and of the character
and views of the archbishops of the last thirty years,
would know that such a story is a tissue of the
wildest improbabilities. You fancy that it requires
boldness for an English clergyman to confess rather
than to deny the divinity of Christ, and for a bishop
to uphold him — as though it were some sort of ritual
istic extravagance ! Had your mind not been a
tabula rasa ready to believe anything and everything
about an utterly unknown country, you would have
severely questioned this traveller's tale ; you would
have felt the need of inquiring carefully before
making so defamatory a charge against men in such
positions — against your fellow-Christians, not to
say, your fellow-bishops. Who does not know this
bitter type of theological convert eager to burn what
he has adored and to adore what he has burned,
regardless of truth, justice, and charity ; who stuffs
the credulous ears of his new-found brethren with
what they will be most pleased to hear, most willing
to believe? Is it simply from sources of that kind
that you draw your inferences about so eminent a
religious institution ?
I can only say that if I am as sensible as ever of
the limitations of the English Church, I have come
more and more to understand and appreciate her
manifold excellences. We have much to learn from
her. If she is poor where we are rich, she is rich
where we are poor. There are reasons (not the

104 MEDIEVALISM
sophistical reasons of popular controversy) which
forbid my return to her communion and keep me
where I am, suspended mid-air. Frankly, I regret
their existence, and have done my best to get over
them. All this I say lest in repudiating the charge of
Protestantism which you bring against me I should
seem to share Your Eminence's curious if not con
temptuous estimate of Protestantism.

IX
A SUPPOSED LEADER OF MODERNISM
AS already observed, I do not complain of your
. summary of my views, although your italicised
lines show that you read me upside down and
fancy you are dealing with a plea for the crudest and
most impossible individualism. I must, however,
take exception to some of your incidental remarks.
In the first place, in choosing me as the represen
tative modernist and the most authoritative exponent
of that school, you do me far too great an honour,
and exaggerate the importance that would attach
to your refutation of me. I am not conscious
of having contributed a single idea of my own
to that interpretation of Catholicism. I have no
claim to be an expert in criticism, nor in ex
egesis, nor in history, nor in philosophy, and
am at best a careful follower of the results ob
tained by others. He who can make none, can
sometimes tell good music from bad when he
hears it. I think I know true metal from false by
the ring. And so, with the reluctant sacrifice of
many a prepossession and prejudice and soothing
hope and cherished dream and darling idol, I have let
myself be taught by abler and more learned men who
105

106 MEDIEVALISM

had won the battle long before I appeared on the
field. My work has been one of "vulgarisation " — of
trying to illustrate and clarify for others ideas that I
myself at first found strange, perplexing, and difficult.
What has pushed me into unwelcome prominence
and made me a "leader" for the journalists and their
readers is simply the short-sighted indiscretion of
ecclesiastical authorities. Had they acted towards me
with the commonest diplomatic prudence, not to say
justice and charity, at any time these two last years I
should never have been heard of. Again and again
they have forced me to speak when I would far rather
have been silent. It is Your Eminence's Lenten
Pastoral that now pushes me into print once more.
Could you not have left me alone? Had you not
already occasioned enough trouble for me ? Nothing
is more repugnant to my whole nature than that
violation of the intellectual liberty of others involved
in the r61e of the proselytiser or leader. I had rather
have a white elephant than a disciple or a penitent or
a convert. But even if I were a leader, to judge so
diversified and complex a movement as Modernism
by any one of its representatives is most unfair to all
the rest. I represent myself alone. Abbe Loisy is
impatient of me as a dreamer and mystic. Pere
Laberthonniere finds me guilty of an occult scholas
ticism. One friend complains of my democratic,
another of my conservative and aristocratic sym
pathies. With all due respect to the Encyclical
Pascendi, Modernists wear no uniform nor are they
sworn to the defence of any system; still less of
that which His Holiness has fabricated for them.

X
HIS INDIFFERENCE TO HISTORY
AND DOGMA
AGAIN, you explain my aberrations by the fact
1~\. that I have been " always and almost ex
clusively preoccupied with the inward life of the
spirit ; and little, if at all, with traditional dogmatic
teaching and with ecclesiastical history." Nothing
could be further from the truth. My preoccupation
has been almost exclusively with traditional dogmatic
teaching and with the problem of reconciling it, on
the one hand, with the exigencies of the inward life ;
and on the other, with the recent results of critical
Church history. As to dogmatic theology it is no
boast to assert that I have nothing to learn from
Rome or Louvain ; for a man might say that and
not say much. When I have departed from scholas
tic conclusions in my writings I have not done so
through ignorance, as you charitably suppose, but
deliberately and consciously from a sense of their
ineptitude. As to Church history it is true I am no expert.
But the results about which experts are agreed have
been almost my chief preoccupation, and constitute,
to my mind, the essential and most characteristic
107

108 MEDIEVALISM

feature of the problem which Modernism has to deal
with. There is, I know, a certain school of mis
called Modernists for whom the historical difficul
ties are altogether secondary or even non-existent ;
whose reconstructive efforts are inspired by a sense
of the inadequacy of scholastic philosophy as a
vehicle of Christian thought; who feel the urgent
need of a religious philosophy which shall be a faith
ful, experimentally verifiable analysis of the implica
tions of religious life and action. With this school I
am in profound agreement. But it is of long lineage,
and not of yesterday — a revival of the pre-scholastic
tradition. If to the superficial it savours of Kant, it
is because both schools agree against scholasticism,
and because, for that reason, much of the Kantian
terminology is convenient and appropriate to the
Philosophy of Action. But what the latter has in
common with Kant is as old as S. Augustine, and
older. It is the historical and not the philosophical diffi
culty that inspires the reconstructive effort of the
Modernist pure and simple. It is the irresistible
facts concerning the origin and composition of the
Old and New Testaments ; concerning the origin of
the Christian Church, of its hierarchy, its institutions,
its dogmas ; concerning the gradual development of
the Papacy; concerning the history of religion in
general— that create a difficulty against which the
synthesis of scholastic theology must be and is
already shattered to pieces. Gladly as I welcome
the more living and flexible syntheses of the Philo
sophy of Action, yet so far as they ignore or evade

HIS INDIFFERENCE TO HISTORY AND DOGMA 109
any of these inconvenient facts or attempt to dictate
to history in the old style, I have no patience with
them. I will not listen to any argument ex incon-
venienti; " facts are what they are ; and their conse
quences will be what they will be."
Hence, though it is not in my department to bring
forward or discuss these disconcerting facts, they are
before my eyes in all that I write, and guide the
course of my pen as so many rocks and reefs that I
must get round or get over as best I may, but with
which I must never come into collision. My one
preoccupation is to wind my sinuous way between
them so as to save all that is best in my cargo of
traditional dogmatic teaching. Hence your assump
tion that I am little or in no wise preoccupied with
traditional dogmatic teachings or with the history of
the Church is as far from the truth as could well be.

XI
HIS KANTIAN PREPOSSESSIONS
NEXT, Your Eminence proceeds to show that
what you call my " system " is powerfully in
fluenced by the Protestant philosophy of Kant, with
its theory of religious certitude. But surely the
notion that God is attained, not by science or syllo
gisms, but by action and experience is considerably
older than Kant. I do not suppose that Pascal or
S. Augustine, or the great Catholic mystics, or
S. Paul, or the Fourth Gospel were influenced by
Kant. To imagine that the Protestantism of my
boyhood was poisoned with Kantian infiltrations is
amusing for any one who knows the dry-as-dust,
hard scholastic rationalism of the old-fashioned
Anglican theology. One might as well seek Kant
in the Pentateuch.
As far as the "method of immanence" is con
cerned — the method that seeks religious truth by
action and not by speculation — I am able to put my
finger on the exact point or moment in my ex
perience from which my " immanentism " took its
rise. In his " Rules for the Discernment of Spirits,"
borrowed, of course, from the great Catholic mystics,
Ignatius of Loyola says, " For as consolation is con-

HIS KANTIAN PREPOSSESSIONS

trary to desolation, so the thoughts that spring from
Consolation are contrary to those that spring from
Desolation." And all throughout the same rules he
assumes that our thoughts and beliefs are determined
by, and dependent on, our moral dispositions and
affective states. Again, in his rules for making an
Election and getting to know the will of God, clear
vision is everywhere made to depend on the right
ordering of the affections. Indeed, his Exercises are
a discipline of the affections, a purification of the
heart, with a view to a better knowledge of God and
his will. Again, Ignatius is said to have himself
used that method which he recommends to us for
finding out the will of God, i.e. by observing whether
a given resolution is persistently accompanied by
spiritual peace or by spiritual restlessness — thus
using the affective states of the soul as a means of
guidance, as feelers by which we can grope our way
from point to point. Then he tells us that it is God's
prerogative to cause these affective states in the soul
without any previous perception or knowledge —
states which, he has already told us, give rise to in
spired thoughts, and furnish a criterion of our own
uninspired guesses at Divine truth.
And now, Your Eminence, if you will compare
what I have written in various places from first to
last on the nature and mode of Divine revelation
with these principles borrowed by Ignatius from the
mystical tradition of the Church, you will perhaps
believe me when I say that I learnt the " method of
immanentism," not from Kant, nor from the Philo
sophy of Action, nor from Protestantism, but solely

MEDIEVALISM

from the Spiritual Exercises of the Founder of the
Jesuits. He, in his turn, derived it from the great masters
of that mystical method which the Encyclical Pas
cendi has swept away in the confusion of its on
slaught against Modernism. It is to be hoped that
the Book of the Exercises which has been, more
than once, before the Inquisition on the charge of
Protestant "illuminism" will be subjected yet once
more to careful examination.
If I owe much of my Modernism to S. Thomas
Aquinas, I owe still more to Ignatius Loyola. Nova
et Vetera and Hard Sayings (this latter, the frag
ments of a projected volume on the Spiritual
Exercises) are rightly admitted by the discerning to
contain the substance of all my later aberrations.
They were written before I had met with or read or
even heard of any of my subsequent Modernist
guides and masters. These only helped me to shape
and fix ideas that were formless and floating, and
gradually to separate the two systems — scholastic
and pre-scholastic — that were so hopelessly tangled
in my mind.
It is therefore superfluous to make Kant respon
sible for views older than scholasticism and as old as
the Gospel.

XII
HIS DARWINIAN PREPOSSESSIONS
BUT besides Kant you find another godfather
for Modernism in Darwin. " It has also been
influenced without doubt by the obsession, as wide
spread as it is unreflecting, which inclines so many
clever people to apply arbitrarily and a priori to
history, and more especially to the history of our
sacred books and dogmatic beliefs, that hypothesis
of evolution which, far from being a general law of
human thought, is not even verified in the narrow
field of the origin of animal and vegetal species."
What Your Eminence supposes to be a climax in
this last clause is really an anti-climax. The idea of
evolution was not derived from the Darwinian hypo
thesis and then extended to the mental and social
evolution of man, but contrariwise. Human evolu-'
tion is not an hypothesis, but a self-evident fact. I
have only to look within myself to see that my mind
has grown as really as my body has grown from
embryo to maturity. It is not merely that I have
added thought to thought, experience to experience,
as one adds stones to a growing heap, each abiding
unchanged in itself. As a psychologist you cannot,
I am sure, accept this atomistic and mechanical
i 113

n4 MEDIEVALISM

notion of our mental growth. Every new ingredient
changes the character of the whole compound
through and through. If I use the same words to
day as formerly, the thoughts they evoke are neces
sarily richer and fuller, pregnant with new relations
and connections ; they have developed with the
whole mental organism in which they live and grow.
The Catechism cannot mean for me at forty what it
meant for me at my first communion. Either it has
come to mean more, or it has come to mean nothing.
The belt of the boy will not girdle the man ; it must
either stretch or break.
And though not evident in the same way, namely,
by a moment's introspection, yet no whit less evident
is the fact of the evolution of the collective mind.
' It is not by mere addition but by transformation
that man passes from savagery to civilisation. The
man-eater is no longer in our midst ; he has been
absorbed and transformed into something higher.
The evolution of civilisation, of the collective life
and mind and sentiment, is as evident as the growth
of any individual plant or animal. It has not the
slightest connection with, or dependence upon, the
Darwinian hypothesis. The former is a matter of
observation ; the latter, of inference and analogy.
You cannot surely be ignorant of the fact that the
critico-historical method was in existence and had
been applied to the Sacred Scriptures long before
Darwin's time, and by men who held the ancient
belief as to the origin of species.
When you say that Modernists have approached
the history of the Bible and of dogma with a view

HIS DARWINIAN PREPOSSESSIONS 115
to verify the Darwinian hypothesis, you are true to
the Encyclical Pascendi, but not to facts. You are
yourself guilty of a most arbitrary and a priori
judgment. Had you studied the critics with any sort
of seriousness, you could never speak thus. That the
Bible and the Church were not created complete by
a Divine fiat, that they have grown with the growth
of man, is not a matter of hypothesis and inference
but of observation. History catches them in the
act. Those who live on the surface of the earth may
fancy it was always thus ; the geologists who dig
down see that it has grown. So as to the Bible and
the Church ; history has dug down and unearthed
truths unsuspected by a priori scholasticism. It has
disclosed, not a series of types whose genetic relation
is a guess, but serial stages in the growth of what
no one denies to be one and the same individual
object. It is not as though there now were several
Christologies which Modernism had traced to a
common root. It is simply that history shows us '
our one present Christology to have passed through »
various stages. One need only look into Petavius
to see that it is so. Where does hypothesis come
in ? What has Darwinism got to do with it ? The
influence of Darwinism on Richard Simon, the
founder of Biblical Criticism, or on Petavius, is
about as conceivable as that of Kant on Pascal or
S. Augustine.

XIII
HIS INDIVIDUALIST PREPOSSESSIONS
OF your third and chiefest cause of Modernism
I have already spoken — of "that Protestant
individualism which is substituted for the Catholic
conception of a teaching authority established by
our Lord, and commissioned to tell us what under
pain of eternal damnation we are bound to believe."
Modernism, I have shown, adheres to the ancient
Catholic and Apostolic conception of a teaching
authority belonging to the Church as a whole, by
which she is bound to preach the coming of God's
Kingdom on earth, and to guide men by precept,
and still more by example, to that repentance and
new life without which none can enter into God's
Kingdom. Modernism does not believe in the
religious independence of every isolated individual ;
nor does it believe in the absolute subjection of all
to the private will and judgment of a privileged
individual who can impose theological definitions
upon the rest under pain of eternal damnation.
It believes in the Church as being alone, in the full
sense, Christ's Vicar upon earth, commissioned to
teach what he taught and no more ; and in the way
that he taught it, and not otherwise ; commissioned
* 116

HIS INDIVIDUALIST PREPOSSESSIONS 117
to be what he was, the revelation of a new life, the
inspiration of a new hope, the communication of a
new strength. The light he has commissioned her
to let shine before men is not the light of science
or metaphysics or even theology, but the light of that
revelation of God which Christ himself was. Out
side the sphere of that revelation she has no divine
doctrinal authority whatever. The Kingdom and
the Way as preached by Christ himself is the entire
depositum fidei. Nothing obscure ; nothing abstruse ;
in a sense, nothing new. A problem not for the
intellect, but for the will and the heart. The Gospel
is Power and not Knowledge. Strength is what
men lack and not light : " To wish is present with
me ; but to perform I find not. Wretched man that
I am who shall deliver me?" — that is the problem
which Christ came to solve and which the Church
has authority to deal with in his name.
Within this sphere of her authorised teaching the
Church is one and undivided and unfailing — in neces-
sariis unitas. Outside it, she is divided and change
able and fallible — in dubiis libertas. She cannot be
indifferent to theological truth, to the intellectual
analysis of her own life, any more than to intellectual
truth in. general. She is bound to understand her
self so as to direct herself as efficiently as possible.
But such self-understanding is not revelation. It is
no part of Christ's preaching ; no condition of enter
ing into the Kingdom of Heaven. If we live the
life, it matters not that we fail in its analysis, which
is always tentative and perfectible — in dubiis libertas.
If theology has been ever a sword of division, a

n8 MEDIEVALISM
principle of disintegration, it is because its concepts
and definitions have been confounded with that
Divine revelation of which they are but the human
analysis; it is because Christology has been put in
the place of the living Christ and Church theory in
that of the living Church ; it is because that penalty
of spiritual loss which is the natural and inevitable
consequence of unbelief in the Gospel of the Kingdom
and the Way, has been arbitrarily attached to theo
logical error.
Men are naturally intolerant about their opinions,
especially in matters remote and uncertain where
the opinions are more wholly the children and
creatures of their own will and judgment. It is for
religion and morality to assuage, not to foster, this
egotistic ferocity and to counsel liberty in open
questions. But let hell be the penalty of theological
error ; let man's natural intolerance receive a divine
consecration and blessing, and the result can only
be what it has been — hatred, persecution, division
and subdivision. Liberty, and not compulsion, is
the only way to secure a healthy progress towards
that free theological unity which, though not a neces
sity, is a primary desideratum for the well-being of
the Church. Had no more ever been imposed as of
necessity than what Christ imposed — the Kingdom,
the Way, the Life; had faith in the living person
ality of Christ not been confounded with intellectual
assent to Christological speculations, the whole world
might have been Christian by this time. But as it
is, the Gospel with all its theological paraphernalia
easily gets tangled in the brain before it reaches the

HIS INDIVIDUALIST PREPOSSESSIONS 119
heart. Not till the Church is content with unity in
necessaries, not till she grants liberty in uncertainties,
will she attain unity either in these or in those.
In the propagation of the Gospel, in the work of
revelation, the Church possesses the same sort of
spiritual authority as Christ himself. And so far
as her appointed officials speak really, and not
merely by a sort of legal fiction, in her name, their
voice is hers. They are not merely her " delegates,"
for in the measure that they truly represent her they
are not distinct from her, but are part of the very
Church which speaks, and co-depositaries of her
spiritual authority. A delegate does not identify
himself with the message he carries. Outside the
sphere of her divine mission — in matters of science
and metaphysics and economics and politics they
are as other men, only perhaps with a deeper obliga
tion of fidelity in the quest of truth.

XIV
MODERNISM AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM
" r I AHE doctrines condemned by the Encyclical,"
A Your Eminence goes on to say, " are such as
to repel the Christian conscience by their bare men
tion." Naturally enough. For atheism, agnosticism,
and materialism are among the reckless charges
there laid against Modernism. But the strange thing
is that such repulsive conclusions should issue from
such attractive principles : " There is something se
ductive in the Modernist tendencies which makes an
impression on certain minds otherwise attached to
the faith of their baptism. Whence comes this?
How is it that Modernism has such an attraction for
the young ? "
It is indeed a serious problem. If the young are
with us, we have only to wait. A generation more
and the whole world will be with us. The young
are with us because, as you imply, they belong to the
dawning and not to the declining age. The two
deepest characteristics of the new order are the
scientific spirit and the democratic movement — a
new conception of truth and a new conception of
authority and government.
So far as Modernism is, in these respects, with the

MODERNISM AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM 121
age and the Encyclical against it, the young are
drawn to the former and repelled by the latter. You
therefore proceed to show that the Encyclical in no
way interferes with scientific liberty, and that, even if
Democracy be at all permissible in politics, yet the
Church is by Divine and positive institution an abso
lute monarchy or spiritual dictatorship, and must be
taken or left as such.
I have already noted (p. 35) that though Modern
ism is not synonymous with modern thought, yet the
condemnation of the former may entail that of the
latter. The condemnation of a synthesis may fall on
one or both of the united terms or on their amalga
mation. The assertion that the Encyclical Pascendi inter
feres with scientific liberty is, you tell us, a calumni
ous accusation of an infidel and hostile press. You
appeal in proof to what Belgian Catholics have done
for science — though the proof demands that you
should confine your appeal to what they have done
with approval since the Encyclical of last September ;
for it is the effects of the Encyclical that are in
question. You tell us that " the representatives of the philo
sophical and theological schools of our universities,
and of our free faculties and seminaries and religious
congregations have unanimously and spontaneously
declared and proved, by a document signed by each
of them, that the Pope has, by his courageous En
cyclical, saved the Faith and protected science."
Ah ! this spontaneity and unanimity ! If it were
only a little less it would be so much more ! Being

MEDIEVALISM

what it is, it is just nothing at all. What would be
the lot of the unfortunate professor, or teacher, or
seminarian, or student, or monk, or nun, who, by re
fusing to sign such a declaration, were to be exposed
to all the petty persecutions prescribed by the En
cyclical in question, and eagerly put in execution by
all the bigotry, jealousy, ambition, and sycophancy now
let loose on the Church to her shame and humiliation ?
Do we not all know, as well as Your Eminence, how
these unanimous and spontaneous expressions of
adhesion and satisfaction are, if not ordered, yet at
least "expected" of every bishop under pain of
Rome's displeasure — and how promptly they have
been forthcoming? Have we not learnt and blushed
over the secret of the spontaneous unanimity of the
French episcopate on certain recent occasions, — over
the double insincerity of those who could exact and
accept, and of those who could proffer, a lip-service
as to whose value not even the simplest are deceived ?
Once more, let me remind you that an engineered
uniformity has nothing to do with spiritual unity ;
that to be significant, the concurrence of witnesses
must be absolutely free and independent ; that a
man is not free who is threatened with persecution,
calumny, disgrace, and starvation. All that this
signed declaration proves is that Belgian Catholics
are thoroughly drilled and centralised ; that they are
passive and plastic as putty in the hands of their
priests. You think this a symptom of life ; I think
it a harbinger of death and decay. I know your
drill-sergeants too well to have any doubt about it.
It is only a corpse that will obey like a corpse ; only

MODERNISM AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM 123
a stick that will obey like a stick. I am therefore
not impressed by your signed declaration ; nor am
I so sure as Your Eminence that Belgium has
not its little muster of timid Modernists meeting in
some upper chamber for fear of the Jews. It is
hard to believe that the youth of the country are
"attracted" towards Modernism and yet rest im-
potently in their velleity; that so much tendency
never arrives at any result. It must be, I think,
that your "Vigilance Committee" is not quite
properly organised, or has not yet grown expert in
methods of detection and espionage.
Those who, like Your Eminence, believe that the
object of Faith is a revealed theology, a body of
divinely guaranteed terms and definitions and state
ments, final and valid for all ages and nations, are
quite consistent in holding that the Encyclical, far
from interfering with scientific truth and liberty, is
their friend and protector. For the solidarity of
theology with other sciences and with the totality
of knowledge is not to be denied. If God's word
vouches for any one science that science must be
the rule and criterion of all the rest. To be under
its control is not slavery but liberty — liberty from
error. Nay, it must be a cause of rapid and
fruitful progression. While an unaided astronomy
or geology or history is delayed and weakened by
uncertainties ; that which derives were it only three
or four fixed and infallible truths, from Scripture or
Tradition, has a solid foundation to build upon, and
builds itself up rapidly and securely. Such for
centuries was the supposed relation of Catholic

1

124 MEDIEVALISM
science to revelation. Such it is still for Your
Eminence and for the Encyclical Pascendi. Such
it must necessarily be if scientific propositions form,
however implicitly, part of the substance of Divine
Revelation. But if they do not ; if revelation be
not theology, the bondage of science to the fallible
theological conceptions of a past age is a bondage
ndeed, an insuperable obstacle to progress.
Can we say, on looking back over the history of
its development, that the control of science by a
revealed theology has been a stimulus and not an
obstacle? that since it has thrown, off that control
it has languished ? that it has declined steadily from
the sixteenth to the twentieth century — more es
pecially in Protestant countries ? Can we say that
what Your Eminence would call " the teaching of the
Church " enforced under all sorts of pains and penal
ties, temporal and eternal, has notably hastened and
facilitated the discovery of truth as to the nature
and history of the world and of man? Is it not
just in the name of revelation that the whole
authority of the Church over conscience has been
brought to bear against one science after another,
so as, if possible, to strangle them in their birth ? If
the Church had had her way, if Reason had not
refused to listen to her outside the narrow limits
of her teaching commission, our scientific conceptions
to-day would be those of the Bible. We should
believe that the world was flat or concave, and not
spherical ; or that if spherical, there were no
antipodes ; that the stars were hung out like lamps
night by night ; that the sun swept round the earth

MODERNISM AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM 125
day by day ; that man was created only six thousand
years ago ; that fossils were created just as and
where we find them ; that eclipses and meteors were
miraculous portents ; that the multiplicity of lan
guages was a preternatural phenomenon; that all
races derived from the three sons of Noe; that all
animal species had existed in one spot and were
represented in Noe's ark ; that the whole world had
been submerged and drained dry again in a couple
of years. We should still be burning old women on
the charge of the evil eye or of intercourse with the
devil ; we should be treating epilepsy, hysteria, and
insanity as diabolic possession ; we should be using
prayer and exorcism instead of medicine, surgery,
and hygiene ; we should be ringing consecrated bells
against storm-demons and earth-shakers ; the chemist
would be a magician ; the money-lender an ex
communicate. The men who first challenged these positions were
condemned and energetically opposed in the name of
revelation as heretics and blasphemers. Had they
been free-thinkers, such opposition had been far less
effectual. But they were believers who accepted the
current confusion between revelation and theology;
who knew nothing of the distinction (forced on us so
slowly) between the experiential and the intellectual
values of the sacred writings ; or who, at most, tried
vainly to deny the solidarity of theology with other
sciences, and to separate the scientific from the
theological teaching of the Bible. And, therefore,
just because of their belief, their conscience Was en
listed against their reason and their senses ; and

126 MEDIEVALISM

their energy was paralysed by the illusion of an
imaginary contradiction between truth and truth,
between revelation and science. It was not purely
the fear of ecclesiastical tyrants, but also the fear of
God and of a perplexed conscience that made men,
like Galileo, retract a known truth in deference to
what they believed to be a revealed truth. Thus
it was that for centuries the scientific efforts of
' Catholics were checked and frustrated by theology
posing as revelation. As soon as that yoke was
shaken off, science rushed forward by leaps and
bounds. But all that, you will say, is past history ; nor
were Protestants any better than Catholics in those
days of general obscurantism. Now everything is
changed. The Church puts no fetters on physics or
physiology, or geology, or astronomy. We are free
as the wind ; we are abreast and ahead of free
thinkers in all these subjects.
Yes, but who won you that freedom and at what
cost? Was it the Church and the theologians, or
was it those whom theology opposed and persecuted,
and by whom it was beaten back again and again and
finally reduced to a sullen ungracious silence? Is it
due to a change of principle on the part of theology,
or to a loss of power ? On the part of Protestants it
is largely due to a change of principle. But when we
turn to the Encyclical Pascendi, we find the old
principle reasserted in its crudest form ; we find the
scientific and historic infallibility of the Bible affirmed
under pain of making God a liar. We are bound
down to all the scientific and historic implications of

MODERNISM AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM 127
scripture and defined dogma ; we are told that
science must be ruled by scholastic theology and
that such rule is for its benefit and protection. The
principle is not changed. Moreover, it is to be applied
vigorously just to that science which is the most
characteristic and important of our day — to the
scientific criticism of history. Theology, learning
nothing from her past defeats, is to contest this new
field on the old lines, with the old weapons; by
accusations of blasphemy and heresy ; by delations
and inquisitions and petty persecutions. The very
tone of the sophistical attack on the critico-historical
method — now violent and injurious; now supercilious
and satirical — echoes that of the official refutations
of the new astronomy of Galileo.
When, therefore, you assure the youth of Belgium
that the Encyclical leaves scientific liberty intact, you
must be thinking of the natural sciences against
which its principles are now simply helpless, and
which theology has wisely learned to leave alone ;
and you must be forgetting the one science upon
which the whole Modernist controversy turns and
which is condemned along with Modernism. Can
you deny that the criticism of the Bible and of
Church history is a science ? Can you deny that this
science — the most fruitful and important of our age —
is condemned root and branch by the Pope's Ency
clical ? Can you deny that the whole document is a
reassertion of the principle by which freedom of all
science is inevitably condemned? If the Church
now had her way, if she had the control of all educa
tion in her hands, what would be to-day the prospects

128 MEDIEVALISM

j of historical science — of history controlled by the
conclusions and presuppositions of the Summa
Theologica of S. Thomas ? It is, of course, because
you sincerely believe in a divinely revealed infallible
history that you can persuade yourself that the con
trol of revelation must further and not hinder true
criticism. But I doubt if the youth of Belgium will
long share Your Eminence's persuasion.
When you appeal to the superior efficiency of the
Catholic, as opposed to the non-Catholic, schools and
colleges of Belgium, one would gladly see in this a
conclusive proof of the Church's awakened zeal for
general education, as such, and apart from all eccle
siastical self-interest. But who does not see that
even Catholic parents will not trust their children to
the Church schools unless these can secure their
temporal interests as well as, or even more efficiently,
than the State schools ? Everywhere it is the same.
j Competition and the law of self-preservation force
| the clergy to an activity which they rarely exhibit in
the absence of such competition. For this reason I
cannot regard your argument as by any means
proving your point. General education does not
create the atmosphere in which a "revealed the
ology" can best flourish. Theologians have always
felt it, and have accordingly looked with suspicion
on general education as a danger to what they sup
pose to be Faith.
But, living in evil times, they must perforce go
with them, or go out of them ; and they choose the
lesser disadvantage. I speak, however, of the dying,
not of the rising generation of clergy.

MODERNISM AND SCIENTIFIC FREEDOM 129
Do I then mean to admit that the Church is hostile
to science or to any human interest ? God forbid ! I
only mean that theologians and ecclesiastics are not
the Church; that revelation is not theology; that since
there is a relation of solidarity between theology
and every other science, the Church in proving her
self fallible in science proves herself fallible in the
ology. Since belief in a revealed theology issues in
scientific error, that belief is not true. Theology is
human ; Revelation is Divine. Revelation is a
supernaturally imparted experience of realities — an
experience that utters itself spontaneously in im
aginative popular non-scientific form ; theology is
the natural, tentative, fallible analysis of that ex
perience. The Church's divine commission is to
teach and propagate a new life, a new love, a new
hope, a new spirit, and not the analysis of these ex
periences. Her theology is true and helpful just in
the measure that it grows out of and ever returns to
the collective religious experience of those who live
the life and breathe the hope of the Gospel as
preached by Jesus Christ.

XV
MODERNISM AND POPULAR
GOVERNMENT
THE other attraction that Modernism exercises
over the youth of Belgium is its conception
of ecclesiastical government and authority. Modern
ism, apparently in the wake of Dr. Doellinger, has
been led astray by the principles of J. J. Rousseau
and of " the rights of man." It is a child of the French
Revolution. The youth of Belgium are unfortunately
saturated with these same modern notions of parlia
mentary government, and are consequently out of
sympathy with the idea of the Church as a divinely
established absolute monarchy whose power is
gathered into the hands of a single irresponsible
individual. That you should identify the Catholic and histori
cal view of the constitution of the Church with the
principle of government by numerical majorities is
not more surprising than that you should hail a
disciple of Rousseau in a deeply conservative thinker
like " the apostate Doellinger " — a man who lived his
whole life in the pages of ecclesiastical history, and
whose protest against papal absolutism was in name
of past facts and not of present philosophy. I am
130

MODERNISM AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT 131
not going to qualify such criticism, for I could not do
so without some indignation.
Let me state simply that the mind of the Church
to which the bishops in council bear witness is not
that of a numerical majority, nor even of the total
number ; but is the corporate mind of the whole
community— as different a thing as is any organism
from the sum total of its separated parts ; as different
as is water from two parts of hydrogen and one of
oxygen ; as different as is a stone building from a
heap of stones.
For political and practical purposes, the fiction
that the will and opinion of the majority is also that
of the minority is necessary. But to settle matters
of truth, and especially of religious truth, by a
majority-vote was a precedent invented by the Vati
can Council. Till that time, moral unanimity was
required as the authorisation of ecumenical decrees.
For in what sense could that be the mind of the
Church, of the Christian orbis terrarum, which was
contrary to the mind of such a portion of it as any
appreciable number of bishops would represent ? It
is not a practical question of making and forming,
but of discovering and declaring the universal belief.
To turn a Council into a theological debating club
where most votes carry the day, was possible only
for men who were dead to the organic character of
the Church, and who, under the influence of revolu
tionary and Napoleonic conceptions, had come to
regard it as an artificial structure.
The faith of the Church is not that of each in
dividual, be he Pope or layman. In each, the

132 MEDIEVALISM

Christian spirit manifests itself in some new and par
ticular aspect, never twice the same. No one can
say " I am tradition," " I am Christianity." It is by
the social interchange and comparison of these cease
less and varying manifestations that a corporate
mind is formed and developed which serves as a
standard to waken, guide, and stimulate the develop
ment of each several soul. Here is the advantage of
an institutional Church, within whose limits the ex
periences of multitudes and generations are brought
together and unified for the general good. And it is
to this end that the Church needs to be organised
hierarchically, so as to bring to one focus the count
less rays of her spiritual illumination, and to distri
bute the contributions of the rich and able to the
utmost advantage of the poor and needy. In no
sense are the bishops in council the delegates of
their flocks. This pastoral metaphor is the root of
much evil. The bishop is part of the same organism
as his flock — nay, he is the principal part. He and
they are one moral personality and not two. He is
not outside and above them ; nor are they outside
and above him. He and they have but one cor
porate mind and will. It is of that corporate mind
that he is the representative — not of his own separate
mind nor of theirs. Nor, again, is the Pope the
delegate of the universal Church as of a distinct
moral personality. As the first among his brother
bishops, he is the principal representative, not of his
own individual mind, but of the corporate mind of
the Church. As bishop of the principal see to which
Christians flock from all parts, he is (as Irenaeus

MODERNISM AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT 133
says) in touch with the general mind, which in
ordinary cases can be learnt more expeditiously
through him.
It was from history and not from Rousseau that
Dr. Doellinger learnt the true Catholic tradition of
authority. You imply that I go still further in the
direction of Rousseau. But I can attach no meaning
whatever to your words. You say, " It is this con
ception of authority that Doellinger would apply
to the bishops in council. But Tyrrell applies it
alike to the bishops and to the faithful ... of the
Christian community." You mean apparently that
as Doellinger views the bishops as mere delegates, so
I view the laity also as mere delegates. Delegates
of whom, in the name of Reason ? There cannot be
a processus infinitus in delegation. With Rousseau
the people is sovereign and not delegate.
Possibly you mean that as Dr. Doellinger makes
the bishops mere delegates of the faithful, so I make
the Pope the mere delegate of the bishops. But so
to put the Pope under the bishops would be to take
him out of their rank and file just as much as to set
him over them. It is this mechanical separation of
the united members of a single organism with one
life, one mind, one will, that I object to. For your
" bishops in union with the Pope," I would put, " the \
Pope as united with the bishops and the bishops as
united with the Church." Till I can attach some
meaning to your remark I must regard it as a
rhetorical flourish. At all events, I am as uncon
scious of differing in this point from Dr. Doellinger
as I am of agreeing with Rousseau.

134 MEDIEVALISM
I have neither the inclination nor the ability to em
bark in a discussion as to the best form of govern
ment. But, on the one hand, a system which
commits the most difficult and complex problems to
the vote of the majority, that is, of the least edu
cated and competent, seems to me sheer madness ;
as much as it would be to decide theological contro
versies by popular ballot. As to the daily ex
periences and natural exigencies of soul and body ; as
to immediate appearances and impressions, in contra
distinction to reflections and inferences, all men are
equally competent to judge. Outside that sphere,
wisdom is with the few and fewer, and not with the
many. On the other hand, an absolute monarchy is
tolerable only on the impossible supposition of a
prince who is infallible in wisdom, goodness, and
power. As we know that institution in history, it
is something essentially evil and altogether anti-
Christian. It has sometimes tried to save itself from
this latter imputation by the doctrine of the Divine
Right of Kings and the claim to a more or less
miraculous grace and guidance guaranteed to the
monarch by the King of Kings. Under this cover
its worst atrocities have been committed. But even
in its best manifestations it has been incompatible
with that conception of personal dignity and respon
sibility which is the best fruit of Christianity. To be
delivered from one's petty individualism ; to live out
of oneself and enter into the corporate life and interests
of the community to which we belong, it is necessary
that we should be at least allowed to share in its
action and further its aims ; that we should feel our-

MODERNISM AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT 135
selves responsible for it in some degree ; that we
should feel honoured in its honour and shamed in its
shame. If we have no responsibility ; if our sole
duty is to obey passively and blindly in the service
of ends that are unknown to us — ends, nominally
public, but usually those of a selfish bureaucratic
clique ; if we are little better than witless forces to
be disposed of by our rulers, we cease to be persons,
and the boundaries of our own separate individuality
become those of our interests.
And the modern interpretation of the papacy as
an absolute spiritual monarchy has had precisely
these results. It tends to make, not only of the
laity and the lower clergy, but even of the bishops,
so many wooden marionettes whose strings are pulled
in the office of the Pope's Secretary of State. As a
spiritual absolutism it is a far more deadly enemy of
personality than any political absolutism ever has
been, or could ever possibly be. Though outwardly
a slave, an Epictetus can be inwardly a personality.
He can, without rebuke from his conscience and his
religion, feel himself as a man responsible for human
ity ; he can feel that the concerns of society are his
concerns. He can remain a free citizen in the City of
God. But that right of citizenship is taken explicitly
from the Catholic layman and priest by the Ency
clical Pascendi. It is left to the bishops nominally,
and for very shame, lest the stones should cry out.
The layman is told that he has no active part what- '
ever in the life and movement of the Church, except \
as a blindly obedient force at the absolute irrespon- '

136 MEDIEVALISM
sible disposition of the Pope. It is not his business
to think, to understand, to feel, to suggest, but simply
to obey.
Nothing seemed stranger to me on first coming to
live among Roman Catholics, and still more among
priests and clerics, than their extraordinary supine
indifference as to the deeper and more universal
interests of their religion ; as to the bearing of
current movements and events and opinions on the
fortunes of their Church. It was not that their zeal
was first directed, but that it was so exclusively
directed, to their own little personal and party
concerns ; and that they regarded it as a dangerous
eccentricity to manifest a responsible interest in " the
whole state of Christ's Church militant here on earth."
The rare exceptions were, for the most part, recruits
from the Church of England or elsewhere. In this
respect the Roman Catholic clergy seem peculiar
among professional men, who, as a rule, are keenly
interested in the general progress of their science,
art, or business. Yet the reason is fairly evident. If
there is nothing more to know, or than can be readily
known by application to head-quarters ; if all power
and responsibility are in the hands of one man ; if in
spite of blunders and abuses God has promised
success and triumph ; if it is distrust and presump
tion to trouble oneself about the course of events ;
if we are minors and not persons, slaves and not free
citizens, is it possible to be interested in more than
the actual task committed to us by authority and to
be performed in a spirit of blind obedience ? And
may not this be the reason why the buried and for-

MODERNISM AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT 137
gotten interpretation of Catholicism, unearthed by
the Modernists, offers some attraction to the youth of
Belgium as suggesting that their religion is a great
world-cause for which they are personally responsible
and in which they can co-operate actively with all
the best energies of their minds and hearts ? May it
not be the reason why you ransack the libraries of
their seniors in vain search for a New Testament or a
Roman Missal or a shelf devoted to religious litera
ture? But, whatever the disadvantages of absolute
monarchy in general — and they are in some ways
increased where the miraculous powers of the ruler
justify a complete resignation of all responsibility
into his hands — you will tell us that we have no
choice in the matter : " The Church as a supernatural
society is essentially of positive and external institu
tion and must be accepted by its members in the
shape in which it has been organised by its Divine
Founder. It is for Christ himself to dictate his
will to us." That is, the Church has not grown and
developed from within, like a natural social organism,
in virtue of an immanent vital principle. It was
created instantaneously as an absolute monarchy,
with its Pope, bishops, priests, deacons, dogmas,
sacraments, institutions, by the Fiat of the historical
Christ. Like the Adam of Genesis it sprang from
the dust full-formed and mature in mind and body.
As I have already had occasion to remark, Your
Eminence ignores the existence of the most charac
teristic and important science of the day — the critico-
historical science on whose application to the sacred

1 38 MEDIE VALISM
writings and traditions of the Church the whole
Modernist controversy turns. You somewhat beg
the question when you refute Modernism with the
assumption that it is already refuted, and that this
abrupt creation of the present Roman ecclesiastical
system by the Fiat of Christ may be taken for
granted. Far from being self-evident, this view
becomes daily more and more untenable in the light
of historical criticism — a light which no doubt you
suppose you may disregard as having been success
fully extinguished by the Encyclical. It is a view
that will find no new recruits and whose last defenders
will die out in a generation or two. To anchor the
Church to it, is to anchor a boat to a whale. The
whale sinks and the boat sinks with it. Its historical
worth will be as incredible in a few years as that of
the story of Eve and the serpent, or that of the
universal deluge.
Every new insight we get into the history of
Christian origins is unfavourable to this view of the
abrupt and complete creation of the Catholic Church
by Christ " according to the flesh " ; to the view that
S. Peter had the same official self-consciousness as
Pius X ; that he felt himself bishop of bishops and
ruled over his brethren as an absolute monarch. It
is not a question of explaining a series of admittedly
different species by the " hypothesis " of genetic con
nection ; but of observing a series of stages through
which an individual institution, undeniably the same,
has actually passed. Everything points more and more
inevitably to the conclusion that what Christ founded
was not the hierarchic Church but the little body of

MODERNISM AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT 139
missionary brethren, which subsequently, under the
guidance of Christ's Spirit, organised itself into the
Catholic Church ; that he did not directly commis
sion some of them to teach and rule over the rest ;
but commissioned all of them equally to go and
teach all nations and prepare them by the baptism of
repentance and by a new life for the instant coming of
the Kingdom of God upon earth. And such a view,
far from belittling the dignity of the Church or deny
ing its divine institution, exalts it and sets its claims
on a far firmer basis than that supposed to be fur
nished by the distorted and most disputable exegesis
of half a dozen critically dubious texts.
If it comes to texts, it seems to me that the de
fenders of absolutism forget, when convenient, the
promise of Christ to be with and in his Church to
the end, to send her his indwelling Spirit to guide
her into all truth ; they forget that he identified
himself with the mystical Body of those who were
filled with his own spirit and kindled with his own
fire. Do not such expressions as " He that heareth
you heareth me," "Whatsoever ye shall bind on
earth shall be bound in Heaven," etc., justify the
Modernist in regarding the Catholic Church as a
Divine institution built up by Christ ever immanent
in the body of his followers ? Do they not allow him,
without violence to history, to speak of the historic
Christ as having laid its foundation in that apostolic
body of missioners out of which, as its root, it sub
sequently grew under the guidance of God's Spirit ?
Is it not the old question between the static and
dynamic views of God's operation ? Have we yet to

140 MEDIEVALISM
learn that he works as a sage, not as a wizard ; by
process, not by cataclysm? That Catholicism so
originated is not a matter of hypothesis but of ob
servation. The most tortuous wrigglings of exegesis
will not save the ultramontane thesis of the new
theology. Yet since wheat and tares have grown side by side
in the same field, we cannot at once conclude that
the absolute monarchy of the Pope, such as the
majority at the Vatican Council would fain have
defined and established it, is the work of Christ im
manent in the Church. He cannot contradict him
self; he can unfold but he cannot gainsay the
principles of his Gospel. He who restored to us our
personality and spiritual liberty cannot rob us of our
rights as free citizens in the Kingdom of God.
We are not in much doubt as to his ideals of a
spiritual government. His disciples are his friends
and not his slaves just because they are sharers of
his designs, freely co-operating, not blindly obeying ;
actively following, not passively driven — "The ser
vant knoweth not what his master doeth." Will you
contend that these words were addressed to bishops
alone or, rather, to "the bishops in union with the
Pope " ? It is a hardy contention. He tells us that
" the rulers of the nations domineer over them, and
those who are greater among them exercise authority
over them. But not so with you. Let him who
would be greater be your servant, and him who
would be first become your minister. For the Son
of Man came not to be served but to serve." Can
you doubt for a moment that the kind of govern-

MODERNISM AND POPULAR GOVERNMENT 141
ment that is here condemned and forbidden to the
Church is the government of the Roman Caesar,
whose claims, principles, and methods were taken
over bodily by the Popes of the Middle Ages and by
their successors, who still, with a curious irony, style
themselves at once " bishop of bishops " and " servant
of the servants of God " ? Easier to squeeze blood
from a stone, than the spirit of absolutism from the
Spirit of Christ. Tares may grow among wheat, but
not from the same roots.
It is not merely historical criticism that refuses to
view the absolutism of the modern papacy as the
personal institution of Christ. Can you — no, you
cannot pretend that the rigidly conservative and tra
ditional Churches of the East are Protestant or in
dividualist, or under the revolutionary influence of
Rousseau. Yet while they bear concordant testi
mony to the ancient primacy of the Roman bishop
among his brethren ; to his duty of leadership by
good example and spiritual authority, they, as con-
cordantly, deny his claim to be a bishop over bishops,
and to rule his brethren with an absolute, irrespon
sible juridical authority.
That which attracts the youth of Belgium to the
Modernist conception of Church government is there
fore something which it has in common, not with
Rousseau, but with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and
with the ancient Catholic tradition of East and West
confirmed by the results of that critico-historical
method which the Encyclical has condemned.
******
So much, then, Your Eminence, by way of criti-

142 MEDIEVALISM

cism of your Lenten Pastoral. It is a lengthy reply to
so brief a document ; but the shortest text may some
times demand the bulkiest commentary. In a million
ways one may miss the mark of truth. It is the easy
work of an instant. But to hit it fair and square takes
time and trouble ; and a lifetime may be too short to
refute the errors crowded into half a page of reckless
indictment. I would fain think I had taken a fugitive docu
ment too seriously ; that it had been hastily drawn
up in the odd intervals of a busy morning or at the
fag-end of a weary day. But the facts that you have
demanded and obtained for it the special approval of
the Holy Father, and are about to give it the per
manence and universal publicity of a brochure, forbid
me to do so, and force me to believe that you your
self regard it as an adequate and deliberate utterance
of your best thoughts and deepest convictions.
To me it has been a matter of renewed and pro
found discouragement to find so much confusion of
ideas, so much misapprehension of history, of the
significance of certain movements, of the positions of
certain persons, on the part of one whom popular
rumour had pointed out to me as perhaps one of the
most brilliant lights of the Sacred College — nay, even
as possibly the orient star that might one day rise
yet higher to dispel the darkness of our present state.
That faint flicker of hope has been rudely and com
pletely extinguished.

XVI
ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM
BUT before I take my leave of Your Eminence,
let me, simply in my own name, and neither as
a pretended leader of Modernism nor as claiming
any special comprehension of so complex a move
ment, say what Modernism meant for me, and how
I understood it.
The term " Modernist " has been used in a sufficient
variety of senses to cause a considerable amount of
confusion. If not invented, it has, at least, been
established by the Encyclical Pascendi as the preju
dicial designation of a party in the Roman Catholic
Church. But already it is accepted as the designa
tion of liberal Christians of all sorts, and bids fair to
supplant the older term " liberal," which, as standing
for a political as well as a religious principle, is some
what less exact. " Modernist " as opposed to
"modern" means the insistence on modernity as a
principle. It means the acknowledgment on the part
of religion of the rights of modern thought ; of the
need of effecting a synthesis, not between the old
and new indiscriminately, but between what, after
due criticism, is found to be valid in the old
and in the new. Its opposite is Medievalism, which,
143

144 MEDIEVALISM
as a fact, is only the synthesis effected between
the Christian faith and the culture of the late Middle
Ages, but which erroneously supposes itself to be of
apostolic antiquity ; which denies that the work of
synthesis is necessary and must endure as long as
man's intellectual, moral, and social evolution en
dures ; which therefore makes the medieval expres
sion of Catholicism its primitive and its final ex
pression. Medievalism is an absolute, Modernism a relative
term. The former will always stand for the same
ideas and institutions ; the meaning of the latter
slides on with the times. If we must have a sect-
name, we might have a worse than one that stands
for life and movement as against stagnation and
death; for the Catholicism that is of every age as
against the sectarianism that is of one.
A good deal of the force of the Encyclical as an
appeal to the Christian sense is due to its ambiguous
use of the term Modernist.
It professes to be describing those Roman Catho
lics who believe in this principle of " Modernism,"
and who are confident that a synthesis between faith
and the established results of criticism is possible
without damage to either. But, in fact, it describes
as Modernists those Catholics also who possess no
such confidence ; who consider that criticism is fatal
to Catholicism and to its principal beliefs and insti
tutions, who ridicule such syntheses as Utopian, and
who, in many cases, are among the most active
opponents — official or unofficial — of " Modernism."
In short, it describes as "Modernists" all those pro-

ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM 145
fessed Roman Catholics who accept the results of
criticism, however those results may tell upon their
faith, whether disastrously or otherwise. Thus it
cleverly lays every " Modernist " open to the sus
picion of being an unitarian or an atheist or an
agnostic ; it brands them all alike as hypocrites and
pretenders. Unfortunately there are, and there
always have been, such men in the Church even
on the Chair of Peter ; and that, long before the
days of criticism. Scepticism is not modern, nor
is atheism, nor hypocrisy. Let us, then, keep the
word " Modernist " to designate those who believe in
the Roman Catholic Church as firmly as medievalists
do ; but whose deeper faith is not frightened but
stimulated by the assured results of modern criticism.
For, as it is belief in the living Christ that makes a
Christian, and not any particular Christology, so
what makes a Catholic is not this or that abstract
theory of the Church, but a belief in the historical
Catholic community as the living outgrowth of the
apostolic mission. No one who has lost faith in the
mission and destiny of the Roman Church and in
the advantage of being identified with it is a Roman
Catholic. To believe in the living historical Catholic com
munity means to believe that by its corporate life
and labour it is slowly realising the ideas and ends in
whose service it was founded ; that through many
fluctuations and errors and deviations and recoveries
and reactions it is gradually shaping itself into a
more efficient institution for the spiritual and moral
development of individuals and societies ; that by its

146 MEDIEVALISM
continuity and extension it is the collective subject of
a vast experience of good and evil, of truth and
fallacy, and of a slow but sure process of reflection
on the same; that if it advances laboriously arid
imperceptibly it is because its evolution, like that
of nature, is the result of so vast, so costly and
even so cruel an experience, and because the con
tributions of individual effort are opposed tooth and
nail until their right to survive and conquer has over
come almost every conceivable objection. One's
belief in the Church as the organ of religion is to
some extent one's belief in the laws of collective
psychology, which are the laws of nature, which are
the laws of God.
I have laboured heavily at this idea in the first
chapters of Scylla and Charybdis and will here
say no more. In this belief in the living organism
of the Church, Modernist and Medievalist are at one.
They are both Catholics whatever their theoretical
analysis of Catholicism ; both have a right to be in
the Church. As far as one does not believe that the
Church is slowly working out an ever truer and more
fruitful religion ; as far as he views the whole process
as barren, idle, unmeaning, " a tale told by an idiot
full of sound and fury but signifying nothing," he
does not believe in the Church and is not a Catholic.
But the Modernist is a Catholic with a difference.
What is this difference ?
The difference is that whereas the Medievalist
regards the expression of Catholicism, formed by the
synthesis between faith and the general culture of the
thirteenth century, as primitive and as practically final

ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM 147
and exhaustive, the Modernist denies the possibility
of such finality and holds that the task is unending
just because the process of culture is unending.
Hence the new historico-scientific methods and their
results, the new social and political ideas and institu
tions, being irreconcilable with the medieval synthesis,
seem to the Medievalist irreconcilable with what he
considers to be the primitive final and perfect expres
sion of Catholicism. The old synthesis has been
perhaps modified at the Councils of Trent and the
Vatican ; but only along the same lines and categories,
and by way of defining more closely its opposition
to post-medieval culture. The Modernist is no blind
worshipper of present culture. He knows it is a
medley of good and evil, and needs careful criticism
and discrimination. But he believes that, on the
whole, it stands for gain rather than loss ; and that
its new and true values must -be absorbed into the
Catholic organism if the latter is to live.
If he believes in the Church as a Catholic, as a
man he believes in humanity ; he believes in the
world. To regard the world outside the Church as
God-forsaken ; to deny that God works and reveals
himself in human history, that he is in and with
mankind in all its struggles against evil and
ignorance and degradation, that he is the primary
author of all intellectual, aesthetic, moral, social, and
political progress, seems to the Modernist the most
subtle and dangerous form of atheism.
Nay, of the two, his faith in the world is more
fundamental than his faith in the Church — in the
world of which it is written, " God so loved the

148 MEDIEVALISM

world that he gave his only begotten Son." For
he who sits at meat is greater than he who serves ;
and the Church, like her Master, is sent for the ser
vice of the world ; to serve it, not to rule over it, or
trample on it, or despise it. If she has something to
teach it, she has much to learn from it. It is the
living whole of which she is but an organic part;
and the whole is greater than even its most vital
organ. The Modernist loves the Church for the sake
of the world and humanity; which means that he loves
humanity more, as the fuller and all-inclusive revela
tion of God. The Manichean dualism that opposes
the Church to the world, as light to darkness, is to
him a compendium of many heresies. Any barrier
that hinders their free interchange of benefits is im
poverishing to both alike. Each must absorb the
quickening forces of the other under pain of a mon
strous and lop-sided development.
Again, whereas the Medievalist, with his mecha
nical and static idea of ecclesiastical infallibility,
canonises the entire medieval synthesis indiscrimin
ately ; the Modernist, with his dynamical idea of a
process that will infallibly work out right in the end ;
with his conception of our highest truth as ever
alloyed with error, of our highest good as ever
alloyed with evil, is one who discriminates and quali
fies, who distrusts absolutism of every sort.
He does not view the essence of Christianity as
consisting of one or two simple principles given from
the first and abiding unchanged beneath a bewilder
ing mass of meaningless and mischievous encrusta
tions. Its essence is continually being built up by

ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM 149
the expansion and application of these normative
principles; by their combination with all that is
good and true in the process of human development.
It consists not merely in the leaven but in the
whole mass that is leavened and christianised, and
that grows in bulk from age to age. So far he
agrees with the Medievalist against the Protestant.
But he does not believe that the process stopped
with the thirteenth century, and is, therefore, truer
to the Catholic principle.
For him, however, it is a double process of good and
evil ; of false and true. He recognises, what the re
formers could not recognise with their dim historical
light, that the tares were sown almost contem
poraneously with the wheat ; and are always being
sown ; that if the wheat has grown, the tares have
also grown even from the Apostolic age — from the
first pious tamperings with the Gospel text ; that there
has been a development not only of good but of evil
principles, not only of truths but of errors, not only
of the leaven of the Gospel but of the leaven of
hypocrisy. He sees that in every generation some
tare or another ripens and betrays its true character
and needs to be uprooted ; that there are epochs
when a perfect harvest of such tares demands a sort
of revolution — a ruthless thrusting in of the sickle
of criticism, a binding in bundles and burning of
noxious weeds. He recognises in the recent develop
ments of the Roman-law conception of ecclesiastical
authority on the one side, and on the other in the
recent results of biblical and historical criticism and
of social and political developments, the signs of

1 50 ME DIE VALISM
such a crisis in the life of the Church. His is no
blind Philistinism that would raze the Church to the
ground and run up a smart up-to-date structure on
the old site. He holds firmly that nothing which
has, on a large scale and for a long period, both
lived and given life can be destroyed without irre
parable loss and impoverishment. His sole effort is
to separate the perishable from the imperishable
elements in all such cases ; to change as little, to pre
serve as much, as truth and truthfulness will permit.
Alive to all abuses and errors connected with
dogmas and institutions, he is not less alive to the
services they have rendered, to the principles they
have imperfectly expressed. Christ-worship, saint-
worship, miracles, sacraments, dogma, theology,
uniformity, ritual, priesthood, sacrifice, papacy, in
fallibility, nay, Medievalism itself, all stand for so
many attempts to satisfy the religious requirements
of human nature.
Whatever is mechanical, gross, unhistorical, or
decadent must be so removed as to save those values
by which they have lived in spite of their evident
limitations. If the marriage of Christian principles
with the sane principles and elements of growing
civilisation has been fruitful of true developments of
the Catholic idea, their marriage with the unhealthy
and evil elements of the same has produced spurious
developments, in which, however, the nobler strain
must be recognised and purified. Even things so
utterly evil as persecution and inquisition have been
not merely approved by good men, but approved as
right, because they were the perverse and stupid

ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM 151
application of the undoubted truth that the destroyer
of souls is a greater danger to the public than a
murderer ; that temporal death is a lesser evil than
spiritual. No immorality could have lived and
thriven unless it had perversely appealed to con
science under some appearance of morality. We
must not empty out the baby with the bath. We
must save the apparent morality if we would reveal
the full deformity of what it covered and prevent its
return in the same guise.
And so, for the Modernist, even the errors, sins,
and follies of the past are valuable experiences which
the Church is all the wiser and deeper and richer for
having passed through and beyond. In this, the
same law governs the formation of collective as of
individual character. Virtues that have not been
driven home by hard struggle lie light on the soul's
surface ; the storm that rocks the tree roots it.
It is by the experimental method that Nature
gropes her way to what is more useful, more true to
life's laws. Catholicism is a great experimentation
in religion ; a quest of the fullest and most perfect
expression of Christianity. Medievalism, in the eyes
of the Modernist, is a necessary experiment which
must be worked out to its extremest and bitterest
consequences if the Church is to realise inwardly
and comprehensively a truer, deeper, richer notion of
liberty and authority, of faith and orthodoxy, of
revelation and theology, of growth and identity,
than were possible otherwise. Thus it is that God in
history is ever judging the world, gathering the
wheat into his barn and burning the chaff with fire

152 MEDIEVALISM
unquenchable. For ourselves, with omnipotence and
omniscience at our disposal, we should have arranged
things differently ; we should have saved all the
waste and woe of this tedious experimental process ;
we should have created an immutably perfect
Church by the fiat of our will. But God's ways
and thoughts are not as ours, nor can we wonder if
he works as slowly and wastefully in the Kingdom
of Grace as in the Kingdom of Nature. The argu
ment from what we ourselves should have done to
what God must therefore have done is the principal
basis of the ultramontane Church-theory; but it is
somewhat shaken by the consideration of what God
has actually done and does daily.
Finally, the Modernist demands, not greater free
dom, but absolute freedom for science in the widest
sense of the term. He will not have it fettered
except by its own laws and methods and by the
experience which is its subject-matter. He will not
allow even theology to be tied down to any revealed
and stereotyped statements, but only to the religious
experiences of which certain statements are the
spontaneous self-choseri, but at most symbolic, ex
pressions. Such experiences are the substance of
revelation ; the inspired statements are but its classical
and primitive symbols, and cannot be treated as
premisses for deduction.
Science for him is one general system dealing with
all experience and trying to arrange it into a single
synthesis of the understanding. As a theologian,
he takes account of spiritual and supernatural ex
periences as part of the totality of experience ; he

ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM 153
considers the religions of mankind ; the religion of
Israel, the religion of Jesus and his apostles, the
religion of the Catholic community — all, as so much
experience. He considers the spiritual forces and
tendencies and sentiments that have embodied them
selves in the history, institutions and doctrines of the
Roman Catholic Church and in the lives and actions
of her children, and which are revealed in defeat
as well as in victory, in false as well as in true
developments. And from such consideration, he
arrives progressively at a better idea of the essence
and aim of Catholicism and at a truer criterion by
which to shape the course of its future developments.
Modernism therefore has nothing to do with that
sort of more educated and temporising ultramon
tanism that shrinks from an inopportune pressing of
principles which the world has unfortunately out
grown ; that loves to rub shoulders cautiously with
science and democracy ; that strives to express itself
moderately and grammatically ; that would make a
change of circumstances and opportunities pass for
a more tolerant spirit ; and that is usually rewarded
for its pains by finding itself between the hammer
and the anvil.
Modernism does not seek to modify this or that
tenet or institution. It is an all-pervading principle
affecting the whole of Catholicism from end to end
with its distinction between the divine and the
human element ; the spirit and the embodiment ; the
permanent and the variable. If it is a heresy at all,
it is " the compendium of all heresies."
Thus, if we speak of it as a movement or tendency

154 MEDIEVALISM
guided by certain principles and methods which it is
prepared to follow with a certain blind faith whither
soever they may lead, it admits of a fairly clear
description. But if by Modernism we mean a finished
theological system like that of the scholastics with a
definite and final answer to every theological problem,
and if I am asked what is to be the upshot of these
methods and principles, what is to be the modernist
theology of Christ and the sacraments and the
scriptures and so forth, I have a perfect right to
answer " I do not know" — just as a socialist has a
perfect right to say that he does not know what
socialism is ; that he cannot provide a finished theory
of it ; cannot see below the horizon ; cannot define
an idea that is slowly working itself into conscious
ness and is necessarily incoherent and elusive in its
earlier self-utterances. He knows that the whole
world is in labour ; but he knows what is going,
better than what is coming. As against existing
social institutions and ideas, which are clearly
definable because they are played out and dead,
he is dumb and easily convicted of folly, just
because he is feeling after something living that
is coming to birth through a series of uncouth
embryonic developments. But if by socialism we
mean not the theory or idea but the process, ten
dency, or movement which binds millions of men
together for a common end and for a work that is
directly constructive, and indirectly destructive,
socialism is quite definite and concrete.
And the same is to be said of " Modernism " so far
as it stands for the living assembly of Modernists

ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM 155
and not for the idea or end, as yet obscure but
most real and active, that inspires and binds them
together. In the abstract, Medievalism is definable
because it is dead ; Modernism is not so, because it
is living and growing. A system that perforce ignores
all the results of man's mental, moral and social
development since the thirteenth century is naturally
more simple and definite than one that not only
tries to assimilate those results, but that holds its
conclusions as merely provisional in view of further
and yet further results, that has abandoned the idea
of finality and recognised the work of synthesis as an
abiding and unending duty.
When any statement or formulation of experience
is accepted as exhaustive it soon comes to usurp the
place of experience, to be the X or Y that does
duty for it in its absence. Mistaking the symbol for
the reality, the formula for the thing, we cease to be
pressed by the inadequacy of the formula, as we are
pressed by it when the two together are present to
our consciousness. We can easily fit certain pre
dicates to Christ or to the Church when these are
mere names and concepts for us, but not so easily
when what is present to our consciousness is the
living Christ and the living Church. For then we are
ever sensible of the inadequacy of our predications —
of the need of adding aspect to aspect, and relation to
relation ; of adjusting and readjusting and correcting
and improving.
The Modernist therefore denies the scholastic's
right to challenge him for definitions and conclusions
that are ever in the making and never made. And

156 MEDIEVALISM
if it be objected that at that rate he has no message
for the millions — for the poor and the simple — he
replies, first, that their need of definite statements
would not justify false and premature statements or
a pretence of finality where none existed. Secondly,
that the issue is not between popular religion and
modernist theology, but between scholastic theology
and modernist theology, both of which are the
scientific, non -popular justification of popular Catholic
belief and practice. What we preach to the poor is
not theology, but revelation — the inspired and simple
expression of those experiences which theology
translates into the technical language of philosophical
systems. Finally, we reply that the scholastic system, for
all its meretricious simplicity, is fully as unintelligible
to the crowds as the immanental or the pragmatist
system. For does any serious man believe that its
theological expressions concerning the Trinity or the
Hypostatic Union or Transubstantiation which Medie
valists teach the faithful to repeat, correspond to or
evoke any coherent conceptions in their understand
ings ? Do we not know that theologians themselves
when pressed close are found to be dealing with words
and words only? Has Your Eminence any clearly
different concepts answering to the words "generation"
and " procession " in the Athanasian Creed ; or to
such expressions as " spiritual presence " or " wholly
in the whole and wholly in each part " or " three
persons in one nature" or "one person in two
natures"? If you think you have, is it not only
because you think that other people have? No,

ONE ASPECT OF MODERNISM 157
Your Eminence, when we preach to the people what
Christ preached — the coming of God's Kingdom,
the baptism of repentance and a new life — we feed
them with bread ; when we preach scholasticism, we
feed them with words and wind : " For this cause
many among you are sick and weakly, and many
sleep." But it would be wrong to suppose that because
the growing ideas of modernist theology are neces
sarily incomplete and indefinable they are therefore
worthless. For man, truth is an unending process
of adequation, not a finished result. His under
standing and analysis can never do more than out
line the growing masses of his experience. The
inadequacy of his conceptions is not merely quanti
tative ; they are not a mathematical half or quarter
or tenth of the whole. Each addition changes the
quality, the truth-colour, of all that has gone before,
• as each new ingredient changes the quality of a
chemical compound. Still, what is acquired is ac
quired, though it be transformed and transcended by
subsequent acquisitions. The grub survives in the
moth, the foetus in the adult ; and so of the succes
sive expressions which the same reality or ex
perience creates for itself in the human mind. Each
expresses the same thing; each begets its follower
and is begotten by its predecessor. Furthermore,
each is of permanent value in determining the direc
tion of the whole process which cannot be rightly
understood or criticised except from the study and
comparison of its several phases.
When therefore it is a question of preaching

1 58 MEDIE VALISM

Christianity to others, or of living it himself, the
Modernist apprehends and presents it under the
same inspired and imaginative symbols as the Medi
evalist. When it is a question of giving scientific in
tellectual expression to the experiences for which
those symbols stand, when it is a question between
theologians, he refuses to regard any theology as
final or to predict what form it may assume in its
endeavours to unify religious experience with future
accumulations of general experience. It will be tied
by no statements, by no graven inscriptions ; only
by the facts of experience for which such statements
stand, and by the laws of the mind.
Hence, because a Modernist's theology, i.e. his in
tellectual construction of Catholicism, is living and
growing, it cannot be presented with the clearness
and definiteness of a theology that is finished and
dead, and that is impervious to the quickening in
fluence of contemporary culture.
Further, it is perfectly obvious that modernist
theologians will not agree among themselves as do
those who learn, almost by rote, a system imposed
upon them in the name of authority, by an appeal to
their conscience rather than to their reason ; who are
supported by this uniformity, this spurious semblance
of unanimity, in their confident defence of the same,
and who fancy that what is held so firmly and
generally must be self-evident to others if not to
themselves. If faith works miracles, faith in the
faith of others is more mighty still. It can clothe
the naked with a garment of glory, admired by all
and seen by none.

XVII
OTHER ASPECTS OF MODERNISM
THIS, Your Eminence, is Modernism as it seems
to me from the point of view of my own life
long interests and preoccupations since my first
boyish struggles with the ponderous Bishop Butler
up to the present moment. If the desire to make
religion a living truth for living minds be Modern
ism, I was a Modernist in my boyhood, and in my
earliest and most ultramontane days, and during the
long years when I rummaged patiently for the Holy
Grail among the dustheaps of scholasticism under
the direction of men whose infectious self-assurance
was not easy to withstand.
It is the aspect of Modernism interesting to one
whom you describe, with just a touch of supercilious
ness, as " anxious above all things to retain in the
Church such of our contemporaries as are discon
certed by the noisy assertions of unbelievers who,
sometimes in the name of natural sciences, some
times in that of historical criticism, would pass off
their own philosophical prejudices and hypothetical
conjectures as assured conclusions of science in con
flict with our Faith." iS9

160 MEDIEVALISM
Your Eminence, if I have been dealing with such
facile dupes, I have been dealing for the most part,
as you know very well, with those who have had
every advantage that a seminary education can
afford ; who have sought guidance earnestly from
their official teachers, and have sought it in vain ;
who have asked what they should think, and have
been told not to think at all ; to close their books
and their brains and to pray against the temptations
of the devil. For the purpose of the givers, no
wiser advice could be given.
But Catholicism is more than a theology; nor is
it merely the intellectual side of Medievalism that
comes into conflict with so many-sided and complex
a phenomenon as modern culture and civilisation.
Hence Modernism, which hopes and works for the
solution of all these conflicts, presents, not in each of
its representatives (as the Encyclical imagines), but
in all of them together, an endless variety of aspects.
All are agreed that the medieval world is dead ; that
the Church cannot be tied to its corpse and live.
But each views the great sphere of the world, whether
old or new, from his own side, and none compasses
it altogether. Hence the task of synthesis is un
doubtedly far vaster and more difficult than any one
of us realises. Looking at his own corner of it, he
may have moments of sanguine hope. Could he see
all, he might well despair. Yet the spontaneous
division of labour which has made the world can re
make it. We have not set ourselves freely to this
collective task or chosen our places. We are pushed
on, organised and directed by the universal forces

OTHER ASPECTS OF MODERNISM 161
that govern the progress of humanity, by the ideals
that are struggling to realise themselves in a not
very distant future. Our interpretation of those
obscure forces and ideals is sure to be faulty to some
degree. Hardly any such movement in history — not
the Protestant reform, nor the Jesuit reform, nor the
Franciscan reform, nor even the Christian reform —
has followed the lines foreseen and desired by its first
adherents. Such men have been always the half-
blinded instruments of a Power with far wider plans
than theirs. Their partial bondage to an impossible
Past has been the very condition of their serviceable-
ness as mediating channels by which the values of
that Past are transmitted to a Future which to them
would have seemed as impossible, and altogether un
desirable. What we desire and labour for is the revival of
decadent Roman Catholicism ; and this, in what we
believe to be the truest interests of religion. Even
if our belief were mistaken, our labour would not be
in vain. The spirit that lives in us and moves us and
unites us cannot fail of its ends which are greater
than ours. It has already passed sentence of death
on Medievalism, which has been tried experimentally,
weighed in the balance, and found wanting. And
now Modernism is to be put on its trial ; and of that
experiment we are the forced instruments. Its issue
we cannot foresee. We know that like every experi
ment it will make for truth, whether by success
or failure. Is the ecclesiastical organism strong
enough to exclude the new ideas altogether and
live; or is it still strong enough to assimilate

162 MEDIEVALISM

them ; or is it so weak as to be killed by the effort
of assimilation ? Who shall say ? God's world will
go on, and no labour in its cause shall be thrown
away.

XVIII
POSSIBLE TRANSFORMATIONS OF
MODERNISM
THE Modernist's belief in the Church is, I have
said, subject to and dependent on his belief
in the world and humanity. There are not two
Gods but one, who works and reveals himself both
in the great whole and in the included part. I speak
of the world that " God so loved." The world of
which it is said "Woe to the world" and "Love
not the world " is inside as well as outside the Church,
and in its most repulsive because hypocritical form.
But as our belief in the Church, so also our belief
in the World must be discriminating ; it must be a
faith in the meaning and value of a process rather
than in the finality of results, however useful, already
reached by it. Modernists would not be mortal if
the difficulties of their actual position, the persecu
tion and annoyance to which they are subjected by
their domestic enemies, did not concentrate their
criticism on the Church rather than on the Age, and
incline them to see in the latter nothing but what
they miss and desire to find in the former. This
were merely to set up one Philistinism against another.
If the repressive measures of the Encyclical succeed
163

164 MEDIEVALISM

at all, it will be in this unexpected way. They may
kill Modernism by transforming it into something
much more violent and dangerous than Modernism ;
much more akin to the movement of wholesale re
volt in the sixteenth century. Without being a
prophet or the son of a prophet, I seem to see very
unwelcome signs of such an eventuality.
There were no doubt many quiet thinkers in the
eighteenth century who hoped that better ideas of
liberty and the rights of man would slowly permeate
the general mind and effect a peaceful reform in
social and political institutions. But while they
were thinking and philosophising, unheeded as idle
dreamers by those in authority, the people, exasper
ated by oppression, had seized on their half-compre
hended principles and given them a crude practical
application as unwelcome to philosophers as to kings;
an application that reacted in favour of tyranny and
threw back the cause of liberty by more than a cen
tury. To-day while the " Modernism of the study "
is not only unheeded but actively repressed by the
Vatican bureaucracy, the modern spirit, felt rather
than understood, idolised rather than criticised, has
penetrated and inflamed with enthusiasm large num
bers of the Catholic clergy and laity, and roused a spirit
of revolt that may be ill to reckon with. It is a revolt
far less of the enslaved intellect than of the moral
and religious sense violated by the cynically irre
ligious and self-interested opposition of the Vatican
bureaucracy to all the best aspirations of civilised
humanity; by its indifference to every cause but
that of its own aggrandisement and domination ;

OTHER ASPECTS OF MODERNISM 165
above all, by the unworthy Machiavellian methods
through which it would secure its ends.
Popes come and go ; but this overgrown bureau
cracy that exploits the papacy abides unchanged as to
its spirit, its methods, its ends. Here we have a vast
multitude of men for whom the centralisation of the
Church at Rome means money and position ; whose
private interest it is to push the papal claims to their
utmost extreme. With them, the Pope can do every
thing ; against them he can do nothing. They are
the channel of his communication with the Church,
and nothing can pass from one to the other but
through them and in the form most suited to their
collective advantage. It is against this compact army
of officials that the Catholic conscience is beginning
to rise in indignation.
For a time the personal integrity of the reigning
Pontiff kept revolt in abeyance. But since the
Montagnini revelations and other incidents have, to
our shame, made public the methods and principles
of our ecclesiastical government, the duty of a loyal,
but now futile, silence gives place to that of protest
and repudiation. Far from being rebuked, the Nuncio
and his substitute have been honoured and promoted.
And Rome imagines that she can still claim unquali
fied respect and obedience ; that no apology or ex
planation is needed ; that all her sins must be
overlooked and forgiven in deference to her high
official position !
This is to press an abstract truth to its extremity.
We should distinguish the office from the man ; and
be able to reverence the former however unworthy

166 MEDIEVALISM
its bearer. But psychology puts a limit; and a
moment comes when the strongest reverence is too
weak to hold indignation in check, or when it is even
a duty to withhold any sort of reverence that might
seem to associate us with principles and methods
that we find morally objectionable. We are men
first and priests afterwards ; and things may reach —
if they have not already reached — such a pass that
to be a priest or even a bishop one must cease to be
a man and become a passive tool in irresponsible and
possibly unscrupulous hands. Quite apart from the
evils that may actually result from it, the position
itself is as profoundly immoral as that of the mem
bers of a secret society sworn to the blindfold service
of ends into whose nature they may not inquire.
Little wonder, therefore, if all that is earnest and
generous and Christian among the younger clergy is
ready for revolt ; if men refuse to receive, as the
mandates of God, orders engineered by the army of
career-hunters who supply the Pope with the falsified
information necessary for their own godless ends.
Little wonder if this quickly gathering force of instinc
tive indignation is impatient of the moderating control
of carefully balanced syntheses, elaborated by quiet
students far removed from that centre of actual con
flict where ideas are embodied in men and the battle
is between persons and interests rather than thoughts.
The condemnation and persecution of such students
has, at once, added fuel to the fire of this anger and
convinced the more practical-minded men of the
futility of fighting vested interests with the frail
weapons of reason. Strong movements, like strong

OTHER ASPECTS OF MODERNISM 167
men, have need to be narrow-minded and one-sided ;
they cannot afford to weaken their resolution by
"thinking too precisely on the event"; they must often
face the risk, nay, the certainty, of loss for the sake
of a balance of gain. To the reformers in question,
Socialism with all the crudities and shortcomings and
anti-Christianism is more Christian, more akin to the
Gospel, with its " enthusiasm for humanity," than the
cold-hearted cynical ecclesiasticism to which it stands
opposed. Their moral and religious revolt against
the latter bids fair to drive them blindly into the arms
of the former. If they cannot civilise the Church,
they will evangelise the world.
Such is the spirit that Pope Pius X has raised, \
especially in Italy, by his attempts to lay the ghost of I
Modernism for ever ; and this new ghost will be still
harder to lay. Those Modernists who hitherto kept
the younger and hotter heads in control and bade them
have faith in the leavening power of truth, in the
quiet permeation of ideas, in the scythe of Time that
would soon mow down the grey-headed votaries of a
dead past, must now perhaps stand aside and witness
helplessly a conflagration in which their own careful
syntheses and constructions will be burnt up, and
which may throw back the realisation of their hopes
for generations, if not for ever. Though God is not
in the earthquake, the whirlwind or the fire, but in
the gentle breeze, yet he rules over and controls them
as perhaps the necessary harbingers of the still small
voice that is to follow. These violent experiments
may well be essential to a more satisfactory appre
hension of truths that are as yet immature.

168 MEDIEVALISM
Frankly, I cannot regard as a true development of
Catholicism a movement which leaves any one of its
values aside in order to insist on others that have
been neglected. Such one-sided insistence may, as I
have said, be a necessary condition of future de
velopment. But it is none the less one-sided ; and
such a movement when, like Protestantism, it becomes
schismatic and distinct from Catholicism is some
thing infinitely poorer and thinner. Yet even such
schisms have undoubtedly served the cause of
Christianity by keeping alive certain aspects of its
truth that else had perished, and so preparing the
way for some future reintegration. It may well be
then that to carry out the integral programme of
Modernism simultaneously in all its parts is an im
practicable ideal, something inherently impossible ;
that it is only by a series of concentrated one-sided
efforts, mutually corrective and complementary, that
its aim can be slowly realised. Our ways and
thoughts are not always those of God and Nature,
and often owe their superior brilliancy to their falla
cious simplicity.
But Modernism, as I understand it, professes belief
in the Church as well as in the Age; in the possibility -
of a synthesis which shall be for the enrichment of
both, the impoverishment of neither. To sacrifice
either to the other is to depart, rightly or wrongly,
from the Modernist programme.
In accordance with that programme, our faith in
the Age, its ideas, tendencies, and institutions, must
not exclude, must rather stimulate a ceaseless effort
of criticism and discernment. Here too wheat and

OTHER ASPECTS OF MODERNISM 169
tares are mingled inextricably, and the very tares
demand careful study. Here too every evil lives
under some semblance of good, and every lie thrives
by its honest face ; nor may we hastily uproot abuses
that are as yet inseparable from honest uses. We
must learn to look on the history of the world as we
look upon that of the Church ; to see there an ex
perimental search after the conditions of life in
general ; as here, a search after those of the spiritual
side of life in particular ; to regard failures no less
than successes as instrumental in the work of evolu
tion ; to learn, not merely from the present results,
but from the whole process by which the past has
grown into the present on its way to the future ; to
seek a rule of action from the direction of the pro
cess, rather than from any momentary phase which
dissolves while we look at it into something different,
and leaves us guideless and sceptical.
A credulous enthusiastic faith in the thoughts and
tendencies of to-day may be excusable and necessary
as a revolt against a similar faith in those of the
thirteenth century. But the similarity is there, and
the difference is only between philistine and philistine.
Your Eminence, if Faith is of the very essence of
Modernism, Criticism is no less essential, nay, it is
but a quality of its Faith, a proof of its vigour and
purity. Faith in the divine governance and direction
first, of the great world of human life, which God so
loves, and in which he dwells and works and suffers,
and dies and rises again in ceaseless process ; and
then, of the Church which he has set in the heart of
the world to leaven it with the leaven of the Gospel

170 MEDIEVALISM
and to safeguard the deepest and most central interest
of humanity— but a Faith so firm that it can afford
to be fearlessly and pitilessly critical in its certainty
that the bitterest truths are the most wholesome,
that the deadliest poison is that of a spurious
optimism which drowses our senses with its opiates
of flattery and illusion.
It is indeed no ordinary Faith that can discern,
whether in the Church or in the world, a growing
substance of imperishable truth under the accidents
and appearances of so much pretence, unreality, and
downright imposture; that can trust to the immortal
forces of life in the face of such signs of decay and
disintegration ; that can see between the leaves,
blossoms and fruits that come and go aimlessly, the
steady development of the hidden branches that bear
them. Such is the faith of Modernism ; and those
who, like Your Eminence, cannot share it, owe it at
least the tribute of respect due to every great and
noble illusion that has led its victims to forget them
selves, to sacrifice their peace and prosperity, never
wholly in vain, for the supposed cause of God in
Humanity.

XIX
THE DEATH-AGONY OF MEDIEVALISM
IF then, for the greater secrecy of its own designs,
the Roman bureaucracy has once more " set its
foot upon the light," it has little reason for self-
gratulation. It has extinguished a flame only to
raise a conflagration whose consequences are in
calculable. Sooner or later, if the Church goes on,
the inevitable question will have to be faced again
and at a greater disadvantage for the delay. It is
the old story of the Sibylline Books. Perhaps the
offer that has been so rudely rejected is the
last ; perhaps even now the Kingdom of God has
been taken from you and committed to a Faith
no longer found in Israel. What has happened once
may happen again. You rest your fatalistic and
enervating assurance on divine promises not half
so clear and strong as those on which Judaism justly
relied for its perpetuity — promises that are always
conditional, and are cancelled by the presumption
that trespasses on them ; that casts itself headlong
from pinnacles and despises the natural laws of safety.
If you are quite wrong in regarding me as the
embodiment of more than a fractional aspect of so
diversified and complex a manifestation as Modern-
171

172 MEDIEVALISM
ism, I am quite right in viewing Your Eminence as
embodying adequately that scholastic simplification
of Catholicism which you find so well adapted to the
comprehension of first communicants. In addressing
one medievalist I am addressing all.
Let me then plead with you in the name of
Religion and Humanity, to face the inevitable facts
of your situation. The world which it is your mission
to evangelise has already slipped from your grasp.
You have nothing to hold it by. Neither its intel
lectual nor its ethical, nor its social, nor its political
ideas are yours. If it is interested in you at all, it is
only as in a medieval ruin where no sane man would
seek shelter in a storm. It has passed you by long
since, and if now it throws a momentary backward
glance at you, it is because of the clamorous preten
sions of Modernism to march with the age, and your
clamorous outcry against those pretensions. " What
is this brawl," it asks, "in the household of death?"
The times are in labour with a new world whose
characteristics are hard to divine from the obscure
manifestations that herald its advent. But they will
certainly not be those of the thirteenth or the
sixteenth century to which you would tie the cause
of Catholic Christianity finally and for ever.
Do you imagine that the coming world will listen
to a Church that has identified itself not only with
the philosophy and theology of a dead past, but with
the moral standards and conceptions which the line
of casuists represented by Gury have developed to
their profoundly immoral consequences ? Will men
long be content to estimate human acts from the

THE DEATH-AGONY OF MEDIEVALISM 173
outside as separate atoms or entities torn from their
living context in the personality that gives them
their unique unclassifiable character? with the
attempt to apply the forms and methods of the
forum externum to the infinite complexity of the in
ward life? Will they go on admiring a casuistry
of evasion whose pride it is to whittle away duty to
its lowest and meanest terms ?
Will they bear with the mechanical profit-and-
loss asceticism represented by Rodriguez ; the foe
of the older Catholic mysticism and of all healthy
expansive spirituality ; the parent of a servile and
Pharisaical scrupulosity — of all that morbid self-con
centrated introspection which destroys the fresh
spontaneity of the divine spirit in man ; which is
ever totting up merits and dissecting intentions and
keeping the left hand assiduously informed of the
doings of the right ?
Will they accept a quasi-physical or metaphysical
idea of a Grace whose light is hidden under a bushel
from the eyes of men, which has no necessary bearing
on ethical character, and may even vary inversely
with morality? Will they listen to you when you
teach them implicitly to look down on the natural
virtues — truth, courage, honesty, industry, fidelity,
humanity — as supernaturally worthless or indifferent,
as proceeding merely from man, and not from God in
man ? Or when you insist on the superiority of
passive over active virtues — of those which limit
rather than constitute character ; which make absolute
and irresponsible government free to play what pranks
it pleases ?

174 MEDIEVALISM

Will they continue to see the highest fruit of
Christianity in a sanctity that is measured by ec
stasies, automatisms, stigmata, and all the symptoms
of psychic disorder ; or in far-fetched austerities that
have nothing to do with self-government or self-
sacrifice, but proceed from a Manichean dualism or
from a belief in a vindictive God appeased by profit
less and purely retrospective pain and suffering ?
Will they consent to give to a conditional and
limited virtue like obedience the supreme honour due
only to such absolute virtues as truth and charity ; to
make it cover a multitude of sins against one and the
other, and suffer the coward conscience to shift its
burden on to other shoulders and drowse away into
lethargy and paralysis ?
Will they be held back to your medieval notions
of authority ; to your methods of government which
assume a state of chronic antagonism between rulers
and ruled, whose appeal is to fear and self-interest ;
whose maxim is : Divide and reign ?
Above all, do you imagine that by allying your
selves against the people with all the decrepit props
of absolutism, crowned or discrowned, you will be
able to stand against that social revolution which is
pressing towards us with the slow irresistible might
of an advancing glacier, avenging itself mercilessly
on every obstruction ? Do you think that, because
this or that or every present socialist theory is wild
or impracticable, all this imperfect thought and
groping tendency will come to nothing ; that the
obscure idea which inspires them will never take flesh
and dwell among us ; that the scholastic Encyclicals

THE DEATH-AGONY OF MEDIEVALISM 175
of Leo XIII have solved the problem or even grasped
superficially the simplest of its terms ?
Your Eminence, the opposition between these
medieval notions (of which I have adduced but a
few typical specimens) and those of the coming
world is not one that can be adjusted by the most
ingenious patchings and compromises. It lies in a
contrariety of principles from which the opposing
notions spring, and by which they are animated and
bound together. On the one side, the category of
mechanism — government by machinery ; truth by
machinery; prayer by machinery; grace and salvation
by machinery. On the other, the category of life and
growth and spiritual unity. Which is the Catholic
and Christian principle I need not discuss again.
But if tying the Church to medieval notions has
reduced her to her present state of spiritual im
potence, to tie her as blindly to the notions of to-day
would be only to postpone the date of her disaster.
The axe must go to the root of the tree — to this
radical lie that has branched into a whole system of
lies each needed for the support of the rest.
What, then, is this proto-pseudos, this idfa-mere,
this erreur fondamentale of Medievalism which has
been tried in the balance for so many centuries and at
last found wanting ; which has run up a debt to truth
that threatens the Church of to-day with insolvency ?
It is (as I am weary of repeating) the confusion of
faith with orthodoxy ; of revelation with theology.
It is the notion of the Church as an organ of in
tellectual enlightenment ; as a schoolmistress com
missioned to teach us by rote a divinely revealed

1 76 ME DIE VALISM
metaphysics and physics and ethics and sociology
and economics and politics and history. You say
that the Church has at least an indirect mission in
these matters ; and so do I. But you mean that she
holds some revealed statements and premisses in
these several sciences with which the rest must be
squared. I mean that she is guardian of that spirit
of truth and truthfulness ; of patience and self-abnega
tion, and of all those affective dispositions of the heart
with which science must be pursued for the glory of
God in the good of mankind. I mean that her
mission is to the heart and not to the head ; that the
Gospel is primarily power and strength and inspira
tion for the will ; that it convinces by ideals, not by
ideas ; by the revelation of a coming kingdom and a
new life set before the imaginative vision and kindling
a fire of enthusiasm.
This is the eternal and immutable value of the
Christian revelation of which the Church, com
missioned to transmit and spread the sacred fire, is
the depositary. It is thus and not as a body of
ideas that she exercises a spiritual influence, not a
despotic mastery, over the development of man's
mind and the progress of human life.
Nothing, as I have said, is more self-evident than
the ceaseless development of human thought and
knowledge, and of every human institution dependent
on thought and knowledge. What do not grow in
man are the elementary passions and emotions, the
spiritual driving-forces that set his mind and hands
to work, and that are stimulated by ends and
motives, by the appearance or the reality of Good.

THE DEATH-AGONY OF MEDIEVALISM 177
It is to these that the Gospel appeals by the ideal
that took flesh and lived in the personality of Jesus
Christ. It is from him that the corrupt self-seeking
Will of man learns to labour disinterestedly and
devotedly for the Kingdom of God on earth ; to
battle against every sort of error and ignorance ; to
investigate the roots of social evil and sin and misery ;
to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and heal the
sick and instruct the ignorant.
But all this growth of knowledge and understand
ing is man's own work and no part of the revelation
that has inspired his mental labours, and directed it
to the Kingdom of God in man.
Catholicism stands not merely for the leaven of the
Gospel, but for all that has been, or is in process of
being leavened by it ; not merely for the fire, but for
all that it has set burning. It is within the Church
where the experiences of so many peoples and so
many centuries are united and compressed and forced
into harmony, that the Gospel-spirit seeks experi
mentally to embody itself in the best form of external
religious institution. Catholicism is neither the un
changing spirit nor the growing organisation, but the
two together.
In her own way the Church has everything to do
with the universal interests of mankind, with the
development of human thought and life. She can
never be indifferent to any sort of truth, theological
or ethical or scientific or social. The cause of pro
gress is the cause of God's kingdom. Yet her duty
is not to interfere with but to protect the freedom
and autonomy of these sciences; not to dictate

178 MEDIEVALISM

premisses or conclusions, but to cultivate the spirit of
truth and truthfulness, of intellectual humility and
self-abnegation ; to secure the moral dispositions
that condition the fruitfulness of mental labour.
Again it is a question of the difference between
juridical and spiritual authority.
The Church in each age will rightly have her own
opinions, her premisses and conclusions, like the rest
of the world ; but let her not tie herself to them or
confound them with that revelation and message to
the heart which is the substance of her divine com
mission ; let her not impose them on the conscience
" under pain of eternal damnation " — in necessariis
unitas ; in dubiis libertas. She is troubled about many
things that are expedient, whereas but one thing is
needful. How can the world imagine that you have faith in
God, that you believe sincerely in the harmony of
revelation and science, when it sees you so mani
festly afraid of criticism, afraid of the light, afraid of
liberty, afraid of outspokenness and moral courage ;
when it sees the Encyclical placing all its hopes in
the repression of knowledge, in the paralysis of
mental activity, in the revival of those inquisitorial
methods, unchristian and unmanly, that have done
more to dishonour religion and scandalise the world
than all the enemies of the Church put together?

XX
THE MORAL ROOT OF THE CONFLICT
YOUR Eminence, the principle that divides
Medievalism from Modernism is at the root
moral rather than intellectual ; a question less of
truth than of truthfulness, inward and outward — of
a rigorous honesty with oneself that makes a man
ask continually: Is this what I really do think, or
only what I think that I think ? or think that I ought
to think? or think that others think? that teaches
him intellectual modesty and humility and detach
ment ; that restrains his impatient appetite for the
comfort and self-complacency of a certitude (natural
or supernatural) which entitles him to be contemptu
ous, arrogant and dogmatic towards those who differ
from him.
It is a question of respect for the liberty of other
minds ; of a scrupulous veracity that will make no
concession to the exigencies of edification, nor deem
any loose statement justifiable in support of what is
believed to be a revealed truth ; nor imagine that
such pious tamperings with the truth can ever be
God-pleasing and meritorious.
Diplomacy is not the best school of veracity ;
though seeing that the relations of diplomatists are
179

1 80 MEDIE VALISM

frankly those of chess-players trying to outwit and
deceive One another, it may be maintained that such
professional sharp-dealing is consistent with personal
truthfulness. Nor again are the spirit and methods
of absolute and irresponsible government usually
favourable to outspokenness and candour. Repres
sion is met by stealthy evasion ; distrust and du
plicity in the rulers evoke the same qualities in the
subjects. We are prepared for these miseries in the
secular state whose ends are avowedly temporal and
earthly. But we do not expect to find the Church of
Christ governed by methods that are associated with
the most cynical forms of oriental despotism and
that make it impossible to trust the word of an
ecclesiastical official who may be speaking, for all we
know, only from his " communicable knowledge " or
in this capacity or that capacity, or under this or
that mental restriction, or may even be boldly lying
with all the licence of a diplomatist — and all this in
the name of Christ and in the cause of Christianity. '
And a still deeper and older source of this untruth
ful spirit is the initial error (already touched on), the
idee-mere of Medievalism, that gives the authority of
divine revelation to a mass of untenable historical
and scientific statements that belong merely to the
primitive expression of revelation. One knows how
even a single false premiss will develop into a vast
and complex system of falsehoods the further one
pushes the argument that it vitiates. Bind men's
consciences, then, to a whole host of such premisses ;
forbid them to criticise them ; force them to bring the
results of their observation and reasoning into accord

THE MORAL ROOT OF THE CONFLICT 181
with them ; compel them to defend such premisses
against all gainsayers, against all texts and facts and
documents that may be adduced against them, and
the result must be just what it has been — a profound
inward scepticism begotten of the apparent conflict
between truth and truth ; an absence of anything
that deserves the name of intellectual conviction ; an
inability to understand or respect such conviction in
others ; a readiness to think black is white when so
commanded ; a habit of controversial chicanery and
dishonesty that strikes at the very root of candour
and truthfulness.
Add to this the decadent and enervating casuistry
of the pulpit and confessional which is never weary
of insisting on the merely venial character of un
truthfulness and of relegating veracity to the very
inferior rank of natural or pagan virtues, and we
have a sufficient explanation of that all-permeating
mendacity which is the most alarming and desperate
•symptom of the present ecclesiastical crisis,
Those Modernists who put their trust in the spread
of truth, will labour in vain unless they first labour
for the spread of truthfulness ; nor are they faithful
to their " method of immanentism " if they hope for
an intellectual before a moral reform. What would
it avail to sweep the accumulated dust and cobwebs
of centuries out of the house of God ; to purge our
liturgy of fables and legends ; to make a bonfire of
our falsified histories, our forged decretals, our spurious
relics ; to clear off the mountainous debts to truth
and candour incurred by our ancestors in the sup
posed interests of edification ; what would it avail to

182 MEDIEVALISM

exterminate these swarming legions of lies, if we still
keep the spirit that breeds them ? In a generation
or two, the house swept and garnished would be
infested as before. The only infallible guardian of
truth is the spirit of truthfulness. Not till the world
learns to look to Rome as the home of truthfulness
and straight dealing, will it ever look to her as
the citadel of truth. It will never believe that the
spirit of Machiavellian craft and diplomacy is the
spirit of Christ. " Can the same fountain send forth
bitter waters and sweet ? "

XXI
CONCLUSION
YOUR Eminence, will you never take heart of
grace and boldly throw open the doors and
windows of your great medieval cathedral, and let
the light of a new day strike into its darkest corners
and the fresh wind of Heaven blow through its^
mouldy cloisters ?
In spite of the clamorous contradiction of my
reason and common sense, I cannot even yet bring
myself to believe that it is too late ; I cannot resign
myself to the thought that what has been built up
by the labour of so many centuries, at the cost of so
much suffering and sorrow, is now doomed to de
struction as a mere encumbrance. I will not face,
because I can so hardly resist, the impression that
the rich and varied experience in good and evil of so
notable a section of humanity as has been gathered
within its walls is to be as water poured out on
the ground, or as a column of vapour dispersed in
the broad air. I cannot, or at least I will not, believe
that the persecuted minority who in every generation
have striven loyally against the overwhelming forces
of ecclesiastical corruption and abuse have laboured
in vain, or that we shall never reap in joy the harvest
they have sown in tears. Can it be that the Church
183

1 84 MED IE VALISM

which so many legions of martyrs, saints, thinkers
and scholars have enriched with their very best, with
their heart's blood and their spirit's anguish, is to
fall the prey of a selfish and godless bureaucracy?
that the gates of hell so long resisted are at last
to prevail against her and shut her up into medieval
darkness for ever? Is she to have neither lot nor
part in this new world that is struggling painfully
to the birth and so sorely needs that quickening in
spiration of divine breath which it was her mission
to impart ?
Shall the once-thronged city lie deserted and the
Queen of the Nations be made a widow and the
streets of Zion mourn because there are none to come
to her solemnities, because her gates are thrown
down and her priests in tears and her virgins in rags
and she herself oppressed with bitterness ? Shall her
gold be tarnished and her fine colours faded and the
stones of her sanctuary lie heaped at the street
corners, and all this because she has let her sucklings
perish for thirst, and refused the bread of life to her
little ones — to the starving millions of our modern
civilisation who wander harassed and worried as
sheep having no shepherd ; or because for the scarlet
rags of a secular splendour departed long since and
for ever she has forgotten her true glory, and has
walled herself round with stone and iron, and
narrowed the borders of her tent, and from a world-
embracing religion as wide as the heart of Christ has
shrivelled herself up to a waspish sect glorying as
none other in her rigidity and exclusiveness ?
Is this what Catholicism has come to — so grand 'a

CONCLUSION 185

name for so mean a thing ? Is this the religion of all
humanity and of the whole man ; of the classes and
the masses ; of the Greek and the barbarian ; of the
university and the slum ; neither above the lowest
intelligence nor beneath the highest ; neither a
burden to the weak nor an offence to the strong ; the
religion not so much of all " sensible men " — for all
are not sensible, as of all honest men — for all can be
and are naturally honest ; a religion unencumbered
and unentangled with contingent and perishable
values, free as an arrow in its flight straight home to
the universal conscience of humanity ?
All this we had a right to look for in the Church
of Rome, the nursing-mother of European civilisa
tion. And what do we find ? Are her breasts dry ?
Are her hands empty ? Can she do nothing for us —
nothing at all ?
Your Eminence, I know it right well, yet I will
not believe it. My faith in the Church is, in its very
different way, as blind as your own. It is part of
my faith in humanity whose prospects seem not less
desperate. The very word "Catholic" is music to
my ears, and summons before my eyes the out
stretched all-embracing arms of him who died for the
whole orbis terrarum. If the Roman Church still
holds me it is because, in spite of the narrow sec
tarian spirit that has so long oppressed her, she
cannot deny her fundamental principles ; because, as
a fact, she stands for the oldest and widest body of
corporate Christian experience; for the closest ap
proximation, so far attained, to the still far-distant #
ideal of a Catholic religion.

1 86 MEDIE VALISM

The very paganisms with which the Church is
reproached assure me that all the streams of religious
tradition from the most ancient times and the most
distant quarters of the earth have met in her bosom
to be mingled with and purified by the living waters
of the Gospel of Christ. Profoundly as I venerate
the great truths and principles for which Protestant
ism stands, I am somewhat chilled by its inhumanity,
its naked severity, its relentless rationality. If it
feeds one half, perhaps the better half, of the soul, it
starves the other. The religion of all men must be
the religion of the whole man — Catholic in depth as
well as in extension.
Could I dare admit that the Vatican Council had
succeeded completely and finally in cutting Rome off
from the ancient Catholic tradition ; in inverting her
constitution ; in impeding the full influence of her
past experience upon her future development, in
damning the onward flow of all but the worst and
most sterilising elements of that experience ; in thus
putting an end to her growth and expansion, then,
indeed, by default, I should have to look away from
this stunted trunk to the next heir of the Catholic
tradition — to some of the lesser, but still living and
growing branches of Christendom. If I hold on, it
is because I abhor runaway solutions, and spurious
simplifications, whether ultramontane or schismatic,
that would force a premature synthesis by leaving
out all the intractable difficulties of the problem ;
that prefer a cheap logicality to the clash and con
fusion through which the immanent reason of the
world works order out of the warring elements of a

CONCLUSION 187

rich and fruitful chaos. The new must be made out
of the old, must retain and transcend all its values.
As long as I think thus, it seems to me I must
hold to the Roman Church. And if I will to do so,
" Who shall separate us ? " not twenty Popes nor a
hundred excommunications. I belong to her in the
only way that I care to belong to her — in spirit and
in truth ; by the bond of my free conviction that no
bishop can snap. Multi intus sunt quiforis videntur
— many who, with "the apostate Doellinger," seem
to be outside are really inside. Many who, with
their traducers, seem to be inside are really out
side ; for, what they hold to under the name of
Catholicism is only a monopolised individualism —
not the supremacy, but the absolute servitude and
subjection of the orbis terrarum.
And so, Your Eminence, till better advised I will
cling to my belief in the resurrection of the dead,
and will dream my foolish dream of a day — not
perhaps very far removed from the Greek Kalends —
when the Catholic people represented by their bishops
and their Pope will assemble, not to decide and
impose points of theology, ethics and politics " under
pain of eternal damnation," but to proclaim the
gospel of God's Kingdom upon earth as it was
proclaimed by Jesus Christ; to preach "unity in
essentials, liberty in non-essentials, charity in all
things." Your Eminence, I call this a reply, yet strictly it
is not so. Your Lenten Pastoral was not addressed
to me, nor did I know of its existence till Lent was
over and chance put it into my hands. I have

1 88 MEDIE VALISM

thought it, however, more respectful and straight
forward to write to you, rather than about you or at
you, and to ensure that my words shall reach you
before they reach any one else, so that you may have
ample time to keep them from the readers of your
Pastoral should you think fit.
I am not so sanguine as to imagine that they will
make the slightest impression on you, though from
certain lines in your Pastoral I would fain believe
that you were not all Cardinal, but had still some
vulnerable heel of humanity in which a more skilful
marksman than myself might lodge a shaft. In
deed, it is no impeachment of your sincerity to
suspect that, in the depths of your subconsciousness,
you agree with me more than you dare admit to
yourself. For I know from personal experience how
deep and sincere may be the conviction which,
regarding the official view as identical with God's
view, makes it a matter of conscience to shut one's
eyes and ears to every suggestion of the possibility
of any other view. I conceive it a false conscience,
but as conscience in any form I respect it.
Your Eminence's
Fellow-servant in Christ,
G. Tyrrell.
London, May 17, 1908.

APPENDIX
LETTRE PASTORALE ET MANDE-
MENT DE CAREME.
DESIRE JOSEPH MERCIER, Cardinal-PrStre de
la Sainte Eglise Romaine du Titre de Saint
Pierre-^s-Liens ; par la Grace de Dieu, et du Saint-
Siege Apostolique Archev£que de Malines, Primat
de Belgique; au Clergi et aux Fidiles de notre
Diocese, salut et bMdiction en notre Seigneur Jisus-
Christ.
MES BIEN CHERS FRi!RES,
A la date du 3 juillet 1907, le Saint-Pere fit
dresser un catalogue d'erreurs qui, plus tard, furent glo-
balement designees du nom de Modernisme et les con-
damna. Le 8 septembre suivant, il donna au monde
une Encyclique d'une ampleur, d'une nettete, d'une
vigueur incomparables, a l'effet d'exposer les raisons
qui avaient motive la condamnation du Modernisme.
Dieu merci, ces erreurs qui ont envahi surtout la
France et l'ltalie, ne comptent guere d'adeptes en
Belgique. Vous devez d'en avoir ete preserves a la
vigilance de vos Pasteurs et a I'esprit d'impartialite
scientifique et de soumission chretienne qui anime
les representants du haut enseignement dans notre
pays. 189

190 MEDIEVALISM

Neanmoins, Mes Freres, je considere comme un
devoir de ma charge pastorale de porter, dans une
certaine mesure, a votre connaissance l'Encyclique
pontificale qui desormais sera designee dans 1'histoire
ecclesiastique par les premiers mots latins de ce
grave document " Pascendi Dominici gregis " ou, plus
brievement, par le mot " Pascendi."
Puisque le Saint-Pere adresse sa lettre a toutes
les eglises particulieres, c'est-a-dire aux Eveques, aux
pr£tres et aux laiques de la catholicite, c'est que dans
sa pensee, chacune d'elles peut en tirer avantage.
Le document, d'ailleurs, est d'une telle importance
qu'il a, des aujourd'hui, acquis une valeur historique,
et que, par suite, quiconque s'interesse a la vie de
l'Eglise, notre Mere, doit en connaitre, au moins en
substance, la signification.
Enfin, Mes Freres, a peine le Pape avait-il parle\ ou
plutot, avant meme qu'il parlat, des le moment ou
les agences telegraphiques annoncaient sa parole, la
presse incredule s'attacha a la defigurer. Ni les
journaux ni les revues des partis hostiles a l'Eglise
dans notre pays ne publierent, en toute loyaute, soit
le texte, soit la teneur generate de l'Encyclique.
Mais, avec un empressement et un ensemble que
peut seul expliquer le parti pris, ils equivoquerent
sur le mot Modernisme et firent croire, a ceux qui les
lisent de confiance, que le Pape condamne la pensee
moderne, ce qui, dans leur langage ambigu, signifie
la science moderne et ses methodes.
Cette impression injurieuse pour le Pape et pour
ceux qui suivent ses directions, a peut-£tre 6t6, de
bonne foi, partagee par quelques-uns d'entre vous.

APPENDIX 191

S'il en est ainsi, nous voulons les detromper.
Nous nous proposons done, Mes Freres, de vous
entretenir du Modernisme, avec I'intention de vous
faire comprendre les raisons qui ont motive1 sa con
demnation par la supreme autorite de l'Eglise.
Qu'est-ce done que le Modernisme? Ou plutot,
comme il ne s'agit pas de nous attacher a des details,
qui pour beaucoup d'entre vous seraient sans interet,
quelle est l'idee mere, quelle est l'&me du Modernisme?
Le Modernisme n'est point l'expression moderne
de la science, et par consequent la condamnation du
Modernisme n'est ni la condamnation de la science
dont nous sommes tous si justement fiers, ni la repro
bation de ses methodes, que les savants catholiques
tiennent et doivent tenir a honneur de pratiquer et
d'enseigner. Le Modernisme consiste essentiellement a affirmer
que l'ame religieuse doit tirer d'elle-m6me, rien que
d'elle-meme, l'objet et le motif de sa Foi. II rejette
toute communication revelee qui, du dehors, s'im-
poserait a la conscience, et ainsi il devient, par une
consequence necessaire, la negation de I'Autorite
doctrinale de l'Eglise etablie par Jesus-Christ, la
meconnaissance de la hierarchie divinement con
stitute pour regir la societe chretienne.
Pour mieux comprendre la signification de cette
erreur fondamentale, rappelons-nous les enseigne-
ments du catechisme sur la constitution et la mission
de l'Eglise catholique.
Le Christ ne s'est pas presente au monde a la
facon d'un chef d'dcole de philosophie, incertain de

192 MEDIEVALISM

lui-meme, abandonnant a la libre discussion de ses
disciples un systeme d'opinions rdformables. Fort de
sa sagesse divine et de sa puissance souveraine, II a
impose aux hommes, en meme temps qu'il la leur
proposait, la parole revelatrice qui leur montrait le
salut eternel et l'unique voie qui y conduit.
II a promulgue pour eux un code de morale et leur
a apporte les secours sans lesquels il est impossible
d'en mettre les regies en pratique. La grace et les
sacrements qui nous la conferent ou nous la restituent
lorsque, l'ayant perdue, nous consentons a la re-
couvrer par la penitence, forment l'ensemble de ces
secours, Peconomie du salut.
II a institue une Eglise. Comme il ne devait
passer que quelques annees parmi nous, il a, avant de
nous quitter, confie ses pouvoirs a ses Apotres, avec
la faculte de les transmettre a leurs successeurs, le
Pape et les eveques. L'6piscopat, en union avec le
Souverain Pontife, a done ainsi recu et possede seul
la mission d'exposer officiellement, de commenter
authentiquement les doctrines revelees par le Christ;
il a, il a seul le droit de denoncer avec autorite les
erreurs qui sont incompatibles avec elles.
Le chretien est celui qui, confiant dans l'autorit^ de
l'Eglise, accepte sincerement les doctrines qu'elle
propose a sa foi. Celui qui rdpudie ou met en doute
son autorite et rejette, en consequence, une ou
plusieurs des verites qu'elle oblige a croire, s'exclut
lui-m6me de la societe ecclesiastique.
L'excommunication prononcee par le Pape contre
les modernistes obstines, et que nos adversaires
voudraient faire passer pour un acte de despotisme,

APPENDIX 193
est la chose la plus' simple, la plus naturelle du
monde. II n'y a ici en jeu, Mes Freres, qu'une ques
tion de loyaute.
Oui ou non, avez-vous foi a la divine autorite de
l'Eglise? acceptez-vous, exterieurement et de cceur, ce
que, au nom de Jesus-Christ, elle vous propose a
croire ? Oui ou non, consentez-vous a lui obeir ?
Si oui, elle met a votre disposition ses sacrements
et se charge de vous conduire au port du salut.
Si non, vous brisez delib^rdment le lien qui vous
unissait a elle, dont elle avait serre le noeud, que sa
grace avait sacre. Devant Dieu et devant votre
conscience, vous ne lui appartenez plus. Ne vous
obstinez point a rester hypocritement dans son sein.
La loyaute vous interdit de vous faire passer encore
pour un de ses fils, et elle, qui ne veut ni ne peut etre
complice d'une hypocrisie sacrilege, vous demande et,
au besoin, vous somme de sortir de ses rangs.
Bien entendu, elle ne vous repudie qu'aussi long-
temps que vous le voudrez vous-memes. Le jour ou,
deplorant votre egarement vous reviendrez recon-
naitre loyalement son autorite, elle vous accueillera
avec une maternelle clemence et vous traitera avec
tous les egards que le pere de la parabole de 1'enfant
prodigue temoigna a son fils repentant.
Telle est done la constitution de l'Eglise.
L'episcopat catholique, dont le Pape est le chef,
est l'heritier du college apostolique, il enseigne
authentiquement aux fideles la reyelation chretienne.
De meme que la t£te concentre la vie de l'organisme
entier et dirige son action en coordonnant tous ses
mouvements, de meme, le Pape assure l'unite a

194 MEDIEVALISM

l'Eglise enseignante, et chaque fois que, parmi les
fideles ou parmi les eveques, il surgit un differend
doctrinal, le Pape le tranche avec une autorite'
souveraine. Son pouvoir est sans appel.
En resume, chaque fois qu'un chretien, a un
moment quelconque de son existence, s'adresse ces
deux questions capitales :
Que dois-je croire en ce moment ?
Pourquoi dois-je le croire ?
— la reponse qu'il a a se faire est la suivante : Je
dois croire ce que m'enseignent les eveques du monde
catholique qui sont d'accord avec le Pape.
Je dois croire cela, parce que l'6piscopat en union
avec le Pape est l'organe de transmission des en-
seignements reveles par J.-C.
Soit dit en passant, l'organe de transmission est
ce qui s'appelle d'un mot la tradition, a laquelle doit
repondre la foi des fideles.
Eh bien, Mes Freres, le Modernisme, que le Pape
a condamne, est la negation de ces enseignements si
simples, que vous avez appris des votre enfance
lorsque vous vous prepariez a la premiere com
munion. Les idees generatrices des doctrines modemistes
sont nees et ont germe sur la terre protestante
d'Allemagne, se sont acclimatees aussitot sur le sol
d'Angleterre, et ont pousse quelques rejetons aux
Etats-Unis. If esprit moderniste a passe en pays catholiques ;
il y a fait surgir chez quelques ecrivains, oublieux de
la tradition de l'Eglise, des erreurs dont l'enormit£

APPENDIX 195
epouvante les consciences droites, simplement fideles
a la Foi de leur bapteme. Cet esprit a souffle sur
la France, l'ltalie en a gravement souffert, quelques
catholiques d'Angleterre et d'Allemagne en ont ete
atteints ; la Belgique est un des pays de la catho
licity qui ont le mieux resiste a son influence per-
nicieuse. Vous l'entendez, Mes Freres, nous etablissons une
distinction entre les doctrines modernistes et le
souffle qui les anime.
Les doctrines, disseminees dans des ecrits de
philosophes, de theologiens, d'exegetes ou d'apolo-
gistes, ont et6 admirablement systematisees dans
l'Encyclique Pascendi; puisque vous avez eu le
bonheur d'y echapper, je ne m'attacherai pas ici a
vous montrer combien elles sont en contradiction
avec la Foi et avec la saine philosophie.
Mais je redoute davantage pour vos ames la
contagion de I'esprit moderniste.
Cet esprit est issu du Protestantisme.
Vous connaissez le Protestantisme. Luther con-
teste a l'Eglise le droit d'enseigner avec autorite a
la societe chretienne la Relation de Jesus-Christ.
Le chretien se suffit, pretend-il, pour connaitre sa
foi ; il en puise les elements dans PEcriture Sainte,
que chacun interprete directement sous l'inspiration
du Saint-Esprit. II ne veut pas qu'il y ait, dans
l'Eglise, une autorite hierarchiquement constituee
pour transmettre fidelement au monde les enseigne-
ments r6veles, pour les interpreter de plein droit
et avec assurance, pour en proteger incessamment
l'integrite.

196 MEDIEVALISM

Le point essentiel du litige entre le Catholicisme
et le Protestantisme est la.
Le Catholicisme dit que la foi du chr6tien est
communiquee aux fideles par un organe officiel de
transmission, Pepiscopat catholique, et qu'elle est
basee sur l'acceptation de l'autoritd de cet organe.
Le Protestantisme dit, au contraire, que la foi est
exclusivement Paffaire du jugement individuel
appuye sur Interpretation des Livres Saints.
Autorite d'une part, individualisme de Pautre.
Aussi une eglise protestante est-elle necessairement
invisible : c'est l'accord suppose de consciences
individuelles sur une m£me interpretation des
Saintes Ecritures.
Le Protestantisme ainsi formule a ete condamne
par le Concile de Trente, au XVIe siecle, et il n'est
plus personne qui osat se dire protestant et se croire
en meme temps catholique.
Mais X esprit protestant s'est infiltre deca dela dans
les milieux catholiques, et il y a fait germer des con
ceptions ou l'on trouve, a la fois, la piete d'intention,
le proselytisme d'une &me catholique, et les devia
tions intellectuelles propres au protestantisme.
M. Frederic Paulsen, professeur a PUniversitd pro
testante rationaliste de Berlin, note, a propos de
l'Encyclique Pascendi, ce fait curieux : " II semble
bien, dit-il, que toutes les doctrines condamnees par
l'Encyclique soient d'origine allemande, et cependant,
il n'y a peut-etre pas un seul theologien qui defende
le Modernisme au sein des Facultes de thdologie de
l'Allemagne." 1
1 Internationale Wochenschrift, 7 Dez., 1 907.

APPENDIX 197
L'observation est significative.
Ce n'est pas d'aujourd'hui que Pon trouve, en Alle-
magne, dans les milieux universitaires, des traces de
I'esprit protestant.
Lorsque, en 1868, Pie IX decreta Pouverture d'un
Concile universel, un savant catholique, tres en vue,
professeur a l'Universite de Munich, qui, plus tard,
fit ouvertement defection, Doellinger ecrivait a propos
du r61e des eveques dans les reunions conciliaires :
" Les Eveques doivent aller au Concile temoigner
de la foi de leurs diocesains ; les definitions qui en
sortiront doivent etre Pexpression des croyances de
la collectivite."
Vous Pentendez, Mes Freres, voila deja l'accord
des consciences individuelles substitue a la direction
de Pautorite.
L'observateur le plus penetrant du mouvement
moderniste contemporain, le plus attentif a ses
tendances, celui qui en a le mieux degage I'esprit et
qui en est, peut-etre, le plus profondement imbu, est
le pretre anglais Tyrrell.
Or, dans les nombreux ecrits publies par lui, au
cours de ces dix dernieres annees, il y a, a cote de
pages d'une piete penetrante — que nous avons, pour
notre part, lues avec edification et dont nous savons
gre tres fidelement a. leur auteur, — il y a souvent
meme, dans le souffle qui anime ces pages, Perreur
fondamentale de Doellinger, c'est-a-dire Pidee-mere
du Protestantisme.
Rien de bien etonnant d'ailleurs, car Tyrrell est un
converti dont l'education premiere fut protestante.
Attentif toujours et d'une facon presque exclusive

198 MEDIEVALISM

aux demarches interieures de la conscience, peu ou
point preoccupe des enseignements traditionnels du
dogme et de Phistoire ecclesiastique, soucieux par-
dessus tout de retenir dans le sein de l'Eglise ceux
de nos contemporains que deconcertent les affirma
tions bruyantes des incredules qui, tant6t au nom des
sciences naturelles, tantdt au nom de la critique
historique, veulent faire passer leurs prejuges philo-
sophiques et leurs hypotheses conjecturales pour des
conclusions acquises a la science et en conflit avec
notre Foi, Tyrrell a renouveie, a quarante ans de
distance, une tentative analogue a celle de Papostat
Doellinger. La Rfve'lation, pense-t-il, n'est pas un dep6t
doctrinal confie a la garde de l'Eglise enseignante et
dont les fideles ont a recevoir, aux divers moments
de Phistoire, interpretation authentique. Elle est la
vie de la collectivite des ames religieuses, ou mieux,
de toutes les ames de bonne volonte qui aspirent a
realiser un ideal superieur au terre a terre des
consciences egoi'stes. Les Saints du christianisme
forment l'eiite de cette societe invisible, de cette
communion des saints. Tandis que la vie religieuse
suit invariablement son cours dans les profondeurs
de la conscience chretienne, des croyances " th/olo-
giques " s'eiaborent dans les intelligences, s'expriment
en formules commandees par le besoin du moment,
mais d'autant moins conformes a la realite vivante
de la foi qu'elles gagnent en precision. L'autorite
de l'Eglise catholique romaine — les eveques et le
Pape — interprete la vie interieure des fideles, recapi-
tule le produit de la conscience universelle et Penonce

APPENDIX 199
en formules dogmatiques. Mais la vie religieuse
mte'rieure elle-meme reste la regie directrice suprime des
croyances et des dogmes. Au surplus, l'effort des in
telligences etant soumis a mille fluctuations, le code
des croyances est variable ; les dogmes de l'Eglise,
a leur tour, changent de sens, si pas necessairement
d'expression, avec les generations auxquelles ils
s'adressent ; neanmoins, l'Eglise catholique reste une
et fidele a ses origines, parce que, depuis jesus-Christ,
un m£me esprit de religion, de saintete anime les
generations successives de la societe chretienne et
toutes se rencontrent, au fond, en un m£me sentiment
de piete filiale envers notre Pere qui est dans les
cieux, et en un meme sentiment d'amour pour
Phumanite, de confraternite universelle.
Telle est, Mes bien chers Freres, P&me du
Modernisme. L'idee maitresse du systeme a itt puissamment
influencee par la philosophic de Kant, protestant lui-
meme et auteur d'une theorie speciale, 011 la certitude
universelle de la science est mise en opposition avec
la certitude exclusivement personnelle du sentiment
religieux. Elle Pa ete aussi, sans doute, par cet en-
gouement, aussi general qu'il est irreflechi, qui
entraine tant de bons esprits a appliquer, arbitraire-
ment et a priori, a Phistoire, surtout a Phistoire de nos
livres saints et de nos croyances dogmatiques, une
hypothese, — Phypothese evolutionniste, — qui, loin
d'etre une loi generale de la pensee humaine, n'est
mfeme pas averee dans le champ restreint de la for
mation des especes vegetales ou animales, Mais en
elle-meme, l'idee qui inspira, a Porigine, plusieurs

2oo MEDIEVALISM

champions genereux de Papologetique catholique et
les fit sombrer dans le Modernisme, n'est pas autre,
au fond, que Pindividualisme protestant, qui se sub-
stitue a la conception catholique d'une autorite
enseignante, etablie d'office par N. S. J. C, et chargee
de nous dire ce que, sous peine de damnation eter-
nelle, nous sommes obliges de croire.
II est partout dans Patmosphere, cet esprit modern-
iste. Et c'est pour ce motif, sans doute, que le Pape,
guide specialement par la divine Providence, adresse
aux catholiques du monde entier une Encyclique
dont la teneur doctrinale ne concerne guere, semble-
t-il, qu'une fraction catholique relativement peu nom-
breuse de France, d'Angleterre et d'ltalie.
Les doctrines reprouvees par l'Encyclique epouvan-
tent, par leur seul enonce, les consciences chretiennes.
Mais il y a dans les tendances modernistes quelque
chose de seduisant ; elles font impression sur certains
esprits loyalement attaches, cependant, a la foi de
leur bapteme.
D'oii cela vient-il? d'ou vient au Modernisme son
attrait pour la jeunesse ?
Nous voyons a ce phenomene deux causes prin-
cipales. Ce sont deux equivoques, que je voudrais dissiper
dans la seconde partie de cette Lettre Pastorale.
La presse incredule clame bruyamment que le
Pape, en condamnant le Modernisme, s'est mis en
travers du progres et refuse aux catholiques le droit
de marcher avec leur siecle. Trompes par ce men-
songe, que certains poiemistes catholiques ont im-

APPENDIX 201
prudement accredite, quelques ames droites, jusqu'ici
fideles a l'Eglise, flechissent, se decouragent, s'imagi-
nant bien a tort qu'elles ne peuvent en m^me temps
obeir a leur conscience chretienne et servir la cause
du progres scientifique.
Je me ferai un devoir de repondre a cette accusa
tion calomnieuse de la presse hostile, dans une com
munication plus spedalement destine au clerge et
dont il pourra, la oil il le jugera a propos, utiliser a
votre intention certains extraits.
Est-il bien necessaire, d'ailleurs, de faire voir aux
hommes de bonne foi, en Belgique, que, pour etre
avec le Pape contre le Modernisme, on n'en est pas
moins avec son siecle pour promouvoir le progres et
honorer la science ?
Graces en soit rendues a Dieu, nous vous l'avons
dit, les catholiques beiges ont echappe aux heresies
modernistes. Les representants de l'enseignement
philosophique et theologique de notre universite et de
nos facultes libres, des seminaries, des congregations
religieuses ont unanimementetspontanement declare
et montre, dans un document signe par chacun d'eux,
que, par sa courageuse Encyclique, le Pape a sauve la
Foi et protege la science.
Or, ces memes signataires n'ont-ils pas le droit de
se tourner fierement vers leurs accusateurs et, au nom
des institutions catholiques qu'ils represented, de
leur demander : Quelle est done la science que nous
n'ayons servie et ne servions aussi bien, sinon mieux
que vous? Nos maitres redoutent-ils d'etre com
pares aux votres? Les eieves que nous formons
et que les concours publics mettent en presence de
o 2

MEDIEVALISM

vos eieves ne depassent-ils pas regulierement les
v6tres ?
La vigueur des convictions et la sincerite de
Pamour s'eprouvent au sacrifice.
Connaissez-vous, Mes Freres, des largesses d'in-
croyants au profit de la science? Si oui, je m'en
rejouis et je vous invite, sans crainte, a les mettre en
parallele avec les millions que verse la generosite
des catholiques beiges a Pceuvre de Penseignement
primaire, secondaire et superieur.
La seconde equivoque qui profite a. la penetration
de I'esprit moderniste parmi la jeunesse et qui le
rend parfois seduisant aux masses, c'est Passimilation
inconsciente de la constitution de l'Eglise catho
lique aux organisations politiques de nos societes
modernes. Sous le regime parlementaire, chaque citoyen est
suppose investi d'une part d'autorite dans la direction
des affaires publiques ; les theories revolutionnaires
mises en circulation par J. J. Rousseau et formuiees
dans la Declaration des droits de l'homme de 1789,
ont repandu dans les masses cette idee irreflechie que
Pautorite directrice d'un pays est faite de la somme
des volontes individuelles de la collectivite sociale.
Les representants du pouvoir sont ainsi considers
comme des deiegues, dont le role exclusif est d'inter-
preter, de faire valoir la pensee et la volonte de leurs
commettants. C'est cette conception du pouvoir que Doellinger
voulait appliquer aux eveques reunis en concile au
Vatican. A son tour, Tyrrell Papplique aux ev£ques

APPENDIX 203
comme aux fideies, ecciesiastiques ou lalques, de la
communaute chretienne, pour ne reserver aux
eveques et meme a I'autorite supreme, au Pape, que
le droit d'enregistrer et de proclamer authentique-
ment ce qu'ont pense, aime, senti les membres dis
perses de la famille chretienne, voire meme de la
societe des ames religieuses.
Cette assimilation est trompeuse, Mes Freres. La
societe civile nait, suivant une loi naturelle, de
Punion et de la cooperation des volontes des
membres qui la constituent. Mais l'Eglise, societe
surnaturelle, est essentiellement d'institution positive
ou externe et doit etre acceptee par ses membres,
avec Porganisation qu'elle a regu de son divin Fon-
dateur. C'est au Christ lui-meme qu'il appartient
de nous dieter sa volonte.
Ecoutez done le Fils de Dieu fait homme, donnant
a ses Apotres ses instructions souveraines et impre-
scriptibles : " Allez, leur dit-il, dans le monde entier,
prechez PEvangile a toutes les creatures. Celui qui
croira la foi que vous lui enseignerez et se fera
baptiser, se sauvera ; mais celui qui refusera de croire
sera condamne."
L'evangeiiste Saint Marc, qui cite ces paroles a la
derniere page de son evangile, conclut son recit par
ces mots :
"Et le Seigneur jesus, apres avoir ainsi parie,
s'eieva dans les cieux 011 il est assis a la droite de
Dieu son P£re ; tandis que les apdtres partirent dans
toutes les directions pour precher PEvangile avec
Paide du Seigneur."1 1 Marc xvi. 15-20.

204 MEDIEVALISM

Eh bien, les eveques sont les continuateurs de la
mission apostolique. Les fideles doivent done les
ecouter, croire a leur enseignement et leur obeir,
sous peine de damnation eternelle.
Si quelqu'un refuse d'obeir a l'Eglise, dit encore
Notre Seigneur, considerez-le comme un publicain
ou un pai'en,1 c'est a-dire, comme un homme qui n'a
pas la foi. Car " je vous le dis en verite, tout ce que
vous lierez sur la terre sera lie dans le ciel, et tout ce
que vous deiierez sur la terre sera deiie dans le ciel."2

CONCLUSION.
Attachez-vous, Mes Freres, a la pierre angulaire
de votre Foi. Appuyez-vous sur votre eveque, .qui
lui-meme s'appuie sur le successeur de Pierre,
l'eveque des eveques, le representant immediat du
Fils de Dieu, Notre Seigneur jesus-Christ.
Protegez avec vigilance le tresor de votre foi, sans
laquelle aucun bien, aucune ceuvre ne vous profiter-
aient pour Peternite.
Perfectionnez votre instruction religieuse.
Mes Freres, n'est-ce pas chose etonnante, a mesure
que le jeune homme grandit, il tient a honneur de
developper ses forces physiques, d'accroitre la somme
de ses connaissances, d'affermir son jugement, d'en-
richir son experience, de cMtier son langage et
d'affiner son style, de s'initier plus completement aux
usages du monde, de se renseigner davantage et
mieux sur la marche des evenements. L'hbmme fait
prend a cceur sa culture professionnelle. Ou est,
1 Matt. xvni. 17. 2 Ibid. v. 18.

APPENDIX 205
dites-moi, l'avocat, le magistrat, le medecin, le
negociant, qui ne rougirait de devoir avouer, a
quarante ans, que depuis vingt ans il n'a plus rien
appris ?
Or, n'est-il pas vrai que, si on les interrogeait,
beaucoup de catholiques de vingt, de trente, et de
quarante ans, seraient contraints de confesser que,
depuis Pepoque de leur premiere communion, ils
n'ont plus appris leur religion, qu'ils Pont, peut-etre,
desapprise ?
Je comprends que, en ce temps de desarroi, Plrre-
ligion fasse des conquetes et je le deplore ; mais ce
qui s'explique moins, c'est qu'un homme intelligent,
croyant, conscient de la faveur que Dieu lui a faite
en lui accordant le privilege de la Foi, se resigne a
ignorer ce qu'il croit, pourquoi il le croit, a quoi Pen-
gagent envers Dieu et envers ses freres les solennelles
promesses de son bapteme.
Tout homme instruit devrait avoir dans sa biblio-
theque un catechisme, sinon pour en reapprendre la
lettre, du moins pour en mediter le texte. Le cate
chisme le plus recommandable est le Catkhisme du
Concile de Trente, ceuvre admirable de clarte, de pre
cision, de methode, ou, sur Pordre des Peres du
Concile de Trente, une commission de theologiens
de valeur a ete chargee de condenser la substance de
la Foi, de la morale, des institutions du christianisme.
Pour se renseigner sur l'objet de leur Foi, les
catholiques instruits devraient, en outre, posseder un
manuel des enseignements dogmatiques de l'Eglise,
par exemple, celui de Denzinger, et les principales
Encycliques pontificales qui s'adressent a notre

206 MEDIEVALISM

generation, notamment celles de Leon XIII, de
glorieuse memoire, et de Sa Saintete Pie X.
Puis, ils devraient avoir sous la main, sinon le
texte integral de la Bible, au moins le Nouveau
Testament, c'est-a-dire, les Evangiles, les Lettres des
Apotres, le recit des Actes des Ap6tres. II leur
faudrait aussi une Histoire de l'E\glise et un Traiti
apologe"tique. Pour entretenir et alimenter sa piete, chaque fideie
devrait posseder un Missel Romain et un Traite"
Hturgique qui lui explique les ceremonies de la
Messe et des principales manifestations du culte
religieux dans l'Eglise.
Iffmitation de Jhus-Christ, les Meditations sur
Vftvangile par Bossuet, Vfntroduction a la vie devote
de Saint Francois de Sales ; enfin, quelques vies de
Saints, qui nous representent l'evangile en action,
formeraient dans leur ensemble, et a un prix tres
modique, le minimum de la bibliotheque religieuse
d'une famille chretienne.
Chaque famille, si humble soit-elle, devrait posseder
quelques livres de religion et de piete. Nous pre-
ciserons, prochainement, a ce sujet, a I'intention des
lecteurs francais et flamands, les informations que
nous nous bornons a indiquer ici.
II m'est arrive de parcourir du regard la biblio
theque d'amis voues aux carrieres liberates : il s'y
trouvait des livres de sciences, de litterature, d'histoire
profane ; que de fois Pon y eut cherche vainement le
rayons de la litterature religieuse !
Est-il bien surprenant que, sur des esprits si mal
armes pour la resistance, une objection formutee avec

APPENDIX 207
audace ait aisement prise ? On s'epouvante alors et
Pon appelle au secours Papologetique.
L'apologetique a son r61e dans l'Eglise, sans doute.
A Pattaque il faut opposer la defense. Quand
quelqu'un est malade, il fait bien d'appeler le
medecin. Mais Phygiene vaut mieux que la medecine !
Etudiez de preference l'expose et les preuves de la
doctrine catholique, penetrez-vous de ses enseigne-
ments, meditez-les ; mettez-vous au courant de
Phistoire de l'Eglise, renseignez-vous sur les ceuvres
de son apostolat.
Puis, veillez et priez. Par la droiture de votre vie,
par la purete de vos moeurs, par Phumble confession
de la dependance ou vous etes vis-a-vis de Dieu et
du besoin que vous avez de sa Providence, supprimez
les raisons interessees de l'incredulite, et vous verrez
se dissiper le plus souvent, comme les nuages aux
clartes du soleil, les doutes qui montaient dans votre
ame et obscurcissaient son horizon. Que si, parfois,
sur un point special, un doute surgit en votre con
science, consultez un traite d'apologetique, ou mieux,
adressez-vous a un homme eclairej: la solution que
vous recevrez sera alors, pour vous, adaptee a. votre
mentalite et a. votre etat d'ame du moment ; elle sera
beaucoup plus efficace que les reponses qui s'adres-
seraient indeterminement a une masse considerable
d'auditeurs ou de lecteurs a la fois.
Mes bien chers Freres, en realite, nous n'appre-
cions pas assez notre bonheur d' avoir la Foi. L'homme
est ainsi dispose qu'il ne remarque plus ce qui est
definitivement acquis au tresor de ses habitudes. Vous

208 MEDIEVALISM

avez la vue claire, Pouie bonne, les poumons sains, le
cceur intact : remerciez-vous souvent Celui de qui
vous tenez ces bienfaits ? Ah ! si vous etiez menaces
de cecite, de surdite, de phtisie ou de paralysie, com-
bien plus haute serait votre appreciation des biens
que vous croiriez sur le point de vous echapper, com-
bien plus spontanee votre reconnaissance le jour oil la
securite vous serait rendue !
Mes Freres, les nations protestantes sont malades.
Voila quatre siecles que le ferment du libre examen
les travaille. Ecoutez avec quelle douloureuse
anxiete les ames religieuses sont tiraillees par les
mille et une sectes qui se disputent leur adhesion,
sans qu'aucune ait un titre a offrir pour se faire
deddement preferer aux autres.
II me souvient d'un ministre anglican qui, vers
Pannee 1895, se convertit au catholicisme. Loyal de
caractere, il enseignait a ses paroissiens, telle qu'il la
croyait, la divinite de jesus-Christ. Un confrere,
pasteur d'une paroisse voisine, la niait devant ses
ouailles. La population pieuse, en emoi, demandait
la solution du conflit. L'eveque, chef des deux
paroisses, etait fideie au Christ-Dieu, mais il etait
notoire que son archeveque le desavouait. Comment
sortir d'un pareil desarroi ? Est-il admissible qu'il y
ait un Evangile auquel nous devions croire, et que,
d'autre part, personne n'ait qualite pour nous dire ce
qu'il contient ?
Le ministre anglican, dont je me rappelle distincte-
ment le souvenir, ne pouvait se resigner a le penser.
L'unite sociale de la foi est impossible, sans une
autorite ; I'autorite en matiere de foi est incomplete

APPENDIX 209
sans le privilege de Pinfaillibilite. II se le dit, le crut,
reconnut I'autorite du Pape et devint, a son tour, un
apdtre de la foi catholique et romaine.
Et c'est au moment oil les protestants religieux
assaillis par le liberalisme, ballottes par le doute,
appellent desesperement le secours de I'autorite, en
disant : " Seigneur, sauvez-nous, car nous perissons ! "
c'est a ce moment que les Modernistes voudraient
nous ravir le Chef que les ames des sectes separees
nous envient, et qu'ils nous invitent a refaire une ex
perience, dont quatre lamentables siedes ont fait
edater lichee !
Non, Mes Freres bien-aimes, nous ne referons
point cette douloureuse experience! Plus etroite-
ment que jamais, nous nous serrerons autour de
Pierre, le Vicaire de jesus-Christ. L'unite de la foi
chretienne n'est sauve que dans l'Eglise catholique,
l'Eglise catholique n'est stable que sur le siege de
Pierre. "Nous nous tournerons done, disait saint
Irenee, eveque de Lyon de la fin du second siecle,
vers la plus grande et la plus ancienne des eglises,
connue de tous, l'eglise fondee et constituee a Rome
par les deux tres glorieux apotres Pierre et Paul ;
nous montrerons que la tradition qu'elle tient des
Apotres et la foi qu'elle a annoncee aux hommes
sont parvenues jusqu'a nous par des successions
regulieres d'eveques ; et ce sera un sujet de con
fusion pour tous ceux qui, soit par vanite, soit par
aveuglement et par sentiment mauvais, recueillent
sans discernment toutes sortes d'opinions qui leur
plaisent. Car telle est la superiorite de la pre
eminence de l'Eglise de Rome, que toutes les eglises,

210 MEDIEVALISM
c'est-a-dire les fideles de tous les points de Punivers
doivent etre d'accord avec elle et que les fideles, d'oii
qu'ils soient, trouvent intacte en elle la tradition
apostolique." *
La presente Lettre Pastorale et le Dispositif de
Careme qui y fait suite seront lus en chaire, dans les
eglises, chapelles publiques, communautes religieuses
et colleges du diocese. lis y seront et resteront
affiches durant tout le Careme.
Donne a Malines, sous notre seing, notre sceau
et le contreseing de notre Secretaire.
* D. J., Card. Mercier,
ArchevIsque de Malines.
Par mandement de S. E. le Cardinal-Archevique.
Ch. Beuckelaers, Secret.
1 Adversus hareses, Lib. Ill, Cap. 3.

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