stationary view of revelation.  Its ’appeal to antiquity’—­a period which, in accordance with a convenient theory, it limited to the councils of the ’undivided Church’—­was intended to prove the catholicity and orthodoxy of the English Church, as the faithful guardian of apostolic tradition, and to condemn the medieval and modern accretions sanctioned by the Church of Rome.  The earlier theory of tradition left the Roman Church open to damaging criticism on this side; no ingenuity could prove that all her doctrines were ‘primitive.’  Even in those early days of historical criticism, it must have been plain to any candid student of Christian ‘origins’ that the Pauline Churches were far more Protestant than Catholic in type.  But Newman had set himself to prove that ’the Christianity of history is not Protestantism; if ever there were a safe truth, it is this,’ Accordingly, he argues that ’Christianity came into the world as an idea rather than an institution, and had to fit itself with armour of its own providing.’  Such expressions sound very like the arguments of the Modernists; but Newman assuredly never contemplated that they would be turned against the policy of his own Church, in the interests of the critical rationalism which he abhorred.  His attitude towards dogma is after all not very different from that of the older school.  ‘Time was needed’ (he says) ’for the elucidation of doctrines communicated once for all through inspired persons’; his examples are purgatory and the papal supremacy.  He insists that his ‘tests’ of true development are only controversial, ‘instruments rather than warrants of right decisions.’  The only real ‘warrant’ is the authority of the infallible Church.  It is highly significant that one of the features in Roman Catholicism to which he appeals as proving its unblemished descent from antiquity is its exclusiveness and intolerance.

’The Fathers (he says complacently) anathematised doctrines, not because they were old, but because they were new; for the very characteristic of heresy is novelty and originality of manifestation.  Such was the exclusiveness of the Christianity of old.  I need not insist on the steadiness with which that principle has been maintained ever since.’

The Cardinal is right; it is quite unnecessary to insist upon it; but, when the Modernists claim Newman as their prophet, it is fair to reply that, if we may judge from his writings, he would gladly have sent some of them to the stake.

The Modernist movement, properly so called, belongs to the last twenty years, and most of the literature dates from the present century.  It began in the region of ecclesiastical history, and soon passed to biblical exegesis, where the new heresy was at first called ‘concessionism,’ The scope of the debate was enlarged with the stir produced by Loisy’s ‘L’Evangile et l’Eglise’ and ’Autour d’un Petit Livre’; it spread over the field of Christian origins generally, and