What is left of the object of the Church’s worship if the Christ of history was but an enthusiastic Jewish peasant whose pathetic ignorance of the forces opposed to Him led Him to the absurd enterprise of attempting a coup d’etat at Jerusalem?  Is not Jesus reduced by this criticism to the same level as Theudas or Judas of Galilee? and, if this is the true account, what sentiment can we feel, when we read His tragic story, but compassion tinged with contempt?

And on what principles are such liberties taken with our authorities?  What is the criterion by which it is decided that Christ said, ’I am a king,’ but not ‘My kingdom is not of this world’?  Why must the resurrection have been only a subjective hallucination in the minds of the disciples?  To these questions there is a plain answer.  The non-intervention of God in history is an axiom with the Modernists.  ‘L’historien,’ says M. Loisy, ’n’a pas a s’inspirer de l’agnosticisme pour ecarter Dieu de l’histoire; il ne l’y rencontre jamais.’[75] It would be more accurate to say that, whenever the meeting takes place, ‘the historian’ gives the Other the cut direct.

But now comes in the peculiar philosophy by which the Modernists claim to rehabilitate themselves as loyal and orthodox Catholics, and to turn the flank of the rationalist position, which they have seemed to occupy themselves.  The reaction against Absolutism in philosophy has long since established itself in Germany and France.  In England and Scotland the battle still rages; in America the rebound has been so violent that an extreme form of anti-intellectualism is now the dominant fashion in philosophy.  It would have been easy to predict—­and in fact the prediction was made—­that the new world-construction in terms of will and action, which disparages speculative or theoretical truth and gives the primacy to what Kant called the practical reason, would be eagerly welcomed by Christian apologists, hard-pressed by the discoveries of science and biblical criticism.  Protestants, in fact, had recourse to this method of apologetic before the Modernist movement arose.  The Ritschlian theology in Germany (in spite of its ‘static’ view of revelation), and the Symbolo-fideisme of Sabatier and Menegoz, have many affinities with the position of Tyrrell, Laberthonniere, and Le Roy.

It is exceedingly difficult to compress into a few pages a fair and intelligible statement of a Weltansicht which affects the whole conception of reality, and which has many ramifications.  There is an additional difficulty in the fact that few of the Modernists are more than amateurs in philosophy.  They are quick to see the strategic possibilities of a theory which separates faith and knowledge, and declares that truths of faith can never come into collision with truths of fact, because they ‘belong to different orders.’  It suits them to follow the pragmatists in talking about ‘freely chosen beliefs,’ and ’voluntary