It is thus on a very elastic theory of development that the Modernists rely.  ’The differences between the larval and final stages of many an insect are often far greater than those which separate kind from kind.’  And so this Proteus of a Church, which has changed its form so completely since the Gospel was first preached in the subterranean galleries of Rome, may undergo another equally startling metamorphosis and come to believe in a God who never intervenes in history.  We may here remind our readers of Newman’s tests of true development, and mark the enormous difference.

Mr. Tyrrell’s ‘Much-abused Letter’ reaches, perhaps, the high-water mark of Modernist claims.  Not all the writers whom we have quoted would view with complacency the prospect of the Catholic Church dying to live again, or being content to live only in its progeny.  The proverb about the new wine-skins is one of sinister augury in such a connection.  If the Catholic Church is really in such an advanced stage of decay that it must die before it can live, why do those who grasp the situation wish to keep it alive?  Are they not precisely pouring their new wine into old bottles?  Mr. Tyrrell himself draws the parallel with Judaism in the first century.  Paul, he says, ’did not feel that he had broken with Judaism,’ But the Synagogue did feel that he had done so, and history proved that the Synagogue was right.

Development, however great the changes which it exhibits, can only follow certain laws; and the development of the Church of Rome has steadily followed a direction opposite to that which the Modernists demand that it shall take.  Newman might plausibly claim that the doctrines of purgatory and of the papal supremacy are logically involved in the early claims of the Roman Church.  The claim is true at least in this sense, that, given a political Church organised as an autocracy, these useful doctrines were sure, in the interests of the government, to be promulgated sooner or later.  But there is not the slightest reason to suppose that the next development will be in the direction of that peculiar kind of Liberalism favoured by the Modernists.  It is difficult to see how the Vatican could even meet the reformers half-way without making ruinous concessions.’  This supernatural mechanism,’ M. Loisy says in his last book, ‘Modernism tends to ruin completely,’ Just so; but the Roman Church lives entirely on the faith in supernatural mechanism.  Her sacramental and sacerdotal system is based on supernatural mechanism—­on divine interventions in the physical world conditioned by human agency; her theology and books of devotion are full of supernatural mechanism; the lives of her saints, her relics and holy places, the whole literature of Catholic mysticism, the living piety and devotion of the faithful, wherever it is still to be found, are based entirely on that very theory of supernaturalistic dualism which the Modernist, when he acts as critic, begins by ruling out as devoid of any historical or scientific actuality.  The attractiveness of Catholicism as a cult depends almost wholly on its frank admission of the miraculous as a matter of daily occurrence.  To rationalise even contemporary history as M. Loisy has rationalised the Gospels would be suicide for Catholicism.