what they are now.’  Compare this with the following words from the Italian manifesto:  ’The supernatural life of Christ in the faithful and in the Church has been clothed in an historical form, which has given birth to what we might somewhat loosely call the Christ of legend....  Such a criticism does away with the possibility of finding in Christ’s ministry even the embryonic form of the Church’s later theological teaching.’  ‘A dogma,’ says Le Roy, one of the ablest philosophers of the school, ’proclaims, above all, a prescription of practical order; it is the formula of a rule of practical conduct.  Why then should we not bring theory into harmony with practice?’

These extracts mark a much later phase of the revolt against Catholic dogma and scholastic theology than can be found in Newman’s writings.  They are contemporary with the Pragmatism of James and Schiller, and the Activism of Bergson.  So bold a defiance of tradition would have been impossible thirty years earlier.  And yet, when Newman pours scorn upon human reason, and when he enthrones the ‘conscience’ as the supreme arbiter of truth, is he not, in fact, preparing the way for these startling declarations, which imply a complete rupture with Catholic authority?  Dogmas are indisputably ‘notional’ propositions; that is to say, they belong to that class of truths to which Newman ascribes only a very subordinate importance.  We cannot, in his sense,’assent’ to an historical proposition as such, but only to the authority which has ordered us to believe it.  And is there any justification for Newman’s confidence that this authority may make apparent innovations, such as he admits to have been made throughout the history of the Church, but no real changes?  If he had been able to think out the implications of his doctrine of development with the help of such arguments as those of Bergson, would he not have seen that without change and real innovation there can be no true evolution?  Do not the fluidity and pragmatic character of dogma, so much insisted on by Sabatier and Le Roy, follow from the anti-intellectualist personalism which we have seen to be the foundation of Newman’s philosophy of religion?  The Modernist might argue that he is only extending to the history of the Church the doctrine of education by experience which Newman found to be true in the life-history of the individual.  Life itself, with its experiences and its needs, is the revealer of truth.  We cannot anticipate the wisdom of the future.

                      ’I do not ask to see
    The distant scene; one step enough for me.’

The kindly light leads a man on step by step; it conducts him from experience to experience, not without lapses into error; it reproves him if he desires to ‘choose and see his path.’  If this is true in the history of the individual, is it not probably also true in the history of the Church?  And if it is true in the history of the Church, are not the dogmatists wrong who have tried to legislate not only