for the present but the future, and to bind the Church for all time to the formulations which appeared satisfactory to themselves?  If Providence is leading the Church through varied experiences in order to teach it greater wisdom, is it not clear that we must not rashly preclude the possibility of future revelation by stereotyping the results of some earlier stage of experience?  Thus the empiricism of Newman leads logically to consequences which he would have been among the first to reject.

Some rather shallow thinkers in this country have expressed their surprise and regret that the Vatican has refused to make any terms with Modernism.  They have supposed that the fault lies with an ignorant and reactionary Pope.  But there are many reasons why this dangerous and disintegrating tendency must be rigorously excluded from Roman Catholicism.  In the first place, Modernism destroys the historical basis of Christianity, and converts the Incarnation and Atonement into myths like those of other dying and rising saviour-gods, which hardly pretend to be historical.  But it was this foundation in history which helped largely to secure the triumph of Christianity over its rivals.  In the place of the historical God-Man, Modernism gives us the history of the Church as an object of reverence.  We are bidden to contemplate an institution of amazingly tough vitality but great adaptability, which in its determination to survive has not only changed colour like a chameleon but has from time to time put forth new organs and discovered new weapons of offence and defence.  We ask for evidence that the Church has regenerated the world; and we are shown how, by hook or by crook, it has succeeded in safeguarding its own interests.  Ecclesiastical historians are ingenious and unscrupulous; but it is impossible even for them to exhibit Church history as the record of a continuous intervention of the Spirit of Christ in human affairs.  If any Spirit has presided over the councils of popes, cardinals, and inquisitors it is not that of the Founder of Christianity.

Further, the religious philosophy of Modernism is bad, much worse than the scholasticism which it derides.  It is in essentials a revival of the sophistry of Protagoras.  And if it were metaphysically more respectable than it is, it is so widely opposed to the whole system of Catholic apologetics, that if it were accepted, it would necessitate a complete reconstruction of Catholic dogma.  Let any man read the Stonyhurst manuals, and say whether the radical empiricism of the Modernists could find a lodgment anywhere in such a system without disturbing the stability of the whole.  Catholicism is one of the most compact structures in the world, and it rests on presuppositions which are far removed from those of Modernism.  It is one thing to admit that dogmas in many cases have a pragmatic origin, and quite another to say that they may be invented or rejected with a pragmatic purpose.  The healthy human intellect will never believe that the same proposition may be true for faith and untrue in fact; but this is the Modernist contention.