caricature; or if anything good had to be admitted in them, it was set down to a premonition of his own system or a derivation from it—­a curious conceit, which seems somehow not to have wholly disappeared from the minds of Protestants, or even of professors of philosophy.  I need not observe how completely the secret of each alien religion is thereby missed and its native accent outraged:  the most serious consequence, for the modernist, of this unconsciousness of whatever is not Christian is an unconsciousness of what, in contrast to other religions, Christianity itself is.  He feels himself full of love—­except for the pope—­of mysticism, and of a sort of archaeological piety.  He is learned and eloquent and wistful.  Why should he not remain in the church?  Why should he not bring all its cold and recalcitrant members up to his own level of insight?

The modernist, like the Protestants before him, is certainly justified in contrasting a certain essence or true life of religion with the formulas and practices, not all equally well-chosen, which have crystallised round it.  In the routine of Catholic teaching and worship there is notoriously a deal of mummery:  phrases and ceremonies abound that have lost their meaning, and that people run through without even that general devout attitude and unction which, after all, is all that can be asked for in the presence of mysteries.  Not only is all sense of the historical or moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma itself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock phrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium.  Ecclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous.  This is that “Scholasticism” and “Mediaevalism” against which the modernists inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and pronouncement of their official superiors.  Thus both their sense for historical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists to contrast with the official religion what was pure and vital in the religion of their fathers.  Like the early Protestants, they wish to revert to a more genuine Christianity; but while their historical imagination is much more accurate and well-fed than that of any one in the sixteenth century could be, they have no hold on the Protestant principle of faith.  The Protestants, taking the Bible as an oracle which personal inspiration was to interpret, could reform tradition in any way and to any extent which their reason or feeling happened to prompt.  But so long as their Christianity was a positive faith, the residue, when all the dross had been criticised and burned away, was of divine authority.  The Bible never became for them merely an ancient Jewish encyclopaedia, often eloquent, often curious, and often barbarous.