God never became a literary symbol, covering some problematical cosmic force, or some ideal of the conscience.  But for the modernist this total transformation takes place at once.  He keeps the whole Catholic system, but he believes in no part of it as it demands to be believed.  He understands and shares the moral experience that it enshrines; but the bubble has been pricked, the painted world has been discovered to be but painted.  He has ceased to be a Christian to become an amateur, or if you will a connoisseur, of Christianity.  He believes—­and this unquestioningly, for he is a child of his age—­in history, in philology, in evolution, perhaps in German idealism; he does not believe in sin, nor in salvation, nor in revelation.  His study of history has disclosed Christianity to him in its evolution and in its character of a myth; he wishes to keep it in its entirety precisely because he regards it as a convention, like a language or a school of art; whereas the Protestants wished, on the contrary, to reduce it to its original substance, because they fondly supposed that that original substance was so much literal truth.  Modernism is accordingly an ambiguous and unstable thing.  It is the love of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable.  It is the historic attachment to his church of a Catholic who has discovered that he is a pagan.

When the modernists are pressed to explain their apparently double allegiance, they end by saying that what historical and philological criticism conjectures to be the facts must be accepted as such; while the Christian dogmas touching these things—­the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, for instance—­must be taken in a purely symbolic or moral sense.  In saying this they may be entirely right; it seems to many of us that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of meaning if you take it as such; for what scraps of historical truth there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology are of little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this, as of all religions, is to be found in its moral idealism, I mean, in the expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries, of the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life.  Such a moral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what it is in intention.  The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic rationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity is grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the pang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of salvation; it steals empirical reality away from the last judgment, from hell, and from heaven; it steals historical reality away from the Christ of religious tradition and personal devotion.  The moral summons and the prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have lost all force for it and become fables.