II

MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY


Prevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the
cloister. Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of
history and efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the
present age; and under the name of modernism they have made their
appearance even in that institution which is constitutionally the most
stable, of most explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective
memory or established usages--I mean the Catholic church. Even after
this church was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by
the gradual exclusion of those heresies--some of them older than
explicit orthodoxy--which seemed to misrepresent its implications or
spirit, there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics
to share the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to
reconcile them if possible with their professed faith. Often these
cross influences were so strong that the profession of faith was
changed frankly to suit them, and Catholicism was openly abandoned;
but even where this did not occur we may detect in the Catholic minds
of each age some strange conjunctions and compromises with the
_Zeitgeist_. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of
foppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with
the maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the
system of Copernicus, incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric
and moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was
accepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous;
but it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet