one he will not inquire, like the rationalist, how that false record
could have been concocted; but rather he will ask how the rationalist,
in spite of so many witnesses to the contrary, has acquired his fixed
assurance of the universality of the commonplace. An answer perhaps
could be offered of which the rationalist need not be ashamed. We
might say that faith in the universality of the commonplace (in its
origin, no doubt, simply an imaginative presumption) is justified by
our systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of
miracles _a priori_ expresses a conviction that the laws by which we
can always control or predict the movement of matter govern that
movement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history
is fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby
fixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter
cannot be revealed to the historian. This may be good philosophy, but
we could not think so if we were good Christians. We should then
expect to move matter by prayer. Rationalistic history and criticism
are therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his
Encyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add
that rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that
practical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make
instruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond
the narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners,
machinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the
love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

Similarly, the spontaneous insight of Christians and their new
philosophies will express a Christian disposition. The chief problems
in them will be sin and redemption; the conclusion will be some fresh
intuition of divine love and heavenly beatitude. It would be no sign
of originality in a Christian to begin discoursing on love like Ovid