flux of immediate experience. Religion, the modernists feel, must be
taken broadly and sympathetically, as a great human historical symbol
for the truth. At least in Christianity you should aspire to embrace
and express the whole; to seize it in its deep inward sources and
follow it on all sides in its vital development. But if the age of
partial heresy is past, has not the age of total heresy succeeded?
What is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience
interpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would
embrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in
religious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes
him a strangely long time to discover it. He fondly supposes (such is
the prejudice imbibed by him in the cradle and in the seminary) that
all human inspirations are necessarily similar and concurrent, that by
trusting an inward light he cannot be led away from his particular
religion, but on the contrary can only find confirmation for it,
together with fresh spiritual energies. He has been reared in profound
ignorance of other religions, which were presented to him, if at all,
only in grotesque 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?