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 "Mediævalism" 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