of divine authority. The Bible never became for them merely an
ancient Jewish encyclopædia, often eloquent, often curious, and often
barbarous. 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