tradition, to occupy the inquisitive, and sacred philosophy to occupy
the speculative; where there might be religious art, ministering to
the faith, and a new life in the family or in the cloister,
transformed by a permeating spirit of charity, sacrifice, soberness,
and prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become
those of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an
ideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the
Catholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and
they do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect
development of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,
Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly
apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give
out the full and exact note of the New Testament. Much has been added,
but nothing has been lost. Development (though those who talk most of
it seem to forget it) is not the same as flux and dissolution. It is
not a continuity through changes of any sort, but the evolution of
something latent and preformed, or else the creation of new
instruments of defence for the same original life. In this sense there
was an immense development of Christianity during the first three
centuries, and this development has continued, more slowly, ever
since, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern churches have
refused themselves all new expressions, while the Protestant churches
have eaten more and more into the core. It is a striking proof of the
preservative power of readjustment that the Roman church, in the midst
of so many external transformations as it has undergone, still demands
the same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith in
another world. The _mise-en-scène_ has changed immensely. The gospel
has been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,
in conventional forms of charity, like some small bone of a saint in a
gilded reliquary; but the relic for once is genuine, and the gospel