doubt that he found life, whether in the form of political or literary
ambition or in some other woman who would remind him of the woman he
had lost; perhaps he found it in all these things, perhaps in none.
Told as I told it the story seems to me a true and human one, and one
that might easily occur in these modern days; much more easily than
the story my correspondent would have had me write. The story of a
priest abandoning his parish for theological reasons is not an
improbable one, but I think such a story would be more typical of the
sixteenth century, when men were more interested in the authenticity
of the Biblical texts than they are in the twentieth. The Bible has
been sifted again and again; its history is known, every word has been
weighed, and it is difficult to imagine the most scrupulous exegetist
throwing a search light into any unexplored corner. Even Catholic
scholarship, if Loisy can be regarded as a Catholic, has abandoned the
theory that the gospels were written by the Apostles. The earliest,
that of Mark, was written sixty years after the death of Christ, and
it is the only one for which any scholar claims the faintest
historical value. With this knowledge of history in our possession
belief has become in modern times merely a matter of temperament,
entirely dissociated from the intellect. Some painter once said that
Nature put him out. The theologian can say the same about the
intellect--it puts him out. Out of a great deal of temperament and a
minimum of intellect he gets a precipitate, if I may be permitted to
drop into the parlance of the chemist, for dregs would be an impolite
word to use, and the precipitate always delights in the fetich. There
will always be men and women, the cleric has discovered, who will
barter their souls for the sake of rosaries and scapulars and the
Pope's indulgences. The two great enemies of religion, as the clerics
know well, are the desire to live and the desire to know. We find this
in Genesis: God: i. e., the clerics, was angry because his creatures